tortured

this is the kind of image (can you tell i am on a little getty images kick?) that i remember when i think of kurt cobain. staring off into space. in my head, what he is thinking is that i want to be anywhere but here. anywhere other than in front of an audience that has paid to see me. out of sight of this camera off stage that is waiting patiently to capture a moment in my life that someone (like me) will use to define me. i don't want to be here, because i wasn't prepared for my life to be an open book. for my music that i love to be thrust into a machine that calls for my band to be in certain places at certain times to write certain hooks to make certain money. i wasn't prepared for this. i am not prepared for this. i don't want to prepare for this.

that's only in my head, of course. i wish it wasn't that way. i wish that what i remember from the one time that i saw nirvana play live was a frontman that was killing it onstage, having the time of his life and rip-roaring through his band's catalog like it might be his last chance to perform those songs ever. but that wasn't the case. don't get me wrong. the concert, the smoky, pot-ty concert was real and loud and amazing just like i wanted it to be, but it wasn't because of kurt cobain as much as it was i was at a fucking nirvana concert. for all i know, they could have been pumping nevermind through the pa system and had stagehands dressed up as the band. i wasn't close enough to know for sure. but that didn't really matter. what mattered was the experience. what mattered was that i was there. and that i would be able to tell my friends the next day what a second-hand high at a nirvana concert felt like. i wish i could remember what year, exactly, that was. i know it was at boutwell auditorium. i know where "there" was, just not when. not that it makes any difference. remembering life-defining experiences doesn't usually hinge on details. details would just get in the way of a good story that i probably changed each of the hundred times i told it.

as life-defining experiences go, this one, this concert seems fairly minimal as compared to the births of my girls, my wedding day, certain moments during my life as a church staffer, working in huffman and conversations that i've had over ribs or at o'charley's in roebuck or in the pool at gulf shores plantation. shoot, as concerts go, i think i had a more kick-ass (and definitely more of a second-hand high) time in the second circle of hell that was some warehouse in atlanta where i saw limp bizkit. but the nirvana one stands out above the others because of what happened a couple years later. when cobain killed himself. and the tortured part of his story, the romantic and cool part, became tragic. hearing the news of his death was what burned the above image, or something like that, into my brain. all the questions about what he was thinking about while he was staring off into space would now go unanswered and i'd be left to fill in my own blanks. it's kind of like if lost were to never air another new episode. all the loose ends would depend on my tying them up in my own imagination. i wouldn't like that one bit, no sir. there are too many questions in life as it is. there are some things in this world that i request be served to me. serialized tv shows coming to their natural and decided end are one of them (damn you, twin peaks and x-files!!!) another is for "tortured artists" not to kill themselves. is that too much to ask???

experiences, life-defining ones, are drawn from all sorts of perspectives and angles. i, more than likely, would not like nirvana today if they were still around and had kurt cobain found happiness. they'd probably suck. and i feel guilty, somtimes, for drawing inspiration and/or motivation from someone meeting their premature end because they "couldn't deal with it anymore." but the world needs those people. we need our cautionary tales just as much as we need our trivial tales. without one, the other wouldn't have nearly the same impact. it's sad, but true.

we are all tortured, right? we wouldn't have it any other way. what kind of boring life life would that be? one without pain, confusion, constant questions, regrets, death, destruction, terror, unrequited love, divorce, disease?

oh, that's right. it would be heaven.

go jesus.