The Weakend

AN ANECDOTE FOR THE BAND, "THE WEAKEND". (through the peeps of jcw.)
“One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.”
-William Ellery Channing
“He strolls up to the twister, and he says, “have a drink”, and he chucks the bottle into the twister, and it never hits the ground.”
-Philip Seymour Hoffman (as Dusty)
To Draw a Tornado: A Visual Reference.
You draw a tornado. This is your fourth one this week, your seventeenth this month. A sort of nervous tick; these habitual tornado drawings you create. “They just sort of happen,” you say. Hardly the scientific explanation we sought from you, but of course, that was just your inner-tornado talking. Some would speculate that it’s when hot-headedness meets cold clammy hands, that the funnel begins to take shape. Others more partial to the mystic persuasion, give credit to a Godhead, and incidentally have been known to call tornados: “God’s drill bit”, giving any drawing of a man tied to a chair, placed on a railroad track, with the tip of a tornado placed atop his head, meaning.
...though we’re not completely sure what that actually means, and you’re not really the virtuoso of sketch anyhow. You’re a musician. You try to draw this same picture in sound. And you do. And that means something. And you call it “Tornado Days”, because it’s about tornados. And you don’t fuck around.
But you still like your sketches aside from the sound. They’re comfortable. They haven’t eaten your right ear drum raw like your instruments have, and they are much more formulaic and universally understood. Ask a man to draw a tornado. Give him that simple command, and his hand will spiral out of control, mocking his fellow assembly, creating the same descending helix as his neighbor: Calamity, he draws. Just as Mother Nature would draw the equivalent winds of death: Murder, she writes.
Ask a man and his comrades to imitate the sound of a tornado, and you’ve got a collective, uncomfortable mess. It’s beautiful. You hear high winds humming, houses collapsing, sirens blaring, animals wailing, people screaming, and you swear you hear the static-drenched voice of a woman, giving an emergency news broadcast at the back of the pack. It’s unsettling. You close your eyes, and instead of seeing the redundant logo for that sell-out of a natural disaster, you see yourself in a ditch, in the hallway of some institute, in a chair on some tracks, and you hear one-half the destruction with that half eaten ear drum you carry about. It’s like you’re almost there. Almost.
You play for them “Tornado Days”, and now it’s their turn to close their eyes. They hated your sketches; your reminder to them that they themselves cannot draw a tornado well either. But this sound! This feeling! Who knew the high winds could whistle these notes, that they had this sort of range.
The tips of their inner-tornados start drilling at their temporal lobes, causing mass confusion. Some dive into nearby ditches. Most BECOME the tornado, and spin uncontrollably in circles, until green in the face. The “green phase (pronounce it like you would “face”)” doesn’t last though, because the spinning doesn’t last. The spinning never lasts.
The Conclusion of: To Draw a Tornado: A Visual Reference.
The aftermath, is the wreckage they all call their lives, spread throughout Tornado Alley. Music, their vehicle through introspection, their ride through this particular safari, helps them find those rare moments they stored in their homes, before they blew away. They ride out to the fields to rummage through the memories of first lays, “addictions”, deja vu’s, the moral principles they held so true, the attention spans they were put up against. They find anything worth keeping.
You laugh at them. They rebuild with such unstable scraps.
“Can’t a guy build a roof over his head?”, they ask.
Soon enough, they’re the ones laughing. They laugh at your decision to withhold reconstruction, your negligence towards the approaching storms. A light sprinkle, or “God’s Spit”, as some would say, brings a new found heaviness to your clothing. You travel door to door, seeking shelter.
“Can’t a guy get a roof over his head?”, you ask.
Homeless, you revisit the safari, with the rain coming down even harder. You thought you weren’t going to do this anymore, but you know what you’re looking for. It’s the chair you’ve built from your endless hours of thought. Those thinking days when your hand would spiral out of control; those tornado days.
You find it sitting in a smashed automobile, buckled into the passenger-side seat. It appears there is a leg missing, and the orange cushion: a once in a lifetime Plaster of Paris shell of your bottom; torn to shreds.
You drag the three-legged chair to the tracks. The tracks they all once used, to avoid places like this. In the distance, you hear a faint siren. It seems a tornado has touched down. Cold and wet, you tie yourself to that chair you sought out, the one that now sits on the old tracks, and wait.
To Draw a Tornado: The Interview. (Reader has unrestricted permission to copy and paste this interview template to their zine, web-zine, maga-zine, and/or any other periodical unmentioned to pawn as their own, and has full authority to manipulate the context of the interview to their digression.)
You: Where did you guys draw your inspiration for “Tornado Days”?
The Weakend: Tornados.
You: That must be some sort of metaphor, right? Since most lyrics are metaphors. So tell me, what is “Tornado Days” really about?
The Weakend: Tornados.
You: Am I missing something? Is that some sort of flawed euphemism for “man’s life, swiftly spinning out of control”? Or perhaps a call to action against the oppressive forces that set limitations to our free will?
The Weakend: Tornado means Tornado.
You: But don’t you guys care? Wouldn’t you like to reach an audience? Make some sort of connection? Surely you’re unhappy with something...like the assassination of a president, or perhaps economic issues such as affordable healthcare, or the fact that you can’t keep a dollar in your pocket, issues with depression, maybe drugs, surely a female has done one of you wrong. Right?
The Weakend: Anyone up for a game of “Tornado Ball”?