A guy from the record company comes up to me after we lost the Battle of the Bands contest. He tells me 'You should be more yourself.'� I look at him ' he's a middle-aged pseudo-hip geezer working for some big multinational and you can tell he considers being a judge for these amateur shows way beneath him.

'Be myself?'� I repeat. 'What's the point of rock'n'roll if you have to be yourself?'�

He doesn't get it.

'I spend half an hour onstage with a band that cranks decibels, churns bass and thrashes three-chord progressions. Sounds get pulled out of my body. I do this with the express purpose of forgetting myself. I want to be transported somewhere wild and chaotic, where the spirits melt, where good and evil have no meaning. If we played a full show, could you imagine what a mass of jelly I'd be?'�

He still doesn't get it and starts lecturing me about marketability.

Wanker.

And that reminds me about other ways of forgetting yourself. My first orgasm, for instance. A couple of seconds of being overcome with twitching spasms that make you helpless. Later on, I became so much of a sex junkie, convincing myself about the sacredness of the orgasm, trying to time it with my partner's to get like, simultaneous double-strength ecstasy. And then realizing the whole thing is just nature's trick of getting you to squirt your two cc's and procreate. And don't get me started about Tantra. My balls felt bruised for a week afterwards.

Be myself?

What's the point?

You can be yourself all the time. You can chastise yourself, stick up for yourself, criticize yourself, promote yourself'� but there's time and again when you want to really get out of yourself.

The first time I remembered getting drunk, watching myself acting so silly. The first time a reefer worked, feeling thoughts pour into my head. The first time I did something hallucinogenic, just melting into the sky. Also the time at mass, a young comic book freak bored dead, looking at Jesus on the crucifix, thinking what He must have thought if He really was embodied in that cheap plaster statue: what a bunch of straight-jacketed victims; get up, howl and dance naked in the blood I shed for you!

Think of a shaman drinking reindeer piss-diluted mushroom juice in Siberia. The whole tribe waiting as he chants and beats skins and they wait for his trip to begin. Waiting for the answer this drug-fueled visionary will come back with after his voyage to the spirit world.

I'm through with trying to come back with answers. I'm ecstatic with half an hour of explosive Dionysian performance. Fuck that record company clown. And then later, I'm ecstatic again after stomping four hours to some Somalian guitar-drum trio in some condemned warehouse.

I sleep a day and then go for a jog. Ribs pumping air in and out, muscles churning out lactic acid, the chemical process of respiration transpiring automatically. Endorphin rewards me just because I'm part of the biological process that makes me live.

Does this have anything to do with me? The times I feel best are when they do not. Who needs to be myself when it just turns me into someone who feels it's important being so god-awfully important about themselves?

So me and the guys are playing again on some small stage in a pub. It's full of young tourists and they're all drunk or high or just generally out of their heads. It's one of those shows where you don't think, you know your chops, everyone's blaring away, and it is instinctive, you are organic. The beat and the sweat and the holy three-chord progression with inspired variations twist the whole structure awry.

And I'm looking out at silhouette heads popping like bubbles of lava in backlit sprays. There's an eye contact that brings me back to myself. Should I try to find her after the show? A power chord saves me and returns me to the earth's erupting.

We play on and on and one of the guys tells me we have to stop. I feel myself panting, I feel heat. Above all, I see myself as some crazed animal recovering from some affliction, some burning bush, some beating sound of a bell. I drink cold beer to recover, accept compliments to acknowledge I was a part of the madness. I help pack up gear, laboring back into my body.

Looking for those eyes from in the audience before, guess who I run into? Mr. Record Company. He's looking professionally disinterested at the bar, talking to those same eyes that picked me out of the universe. She smiles gloriously at me but stands by his drink-buying arm.
He tells me we're improving and I'm suckered into caring he thinks so. So he continues with his authoritative criticism. 'Try not to pretend you're someone else,'� and he gives me a litany of all the rock stars I'm supposed to be imitating.

'Try to develop your own personality,'� is what he advises. 'Maybe you'll start making it then.'�

'Fuck that,'� I tell him. 'I just want to lose myself. And if that's not what it takes, then'�'� I shrug, not wanting to say that I'll never be a rock star.

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