SUB-CONJUGAL HANDSHAKE OF FRIENDSHIP, TALL VERSIONS OF ACTION FIGURES.

HOLA, CABRONE. COMO? Hopefully everyone had memorable Remembrance Day and that no one put up their Christmas tree instead, BECAUSE IT’S NOVEMBER STILL SO SHOW A LITTLE RESPECT YA TAINTS.

Today, I wish to talk to you about the things that you can’t say. Somewhere between Dee Snider’s comments towards the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) and the emergence of new genres using more “graphic” topics as the entire subject matter of their songs, we hit this weird separate reality or timeline where there suddenly locked doors in our own house, if you will. Easier to describe it with an example than to try and point out a little nuance here or there in a piece, I give you some UK boys who are still inspiring today’s culture,

WOOP WOOP, DAS DAH SOUND DAH TAH POLICE. WOOP WOOP, DAS DAH SOUND AH DAH BEAST.

THE POLICE – DON’T STAND SO CLOSE TO ME

Ah, highschool love. Miles from the rapidly expanding shoulders of the jock-y boys and the Claire’s palette make-up of young girls, resigns the who more than likely live under the same routine as you and I. Getting ourselves up in the morning, checking our bank accounts, seeing exactly how far we can allow ourselves to fall before our lack of food, funds, and friends becomes intrusively obvious to the few people that choose to remain in our lives. The intrinsic difference is that highschool is something that we generally suffer as whole, leaving very few of us without one or two “Highschool was dicks” stories. Take all that knowledge and past experience, and try to imagine yourself making the purposeful decision to not only return to that place as an adult, but to surround oneself with that violently crashing ocean of hormones. Even in this day and age we get somewhere in the ballpark of 3-5 “Teacher banged their student” stories each year, and I am consistently estranged when other people are genuinely confused by them. I certainly remember being sixteen and not only having a “hot” teacher, but a good friend of mine whose body had decided to have him already fully through puberty at that age, even directly asked her out on a date. Imagine being a single woman, stunning, just trying to do your job, and then that occurring. Aside from obviously being set reeling from the implications of such a matter, there is so much more here that as a society we choose not to unpack, or even avoid entirely. Said friend may have been in highschool still, but he was very much a “MAN”. Just under 6-foot, in better physical shape than almost any adult in the building, and funny. Not just enjoyable to a point, but class-clown quality funny. The teacher in question, not even 30 at the time, shared his humour (astoundingly), and seemed to exude that maternal “safeness” we abandon for independence. It grew from a whisper of a rumor to a full-blown headline within days, and the faculty did not have the fortitude to address it the way it should have been address. The assembly was less than enthusiastic. Our principle at one point told us not to us the word “boobs” and that “breasts” was the only appropriate word because it was scientific. . . That was a large mistake to say to a couple-hundred odd boys.

Between books like “Lolita” by Nabokov, and events like the one I described here, I think we can gather a pretty clear picture that there is always more at play. Some actions are like unrequited electrical impulses, brought on by hormones or emotions, but where we fail to draw a line is the EXPECTATION OF EXPECTATIONS. When my friend asked our teacher out, he obviously did it with no actual intention of her saying “Yes” and it was more to test his boundaries. He did it also believe he genuinely “liked” her. His expectations did not exceed beyond the moment he asked his question, because he never planned for it to go any farther than that, whereas the expectations of our teacher began in that instant, and they carried far more importance and weight than the careless offer my friend had made. He had inadvertently placed her into a pit which she had no hand in intentionally creating, with no lifeline to climb back out with, and she laughed it off as best she could. There is a singular moment in adulthood where you realize the “grades” of understanding. How much you understanding you possess at sixteen versus nineteen. Nineteen versus twenty-one. Twenty-one to twenty-five. That’s as far as I can speak for myself, but sometimes it’s just one year for me. I grew more when I was twenty-four than I had done in probably a decade, and what weights on my conscious is the how that pattern should logically continue into my thirties/fourties/fifties/etc. Hopefully the spectrum doesn’t expand too far beyond what I “think” I know as absolutes at this point in my life. Buried within all those interlocking and complex knots lays “Teacher/student intercourse” stitch, just another thing that is only taboo to one party because of our expectations, and our grade of understanding.

