Like I mentioned earlier I drove the Elk Truck for work and pleasure
but ti had some major flaws in its entertainment system, no radio. It
had a broken receiver that would play tapes, or more specifically –
tape. It did play tapes but sometime in the early summer I had
inserted the Opiate album by tool and the ejection mechanism failed
and left that tape as the only respite from the sound of my own
thoughts and the multiple mechanical rattles that old truck had going
on for my listening displeasure. Opiate was a competent album in the
hard driving post-glam/hair rock of the early nineties and the
angst-y themes appealed to my teenage sense of non-threatening
vanilla rebellion. Also there were swears, which was naughty and
awesome. The problem with the album was that it was really short,
something like thirty minutes which meant a drive to anywhere would
get you through the album and back again many times. Here is the best
cut off the album: Warning – Contains the F-word as a modifier to
“Bob Marley Wannabe Mother” so if you don't want to hear
something like that then don't listen.
When I had listened for about four times through I would be done for
the day and I would just sing songs that I knew, or ones that I
thought that I knew close enough to reproduce the gist of. Jordan did
not like me singing the lyrics badly and wrong to many of our shared
favorite songs and after a few songs he would ask for a little more
Tool. Many times the truck's lack of air conditioning and my loud and
demonstrative singing would combine for a windows down a cappella concert for other drivers and pedestrians. Which at least once
included my cousin and her family who thought it was really funny and they honked to try and get my attention but I was too enraptured by the sound of my own singing of some radical song as loud as I could to listen to some star stuck fans
cheer for me.
