Look Upon Satan With Laughter
This is one of the first songs I ever wrote. It's been a long time, so I don't know if I can do justice with my explanation. But anyway, it is one of at least 2 of my best songs that were inspired by pornography. Look Upon Satan With Laughter is very autobiographical. Back when I wrote this song I would take these beautiful existential walks to and from The Coffee Den. It seems wierd/funny now, but on the way home I always used to agonize extensively on whether I had said goodbye well enough to people. I was worrying about relationships and friendships and dreams and excitement. I would spend a couple minutes talking to a girl at The Den and then walk home wondering if I had made a good enough impression. I'd think to myself "what if I didn't say goodbye to Jesse Hanson vividly enough? What if he doesn't like me anymore?" The extra adrenaline lent itself to powerful emotions and downturns towards traditional teenage depression.
So then I would arrive home and sometimes I would find myself alone. And sometimes I would access hentai doujinshi websites (which is comic-book style anime porn) in order to sooth my worried mind. Unfortunately it served the opposite. Due to a lack of physical limitations, hentai tends to be somewhat graphic, and so I was swimming in guilt over using that stuff. I really significantly couldn't cope with it, but I enjoyed it and it comforted me so I continued with it sometimes. It caused me so much melodramatic pain and suffering... it left such a throbbing feeling of injustice in my heart, but I felt that there was no reason for this what-so-ever. I certainly wasn't doing anybody any harm. I felt sincerely that porn was an a-okay thing, but as is often the case there was an insurmountable conflict between what I believe and the way I feel. So I prayed to the eternal that I would have the strength to not curse myself forevermore. If I could just laugh at the darkness, if I could just use Satan for a bit of fun and then let him go his way, all would be well.
One of the coolest things about this song is how deliberate the wording is. The whole song pretty much goes through a weekends time, starting at The Den on Friday and moving through to Sunday morning. "When my deeds be done" reffers to my wanting consoled after performing the act, whereas "when my will be done" reffers to the changing of emotion that always comes over me after masturbation. The final line of the song, "...is she a false one too..." came directly out of my daily life. One morning I was on a walk and I saw this woman across the street walking in the opposite direction. I tried to look her in the eye but I got nervous and looked away, and I thought to myself "is she faking like I am, pretending to be okay with society -- or am I just paranoid? Am I thinking too much? Maybe I'm the only one who's like this." If I were asked what this song is about I'd say it's about letting society take you over with its fears and guilt-trips. But, more accurately, it's about trying to defeat a part of myself which is too painful to keep around. (Luckily, after a couple of years, I think I've succeeded.) How muh power do we have over our own emotions?
Other notes about this song: Musically I was trying to sound like Johnny Cash, no lie. The biggest influence for the instrumentation is Ramblin' Ron Boone, I tried to copy his folk picking kind of style for it. This was maybe the 4th song that I recorded at Jesse Hanson's studio. Satan's phone number is 412-666-3385.
Okay here is the boring part. To clarify poetics in the song, in case you are like me and consider pretty language to be highly suspect and potentially bullshited..... I was "on he road" in that I was walking on the pavement going from my house to The Coffee Den (although retroactively I'd like to connect it to Jack Keroauc's On the Road and suggest that it is exemplifying the fact that I was out on my own for a little while). The sorrow, chance, etc. reffers to the people that I had literally left behind me at The Coffee Den when I would leave while other people were still there chatting. Sorrow = I was sad, duh. Chance = I was wondering if I could have accomplished more as far as friendships go, i.e. if I could have become closer with people. Things I may have left behind = wondering if that girl I talked to for 2 minutes would ahve gone out with me. The notion that it took me a million hours to get home just meant that it seemed like so long because when I would leave the house it would be light, and when I would arrive it would be dead of night. It also made it seem like a long walk because my mind was heavy with ideas. The idea that I couldn't find home of course has nothing to do with my home lacking anything at all, but instead just that when my soul was so stirred up I couldn't really rest at all, I would just come home and continue thinking at a mile a minute and remain unsettled. "The nighttime brough seclusion" just means I was alone, "depart my body from my mind" means I was using the hentai to get lost in physical things and have my mind rotated 180 degrees away from my lifely melodramas. "I called up Satan on the phone and asked him to come by" is just a pretty way of saying that I went on the internet and got in touch with myself, in *that* way, if you know what I mean. "Satan" in this case is of course the darkness and crippling guilt/fear inside my heart, and/or it is also the dark or 'evil' concepts and intentions behind the rough hentais. Satan's "bag full of joys" is the plethora of maybe a hundred different doujinshi comics that were on the site I would go to. The "ties to things that I have loved" refers to Evangelion, Rei, and Noir: anime shows & people which have meant a lot to me. Doujinshi hentais are ones based off of real shows, so it wasn't just random people in the porn. They were characters I knew and loved. The "ideas of demise" I'll admit is a line I threw in just for it's poetic/connotational power. This song was written early enough in my psychological history to predate the slight-masochism of "You Can't Rape The Willing" and the suicidal dreams of "50 More Minutes." In the verse where I restate some ideas from the first verse, the difference is that I'm walking in the morning instead of the night (actually on the studio version of this song I say "on the road this morning" both times, but it was supposed to be "evening" the 1st time and "morning" the 2nd, because I was going from Friday night to Sunday morning). This time I'm "looking past the pavement" instead of "walking 'cross the pavement" because instead of having my mind on the present like I do when I'm going to the den, on a sunday morning my mind is long gone after a weekend of constant contemplation. This time the "people I have left behind" aren't the exciting friends of The Den but instead the people who always have stuck with me whom I sometimes have neglected in order to try and find something different. I love you guys. Peace & love.
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