Death Death Alas

To quote Laura:

Also, any album title that contains the word "alas" immediately gets put into the "nauseatingly pretentious" category. Dude. It might as well be called, "In Which I Employ Stunningly Impenetrable 'Poetry' Which I May Or May Not Have Swiped From The Cover Of My 15-Year-Old Niece's Trapper-Keeper, Woe Is Me, Je Ne Sais Quoi Death Death Alas".

This is very true. My mate Jman is down from Sydney at the moment (hence the lack of blogging), and at a housewarming the other night he performed a song he wrote for a girl when he was in grade nine. It was called 'Tasting the Raindrops'. If we're friends on Facebook I can give you a link to a video of him hilariously performing it a few months back. It includes the line "tasting the raindrops you and me, tasting the raindrops and dancing in a storm." (The 'dancing in a storm' line was clearly very good, so he repeated it in a verse as well). Anyway, it's fun to look back and laugh.

Back in the day Shaun and I had lots of fun reading Teen Angst Poetry, a website devoted to adults who sent in their atrocious poetry from their teen years. You can read a fair few of them on the semi-defunct blog here. Now, I never wrote bad teen angst poetry. And thankfully I didn't write any songs. So what did I do to get out my teen angst? I mostly did the dishes and played basketball outside. I was the family dishwasher for many many years, which explains my current lack of interest in washing up until it's completely necessary. One day - one day - I will live in a house with an electronic dishwasher. I've heard they're these new inventions in Japan, so hopefully they'll arrive here in a decade or so. Apparently you rinse your plates and then put them in the dishwasher, press a button, and they get washed! Amazing!

But anyway. Yes, I played basketball and talked to my younger sister as my way of getting out any teen angst I felt (which wasn't much). I wasn't an angsty teen. And once I fell in love in grade nine, I didn't write letters or anything. We just talked a lot on the phone and at school.

I think that pattern continues to this day. Any angst I feel has to be talked out. Some people write poetry, or songs, or think angry thoughts in their dark bedrooms. I talk.

ALSO

'Death Death Alas' is totally the name of my faux-emo band.