Listen Up, Nerds 24: Rat Saw God
A few weird memories of the past coming up while listening to Rat Saw God by Wednesday
Hey! Sup! I took Friday’s newsletter off because Twitter was doing its best to block Substack links and while 80% of my readership reads this newsletter in their email, about 90% of the traffic to the actual Substack article comes from Twitter. If you’d like to subscribe below, that would be a great help to furthering the mission of reliable subculture narrative. I’m back again this Friday with some reviews.
Here are a collection of things that I thought about while listening to Wednesday’s spectacular new record, Rat Saw God. I find it affecting in the same way that I found the work of Flannery O’Connor so affecting when I was required to read her short stories in high school. On Rat Saw God, characters fade in and out, lost in the shuffle of life and tour. I wish I was listening to this record on a porch on an August afternoon after doing yard work, but I’ll settle for sunny and pleasant mid-April.
Any time I hear about someone getting their stomach pumped, I think of the only time that my friends and I hung out with this other dude, Todd, in high school. Todd was a year older than us and I thought he was the funniest person I knew and I wanted him to think I was funny, too. I can’t remember who said it, but someone suggested we go play basketball even though it was 8 at night on a Saturday and we couldn’t find an outdoor court with lights. Todd said he knew a church where we could go play. He took us to a church where he volunteered on weekends, and when we arrived, I didn’t see a hoop in the parking lot. Unbeknownst to everyone but Todd, we were about to trespass to play basketball. I had not played illegal basketball before, but I have since. He grabbed the spare key they hid under the base of a light in the parking lot and let us inside. We walked around in the dark, looking for the gym, but nobody wanted to find it. We dribbled slowly around the halls, jumping to tap the frame of the door for a layup. We’d make jokes and run from the echo of our own laughter, thinking it was an adult. I don’t think anyone wanted to play basketball after breaking into a church. Todd was acting weird but I figured it was anxiety. Todd kept acting weirder and through laughs, he told me he took some Ambien to hallucinate. “If you try to stay awake after doing Ambien, you see what you’d dream while you’re awake.” He told me that he saw, “A circus of arms and hands.” I can picture it but I’ve never seen that. I still don’t like hanging out with anyone who’s on psychedelics. We exist in two different realms and cannot communicate through them. We locked the church up, put the key back, and drove Todd home. Todd said he couldn’t go inside his house because his parents would know he was on drugs. He wanted his car keys. I told him that he couldn’t have them because I was afraid he’d drive around all messed up on Ambien. He promised me that he’d sleep in the car, but we said we wouldn’t leave unless he went inside the house. I got a call from Todd’s phone maybe 20 minutes later while we drove to a Culver’s. Todd’s mom asked me what Todd had taken. I was scared and I said I didn’t know and that he didn’t tell us. I hung up and freaked out. I didn’t know what to say. I calmed myself down and called her back. I said, “One of my friends thinks he said he took an Ambien?” Todd’s mom said, “Thanks!” and hung up. On Monday, I saw Todd and he said, “Don’t tell anyone about Saturday, yeah?” He tried to fight his parents when he walked inside and they took him to the ER to get his stomach pumped. His name isn’t Todd. He’s married now and works for that church. I didn’t tell anyone about Saturday until today.
My family and I spent eight days in North Carolina when I was 8 or 9 years old. My aunt and uncle bought in on a quasi-timeshare deal and we went to visit. It was a beautiful cabin on a reservoir. Everything was wood and every piece of wood matched every other piece of wood. The cabin was carved from trees from the forest around us. It was a developed neighborhood apart from this spot and I’m not sure why. I’ll never forget that on the first night, my uncle said he was “a cool uncle” because he knew what “WWJD” stood for. I think that’s the first time someone tried to relate to me. Every day of those eight days, someone got stung by bald-faced hornets that made their nests all over the property after the cabin was built. It was my turn on day two. My dad didn’t believe it hurt that bad. When it was his turn, he hit the deck like he’d been shot in a war movie. I’d hear the thunk of a human body hitting the wood of the patio a few more times over those next couple of days. Everyone knew it would happen to them, it was a black cloud over the vacation. These grey and black bugs were the Grim Reapers of your good time, causing a commotion of crying and cursing. I stayed inside for most of the trip after that. If you stepped outside, you were taking a risk. I was like 8 or 9 and didn’t care to take that risk again. The neighbors lived there year-round and didn’t have hornet problems. They said that the only way they could get rid of the hornets in the past was by “blowing them up.” One afternoon, on the fifth or sixth day, one of the neighbors said he’d help out and brought over some firecrackers to do the dirty work. My mom said that there was a bang and a black cloud of hornets came out of the nest while everyone ran inside the neighbors’ house. People still got stung for the rest of the trip. We’d go back in the next few years and the hornets, their nests, and our collective anxieties, were gone.
