And, as power surged to the stage from black-clad hears, we knew that truly, God Hates Us All.

When you live in the rural suburbs, music is your idol. You sift through the detritus of junk shops masquerading as antique stores for records, paw through clattering suitcases of cassettes from when your parents were young and cool, saving up for trips into the city to buy new music—fingers crossed at a place that isn’t scared of “explicit lyrics or content”.

The internet makes it easier. It’s all there, without waiting for your older brother to discover grunge, or a stray chance introducing you to an album that blows your former Sousa-loving mind. But the internet doesn’t bring concerts to the middle of fucking nowhere. You still have to go to the city for that.

When Slayer and Megadeth were booked at the Washington County Fairgrounds, well outside the teeming urban environs of the city, it was like a gift directly from the gods of metal to the scattered farming and bedroom communities on the western rim of the Portland Metropolitan area. Where thunder eggs and amber had dully gleamed just weeks before at the annual gem show, perfected screams would vibrate the air.

The primary paper for these far edges of Washington County, the Forest Grove News Times, was ready to herald the event as “Slayborday Weekend”, a refreshing change from the rote new-school-year staples and heart-warming, if repetitive, events that make up the bulk of rural suburban news. They secured their press passes and entry to what was, frankly, one of the awesomest events to hit the area for years.

But the News Times, one of (if not the) best performing papers in the community newspapers group that includes the Portland Tribune, didn’t reckon on one thing. It turns out that at a second glance their coverage was considered absolutely not worthy of consideration by Mike Thrasher, the man who is presenting Slayer and Megadeath to the Washington County Fairgrounds and who, apparently, gave out too many press passes.

In the face of this overwhelming quagmire, the day before the show Thrasher revoked the two passes given to the Forest Grove News Times. After extensive emailing by the News Times’ photo editor, who’d been looking forward to shooting the show, Thrasher relented to issuing press credentials—but not the passes. If they wanted to cover the biggest show in their county, the News Times would have to purchase their own tickets to get in. In short, Thrasher was cool with the event being covered, but he wanted to make more money, too.

The photo editor’s off-record reply is unpublishable.

Whatever Thrasher’s reasons for cock-blocking the Forest Grove News Times from covering the event, the end result is a hole in next week’s paper, both design-wise and in information. As great as the free alt weeklies in Portland are, they are not necessarily where the board members of the fairgrounds get their news. If a fantastic chance like this concert comes up again, there will be only the most basic paragraph—if that—detailing how Thrasher’s Slayer concert was received. The News Times could dig into their empty pockets to scrape up the money for last minute tickets, but it would be giving publicity and promotion to a man who has proved himself to be unworthy of basic consideration.

Disclosure: I was set to go as the writer for the News Times, to work up an extended caption/mini story to accompany Chase’s pictures. I’m really fucking pissed.

There is this guy I know. Dogs cross the street to get pets from him, and even the most hateful cats love him, because he exudes some sort of “nah, I just want to romp too” vibe.  He will spend literally hours learning about a breed of animal and is now full of more facts about bizarre wildlife than most public television.

He is a ridiculously good photographer with an even pickier sense of self-confidence than I have, which is saying a lot.  He has a job in a dying industry and gets into godlike rages at the pitiful excuses for first aid his superiors half-heartedly attempt. I can’t understand how he is such a good photographer, every time I see a snippet of a new project of his I am floored.

For various reasons he has stopped eating grains and feels about a million times better.  For breakfast he has “bear cereal”, which is berries and nuts with cream poured over.  He yells at crows out of the car window.  He has the prettiest hair and likes to have his toenails done.

When I want to buy something particularly ridiculous and glam I just need to ask him if I should and he says yes.  He always goes for the sparkliest thing.

I’ve known him since he was nineteen, but I don’t want to think about that too much because we’re both twenty-seven now and that is kind of a long time.

The VS Miraculous™ Push-up, blogged here.

The state of the periodical archives in a five year old, 50 million dollar university library.

Abstractedly pushing back loose curls, Gillian licked her lips before chiming in.  “I honestly think I may faint. Or be sick.”

“Jilly!” Elaine spat, embarrassed but feeling the same way herself.

“It’s true.  I am so terribly a bundle of nerves that I cannot bear it.” She smiled weakly, though her eyes blazed. “I will try to choose fainting, if it comes to a choice.”

Doña Absalom threw back her head and laughed, her dark eyes sparkling.  “It’s perfectly understandable Gillian.  And Elaine, you are truly welcome.  As I told you earlier, if I hadn’t your company I would be attending alone—and it is no fun to take in beauty alone.”  On the word “beauty” something in the girl’s expressions melted and they turned as one to the curtain.  The Doña leaned back, settling more comfortably in her chair.

