“I haven’t laughed this hard in a class in forever,” she says to me.

What can I say.

I’m good at what I do.

She calls and I don’t answer. She calls again. She sends a text. I push my phone to the corner of my desk. I find it easier to ignore people. It saves the trouble of having to explain that I just don’t care.

An acquaintance of mine got engaged. I won’t call her a friend, because she isn’t anymore. She is one of those people that as soon as they find a significant other, everyone else becomes an insignificant other. They are doomed, and all I can think about is how terrible her engagement ring looks. I hate them for their happiness.

400 miles away a girl has to be awake entirely too early to drive her friend to get chemo. Twenty something year old kids should not have to deal with this.

I know how she feels, at least somewhat.

How do you keep yourself in check while trying to be strong for your friend?

I still miss him. Growing up with somebody like that and then losing them at such a young age is not in the least bit fair. I don’t understand.

At times I feel like I failed him. Maybe I didn’t visit enough. He was out of state a lot getting treatment, but I feel like maybe I still could have done more. I see his mother, a professor, at school a few times each week. It breaks my heart. I used to think I had all the answers, but after he died, all I had were questions, and all I had was nothing.

I hope your story has the happy ending that mine did not.

My phone buzzes. She has sent me a text once again. She asks how I am. I tell her fine, I am going out. She says she misses me. I say nothing.

400 miles away I still don’t know what your laugh sounds like.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. 2003, 2004 maybe. After that I find little to no evidence proving otherwise. There is an occasional blip on the proverbial radar, but there is nothing consistent or convincing enough to prove otherwise.

Something has happened in the past few years.

We have entered a new Dark Ages. What was once a thriving community full of pride and integrity has been reduced to an embarrassing shadow of its former self. The founding fathers of the scene as we once knew it have been replaced. The bands that once served as the core of this movement have been designated as backups while “fresh” and “up and coming” bands rise to the top, achieving ungodly levels of success.

Honesty and talent have been replaced with picture perfect looks. Sincerity and passion have been replaced with dance beats. Innovation is down, imitation is up. You could take most of the members of the current wave of popular acts and interchange them between bands, and nobody would ever know the difference. The bands themselves probably wouldn’t even know. They would press the same synth key while strumming the same power chord while pulling back their hair as they licked their lips staring down the sea of 14 year old girls who have come to see them play tonight.

Give me a fucking break.

I look at a band like Thursday. To say they have had a significant role in forming the scene as we know it would be an enormous understatement. Following the release of Full Collapse and their subsequent explosion in popularity, Thursday was the scene. Watching the band’s documentary Kill The House Lights not long ago, I was struck by one of the interviews. They were speaking to a guy who helped manage the band throughout their early years. He spoke of when they were dealing with major labels and what these labels were expecting of them. He said something along the lines of these record executives expecting this band to be the new Nirvana. Can you believe that? A bunch of old men driving BMWs and wearing freshly pressed suits expecting these guys who had crawled out of a basement in Jersey to be the defining band of the generation.

Want to know the most ridiculous part of all that? The fact that this band actually did accomplish that. This band is my Nirvana. To this day, I still remember with perfect clarity the first time I ever heard a song by them. Living in the backwoods hellhole that is northern Georgia, it is hard to imagine any other area more culturally devoid or separated from any sort of creative energy. This is where dreams go to die. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a shoddy pickup truck belonging to my best friend.

“Dude, you’ve gotta hear this. You’ve just gotta fucking hear this.” He put in Full Collapse. The intro played, and I was graced with the wonder that is Understanding In A Car Crash. I had never heard anything like this. I grew up on school buses that played country music and oldies. This blew my mind. This was something I had never heard before. This was good. Right away, I was hooked, and I knew this was the beginning of something incredible.

When do you think is the last time the current generation of listeners experienced something like that? Kids these days don’t have anything remotely similar to this occurring. They have front row tickets to a musical landscape currently awash with designer bands, skin tight pants, and product placement. Bands that sing about absolutely nothing are making more money, selling more albums, and having their music heard by more people than any of the bands that have been proving themselves for years now. They play backing tracks and synthesizers instead of guitars and drums. They worry more about their ridiculously shaped hair than their ability to write lyrics that aren’t reminiscent of what would be found in a 7th grader’s MEAD spiral notebook. They are more concerned with producing a 3 minute and 34 second long radio friendly track in hopes that they will be able to shoot a video to showcase their cuteness.

