Life as a touring artist brings unspeakable volumes of filth, fun, and profane awesomeness. We offered up our blog as a road diary and our friend Keith Buckley from Every Time I Die took the bait. In this week’s adventure, Keith touches on the struggles of sleeping in a van,“the scariest moment in horror movie history,” as well as the sheer terror of being stranded in the middle of Canada. Kids, forget finding scary films on Netflix to help bring on the Halloween flare, Keith’s got your back this week. Also, if you haven’t yet, be sure to pick up your tickets to ETID’s Violent Gentleman Tour with The Ghost Inside, Architects and Hundredth, here.
When you’re in a van accident while sleeping, the one thing you can never truly salvage from the mound of mangled steel and broken glass that lays slumped in the snow along the oddly shining, sleek black road like a beast that has been non-fatally wounded by a clumsy hunters bullet is the ability to ever sleep peacefully while in motion.
I can’t speak for everyone else in this band, but if the van is moving and I am not behind the wheel, my brain only allows itself to wade into knee deep water no matter what time the clock shows, no matter how long I’ve been awake. Since that night along the 80 west ten years ago there has been a part of it that remains on constant watch and every sharp turn activates a muscle spasm that grips the seat belt or whatever part of the bench that is closest and bolted down, every short stop sends me frantically upright like deer downwind of it’s own cunning death.
I don’t dream in the van, I just imagine a little more vividly than normal when my eyes are closed. In my life, I have been forced to accept this as a suitable replacement. Such is vagrancy.
We were on hour 11 of a drive from Dryden to Saulte St. Marie where we would get a hotel room, sleep for a few hours then begin another 4 hour drive to a venue in Sudbury. I had driven the first 6 and now it was Andy’s turn and while I hate relinquishing the wheel before I have put a significant dent in the trip, I simply could not keep my head up any longer. The pain in my neck that causes my fingers in my right hand to feel like I had been sitting on it was overwhelming and the thought of the crucial muscle relaxers I had bought from a pharmacy in Montreal plus the quarter bottle of whiskey under the back bench in addition to the new Thom Yorke record was a combination too enticing to refuse. When Andy took over at around 4:30pm there was a haze on the winding road so dense that your headlights could not penetrate, they simply burst against it like fruit thrown at a wall and spread out into all directions except forward. For this reason I understood that sleep would not come, nor anything even resembling it.
I don’t know how I while away the time in the van. Most of it vanishes. A record is usually about a half hour and I listened to three of those (Thom Yorke (good i think?), Yung Lean (intriguingly weird) and Ryan Adams (perfect) ) and I watched two movies (The Lego Movie (funny as shit) and Godzilla (pure shit) ). Being very generous thats honestly only 6 hours. One gas stop is maybe another 30 mins, depending on how many people have to poop and how much money is won at scratch offs. I realize that this is all total shinfo but the reason I’m walking through this schedule is because I cannot for the life of me figure out how, when we ran out of gas at 12:15 am, we were still 60 miles away from our destination. Yet when the van pulled over into the gravel and I bolted up to brace myself for the dive we were taking off the side of a mountain with a slumbering driver at the wheel, there we were. Completely out of gas in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Nobody did anything for a minute. We all took our own personal time allowing the truth of the situation to settle in. We had no gas. We had no cell phones. We had no internet. The last house we passed was a few miles back and who the fuck was brave enough to go knocking on a strangers door in the woods in the mountains after midnight? The two guys with the mustaches, thats who. Brian and Andy decided they would walk back and ask to for help. There was simply no other option. According to every movie ever made, this meant we would never see them again. We said our farewells and sent them off to war. After a few minutes of sitting on the bench in the van and going over multiple scenarios of how this night would end, I decided to get out and take a piss along the side of the road. The haze had long since lifted and the view of the sky was unencumbered and the clarity of all those stars was beautiful and humbling and it made me think about all the things that billions of stars tend to make mankind think about but I was a little drunk and staring straight up gave me vertigo so I focused on more terrestrial matters, ones a little easier to comprehend. The cold. The wind. The highway that disappeared into a Shrodingers Box type blackness. The woods that were somewhere in front of me and around me and behind me. The animals in those woods. Wolves. The second bear we had seen earlier that afternoon. His black eyes. The bobcat Andy spotted running into a thicket. I panicked and tried to quickly finish urinating, but like Ichabod Crane’s obstinate horse that simply will not move through the dark night no matter how Ichabod prods him with sheer terror in his heart, my dick would not stop draining. I yelled at it and cursed at it and threatened to leave it there while I ran back to the safety of our van but it ignored me. I was it’s captive, tethered to the horrible possibilities of a wild animal attack in the thick, breathtaking oil of the dark. There are four things in my life at this moment that I have loved consistently since I was a little boy. The first were my dads chicken wings. The second was a girl named Lindsay who would one day become my wife, the third was music and the fourth was the horror movie genre. It is, however, horror movies (sorry, Lindsay. Sorry dad. Sorry James Taylor) that I am probably the most versed in. So when I say “the scariest moment in horror movie history” please understand that my opinion takes into account a vast array of possibilities spanning over 3 decades. I have seen heads cut off (
