Back in my adolescent narcissistic bubble, the months preceding December 8, 1982 was dark. Yeh, I was sixteen, had my driver’s license and pretty much unfettered access to a car. I had a girlfriend and my jump shot got me all kinds of attention in the halls and in the locker room; but I was spending hours upstairs locked inside my bedroom air guitaring for hours to The Who’s Quadrophenia, bathing my mind in the rock opera’s baroque amphetamine-fueled suicidal dreams and existential teenage angst.
The album is a weird, wonderful, conceptual mashup of identity and rage, mixing tensions between the four original band members with a progression of drug use and dissociative identity disorders: specifically schizophrenia and split/multiple personalities.
Just like high school. [Continue Reading…]
September 12, 2009
1977
He was arrested on August 21 at a police checkpoint under Terrorism Act No 83 which allowed the government to detain any citizen for an indefinite period of time without trial and without the requirement to release any detainee’s name.
He was beaten repeatedly for 20 days until September 11th when, close to death, he was stripped naked and tossed into the back of a Land Rover and driven 1500km to a prison with hospital facilities.
He died on September 12. [Continue Reading…]
The first time I was arrested was on my dead father’s 52nd birthday. I remember this because DL and my father shared the same birthday—June 11—and I remember DL’s parents arriving at the city jail with a scowl on their face and a sarcastic “Happy Birthday DL.” My first thought was “man, I’m glad my old man’s not around to see this,” a thought that later horrified me. [Continue Reading…]
