Journal from December fifteenth

It seems I write my best journals when Gary tells me, "Write whatever you want." I sat before my beputer for roughly an hour, not knowing what to write.... and then, it hit me! Given the subject, it had to be relatively long, but if I'd written everything there was to write on the subject....well, I'd run out of space on my hard-drive. And here is why:

Things that The Fab complains about

Like a life-support system, Fab always needs something to complain about. Get him started on any of the subjects I’m about to list, and he could literally go on for an hour. The reason for this is that he has the strange ability to segue seamlessly from one complaint to another, and the way he manages this will soon become apparent.

“Elephant talk”

The Fab and I are big fans of prog rock - Yes, Jethro Tull, and the like. A fave, though, would be prog veterans King Crimson (known to their enthusiasts as ‘Crimso’). Fab will endlessly quote songs like “Epitaph” or “21^st century schizoid man”. So, what’s there to complain about? Well, in 1974, ol’ Crimso called it quits, and then they resurfaced in 1981 with a new lineup, including the singer/guitarist Adrian Belew. They released an album called Discipline that year, featuring the lead track “Elephant talk”. Basically, the song is Adrian Belew pulling out his thesaurus and reading out all the words that have to do with talking. “Arguments! Agreements!” he yells, doing his best David Byrne impression¹. Each verse features words starting with a different letter - “A”, “B”, et cetra. He even informs us of this extremely complex formula in the “D” verse, saying, “These are words with a “D” this time.” The only reason this song exists, and the reason for its title, is that Adrian Belew had cleverly found a way of making elephant noises on his guitar, and needed a way of showing this off.

When I played it for him, The Fab nearly died from being exposed to such repugnance. On one occasion, he complained loudly about the song for about half an hour on the bus, weaving it in with other complaints, as he is wont to do. I must agree - the song is of a very low quality - but I like the rock’n guitar solo (and admittedly, the guitar-elephant sounds), so I can stand it.

The lack of large trees on his block

Here in East Van, on 6^th avenue, there are some pretty spectacular trees. On The Fab’s block however, the trees don’t reach his high, high standards, which have grown to suit trees more along the lines of 6^th ave’s beauteous arbors. He says that when they were planting trees around Vancouver, they intentionally neglected to place large trees on his block, just to piss him off. He says that this allows his “worst enemy, the sun” into his room - so really, it’s the sun he hates.

Jaslene

Well, I’ll have to tell you straight up; we watch America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) pretty much every week. Last season, there was a girl competing named Jaslene. The Fab would see her on the screen and yell, “Eat a frikk’n sandwich!!” He felt she was too thin, and that she looked like a man. For most of the season, it was pretty fun for us all - The Fab liked complaining about Jaslene (because she gave him something to complain about), and the rest of us enjoyed laughing with him. Then something happened that totally wrecked it (for The Fab, anyways) - Jaslene won! I think that The Fab screamed when he saw that. Now, whenever he sees an image of Jaslene, even for a split second, he goes, “Ahh!! *&%^ing Jaslene!!!

“Tarantula”
“This dust makes that mud”

“Tarantula” is a book by Bob Dylan - over one hundred pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. I remember the first time I opened it, being in awe of how little sense it seemed to make;

“Aretha / crystal jukebox queen of him & hymn….”²

I challenged The Fab to make sense of the book - huge mistake. He looked at it and went, “That doesn’t make sense! Bob Dylan is a crazy lunatic!!!!!!” All the time after that, virtually every time he came over, he would pull it out and say, “Okay, I’m going to make sense of this!!”, and naturally, he would just wind up getting more pissed off.

“This dust makes that mud” is a song by New York-based experimental band The Liars. It is thirty minutes long. The first eight or so minutes are like a normal song (well, normal for The Liars, anyway), but the remaining twenty-two minutes drive The Fab up the wall. Those twenty-two minutes are entirely composed of a four-second loop, continuously repeated. It’s not noise - there’s a drum track, bass, guitar - it’s just a cool loop! But The Fab says, “It’s music for insane people!!!”

One day, The Fab and Cosima were over, The Liars’ album They threw us all in a trench and stuck a monument on top was playing, and The Fab decided, once again, to take another stab at ol’ “Tarantula”. After The Fab discarded it in disgust, Cosima demanded to see it, and quickly proclaimed, “This makes perfect sense!” I decided to read it aloud for a while, and I agreed with Cosima - it made plain sense. As this was happening, “This dust makes that mud” was playing, and The Fab was discovering his extreme dislike for it. These things combined must have made a significant impact on him, these things he detests so.

My Chemical Romance

A band that I, myself, have never actually heard. The Fab makes them out to be absolute criminals, though. He says, “You have to hear them, so you can know what I’m going through!” I say, “Why would I want to do that?” He says that as long as I haven’t heard them, I’m not allowed to complain about him complaining about them. Along with My Chemical Romance, he is ready to complain about Fallout Boy, Panic! at the disco, +44, Blink 182, Angels and Airways, and so on, at any hour of the day. You may wonder how he even knows about all these bands that he despises so much. Well, that leads us to the final complaint, the root of all evil, the thing that every complaint he ever had will eventually trace back to….

Graham

Graham may seem like a normal guy; enjoys a laugh, has some hobbies, likes his friends. Little did The Fab know, Pure Evil lurked below that funny, slightly portly exterior. By The Fab’s account, one day Graham came up, shoved his ear bud headphones in his (The Fab’s) ears, and said, “Listen to this My Chemical Romance, isn’t it great?” He also subjected The Fab to all the bands I mentioned above.

Now, regardless of what he is complaining about, The Fab will almost invariably end his rants (which we’ll get to in a moment) with, “Ugh, I hate Graham!!” To sum it up, I’ll give you an analogy that The Fab makes often; if The Fab was Jerry Seinfeld, Graham would be Newman.

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1: David Byrne was the singer from the Talking Heads. His style was less singing and more yelling in a sort of preacherly way. When David did his thing, it was original and witty. When Adrian Belew, who played guitar with the Talking Heads, ripped him off, he sounded like a jackass.

2: See Bob Dylan’s “Tarantula”, p. 1.

End notes

The Fab’s preferred medium to express these complaints it The Rant. The Fab is a master of the Rant, which is no small achievement - if you’re a bad Ranter, you’ll quickly bore your audience, and The Fab is no bore. His ability to segue from one Rant to another holds one’s attention, and he never runs out of things to complain about. The Fab is an actor, so he sometimes finds clever ways of Ranting in a certain character. The supreme example of this is the Great Peeping Tom, an artful conduit by which The Fab Rants about Gangsta Rap. Peeping, as he is sometimes called, is an unfathomably prolific white rapper, releasing a new album every five minutes or so (all of them concept albums). I remember his birth; we were playing video games in The Fab’s room, and suddenly, he began talking in Peeping’s imitable voice. “Ah kiwed a man when ah was six yeahs owd, y’undestan? Ah was inna stoodeeo, recoydin mah firs EP, anna recoydin engineeah disst mah rahms, so ah bit his heddoff, y’undestan. An dat became th issperation fo mah firs album: “Bitin’ a man’s head off in the studio”.

It didn’t occur to me until recently to ask The Fab, “How is it that you wound up hearing all those My Chemical Romance/+44/whatever songs all the way through?” He said, “I was being polite!”