Black Hole Read Online Free Page B

to be me for the first time, where I was glad I was me and not someone else.
    The best punk shows I ever saw were at parties, in an Oakland backyard, a San Francisco warehouse, or a basement in Olympia.No one taped them, or filmed them. They’re gone, in the air, living in the memory of thirty or forty people who saw the show. I think back to some of those shows, remember the friends who were there who have since died. Every so often, that show will live in one less mind. When everyone who was there has died, that show will no longer exist.
    Now those bands are gone. I don’t hear good bands anymore. I’m flooded with DJs with records and laptops, and yes, there are still bands, but they just feel like they’re playing dress up; they look like throwback bands and cover bands, a copy of a copy of a copy, losing integrity with each generation. Or they look too perfect, punk bands with every spike carefully planned and placed. The old bands are getting back together to play shows that are full of twenty-one-year-olds who missed it the first time and forty-two-year-olds who want it to be back for one night, driving the minivan in from the burbs, old dads in young skater clothes.
    What’s left for an old punk-rock washout like me who doesn’t give a shit about punk bands anymore? Drugs. Which probably means I was always more of a drug addict than a punk. I would tell you then that I was going to change the world with my ideals and a pair of steel-toed boots, but really, I wanted to get really high and listen to something loud and fast. Acid, Robitussin, and cheap vodka: a perfect cocktail for punk. But the drugs now are better than ever.
    There are drugs you don’t know about unless you’re someone like me. For every drug that gets known enough to have a name, there are a hundred others that don’t make the cut. There’s a whole scene of indie-rock drugs too cool for a name that arefighting for their place in the market. But unlike the arts, this shit is a meritocracy. The best drugs will win, because it’s not based on anything but how they satiate the horrible hunger of the drug addict.
    There are drugs like Halloween stores that pop up and go away before you ever try them. Most of them aren’t any good, but they’re new, so people take them and get bored with them. The point is, there are too many for the DEA to give a shit about all of them, and until some suburban brats die taking them, no one will ever give a shit.
    For every meth lab in San Bernardino County, there’s an organic chemist in Berkeley making something new. What’s the point of a new drug, some might ask. Well, if the drug just barely exists, there’s no test for it. So for all the airline pilots and UPS drivers and parolees, they can take as many new drugs as they want because they can’t test positive for something there’s no test for.
    In some tiny warehouse right now, groups of ravers take remote and a DJ plays audio and video at such high speeds you can’t tell it’s music and videos without being geeked out of your mind. They play The Wizard of Oz on the big screen with a dubstep remix of The Dark Side of the Moon compressed into seven minutes. They watch entire runs of 30 Rock and Law & Order ; they listen to the catalog of the Beatles and endless bootlegs of the Black Crowes. Richard Pryor routines lie on top of Miles Davis and John Coltrane records.
    In another warehouse across town, everyone takes Multi, and DJs play multiple records at a time. To the sober, it sounds like a cacophony. On one hit, you can separate two sources of input. On two hits, you can hear four sources. On three hits, eight. Andso on. Kids with hacked iPods walk home listening to several podcasts and all the Led Zeppelin albums at the same time.
    On a floor covered in rubber gym mats, everyone lies still and leaves his or her body on a full hit of Astral. You watch the whole scene floating just