November 25, 2006 "Down-Down-Down"

11/25/2006 The Blue Cat - Bellefontaine, OH
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

Bellefontaine was a small town of 13,000 familiarly centered around a worn limestone Second Empire courthouse, and warmly nestled in the belly of western Ohio, or as I had learned from years of family reunions there, Conservative country.

It was laid out like all the other similarly-sized towns in the region - a half-deserted square whose business population included a handful of banks, lawyers and insurance companies, and a few sleepy restaurants on the brink of fiscal death. Somewhere not far from downtown was a much more vibrant commercial district populated by Super Targets and Chilis' and Jiffy Lubes, split down the middle by a four-lane highway. A city-planning template repeated many cities over, and the veritable fingerprint of modern capitalism.


If there's any doubt as to Bellefontaine's secondary market status, they have Rax.

If I'd grown up here instead of my own hometown, I can say with a relative degree of certainty that my experience would have been much the same. Namely, twelve years of a county school and a Florida vacation.

The Blue Cat was a two-tiered clubbed adorned in alternative rock paraphernalia and Jagermeister shwag. The clientele were scrawny Trenchcoat Mafia types and 23-year-old Iraq veterans with scores of fifty-dollar tattoos and their girlfriends. Visual kei-type girls with black thigh high boots who were almost beautiful in the dark light of the bar but seemed somehow worn out in the honest light of day. I didn't assume they got many guys in dandy vests around these parts much, so I put myself on the offense from the start.

I spent much of my time climbing on the guard rail in front of the stage, singing and trying not to let my guard down. We had a heckler whom I singled out for ridicule as best I could, but it turned out he was just a loud drunk regardless of who was playing. It was much easier to let fly this combative nature, and slightly harder to control. Along with a major van accident, an arrest for battery from the stage was an occurrence of which I was beginning to feel was only a matter of time.

I sat at the bar later, drinking with a man who I assumed ran the place. He wore tinted round John Lennon glasses and had a carefully groomed goatee. He might have been my age, but his incessant voice sounded calloused from years of late nights drinking and smoking and snorting rails. He wouldn't stop talking about some sort of text message marketing plan he came up with that would revolutionize the world, so I kept studying his face while he talked and let all his words melt into one continuous buzzing of sound during which I would occasionally feign agreement, understanding and wonder.

All I wanted to do was go to the dark sanctuary of a motel and sleep.