Kruppo

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We sat out under the stars at the Uno’s near the mall. I’d hopped her car, planning on getting mine back after we’d finished up. It was still in the mall parking lot. But for the past two hours, instead of just eating quickly as I had originally planned, Elicia and I found interesting things to talk about, and for those two hours, I felt at ease, instead of a tired and disjointed state. My head was clear, and I felt content with everything set before me.
It wasn’t that we even spoke about anything that was significantly important. We just spoke about dreams, about future wants and needs, and above all, the end of the road that we thought we could make out from where we were standing; that road called Life, and the end being the literal END of it all, where everything seemed to just come to a crashing halt.
Elicia asked me first, startling me as I had been gazing at the stars, listening to the gentle jazz being played nearby in a speaker system set up all around the area. “So what do you hope you’ll be doing in ten years?”
Easy question. At least, it started out as such. “Well, I hope to be writing music for the rest of my life. I don’t wanna have to worry about money, of course, and we’ll see how that turns out.” I didn’t have much to say on the matter. As far as dreams went, my life was playing itself out well so far. I was at least writing music, and that was a boost of healthiness. Elicia’s next question was the one that startled me.
“But what do you think will really happen in ten years?” I was puzzled by the sudden conviction in her voice, and I looked closer, seeing if I could find a reason for her strange question. Surely she led a happy life? I had not seen the kid once where she seemed upset or unhappy…
But to answer her, I finally gave in and unleashed the floodgates of doubt that had been sprouting within me for the past few weeks after Brian’s departure from Juggernaut. “I don’t think it will work out in the end. I’ll probably end up doing some shit job in some shit place because no one cares if I can play a guitar or not. No one cares if I can write a good song, or if I can actually come up with something fresh sounding. No one even cares about what music is really there for; to explore the depths of the soul. All we care about now is how it sounds to our ear; is the sound pleasant? Perverted? Weird? Uncool?”
Elicia nodded intently, hanging on every word. I was too busy thinking rapidly to let her get a word in. “I know I’m not the best guitarist there is. I know I’m not the first to do what I’ve been doing. I know I won’t be the last. But you’d think that it’s important that we try to achieve that balance between what’s right in music, and what’s not, yeah?” the confused look on her features revealed that she didn’t get it, so I tried to elaborate. “What’s right about music is that it’s…it’s almost a spiritual purge, not a physical one. It’s got its moments where it can help us release a little bit of physical stress, sure, but music is more about cleaning the internal space rather than the external. Music is supposed to help us understand ourselves better.”
“So you think that by playing something that’s already been done before,” Elicia said after a moment “you’re improving yourself spiritually? How? I guess I just don’t get it.”
“Well, it’s not that playing the same thing does the work; it’s the awareness that we develop that helps with that,” She was trying to hide behind that innocent, fun-lovin’ girl image that I’d seen every time we had met and hung out before. Now I was starting to see something; a whole new individual was appearing before me. I decided to keep going, see who I was really talking to. “We aren’t just developing our minds when we start to write and play stuff. We’re evolving, actually. Our minds are shifting into different kinds of specimen than they were when we started out. Now they’re more varied, they enjoy different tastes, and they are willing to experiment more.”
“Evolution? Chad, I don’t think you realize how strange you sound sometimes,” She laughed then, and for a moment the fun-lovin’ girl was back. The image disappeared as quickly as it had come. She leaned forward, looking very pretty in the night, suddenly. I lost my train of thought for a moment, being distracted by her.
“Well…” I floundered in my brain until I found where I’d left off. “It sounds strange, but it’s true. Humanity’s a progressive race; you don’t need me to tell you that though. You’ve probably already noticed it for yourself. We started out with nothing, and now look at what we’ve accomplished over the millenniums gone by.”
She was starting to see my point, amongst other things. We eventually got off topic and she sat uncomfortably for a little while before I got tired of sitting there, watching as she stared blankly at the empty glass in front of her that had held Pepsi an hour ago. “You know, I’m thinking that you have something you wanna get out of your system.” I said it directly, trying to be nice, but firm. Whether she was aware of this, I had no idea. She looked up at me, her lips partly open, as if astonished that I’d read her thoughts.
She opened her mouth, closed it sharply, and then opened it again, looking lost. “I don’t know,” She finally gave up and shook her head. “I just feel like, you know, we’re just wasting our time here.”
“Here at UNO’s, or do you mean it another way?”
“Just everything!” She now looked frustrated, and it was a strange turn of events for me to see her this way. I had never seen her look so bothered over something. “I don’t know why I’m in school. It feels like someone already had my life planned out before I was born, and they’re just dragging me along through it.”
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I'm so post-rock I shit sad birds