STABILO – FLAWED DESIGN

Lyrically giving much better composition to my “grades” analogy is the first few lines of this Stabilo track. Remember the first time you figured out what power a “lie” actually carries? The first time you got away with some meaningless white-lie about not being somewhere or not eating a candy? A little cog clicks in that moment, and you begin to experiment with that tiny flame. At first your “late from traffic”, and then “your dog ate it”, and all of a sudden “this guy with hook hands broke in and erased the file from my computer AND he smoked all me weed and ate all my chips” is just easy-peasy but actually sleazy. A large part of adulthood is giving up on the mastery “perfect lies”, because there are none. We grow up viewing our flaws with such permanence even though so much of that is based on the view point of where we are in life. When I was thirteen I was a nerd because I played Pokemon and card games, and now in my mid-twenties all my well-to-do friends and I play Pokemon and card games while most of the people who called me a nerd spend all their money on cocaine, lifting their trucks, and snowmobiles. It isn’t a contrived notion to say that getting addicted to a lifestyle of drugs, alcohol, and women who know exactly how much oil-riggers make, is easy. Aside from being a company that makes hella writing implements, Stabilo is a unique brand of Canadiana from good ‘ole Maple Ridge, British Columbia. They only wrote a small string of radio hits before choosing to be on “permanent hiatus”, which is like saying you wish to still accept all the perks of being famous, but you don’t wanna try anymore. Congratulations on being Gene Simmons.

Slappingly third in this trifecta of feelin’ funk’d up, you know ya boi is gonna fill slot numero tres with something wierd. So without further ado, a man who need no introduction because we let him keep being a star even after he beat the hell out of Ri-Ri.

CHRIS BROWN – YA MAN AIN’T ME

SO! Let’s leap back to wee baby R&B Christopher here. When he was doing this soulful rendition of what many people in 2016 will remember as a variation of the “Mr. Steal Your Girl”. Singing to impressionable teen girls with the same intention of every fresh young famous kid: Having sex with 12 BILLION girls. This was his group of knowledge at this point, “My voice can get me what I want, nearly without fail, this is permanent”, and much akin to my friend asking out our teacher, his thinking did not exceed that moment. Little did he know that in a moment of being a huge faggot that he would viciously assault his girlfriend, or that he would get in any of the numerous conflicts he’s been in with other artists for this or that, but that lead to the same line of questions I asked myself. Do you think at some point Chris Brown has had that cog click in his head and the thought roll forth that “Wow, I didn’t know shit back when I released that first album. He is a completely different person from who I am now”. In my opinion, he has KILLER candor, to the point where I am willing to say that it is both genuine and unreplicateable. It’s something that even huge bands can completely miss. You can have the most talented musicians, and songs, and whathaveyou and then your singer can put absolutely NOTHING into it. Sure, listening to angry Ben Stine sing about how drunk they got this weekend is fun for all of none seconds, but can’t we all just want a little more? Even seeing the redeeming qualities to flaws within the little things in life will drastically change how you view the world. Chris Brown has had plenty of instances of suck, but at least when he was a little younger we can base a piece of that understanding on how (like any one of us) his view only went so far.

Know why they only ask you where you want to be in five years at a job interview? That is your expected time of employment to a “good” job. They want to know if being one rung higher over a five-year period will be enough to entice you so that they can suck thousands of dollars of profit from your precious hours, OVER YEEEARRRRSSS. No one ever says, “Oh, well I’ll be dead in five years”, despite the unlimited potential provided by living in any city. Between traffic, disease, and a a talking cheese puff that wants to make Korea into another Hiroshima, no day is guaranteed.

AND SO I LEAVE YOU WITH THIS FELLOW VERTEBRATES,

We’re all kind of like trees. When we are young, we are the most fragile things in the whole forest. It takes the sheltering colossal forms of our parents to make sure we make through those first few years as we set our roots, and learn to stand against a few hard blows. The older we get, the taller we are, and the further our view of the world expands. When we’re big enough we begin to plant seeds of our own to nurture and tend. We contend for space with those around us, choosing to allow the growth of those who don’t impede our own, while commonly suffocating the smaller, less symbiotic ones. Sometimes we seem lesser to those around us because of being untraveled, or unskilled in some area, but having a lot of leaves does not mean you’re better. Matter-a-fact, some people get so wrapped up in their own foliage that they lose the ability to see past three feet in front of their own faces, leaving their bark much worse than their bite. We need to stay rooted things that nurture us, make sure that we keep ourselves humble, and do our best not to die during winter.

– Bear

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You can find Bear smoking bong and building snowmen on instagram.

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