It’s All Such Bullshit

Halloween In Denver

I’m not sure the music has anything to do with title on this one. The title is interesting though. It’s a reference to being diagnosed with CF in Denver when I was 8 years old. It was Halloween and I lived in Taos, which is 3 hours or so away. It was nighttime, I remember - well I remember we were there a long time doing sweat tests and blood tests and bullshit. Then somebody gave me a plastic jackolantern bucket and I was going around trick or treating in the various rooms. I don’t remember where we stayed.

They were creating a monster. *laugh*

I kept thinking about this song this weekend:

Halloween In Denver

It’s from the first Third Option album, Frosted Mini Wheats. I thought of doing that album, and thus created that act, when I had been beatboxing for an hour straight on the drive home from hockey practice when I was playing for UNM. I noticed the beatbox tunes would change slowly over time. I thought I’d invented something and I told my buddy Dustin how I was gonna make an album where each song just morphed into the next, and he said “oh you mean a trance record?” Dammit. I had invented nothing!

But this Halloween In Denver song, it’s funny that such a marginal thing that I never really shared with anyone is the one that’s called Halloween In Denver. That title is a reference to me being diagnosed with CF when I was 8. It was at a hospital in Denver and it was Halloween. They gave me one of those plastic jack-o-lantern buckets and I was going from room to room getting little Snickers from people with it. That stupid night and that stupid diagnosis has defined my life ever since, really a lot more than any “disease” or “condition”. But I didn’t write a slam poem that I did in front of thousands of people, or even a rap song or anything. It’s just this short tune jammed in the middle of 60 minutes of album, and what’s more it’s not a highly charged big epic thing either, it’s just a pretty melody that I like. But what makes me think about it sometimes is that that melody doesn’t seem like me to me. It seems like something that comes from outside of me, or maybe it comes from my essence, whereas a lot of stuff comes from the ego and personality that I built on top of that essence, shrouding the essence. Ironically, I probably built a lot of that up in response to the diagnosis, so there’s this irony around having a song that comes from the essence, who’s title refers to the diagnosis.

It’s like a subtle, sleek victory. Poision in the night that the enemy general never even notices, let alone resists.

I win!!