on the dripster and his puddle
MOAR COWBELL!
Oh dear. Your room mate is throwing up.
He’s throwing up?
Actually.
Actually?
Actually.
Ok. Let me deal with it. What happened Jim.
I responded in between heaves.
Eating chicken. I think it was the chicken. Likely.
My response was interrupted: more moaning and barfing.
Ok. Can you keep it down? We’re watching a movie.
I could see the dipsters drippy girlfriend rolling her eyes all the way through the cracked plaster and lathe walls of Hipster Hall.
I was soooo problematic.
What can I do?
We trolls have sensitive stomachs.
I remember the first time I had sam and ella. (salmonella dear reader, salmonella)
I was in the chunky soup apartment.
No we didn’t eat chunky soup it all the time.
It was all about the floors.
The floors were slanted and enchanted, so much so that the crooked rain, crooked rain that came through the leaky ceiling would flow down them like a river. When things were dry, we’d race soup cans down them.
My mom was outraged when she first saw the place
This place is a dump! We didn’t raise you to live in a slum.
But it was the 90’s. Slumming it was all the rage back then.
The more outrageously bad the apartment the better.
The cockroaches were so big we thought of using them to replace the budweiser horses.
It was heaven on earth for the grunge rock scene - a self important group of shoe gazing autophallosugatori obsessed with everything dilapidated, used and nearly broken. It was the high temple for the priests and priestesses who ruled the cult of ugly twenty something art and music scene. Think of the film Singles without Matt Dillon’s massive nostrils or the whole Seattle thing.1
I lived there with the dipster.
He was an odd duck who loved smoking and judging people for their music collection.
The dripping sound I heard constantly wasn’t the leaky pipes - it was moaning and complaining of his rockhouse girlfriend.
She’s some fancy schmancy producer or something these days.
She was an art school conformist.
She knew all of the rules:
Thou Shalt Worship Obscurity (But Only the Right Kind): Liking anything mainstream was instant social death.
Thou Shalt Affect Disinterest (Passion is So Mainstream): Enthusiasm was gauche. The correct posture was one of detached irony and world-weary cynicism.
Thou Shalt Embrace Thrift Store Chic (But Curatedly): Looking like you rolled out of bed in someone else's hand-me-downs was the goal, but it required significant effort.
Thou Shalt Espouse Left-Wing Politics (But Primarily in Theory): Loudly proclaiming your progressive ideals was mandatory, especially when railing against "the man” and “men”.
Thou Shalt Champion "Authenticity" (While Performing Your Identity): Everything had to feel "real" and "unpretentious," even though the entire subculture was a carefully constructed performance.
Thou Shalt Possess the Correct Canon of Cool: Knowing the "right" bands (Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Pavement), the "right" filmmakers (early Tarantino, independent documentaries), and the "right" authors (Kerouac, Bukowski, obscure feminist poets) was essential for social currency.
Thou Shalt Scorn Materialism (While Accumulating the Right Kind of Stuff): Ostentatious displays of wealth were bad, but owning the correct vintage record player, obscure art books, and ironic collectibles was a sign of being "in the know."
Thou Shalt Judge Relentlessly (But Subtly): While outwardly preaching tolerance, the grunge hipster art school crowd was a hotbed of subtle judgment. Everything from someone's musical taste to their choice of footwear to their perceived level of "selling out" was silently scrutinized.
Thou Shalt Believe You Are Radically Different (While All Dressing and Acting the Same): The ultimate irony was the intense pressure to fit into this specific brand of non-conformity. Individuality was celebrated, as long as it aligned with the established codes of the subculture.
I did not.
She hated me.
Couldn’t handle the troll.
Troll didn’t know how to behave.
Apparently there are rules.
And dipsters and dripsters?
They are hyper aware of the rules.
And the scores and all the points you get from knowing the right bands and the correct music and being seen in the right way.
Me?
I wanted to give a shit about the rules.
Two problems?
One, I didn’t know how.
Two, the rules that didn’t seem to work came outta me like sam and ella chicken.
The first time I was merely twenty years old.
I wanted to eat healthy. My mom sent me to my flat with a bunch of boneless skinny chicken boobies.
On the first night there, I tried cooking them. Into the frying pan they went, still frozen.
I’m not sure what I had with them for starch or veggies.
I do know that I had orange juice.
Dear reader, you will be tickled to know that I cooked the chicken in orange juice - fancy eh?
Sadly though, I didn’t cook the chicken long enough.
Within two hours that chicken and orange juice made an encore appearance. I must have had beets as well because I remember that by ten at night I produced a full technicolour yawn. Imagine to my delight as all of the colours of rainbow brite came arcing through the air, splashing and splattering all over the porcelain.
There was an issue however.
As my guts contracted to project my chicken delight upward, they also pushed downward. Imagine taking a tube of toothpaste, opening the top, cutting a small hole in the bottom and squeezing in the middle really hard.
Yup. Things were messy.
What’s worse, the dripster and his soggy bottom girl were there in the flat.
Gnnnnnuuuuuaaaagggggghhhhhhh! I wailed and groaned as a chunk of citric chicken lodged in my sinus.
Puking and shitting and blowing my nose, I sounded like a moose hit by a semi and in the throes of death. The dripster and his puddle kept the door shut tight.
But that’s what it’s like being a troll.
The values and beliefs of the world are things that some can eat and swallow whole.
But we trolls have sensitive stomachs
Most people find ways to chug down the rotten chicken bits of our culture. In the name of being polite and not wanting to create a glorious spectacle of vomit and feces are able to keep things down, play the game, score points and fit in.
The dripster’s rock house girlfriend gagged down all of it. From worshiping at the altar of the cult of ugly to perfecting the art of the eye roll, she not only followed all of the secret codes of grunge rock ‘cool’, she enforced them.
You know, I almost have to thank her, that art school conformist with her list of unwritten Thou Shalts. If it wasn't for people like her, so desperately curating their cool, so terrified of a misstep in the intricate dance of acceptable non-conformity, how would us trolls even know what we were reacting against? She, and the dipster by her side, were the perfectly behaved bland backdrop for my technicolour yawning.
They were the rule book I instinctively knew how to shred. Every eye-roll, every sniff of disdain, every slammed door just confirmed it: my stomach was working perfectly. It knew poison when it tasted it, whether it was undercooked chicken or overcooked pretension.
And that, dear reader, is a kind of superpower, even if its main expression is making a godawful mess.
Some of us are just born to be the grit in the oyster, or perhaps, the lump of chicken in the orange juice gravy.
To quote the great grunge poet Anthony Kiedis: Fuck ‘em to see the look on their face Fuck ‘em just to see the look on their face.
They actually referred to Halifax as the Seattle of the North which is ironic because Halifax is on the same latitude as Portland Oregon. Perhaps Seattle should be called “The Halifax of the North” based merely on geography.
What’s worse? These days there are some in Dartmouth who are more Portland than Portlandia - and you can put a bird on it if you have any doubts.