“Chicago Runts”

My favorite are these Chicago runts who come over to South Bend and act like they own the place. In their minds, I’m sure, they’re like these slick John-Cusack types, although, in reality, even Cusack has far more edge and firepower. But that’s another story.

What I’m talking about are these stiff-necked dweebs who come over and almost invariably wield insurmountable anger in public places like taverns. The source of this anger is typically a refusal from our women, who, typically, see through their tourist-y, kid-in-a-candy-shoppe expressions and manner of interaction as the sleazy charade that is. Our female bartenders in South Bend and Mishawaka often have busts that are extremely, extremely sexy, the size of oranges, or there about, and, often, faces that reveal a motif of sacrifice and awareness of ubiquitous calamity, which, if not necessarily sexy, so to speak, is certainly, at least, commendable.

So the ire is considerable, in other words, in these wooden number-two pencils who sit there with no beards, no conversation and no facial expressions. I walked in one time and these shots were sitting there, voiceless, toothless and fuming, and so I put on TOOL on the juke, “Eulogy.” And the music came on, spooky bass and relentless guitar stabs, with haunting, apocryphal vocals from Maynard James Keenan, and it body-slammed the tension out of the room. And the best part was that “Eulogy” is like seven minutes long, or so, and so represented a good, sizable slab of genuine rocking.

The last thing I expected to happen, then, after the song was done, in a million years, was for this Chicago douche bag, who looked kind of like Edward Snowden without the courage, to actually assert an attempt at entitlement to the music, and put on all this faggy, static crap like twee pop and that Social Distortion song that goes “In a world of human wreckage, or whatever. I mean the guy played like six songs and they were all ridiculously pointless, of course staunchly adhering to the nauseating tenet of “indie,” bringing in the concept of economics like we’re all on some sectarian cultural retreat.