The Absaloms were fresh arrivals to the woods-bound city and they fairly crackled with the cosmopolitan energy of the south.  The Doña’s station, as the wife of a successful mining company executive, was one the girls’ parents admired.  They’d dutifully paid a welcoming visit to the newcomers and, in between sympathising about the ever-present rain of the season, they offered their daughters as lady’s companions, assuming the Doña’s boredom from her conspicuous lack of children.  Though she was far from bored, the Doña agreed.  She was pleased to find the girls bright, curious and not yet settled into the restrained Protestant mould of their parents.

By the time the reputations of the Absalom’s former social circle had caught up with them, the three women were firm friends despite more than a decade’s difference in age.  The girl’s parents weighed wild stories of gypsy artists and lady pilots against the irrefutable proof of the Doña’s status and the clear love the three shared.  In the end, Elaine and Gillian were allowed to continue seeing the Doña.  And she continued introducing the girls to society, balancing balls and garden parties with devilish demonstrations at scientific salons and bohemian meat teas with impassioned discussions of modern morality.

Gillian and Elaine took it all in with the wide-eyed credulousness of youth, their excited chatter at the end of the evening reigniting for the Doña an enjoyment that had been lost in the routine debauchery of the sprawling desert city she’d left.

Even with her love of music, she might have passed up this concert if Elaine hadn’t seen a fantastic poster for it and made Gillian pump the between maid for the latest gossip. Dear, rough Bonnie; perfectly scandalous and equally competent, she’d held her position for years in spite of family feeling through the sheer force of her ability to deal with the butler and the cook’s infighting.   When the Doña offered her a seat in the box, the girl had laughed and, with a telling swish of her hips, said she’d planned for “more exciting sort of company, if you know what I mean.”  The girls were ostensibly staying with the Doña while shopping for the upcoming season.  It was expected that during their visit she would take them to the theatre, but their parents remained comfortably ignorant of what theatres and what shows.

Elaine interrupted the Doña’s musing.  “I believe they’re starting!” The girl was dressed in a bicycling outfit that would have her parents rending their hair and she was practically glowing.  Gillian made shushing movements and the Doña drew her chair forward to join the girls in watching the stage as the house lights dimmed.

A swell of strings with an undercurrent of haunting electrics harmonising brought the curtains open.  Elaine and Gillian’s gasps at the set were lost in an encroaching drum.  The Doña recognised the mechanics of the centrepiece from the last world’s fair, here interpreted as a madman’s fairyland, giant clockwork grown from vines, struts of trees, flowered springs spiralling across the boards.

To thrums of bass that stirred the heart, the performer they’d come to hear was illuminated.

Trim waist, coat flaring at the hips, with biblically angelic features, like a devilish Louis XVI androgyne, his voice drew them in.  The girls’ cheeks were flushed, Gillian’s lips parted as though she was trying to breathe in the music.  From stirring deep notes to a heartbreaking falsetto, he built them a world of clockwork men trapped in a machine.

It was, the Doña thought in a moment between numbers, wildly different than the steam organs and brass and European operas.  She looked at the girls, their faces aglow as they strained against the railing, standing in applause.  A new song eased forth, dark rococo sweetness blending the best aspects of Mozart and Wagner into something more.  Looking into the stalls below, the Doña saw a sea of youthful faces of all classes turned up to the music.

The lyrics were no more bawdy than the latest tours from France, but there was something insidious about the bass line that pulsed through the veins, tearing open a place for the words and catching you up with it.  The girls’ parents, the Doña thought with a smile, would think it hellish.

By the end of the show the Doña was as converted as the girls.  They filed down the stairs to their carriage, chattering high-voiced with excitement.  The cool evening air and stars seemed sweeter, clearer, as seen through a new glass.  The three fell quiet as they were driven home, each encapsulated in her own crystal bubble of sound.  The Doña looked at Elaine and Gillian, her girls, their eyes full of new ideas and blood astir.  Music like that, she thought, could change the world.

I have never had someone react quite the way a woman at my morning bus stop did last Monday, however. Here, let me set it up:

Every workday I walk from home in the old residential area of town to one our more ridiculous bus stops. Situated in front of a Plaid Pantry, the area’s answer to the 7-11, this stop sees the passage of innumerable drunks, commuting children, people getting off graveyard shifts and so on. There’s a coffee kiosk behind it, run by Wayne, one of the more endearing Canadian-Americans I know. He’ll be putting out a-board signs with the day’s specials as I walk up, or shortly after, and we always wish each other good morning. I meander a couple of yards past the bus shelter so I can finish my cigarette and start in on the day’s read while keeping a clear view of the road through the cherry trees.

