Monday 30th June 2003
The following story is true. And some of it actually happened.
That's the Foreword as it currently reads. I guess it explains the idea as well as it can really be explained.
And then I got busy again. Or still. Something.
There's a lot going on here. I'm still reworking the Black Text Required stuff at Wasted, Inc.--although I took a break to add the new Parental Advisory stuff seen to the right; something I've been meaning to do for a while now. Funny how you never hear about implicit lyrics, isn't it; that would be, like, telepathy, or something.
And there have been a few other minor updates to the merch. Most of which are just fixing existing things, or setting up for new things once I have time to do them. Which might actually be sometime this year.
Meanwhile, I trashed Slackerhood a while ago. It wasn't really working as it was. So I've started over in a better way, now. Or, at least, a more possible way. Which will probably bug a few people a bit. In fact: it already has. I've been suggesting that I was going to write this book for years. Now I've just given it a name.
Basically, it works like this.
We know from the Redundant Subsite that life existed before gremlin.net. Although only by a few years. All manner of neat things happened before 1988. But nothing I want to talk about anymore. The really fun stuff happened later. From 1989 through 1995. And, to some degree, since then; although most of that wound up happening or being documented here at the site, starting at the beginning of 1997.
So. Slackerhood, on its own, is designed to cover a number of neat things. A largely autobiographical, arguably true account of...stuff. Basically the same anecdotes still told by people who were never actually involved. Especially now that Corey is singing for SlipKnot and StoneSour.
Which is not to suggest that this is the literary version of that bullshit Behind the Masks disc people have been buying for the last few years. It's just an account of a really weird time in history, written from my perspective, documenting the activities of...of us.
It almost sounds unnecessary to do it now. Because it's in the past. Except that it's really not just in the past. I still hear about this shit. I run into kids I've never met before, claiming to be close personal friends of the people who did these crazy things. Which is always fun to hear about, since I was one of them, at the time.
It's hard to explain. Here's as well as I've been able to explain it, after thinking about it all this time....
Call it historical fiction, or something.
It’s not really my intention to lie about any of what happened--anymore than it’s my intention to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Some things are better left undocumented, regardless when the statute of limitations actually ran out; other things…as much as I might like to record them verbatim, my memories of the literal events have probably--at this point--been replaced by the more recent legends which embellish the entire tale.
Which, incidentally, is not my fault. I’ve always had more interest in going out and doing new and dangerously stupid things than in reminiscing about the good old days, as though the good old days didn’t suck utterly before they became legendary.
So. While I’d like this to be a perfect, true fact account of the last…fifteen years, if I let the book go on from start to current finish: I know better than to assume that it ever really could be. And, really, even if I could write this all down exactly as it happened, no one would ever believe I was telling the truth. It was all just too weird to consider any form of reality.
I’m therefore regarding it as a form of historical fiction, with a terribly autobiographical slant. Because I, and some of the arguably fictional characters herein, still remember it happening this way. Nowadays. Granting that most of the things worth remembering in the first place have been told and retold and modified and sensationalised and fictionalised and canonised and--in a number of cases--denied to hell and back by we the very people who know for a fact that it all happened exactly as the legends assert, if memory serves, which it might well not, now that the telling of the tale is about as close as anyone ever really gets to doing these things anymore.
Which is oddly sad. And, at the same time, a relief. Not all of us survived the events herein; most of those of we who did, to this day, aren’t sure what we did to avoid certain death. Even though the legends told, to this day, by kids who barely existed fifteen years ago, outline our every amazing escape from whatever exaggerated circumstances we happened to live to rant about.
Of course, however fictional I might be willing to denounce the story as being, and however vehemently I might want to repudiate most of the claims I’m about to make, I’m still thinking in autobiographical format here. Simply because, whether it all really happened or not, what little percentage of it I can remember first hand plays back exclusively through the GremCam. I can’t visualise any of it from a third-person perspective. Trying to think of it that way turns it into fiction for sure; this way, it remains at least moderately possible, to me.
Even still: there are a number of reasons I’d rather write this out from a more fictional perspective, and even more reasons that I’d rather not write it out at all. But the longer I put it off, and the more I hear about all the things we did, and the stranger and more alien the tales become as each new ‘eyewitness’ tell them: the more I’m compelled to set the record straight once and for all. And, knowing that I could never, at this point, accomplish that much: I’ll settle for committing my best recollection to immutable print.
There are two basic, questionable adages you hear every day, but never fully buy into. That, if you remember the sixties, you weren’t there; and that history never repeats itself. One of those two is a lie. I’m not sure which. I do know that, at this point, given what little I can remember without hearing the New and Improved Versions of the events, I can’t particularly remember the eighties. Or, to a large degree, the nineties. I may have wanted to forget. Or, maybe, I wanted to remember so badly that, concentrating on remembering, I forgot the things I was hoping to remember. I suppose that amounts to roughly the same thing, in the end.
I remember things. Sometimes I remember how, but not why; other times I remember why, but not how. I remember who, but not where; I remember when, but not which. I remember days, but not years. I remember names, but not faces. I remember just enough to remember that I forgot to remember the rest.
I do happen to remember one thing, in perfect detail. 28th January 1995; three in the afternoon. I remember saying one of these days, this is all going to make a hell of a book.
I also remember thinking, at the time, that I was joking.
At the moment, I'm still writing the prologue--the events leading up to the main story. So far, the first twenty-seven pages account for the first twenty-two hours. And that's from five months before the story really begins.
But it seems kinda necessary to cover it. Pretty much the purpose of a prologue, I suppose. If the prologue gets way too long, I might start slicing things up a bit. Drop some of it. Or jump back and forth as needed. There are always ways to do things.
In any case, there's no way to make this thing a short book. Except, maybe, to cover less time with it. Cut it down to yearbooks, or something. There again: I'll have a better idea what to do with it once it's done.
Hunter's idea--which I haven't discounted yet--is to give each basic thing a chapter. And then make each chapter a different file to upload to slackerhood.com. A sort of historical News of the Stoopid thing.
Which might work. Release the story as a website; release it as a novel; see which one gets more hits. That might be fun.
Anyway: I've still got a few things to do here before I can switch the site over to V14. Let's see how many of them I can get done in time.
More later....
--Gremlin