Spiritual State

This isn't really a review of this album, I thought I'd just take the time to write about a small comfort. My mother introduced me to rock music at an early age. I spent my earliest years listening to Guns 'n' Roses and Metallica. Electric guitars put me to sleep. Distortion glided through my ears like rarest spun heavy metal. I hated rap music. I thought I'd always hate it. I thought I was better than the other kids who listened to 50 Cent or even worse, Baby Boy da Prince. Years later I found the music I loved at its most extreme, through the philosopher's stone of black metal. I carried it with me everywhere on a remarkable invention, one of the first Android phones. Thankfully, I had other interests. Anime was on my mind too.

My friend in high school told me about an anime he really liked that he said I needed to watch. It was Samurai Champloo; something I could swear I vaguely remembered catching late at night on Toonami. I didn't get the appeal of hip hop until I watched Samurai Champloo. But even more specifically, I didn't get the appeal of hip hop instrumentals. What could be more boring than a drum machine or poorly emulated instruments? Aruarian Dance changed everything. I no longer cared if the guitars were sampled, because it was a good sample. The drums felt right, for the first time in my life. It was the first song from the soundtrack I went out of my way to hunt down. I had to hear more, and I knew how to pirate. I ended up with Nujabes's entire discography on my hard drive. It's still buried there somewhere. Worst of all, Shing02's verses compelled me to write awful lyrics.

We became good friends. He asked me if I'd be interested in coming to an anime convention. I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. How do you put the words anime and convention together? Months later we were driving up to it, trying to find our hotel. I spotted someone dressed as a Game Boy. No, not someone wearing a corny shirt, dressed as a GameBoy. I immediately understood the world I had been transported to. As this isn't a review of my first anime convention I'll write about that later. More important to our story is my second anime convention. It was at a convention center near a beach. I remember being disappointed by the beach itself but it's awfully unfair as childhood memories of Santa Monica are nearly impossible to beat.

We parked at a Motel 6 by a Waffle House. It was close enough to the convention center to be a comfortable walk. Once again I was carried off into that sacred dimension, surrounded by angels and gods. I spent most of my time walking around. I tried to make friends. It was the peak of the Homestuck era, I saw plenty of trolls in gray paint or with gray sleeves. I never got Homestuck and I still don't, but part of me still wishes I could freeze the moment in time where I could see them walking around, living their lives, blissfully unaware that a decade later we'd be lobbing missiles at foreign dignitaries and dismantling any guardrails preventing us from barreling feet forward into a nuclear apocalypse.

I had one of my first tastes of beer, cheap Bud Light that I drank while gorging myself on a bag of Hot Cheetos. I don't remember what we were watching. That night turned out to be a clusterfuck of teenage hormones but all my attention was on my tastebuds and my own matters of the heart. I had a crush on a girl I met. I did anything I could to meet her again. She found me offputting. A decade later she probably still does, somewhere in that endless distance between us. I brought a Mudkip hat, one I desperately wish I still had. I wore it for the whole convention. I danced, awkwardly. A friend I made was on some turntables upstairs in a wide open space in the convention center. Unfortunately, this was at the height of my love for hardstyle and jumpstyle so my legs flailed everywhere in a fit of barely practiced moves, my upper body jerking in fits as if something were trying to escape from me.

Eventually we left, all of us. I never went to another anime convention there ever again despite them occuring every year at the same location, and I don't think I ever will. But even if I did, I'll never be that young again, I'll never again be so delicate and stupid. But, to get back to the point: it's easy to relive. All I have to do is open up Spiritual State and press play, because the pianos, that roll like waves, take me right back, more effortlessly than any words. I hear the reverbed claps and I'm transported back to the sands, however briefly, and once again we're all on that beach in all of our ignorance, shame, and joy. Anime conventions and Nujabes, eternal hypercosmic delight.

862 words.