It’s nice. It is routine. I won’t be home for another ten or eleven hours and I like my handful of minutes sitting there, enjoying the morning. I will give people cigarettes and lights and talk about the weather with Wayne, but I fiercely treasure those moments of quiet where it is just me and my book and a raucous group of birds across the street.

But Monday. Monday when I walk up to the stop I hear Wayne interacting with an overly cheerful lady. Being a crazy ray of sunshine himself he barely falters as she learns his northern origins and shouts “God Bless Canada!”

I start in on my book, the back of my neck tracking the cheerful woman’s movements. When you are antisocial, talkative people inspire cold-war levels of paranoia and preparation against learning far too many facts about their pets and their children and their Jesus. I believe I flinched when she called “Morning!” from the shelter of one of the town’s monstrous sequoias. Assuming that I was not her intended target, since I was clearly reading, I ignored her. Totally in vain. “Morning!” she called again.

Against every inner will, politeness took over and I turned, painfully, to regard her. I gave her a “Good morning,” and returned to my book. Taking my words as an invitation to make friends, the woman wandered over to where I sat and began talking at me. I tried my best to look very interested in my book, eyes returning to the page during every pause in her rambling speech.

I couldn’t really tell if she was intoxicated or naturally unaware of social signals. She was engulfed in a red sweatshirt, her hair looking like it had been done the morning before and not touched since, half-matted and the straw blonde of a woman in her forties still trying to overcome mousey brown at home. There was a feather stuck at a wilting angle in her hair, which clashed a little with the crushed orange plastic lei.

When she asked me about the book I was reading I told her it was science fiction. This launched a weird anecdote on her part about Scientology and some gathering in the city her nine year-old daughter had seen. “And she told me she liked what they were talking about, and here’s this little girl who doesn’t know anything and what does that show us?”

A handful of completely inappropriate answers ran through my brain, but I just shrugged. She became more animated.

“It shows that we should be able to pick whatever we want to believe in and nobody should be able to stop us.” Which, okay, I totally agree, but it didn’t really parse in context. Her small comments and conversation continued, to my dismay, hitting on several themes before she asked my name.

“Oh, that is a lovely name,” her level of sincerity was absolute and I wondered what the rest of her hair was doing, since only half of it looked to be in the braid. “It’s from?”

“It’s Irish.” I smiled with my eyes and tried to go back to my book. But she had to tell me how nice it was, the name and so on. Somewhere in there I told her I was a warehouse manager and her soliloquies became tinged with feminism, since I guess that is a job I had to wrest from the hands of some guy.

“So you’re Irish and—what else? You look Jewish.”

I sighed. “I’m Palestinian.” Which is a heavy simplification, but honestly—when you’re evenly mixed ethnically and culturally, it’s easier to just pick what people think you look like. And telling people I’m a kind of Arab tends to make them leave me alone, which was rather not so in this case.

I’d barely finished the last syllable when her eyes welled up, pooling above expertly applied black liner. Her face contorted with pain and I felt myself on the edge of utter confusion.

With a voice nearly cracking under the weight of emotion it bore, she gathered herself and looked directly into my eyes, “Oh no. Poor Palestine.” Eyes closed and she took a breath before looking at me again. “I need to tell you. I am so sorry for the Christian War.”

What do you say to that?

And what do you say, besides uncomfortable murmurs of consolation, when a complete stranger who has roped you into a one-sided conversation begins working herself up over the unjust treatment of a people she has decided you are a representative of?

Having finished my cigarette, I moved to the curb, willing the bus to hove around the corner at the end of the line, while she paced, darting her hands in small chops to underscore points. She stopped in front of the bus shelter and I realised we weren’t talking about race any more.

“When I was a girl I thought I was a queen, putting on hats. But I’m not. But all women are queens.”

“Okay.” I said. “Sure.”

She came up close to me, I watched the freckles warp across her face while she was struck with another wave of emotion as she brought the conversation back around to Palestine. I wondered where the bus was.

“Can I ask you, honey, what religion are you?” I considered this for a second.

“My great grandparents left Palestine because they were Catholic.” Another oversimplification, and not really an answer, but it seemed appropriate. She laughed.

“Well! That would be a good reason to leave! But you know, and don’t take offence, but the only true Catholics are Episcopalians.” I nodded and she moved in front of me, blocking my view of the road.

“Let’s pray.” She put her hand on my arm and said a few words that were a surprisingly lucid, non-denominational statement of general hope. I saw the bus finally turn the corner behind her shoulder as we said amen.

As I was pulling out my pass she hugged me lightly and kissed me on the cheek. She called out behind me while I moved towards the opening doors.

“You have a good day! This day is yours, it is my gift to you!” And it was, more or less. But seriously, I am just going to start telling people that yeah, sure, I’m Jewish.