Current mood:	sprinkled
Current music:	The Ramones- "Life's a Gas"

Questioningly
I got my first Ramones record when I was 12. At the time I was just starting to get into punk rock, so of course my favorite bands at the time were Green Day and The Offspring. And through the wonders of the internet I found many an interview where their respective members would talk about how the band changed their life. The first Ramones song I ever heard was The Offspring's cover of "I Wanna Be Sedated". They recorded it for a movie soundtrack-- Idle Hands, this horrible late-nineties teen horror comedy with a pre-Dark Angel Jessica Alba. I remember listening to that song and thinking, "this sounds too bouncy for Offspring. This sounds like a Green Day song" and pausing the credit sequence at the end to find out who had written the track. "Originally performed by The Ramones". Now that I think of it, it's oddly appropriate that my first taste of the Ramones came at the same time as my first glimpse at the woman who would serve as masturbatory fodder throughout a big chunk of my teens.



Speaking of balls, shortly after my 12th birthday I noticed an unnatural swelling of my ballsack. It had been bothering me for a few days but I ignored it, mostly thinking it had to do with how I was wearing my underwear. One day after hanging out with a few friends from the neighborhood I came back home and realized my balls were enormous and red and extremely painful. My mom took me to the doctor who quickly told me that I had an extra-testicular cyst in my scrotum. This meant that I had a cyst in my scrotum, not in my balls. While this was a huge relief, the fact that they were going to have to cut me open to remove the benign tissue was a shock to me, and I cried for hours that night. The next morning I was sent in for surgery, where I had some sort of allergic reaction to the anesthetics and had complications related to facial swelling and fever dreams. It was a long, bizarre night. I survived.

The next few days were horrible. I couldn't move, obviously, since my ballsack was still healing. The pain was the worst I've ever felt, and the nights were spent crying in pain as I watched my Dragon Ball Z tapes over and over again. Of course, my dad helped me out in every single way he could, trying to keep me happy by getting me junk food and goodies. One of those goodies was the Ramones album Adios Amigos (my aunt gave me a trade paperback copy of the Batman: Knightfall storyline, which was my first Batman comic and the trigger for another decade-long obsession, but that's a whole other story).

I listened to that album on repeat for days. It was like a 35-minute rockn'roll history lesson. All my Offspring and Green Day albums were rendered obsolete as soon as the first few ripping chords blared through my headphones like the screaming, bloody birth of rockn'roll. They were fun, they were aggressive, they were passionate and they were soulful. This wasn't "When I Come Around". This wasn't "Pretty Fly For a White Guy". It wasn't on MTV all the time. None of my friends knew them. This was a whole other thing. This was my band. And they were my closest friends all through high school, along with other luminaries like Fat Mike, Elvis Costello, Robert Smith and Tom Waits.

(Interestingly enough, the first Tom Waits song I ever heard was in that Ramones album-- track 1, "I Don't Want to Grow Up". Of course, the punked-up Ramones version was a far cry from what I would be getting into a few years later when I found my all-time favorite artist, but I just find it poetic somehow. Offspring-> The Ramones-> Tom Waits.)

I remember what I did the night Joey Ramone died. I cried in my bed, feeling like a complete asshole for it. I read articles about him online. I scribbled his lyrics in my journal. I learned how to play "Cretin Hop" on the guitar. And I remember what I did the night Dee Dee died. I had just come home from a weekend trip to Cartagena with my family. I decided that night that I was never going to do heroin, and listened to "Poison Heart" on repeat for hours. When Johnny died, I played along with "Loco Live" and sat outside my record store alone at night, and then I came home and I blogged about it. My friends were dying. One by one.

I thank that cyst in my scrotum for opening my eyes and showing me some fantastic music that has stuck with me through the years. Who knows what my high school existence would've been without them? I'm listening to "Life's a Gas" now and remembering.

Gabba gabba hey, brothers.