We live in an age of friend requests and MySpace plays. What the fuck is the point, what does that shit even mean? MySpace pages for bands are filled with comment after comment from hormone overloaded teenage girls spouting line after line of nonsensical, unwarrantedl praise. These clowns have been anointed Gods of the Earth for their ability to keep their hair in place and croon sweet auto tuned vocals over an E chord while a drum beat permeates the background.

When the fuck did the music stop being about the music? When did that feeling go away?

The bands I grew up with had nothing but word of mouth and maybe a few demos on a long lost website known as MP3.com. Yeah, that’s right, back in the day bands like Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, Jimmy Eat World, Something Corporate, (insert other band of yesteryear here) did things the old fashion way. And it worked. They were sincere. They cared about the music, and they cared about their fans. I don’t look back on any of the albums those bands put out and think “What is he talking about?” or “That’s just so trite and forced, who is he trying to impress?” Every line, every lyric, every song is as honest as you can get. And it shows. Very little music that is being made today compares to any of the early work of said artists and the other bands that they held company with.

MTV put a bullet in the chest of the scene. The internet and the explosion of technology in general put two in the back of its’ head. What was the killing blow? I’m not sure. Maybe kids in general are just dumb as shit and simply don’t care about anything anymore. As long as they get to be captain of the cheerleading squad or as long as they get their cock sucked on prom night, maybe they really just don’t give a fuck about anything. There’s no time in their lives or room in the hearts to experience and appreciate something like this.

It bothers me that people are abandoning the intimate experience of having that moment when they hear a song, or even more farfetched, a whole album, and think to themselves “Wow, they feel just how I feel. This is something special.” That connection is being made less and less with today’s listeners.

Music has become a commodity. An accessory. A revolving door of shit. There are still bands making great music, many of them part of the original lineup that made this genre so successful to begin with. But they are no longer the priority, and it is getting harder and harder for them to survive.

Maybe I have gotten too old and I am in denial about the evolution of music. Maybe I have already reached an age of nostalgia. Maybe I’m totally wrong about everything. But I don’t think I am. Something is different. The community has suffered, the industry has suffered, and most of all, the listener has suffered.

Especially the kid who hasn’t even had the chance to listen yet. It makes me sad to think that as this progresses, fewer and fewer kids will be having moments like I did sitting in my friends truck, having my life changed by the sounds coming through the speakers.

Perhaps things will never reach that level again. It is hard for me to imagine anything as groundbreaking occurring anytime soon. I am disappointed at the direction the scene has gone over the years, but I am thrilled I was there to see it at its finest. Those are the days I will never, ever forget.

The scene is dead.

Long live the scene.

I was trying to find a way to express a thought that’s been in my head for awhile, but I couldn’t think of a way to get it out without sounding like a huge asshole (which I can sometimes be). So, instead:

1. People should stop trying so hard to get noticed/make others think they are important and or cool and or interesting. Chances are if people don’t notice you in the first place and you have to go out of your way to attract said attention, you don’t deserve it to begin with. Stop.

2. What the fuck ever happened to sincerity? God damn. Do something because really you want to. Because you fucking feel it. People are so desperate to be wanted and loved and needed these days it is incredible. I am tired of seeing selfish attention whores compromise what little artistic integrity is left in the world.

How come it is so important to have the validation and approval of people who have empty heads and absolutely no impact on your life? God, who cares.

I swear I felt something crawling on me in bed.

I will sleep on the couch.

A very generous person told me they were sending a Christmas present. I had no idea what to expect, and it just arrived at my house moments ago.

Opening it, I was amazed by what I saw. A hardcover book with a photo I’d taken as the cover image, containing all of my blogs from 2008. Every single one. Nearly 200 pages in length and aptly titled War All The Time. It’s strange seeing all my words printed down on real paper. I’m probably going to have to do this for all of my earlier entries.

People always tell me I should write a book. It looks as if it’s already been written.

Thank you so much.