This is all by way of explaining this song. In 1988, I was 18, and deeply in love with an out-of-town church girl. She was red-haired, and I was writing letters to her and getting poised for a serious romantic relationship, fresh on the heels of the guilt I'd felt from falling for a curly-haired, tiny doe-eyed brunette with a big, white smile, of no fixed faith, who went to my school. I wrote poems and songs (none of which I shared with Ms. Ginger, of course) and drew pictures and sculpted things.
There was a bible conference at the local college at Easter. I felt/feared her interest slipping away, long-distance, and carved and painted a little wooden chickadee with pewter legs and feet. Her birthday was around Easter time, so I was going to present it to her at this spring bible conference, which events were hotbeds of fertility-god-style teenaged tumescence. It soon became clear to me at the event that she was avoiding me like the plague. Her sister kept denying it, but it was happening. Every time I entered a room, across it I saw flaming red hair darting through a different exit. I felt like death on legs. I went and leaned on the wall outside the cafeteria at supper-time, numb with shock, a buzzing in my ears, overcome with amazement that a person could feel this messed up.
As I so leaned, a 19 year old walked by with a small child on his head. You know how you give a kid a piggyback ride on your shoulders? Like that, but on his head. And, shortly behind him followed his brother, a smaller, ginger teenager, with an even smaller small child on his head. There was something deeply surreal about the experience. The younger, more ginger teen released his child to run off, and soon started up a conversation. He was a jolly, friendly, sunny type who was clearly intelligent and artistic, which combined traits I had never before encountered in a church attending person. We started a friendship. He liked quaint, Broadway/opera/classical/oldies music. Stuff I thought was cheesy. I was just starting to branch out into harder and harder rock. I'd been taught that all rock musicians were Satanists recruiting for their Dark Lord, and was starting to learn that this was a bullshit lie and I was angry. Not angry enough to listen to metal at that point, but this soon followed.
What also soon followed was that my new ginger friend started dating Ms. Ginger. They put their ginger heads together and seemed bent on producing a ginger family. My ginger friend was all guilt, as he'd only befriended me to try to get close to Ms. Ginger. You see, he'd heard that she and I had been a bit of a thing, at least by church standards, so he'd insinuated himself strategically. I found this out when I went to a distant bible conference (Toledo Ohio) to hang out with him, and he was with her, holding ginger hands. He braced himself for my ire, and though I felt tricked by him, I realized that I really didn't want to be saddled with her. Seen from the vantagepoint I now had, I wondered what I'd ever seen in her to begin with. She was kind of befreckled and vacant-eyed, and she spoke in a sing-song voice, wore befrilled Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ashley dresses with lacy collars, and was affecting carrying a tin bucket as a purse that year.
All was not well in Gingerland, though, and the dating didn't last. Despite the admission of why he'd befriended me, somehow, starting out with guilt and perceived friendship obligation due to his dubious behaviour at the start of things, we two remain friends to this day. Years ago I sat down with him and tried to write a song about how we became friends, to form part of a concept album of mine in which emo me has dug a giant, deep hole (rather than built a giant wall) and is being invited to come on out and be friends (by a jolly, oldies-loving guy) when I am in a darker, angry place. We got a bit of something, but mostly the song sprang into my head later, and I have since recorded it several times. This latest one represents me trying to push the envelope on how heavy the "me" part is.
A big problem with my singing heavy songs is that I have a mellow baritone voice. When White Zombie came up on my iPod shuffle on time, I realized that I couldn't really sing like him at all, but that I sure could shout "YEah!" in a raspy voice. In this song, I do that a lot.
On a side note, by way of epilogue: at a later bible conference, I fell head over heels for a Hispanic girl from the Dominican Republic. We wrote a bit, but she then married my cousin. Her brother, though? Married Ms. Ginger.
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