I flew to North Carolina to buy a car one time. My previous car got totaled after a dump truck driver ran a stop sign and took the front of my Volkswagen with him. I loved my Volkswagen. It was everything I wanted in a car. So I looked for another 2003 Volkswagen GTI VR6. After a week, I found one, albeit with different paint and different interior, in North Carolina. I called the dealership, asked them to hold the car for a couple of days, and booked a flight to Raleigh. The dealership picked me up from the airport and I felt like a big deal, but they knew I was just some dumb kid with $8000. I test drove the car for all of 15 minutes before deciding that I needed to get on the road and go back to Indianapolis. I handed over my check, got the title and the keys, and drove home. At one point, I stopped in Middle-Of-Nowhere, North Carolina to get Burger King. I was experimenting with vegetarianism and in 2011, your only option for vegetarian fast food that wasn’t Taco Bell was the “Garden Patty” at Burger King. It sucked but it was tolerable with cheese and barbecue sauce. Most everything is. That sandwich tasted like melted plastic and smelled like whatever a Burger King smells like. Every Burger King smells burnt in a way that’s off-kilter. Nothing at Burger King tastes how a Burger King smells. I finished the burger in the parking lot and a guy tried to race me at the last stoplight out of town. I’d say mid-20s, buzz cut, lanky white dude. He was driving a white Chevrolet sedan of some sort, probably a Lumina. He wore gas station sunglasses and had a decal on his windshield that said, “~DONNIE~” but imagine that the tildes are tribal graphic accents. I declined and he said, “We don’t do that foreign car shit around here,” out the side of his mouth not holding a cigarette. He squealed his tires at the change of the stoplight and drove straight ahead. I turned right on to the highway on-ramp and went home.
The person who taught me how to play Mortal Kombat is dead. That’s all that I know about him, really. I could paint you a picture of his life and you and I could extrapolate on the kind of person he was, but the two indisputable facts I know are that he taught me how to play Mortal Kombat and that he is no longer alive.
I love “TV In The Gas Pump” for its vivid imagery of coming up on shrooms in a Dollar General, which could either be great or horrifying. The colors inside of a Dollar General are kinda crazy for a drug trip, all sorts of loud primary colors and harsh white shelves under fluorescent lighting. It’s a funhouse but for adults with money where nothing makes sense and you have to laugh at yourself if you catch yourself in the mirror. You don’t want to live in a funhouse but it’s a good time for five minutes. Carnivals, in general, are fun until you spend too much time playing rigged games and getting sick on food that sounds good until you eat it. Now all of my ads online are for sports gambling and meal plan subscription services. It’s all a lot more fun until it’s reality.
On Sundays, every once in a while, I wake up and watch Formula 1. I have this stupid superiority complex around it because I’ve been watching it on and off since I was a kid. I think I know what F1 is about but that’s only because I spent a lot of time around it when I was young. I went to every US Grand Prix in Indianapolis with my family and some family friends. I barely know my ass from a hole in the ground but I could tell you who David Coulthard and Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello and Juan Pablo Montoya are. I could identify drivers by their helmets and I could give you the race strategy for the US Grand Prix course in Indianapolis. Those drivers and that race are long gone. I don’t remember too much of what happened at each race, but I remember a lot of my dad and his friend spinning yarns about every driver and every person they could think of, every small action containing a world within it. I looked through my binoculars at pit row to see drivers milling about at their workplace. My dad recalled a story where a friend was looking through his binoculars at a race, and seeing his brother across the track with his own pair of binoculars, giving him the finger. Neither knew that the other was at the race, but they found each other. I can tell you how it all looked (Bright and colorful but not bright and colorful like it is now, more navys and grays and black and white) and sounded (Loud) and smelled (Pungent gas, hot rubber and asphalt, the dead grass of late summer, spilled beer, sunscreen) but I still don’t know much about Formula 1. I’ve just been around it.
Everything on the Wednesday record reminds me of hazy summer afternoons, but mostly “What’s So Funny.” I can smell the mixture of oil-and-gas that goes into a two-stroke motor on a weed whacker or chainsaw and feel the sting of a hornet in my heart when Karly Hartzman croaks the lines, “Found out who I was and it wasn’t pretty/Suddenly it’s a tragic story, but that’s what’s so funny.” Each pause pregnant with the possibility of getting better or worse. It’s the coolest line on the album apart from Parking Lot Lazarus resurrected by Jesus in the form of Narcan.
I don’t like the line, “you amazing idiot,” but it does make me think of all of the people in my life. I know so many amazing idiots and people who didn’t die but could’ve and people who died and I wish they didn’t, and the Wednesday record makes me think of all of them and their stories.
I have this review bookmarked and pop back to it from time to time. I don't really listen to much Wednesday, and really only gave Raw Saw God one listen before deciding it wasn't for me.
But that's ok. I come back to this review because all of these stories are so incredibly real and I'm trying to think of a word that would capture the feeling of "these events didn't happen to me specifically but I was only one or two degrees of life away from getting myself into a very similar situation". When I figure out what that word is, I'll come back here.