), achilles heel’s sliced (“High Tension”), genitals mutilated (in person and on YouTube.com), animals gutted (“Cannibal Holocaust”/YouTube.com), humans skinned (“Martyrs”/YouTube.com) and babies fucked (“A Serbian Film”, please don’t ever watch), but in my mind, the scariest moment in horror movie history comes at the end of “The Blair Witch Project” when Heather is trying to find her friends. As she is screaming, running through the house they have found in the woods, she passes a landing between the second and first floor on her way to the basement and very briefly- so quickly you might miss it if you blink- her handheld camera pans across a window that looks into the forest and you realize that she (and you) are glimpsing into the infinitely terrible possibilities of abject darkness and NOTHING is more horrifying than that. Nothing. The darkness that she saw in the movie and the darkness I saw around me that night terrified me for the same reason time does. It’s not what it is, but what it represents- the unknown, a concept that our puny, inchoate human brains obviously have never been able to grasp or else it wouldn’t be called “the unknown” anymore. Darkness itself doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary to me. It isn’t violent. It isn’t rude. It takes away one sense but at least it has the courtesy to heighten all others and there are hundreds of drugs that have been proven to do the same. It makes us feel alone, yes, but everything we “love” does so at one point or another and I have been able to continue on for the most part, so I can’t point to that as the reason that level of darkness ushered in such dread. And time? Time is laughably predictable. It marches in one direction at the same pace like some solemn farm animal and it will not alter its course no matter how much I protest. Unless we travel off it or at the speed of light while on it, time is one of the most reliable things on earth. But it is not time or the darkness themselves that I think we tend to fear, it is their stubborn unwillingness to explain themselves to us. They conspire like two members of the cool inner circle in high school who whisper about their good friend death and look back at you while they laugh. The darkness hides infinite time and time hides infinite darkness and neither of them reveal what they have in store for us. They might allow indications of patterns (a growl from the trees implies an animal like it did to our ancestors, an animal implies danger like it did to our ancestors, danger implies death like it did to our ancestors) but they are unlike natures patterns in that they are not proud. Nature boasts of its inexplicability. It’s birds are fucking crazy looking, but they reproduce. It’s plants are goddam bonkers, but again their functions and appearances repeat. I believe that everything (including us) exists to learn of itself and can only do so by revealing itself to others. Everything except darkness and except time. Time takes you from darkness when you are born and it will personally deliver you back into darkness when you die but neither of them will tell you when, though they both know exactly. Death is a shark in the water. We don’t know where and we don’t know when. But we all know what. All of us. As a horror movie fan, I cant think of anything more awful than looking out into the field where certain death waits like Heather did as she ran down those steps. The night ended rather “miraculously” if I could be so inclined to use that term. A cop came along and other than hassle us for having an open bottle of alcohol in the car and threaten to seize our vehicle because of it, he could provide no help except promise to alert someone when he got to the town. He reminded us again how “cool” he were for not busting us as if we owed him thanks for taking pity on such lowly creatures and he drove off. Then, at around 12:45 as I stood outside of the van with my hand firmly attached to the door handle like a child holding onto my mothers leg as I dipped my toes into ocean water, a small light burst into existence from a few hundred yard away. “Who is that?” I yelled. No response from the hulking mass of a man (I could tell by how far the light stretched along the road in front of it) so I quickly got back in the drivers seat and shut and locked all the doors and we all screamed like little girls only half jokingly. As it got closer, it was suggested by Wyatt (our merch guy) to cover ourselves in blankets in order to “look like pillows” which may be the first time anyone has suggested the tactic of “looking like pillows” in order to thwart criminals. At about 20 yards I realized it was Andy and Brian but I kept the doors locked anyways because to be honest they’re just as scary as any monsters. The only house they found had numerous, full, spare gas canisters for sale, yes, even on a wednesday in the middle of the night, even in the woods in the middle of Ontario. Without a phone signal, without internet, without a map, without anything more than true “need”, I couldn’t help but feel as if we were looked after by something larger than chance. Less than an hour later as we coasted into a gas station in Saulte St. Marie on fumes, the haze had settled over the roads again and what was known to surround us slipped back into the warm un-known. The stars above us were no longer as clear as they had just been either but they were much louder than they had been in a while. *cue the moon winking into the camera* *iris fade out* *roll credits over still photos of us doing zany shit at a gas station like trying on hats*
