LoSe THiS SKiN

Some of it’s fuzzy, but lets see…In late 1994 after squandering months of post-high school life and facing starting at Roane State Community College in January ’95, I found myself drifting like a ghost around my hometown, sort of circling the drain. I’d drive to Knoxville and haunt this one bookstore in Market Square, check out bands at the Mercury Theatre and hit the record stores on the strip (all of which are LONG gone, along with anything charming about Knoxville, except for the music scene). I was managing and roadie-ing for my friends’ band, the Bourgeois Pop Machine and trying to get my own band going. I’d declared myself a writer in the third grade, but after high school I’d sort of hit a dry spell. I had stacks of comic book scripts, a short story that appeared in my school’s literary magazine and 90 pages of an aborted sci fi novel and no direction.

In my first English Lit class I met my friend Lisa and through the course of our first conversation, I mentioned being a writer and she asked me if I ever went to any open mics. Why no I’ve never done that. She told me of one that happened every Tuesday night at a place called Manhattans, in Knoxville’s Old City, and had a mix of musicians and poets. Cool, I said, I’d be there the next Tuesday! Back up to that New Year’s eve, I took the stage for the first time singing lead with BPM for one song. From that moment on I LOVED being on stage performing. Before that I was terminally shy. In school I’d rather take an F than get up in front of the class, and sometimes did. So, I dug this idea and was definitely going to attend. The only problem was I had a serious lack of material and less than a week to come up with some. At home I started raiding my notebooks, pulling out lyrics and fragments of stories and with a performance to concentrate on I started writing some new material. I needed to fill ten minutes and I practiced my best material out loud, timing myself. Monday night I felt like I had it down pretty good and headed to Manhattans the next night full of confidence and looking forward to seeing Lisa, who didn’t show up, but everyone from BPM did. I went on around 11:30 and actually got a fairly positive response. From that night I attended an open mic nearly every week for the next two years. Having found a direction I began writing all new material-short bursts of poetry and prose that could be read live. This was my punk rock! Shitty relationships and a jobs I fucking hated gave me plenty of fuel and I started addressing all the depression and fucked up feelings I had from growing up in a broken home.           

By the next fall I’d amassed quite a bit of material, but had no idea what to do with it, until I found some of Henry Rollins’s books at the Disc Exchange. He self published and his old band Black Flag (who I’d loved for a couple years at that point and still love to this day) released their own albums. So, duh! I’d make my own books! I started compiling my material, doing rewrites, edits, finishing some fragments and writing a list of titles. In December I’d finished and settled on the title Destroying Lives For Fun and Profit. My friend and frequent collaborator, Jason Gollihar, designed the cover and then it was a matter of figuring out who could copy and bind it. We found a copy center in Knoxville that could do it for a relatively affordable price and I ordered fifty copies, 8.5 x 11, velo-bound. It looked completely amateurish and cheap and the Xerox ruined the awesome black and white photo on the cover, turning it into mud. Eh! Punk rock, junior! So on my twentieth birthday, January 1996, I drove to BPM’s rehearsal with a box full of copies of my first book.

Around that time I wandered into that bookstore in Market Square and there was a woman doing spoken word and she was flat awesome, her name was Heather Royce and I got to chat with her a little before the next performance. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but a handful of people set up stools and started doing a dry run of a play called Definition of a Grrrl, written by Priscilla Grimm. I didn’t get to talk to her that night, but I ran into Priscilla a few weeks later at Manhattans. I came over and introduced myself and told her how much I had loved Definition and gave her a copy of Destroying Lives. A few days later I received a multipage letter from her and we became friends. More than that, she was a big sister who taught me a lot, introduced me to tons of music I still listen to today (I’m listening to Bikini Kill while I write this), and did some spoken word shows with me in Knoxville and Boston. When Definition ran for a week at the Carrousel Theater, she gave me a thirty minute set to open the show on opening night. In short, she wound up being one of the most influential people on me in my early twenties.

I was already writing material for the next book at that point and published it in a small fold and staple booklet, which worked well and the next seven books were done in the same format. The next two books to come out were Fight The Power…Or Fuck Off (title inspired by Public Enemy), followed a couple weeks later by Peace Keeping Mission, which reprinted articles I’d written for my college newspaper, new poetry and vignettes and some reworked pieces from Destroying Lives.  Here’s Your Warning (got that title from 7 Seconds) came a couple months later and Depraved New World a couple days after that. Bad Dogma was next and was sort of a transitional book, ending with the short story “Love in a World Full of Hate”. I was beginning to tire of writing heavily political pieces and was concentrating more on being a better story teller (not that I believed in my bleeding heart politics any less then or now, I just came to the realization that there are many people who are better at articulating these ideas).

All that remains of the next book, Fuel, is the original cover that was done for me by Pop Gurl 64.The book’s content is a complete mystery to me-I don’t remember anything that went into that book and all the original pages are missing. I can make guesses by going through old notebooks, but truth be told, at that point I was drinking heavily and I was becoming far less prolific. There are copies out there, I know I had some with me when I read at the Lucy Parsons Center in Cambridge MA. And the last book, The Devil and the American Night didn’t come out at all. That one was all poetry and completely devoid of politics, instead I focused on character sketches based on people I’d known. I feel like Devil was the most consistent and focused of the original books, but heavy drinking, depression and two destructive relationships killed my drive and I never released the book.

Priscilla had moved to Ohio, Jason moved to Boston after BPM had broken up, and most of my friends drifted away to new lives. The open mics ceased, I was homeless for a while…If it wasn’t for my good friend/BPM guitarist Jason Day (Shortwave Society) getting a place with me I probably wouldn’t have survived the next year. At that point my creativity was dead and I moved into horrible, prolonged period where I sort of lost my mind, but that’s a story for another time.

So! Over the next couple of days I’m posting what, I feel, is the best of the early books. Yes, these are new edits, because my spelling and grammar were at times atrocious, depending on how fast I was working and how much sleep I’d had. The biggest difference is with “Suffer”, which first appeared in a non-profane version in my high school’s lit mag, then got an explicit remix in Destroying Lives. This third version is based on a red pen attack I made on the story when I planned to release it as a single backed with two vignettes back in ‘98. I think this version is far more readable, and yes it may feel like cheating, but I am owning up to it at the outset.

Going through all this old stuff is both embarrassing and funny. I look back at me at twenty, at what a loud mouth, brash, know-it-all asshole I was and shake my head. At least my heart was in the right place…I hope this stuff still has life, I’m unable to judge it anymore.

Thanks and blessings to you my fiends,

Tim