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The Cure. The symbol of my rebellion, earlier years; the Cure was my edge during those years. It was the first time I'd ever worn eyeliner. Disintegration is The Cure's defining album, in many ways my defining album. I had a long running fascination with someone when I was seventeen. His name was David.
We'd listen to Cure 45 B-Sides (imagining we were part of the band) and scribble stream of consciousness in our school notebooks, sketching eyes and stick figures all over our books and skin, wearing black converse sneakers and ripped pants and button-down shirts and fishnets on our arms. David was the first boy I ever kissed. I remember thinking how peculiar it was to feel the sandpaper stubble of his unshaven face, hiding from our friends and his parents downstairs. The band's melodies and lyrics haunted me then, brought me closer to myself, as they still do. The sounds were deep, a nice fusion of acoustic synth. Robert Smith taught me that it was o.k. to be unhappy. Big frizzy hair and makeup didn't have to make you gay. You didn't have to define yourself as anything if you didn't want to. Being a freak was somehow personal - the only "flashy and cool" I was looking for. It wasn't so bad being a queer; being yourself was as easy as flipping the 45 over to get the real cream of the crop (the B-Sides were always better).
Years later I learned that this song was about child molestation. Somehow the spider had always been menacing to me. (I'd like to know when the obsession began: arachniphobia.) I think of spiders, of struggling, and of helplessness.
Sometimes when you're a kid you can't choose your friends. Or your enemies.
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"...on candystripe legs spiderman comes
softly through the shadow of the evening sun stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead looking for the victim shivering in bed searching out fear in the gathering gloom and suddenly! a movement in the corner of the room! and there is nothing i can do when i realise with freight that the spiderman is having me for dinner tonight.
...quietly he laughs and shaking his head creeps closer now closer to the foot of the bed and softer than shadow and quicker than flies his arms are all around me and his tongue in my eyes 'be still be calm be quiet now my precious boy don't struggle like that or i will only love you more for it's much too late to get away or turn on the light the spiderman is having you for dinner tonight.'
...and i feel like i'm being eaten by a thousand million shivering furry holes and i know that in the morning i will wake up in the shivering cold and the spiderman is always hungry."
(Lullaby, The Cure).
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