I can't believe it's been three year since Year Zero came out. That just floors me.

This album holds a special place in my heart. When Reznor released With Teeth and displayed himself as sober (and buff) it seemed like my near ten year fandom was coming to an end. (Admittedly 9 years is not very long...) Teeth was pretty much terrible, seeming mostly like emasculated dance music to me, or at the very least it seemed wimpy, you know? I just couldn't get behind it. Nine Inch Nails, the band that shaped who I was and am, had thrown in the towel.

But the Year Zero Alternative Reality Game gave me a lot of hope for the album. At the time, early in 2007, I, like a lot of young hippie liberal douches, felt almost terrified at the state of the US government, all Big Brother-like and shit, wiretapping and declaring holy war on terrorists and all that, so when the Year Zero stuff showed up going, "I bet the world will be even worse in the future, with drugged water supplies and complete media lockdown," I was there to eat it all up. The paranoia, fear, and anger were all channeled by Year Zero.

Besides, it was kind of fun to follow the story. There was a complete cast of characters in the ARG, and when the album finally came out it was fun to listen and discover that the album itself is from the perspective of the characters of the ARG. It's easy, if you're familiar with the ARG, to pick which song applies to each character. It also, I think, strengthens the emotional bond to the music.

For me, ever since I saw it in the video, I've been attracted to the idea of The Presence. I think the truth of the matter is that even non-believers like myself like the uncomfortable notion, the fear as it may be, that there is something watching over us. Not only that it is watching over us, but like in this song, judging us. Not even me, but you, it's judging all of you, and you're being found wanting.

What if one day a giant hand did reach down from the sky in front of you, burying its fingers in the ground? What would you do? What would I do? I have no fucking clue, but it would be awesomely terrifying. A once in a lifetime experience, for sure, unless you made friends with it and then it came down from the sky every now and then just to play pool with you and rock back a couple cerveza.

Anyhoo, Year Zero, possibly the last truly great Nine Inch Nails record.

You can watch a movie only once and remember what happens at the end, and you'd probably be able to recall many of the major plot points up to a year after you see it. Why is it then so hard to recognize the patterns in your own life? And what do you do when you do see them? How do you know that things can't change? Are we trapped by the circles that we travel within?

Is it true then, as the Philosophy of Time Travel describes, that we are lead by an Abyss-like water-tentacle through our lives and that our paths are set? But what if you see it! And then change it. Oh yeah.

Sorry. Back up.

Relationships are always difficult to analyze because there are two people in them and no one can possibly know what the other was really thinking the whole time. You're lucky if you've got one absolutely true and uncensored perspective, and you're extra lucky if that perspective is your own. (I don't really think I can trust my own.) Usually you just end up with a big mess: all this shit, so fucked up, boom. There's no data to extract from that usually but vague generalities: 'maybe I should be more careful', 'no more women who stick their faces into cats and smell them deeply as if they were fresh laundry', 'more women who stick their faces into laundry hot out of the dryer', 'asses don't have freckles, wear a condom', 'once upon a time i was falling in love, but now...'

Usually the players are equally fucked up, or there's one who is way more fucked up than the other, so when the same things begin to happen to the same person in a different relationship, it's hard to notice: it's the same story, every time, it plays out the same and it ends ugly and confused.

If you date outside of your regular demographic however you mix it up. You replace one of the players, keep one the same, we've done enough controls so now let's mix it up a little bit. It's obvious that no one else has gone on to have a successful relationship, so it's my turn, you know, to try to do something with someone swell, to try to do what no one else has.

And you know what, my head went to the same places it always does. I started to feel the same way about someone I had no reason to feel that way about. It's so routine now, the disintegration of... something. The disintegration of my appreciation? I don't know where this is from. This is new to me. I've always felt the problem was me, but now it's kind of clear.

It's clear that I'm beating myself up anyway.

I live such a busy routine every day that my days are exactly the same. The last seven months have gone by not so much 'in the blink of an eye' but more a slow yawn coupled with a stretch, and I just don't know what I'm doing. I think I said about a year ago that I wanted to spend some time just being happy for a while before I jumped back into the grind of hating my life, and, well shit, I guess I did that.

