The Scene

by Noise Pollution

I think one of the reasons I’ve always wanted to be a musician on some sort of “professional” level – not like, a studio musician or anything, I just didn’t want to say “rock star” – is to be a part of “the scene”, whatever that means. I always fantasized about going to parties and hanging out with cool people even though I kind of hate parties and am no good at talking with people. I just thought that if I was a part of this mythical “scene” that everything would suddenly come easily to me. Like, just by having a record out I’d somehow transform into the cool guy smoking a cigarette alone who people have a hard time approaching because he’s so aloof.

Bahaha. What a bunch of self-indulgent bullshit.

Not that I don’t still dream about it. I’m just trying to be a little more realistic now. Being a part of a scene wouldn’t cause me to suddenly fit into it. I know myself, at least sort of, and I think I’m incapable of changing quite that much. So unless the scene was predicated entirely on, you know, me… I wouldn’t fit in at all. I’d still feel awkward at parties. People I interpret as “cool” would behave the exact same way towards me. Which isn’t to say that they’d be mean or that I’d be ignored; in fact, throughout my life, people who I labelled as “cool” were always incredibly nice to me. They’d pile drunken compliments on me all night and it felt great. But I wasn’t exactly one of them. I was just someone they liked being around when they were fucked up. And you know what? Maybe what I was looking for doesn’t actually exist. Maybe being someone that people like being around is as far as you get with people who you aren’t incredibly close to. I don’t really know what I wanted out of these relationships. But I wasn’t really getting it out of what I had, and I don’t think being a part of the music scene would really fix that. But I used to think that.

I’ve also been reading this book about the punk scene in the 70’s, and holy shit, those guys were dicks. Even the people who I’ve come to admire after reading it were generally pretty mean to people. And then there’s the whole sexual promiscuity thing… I wouldn’t be able to handle that, man. For a number of reasons. The first being that I am pretty sensitive to infidelity, and get hurt really easily by that sort of thing. The second being that I just don’t put sex all that high on my list of priorities, so it’s not like the added benefit of “I could fuck whoever I wanted” would really mean anything to me. I mean, yeah, sex is great and all, but it’s not the end of the world. Drugs are so much better. Seriously. I don’t even do them anymore, but just knowing that the feeling you get from sex is pretty minimal when compared to having an extremely heavy substance abuse problem is enough to make me not give that much of a shit about it.

I’m sure that the scene is different now, but I’m still doubtful of my ability to fit in. Regardless, I still want to be a part of it. Desperately. I’m just not as optimistic about it as I used to be, so if I ever do manage to break through, I won’t be all that disappointed when I’m doing the inevitable: standing alone at a party with my back to a wall, a beer in my hand, and a pill under my tongue.