I think I need to break out of this routine. This time of year always leaves me feeling trapped, for some reason. (Maybe it's the change in temperature: I appreciate the 'cold' here in California, and then suddenly one day you wake up and it's 90 degrees and I want to fucking die, because I like my jackets, damnit, so I feel sandwiched between happy-coldness and the horrible approaching 100+ degree temperatures.)

There's no direction, that's all, I've got no direction. I've got goals but no direction. That's what I'm doing wrong. That's why this has happened. There was a reason after all!

Crap.

Thanks, internet.

I'm not sure why or how, what aspect of my upbringing it was, or my social status in school, but when my friend Keith handed me his beat up copy of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, my entire outlook on everything changed forever. I'll say that I never thought about it too hard before, but this is "the album" for me.

I can't help but feel kind of like someone bowing before a deity when I write anything positive about Nine Inch Nails & Trent Reznor, not that I look at him that way, but this album is so significant to me. I am not sure who I would be now, without it.

This album is so powerful, so richly layered, and the emotional gamut it runs is so blatant and unapologetic, even cheesy, but Reznor's sincerity reigns supreme and there are no sour notes in this suicidal magnum opus. (That paragraph was written strictly for pull quotes.)

Was I depressed as a teen before I was exposed to Nine Inch Nails and just didn't show it because I didn't know how? Or did Nine Inch Nails give rise to a voice in me that didn't exist previously? Or was it just, you know, science? And dressing all in black and listening to Nine Inch Nails & various other industrial was how I decided to cope with the angst of puberty at 12? I don't know.

I'll say that Nine Inch Nails made it easier, though I can't really be sure. I found a lot of solace in the chainsaw guitars and I remember turning up my earphones as loud as I could bare just so I could listen closely for all the background screaming and effects. Did it encourage me, or did it really make a positive difference?

I took all my NIN albums with me on Sunday school trip, this was probably around eleven or twelve years old and I was still going to Sunday school (I was born a Quaker, which has been randomly odd or helpful at times) even though my parents hadn't taken anyone to church since I was seven. I had just gotten my first pair of Dr. Marten's, and I was so proud of them. We stayed in a cabin by Lake Arrowhead and I remember it being beautiful (the trees and the leaves and it was cold and beautiful!) and terrifying (at one point I wandered off through the trees and very briefly found myself absolutely lost amid all the samey trees and cabins) all at once, but I was so upset all the time.

At one point another kid turned my music up too loud to mess with me and they took away all my CDs. I ended up staying in bed for a whole day, completely melodramatically miserable, until they finally gave me my music back. As soon as I listened to a couple tracks I was all better, back downstair_e_s, listening to their hushed whispers about what a weirdo I was. (If I remember correctly, on that church trip, the girls dressed up me and another guy as chicks out of boredom. Unconventional, it was. There are pictures somewhere. I had long hair and a sad look in my eyes, so I could work it better, you know. [That sentence could be taken horridly out of context. No one touched me, I swear.])

I do look back on myself at that age and wonder what my problem was. I'm still a depressive person now, it comes and goes, but now I've got things I can be upset about now. Back then I have no fucking clue what I was so upset about. I guess it was science.

If I could go back in time I would wave The Downward Spiral in my face and say, "This is good stuff and thank you for listening to it, but stop acting like such a fucking pussy, Jesus Christ."

Site Note: This is Day 1 of "Youth Week" in which I'll be picking songs that relate to my, uh, youth, duh. Don't be dumb. Originally I was like, "Oh my god, I have to plan this all sick, and have a clear progression through the years of my life," but after I sat in front of iTunes trying to pick songs and keep all the stories straight in my head for about 20 minutes I was more like, "Oh, wow, fuck this shit, I just want to write something and go do something else!"

P.S. There's a 5.1 mix of this album that is simply incredible and is a great way to stress test your surround sound system. It is sonic bliss and all the "gimmicky" uses of having rear channels are absolutely sublime. Reznor uses the rear channels to great effect on March of the Pigs. Totally adds to the already existing feeling of the music. The guy is a fucking genius. It's too bad his music has sucked pretty consistently since The Fragile.