"everything in its right place."
I went into College not really sure of myself. I wanted to make video games because all we ever did was play video games so I majored in Computer Science. I struggled with the classes and realized I didn't want to spend my life in front of a computer all canned-in. I could feel the spirit starting to take me in the Computer-lab learning proper "code-ethic" which took all the freedom and creativity out of computer programming for me. I started drinking heavily with my friends who were smoking a ton of pot, I never smoked though, I never even smoked cigarettes. Always hated the taste of smoke in my mouth, still do. I like that other people enjoy smoking though. Still do.
But I excelled in my humanities courses where my brother had failed and dropped out and became an electrician. I decided to "go all literary" and I even met with my humanities professor about the career path that leads to being an Art History professor. I was playing guitar more and my friend Jay started playing bass with me. We watched the Seattle Hype documentary repeatedly with our friend Jim and resolved to start a band. I bought a drum set in the spring of 2001 and practiced my ass-off until I could play it. Our band was the Green Party Jedis.
My parents were always gone on business and we always partied in their basement. Dad put a pool table and bar in when he finished his basement in the 80s and it was a beloved place for 1000s of parties and countless other good times until the place was destroyed in 2008… But for now it was the lair for the Green Party Jedis, a totally retarded noise band that sought to sound like "Some Velvet Sidewalk," "Heroic Dose," and "Fugazi."
Jay would play a distorted bass and I would play drums while Jim would scream. We had got the distorted bass idea from Derek Devries who worked with Jay at the can redemption center while Jay was in College to become a cop. Derek and Jason Nelson had a band called "Halfway Situation" and they worshipped Fugazi and Jason would play two-finger bass chords up the neck of the guitar. Chuck Hoffman recalls one of our early shows:
"Exit Drills was asked to be on the bill for The Bonnie Situation's first gig, at The Boat House, a show that Josh Forbes had set up -- probably because we were sharing Josh Schneiderman on drums and Josh Forbes probably figured we'd draw some people. I'd talked to Steve Wilson a few days before and he was telling me about this Blake kid -- Blake Badker, as it turns out -- who was coming around to Bob's Guitars (where Steve worked at the time) and talking up this band he was in, Green Party Jedis. I'm not sure if No Consensus was supposed to be playing that night or not, but Steve was at the show, and had apparently gave Blake the idea that they could just show up at the show and play.
So long about what felt like two hours into The Bonnie Situation's set (they were dreadfully boring, I'm sorry to say), some kids show up and start loading equipment in through the front door. Bonnie finishes a song and someone shoults out to them, "who the hell are you guys?" The blonde one (Blake) shouts back, "We're the Green Party Jedis, we're here to save the day!"
So the consensus among atendees came to be, we might as well let these kids play, they look interesting. One of them (Jim Averill) had a green mohawk, and they had cut-out bits of a Star Wars blanket taped to the drums. They didn't even have a guitar, just a bass with a distortion pedal (played by Jay Johnson), drums (played by Blake Badker) and vocals (Jim Averill.
Bonnie finishes up and the Jedis get set up. The party finally gets going when they launch into their first song, "Power Wheels Demolition Derby," a blast of frenetic neander-noisecore and screeching vocals. Jim stalked about the stage area making the strangest noises come out of his mouth. Their songs had coherent riffs, but they were either obscured by the distortion or barely held to any kind of steady beat whatsoever. Blake didn't have the top wingnuts on his cymbal stands and his cymbals would often fly off them and crash to the floor. They returned heckling-in-fun comments from the audience in kind. They had a song called "Fuck You Zoloft." They were totally primal, totally amateurish, and totally spirited, everything punk rock was supposed to have been, and I thought they were geniuses. They actually did save the day -- the smallish crowd's enthusiasm picked up big time and Exit Drills's set benefited from it.
I got some contact info from them afterwards, and ended up booking them for a couple Boat House gigs I had coming up, including the kickoff for the No Consensus mini-tour with Circle Of Willis. At that show they upped the ante with a hilarious anti-guitar-solo and a keyboard. At one point I was trying to start up another zine and did an interview with them in which I fabricated rumors about them, such as that they refused to accept money for playing. Unfortunately, I never got the zine out, and the interview tape got lost."
So yeah you're probably noticing that the biography is gonna get more long-winded when it comes to the music stories, but you're just gonna have to suck it, because I don't care if it makes me look bad to you.
That said around that time we all took mescaline LSD microdots at my parent's place and I went into a crazy all night vision where I was sure I saw the entire universe and I'll tell you it looks like "a wheel in the sky that keeps on turnin'." I got into Sigmeund Freud and Stephen K Hayes and paranoia and resolved to be a REAL ninja and trained my ass off running and biking and swimming and doing push ups and sit ups and sets of 500 squats and learning Karate and being psycho.
Jesus and Mary Magdalene, I got my powers from my soul and Tai Chi/Yoga - "three wise men from the East."
I wonder in a way if I picked up on the secret training for the 9/11 wars (World War III) and I followed spiritual suit in order to be in tune with civilization as they were going to war. I started to study and penetrate 5-element ninja theory and to this day see it as spiritual science. That fall I took a Chinese Civilization class and began to have an unquenchable thirst for taoist and buddhist literature. To this day I still know the section "BL" of the UNI Rod Library is where all the Buddhist and Taoist books are. I found this fatalistic - "BL," "BLAKE…"
I took mushrooms in the fall of 2001 and became very aware of auras and I eventually started my tai-chi and meditation practices that I continue to this day. But I was running myself ragged… I was heading for a breakdown that would occur in fall of 2003, but I will cover that in the next chapter as a lot of other important things were going on at this time.
I was having a couple girlfriends. I lost my virginity I held onto through high school even though my friends called me and told me I was supposed to come to this party and have sex with my girlfriend so they would know about it. I think that's why I chose to not do it. I didn't need to go through the social scripts to have sex just to prove something to somebody. I was and still am a romantic.
Eventually curiosity came through and I would have girlfriends that I would just use to sexually explore, to find myself sexually, but I still remember at a campfire with Jay and Jason Nelson and Derek Devries telling them that I fully regretted having sex with girls I didn't love and vowed not to do so. I only wanted to have sex with girls I loved and didn't mind looking like a loser in the interim… My good friend Everts was quite the opposite in Mercutio-lovable-fashion he'd go on and on about fucking and the girls he wanted to fuck and I still am quite disturbed by how fully we went in conversation about our sexual desires, there's probably no one else I've told so much sex stuff to.
I should mention my cousins Chuck and Larry who lived together in Iowa City and that we'd go down there and get drunk and party and play XBOX all goddam day. Both of them ended up in the war and I guess hollywood wrote "I pronounce you Chuck and Larry" in order to tell them to quit wasting so much time… But Chuck's married now and Larry has this hot little Vietnamese girlfriend after never having a girlfriend forever so I'm proud of them. I guess hollywood can go fuck themselves.
Gotta mention Kyle Weber and Lucas Sheerer and all their friends and drinking and partying and smoking pot back in the day at their party house where they lived. Great parties staying up all night watching Dark City and Primus concert videos with Kyle just staring at light fixtures because he was tripping balls. Those two are long past the pot days and married with children so I don't feel bad mentioning it, I hope Big Brother and their employers understand they were young and don't do that anymore and it's more important that I leave this in the story because I love those two guys for teaching me how to be cool even though I wasn't and partying with me so much. Two of the coolest dudes you can find.
"Joey said he always heard horns, pianos, and other things that weren't even there in the Ramones' Wall of Sound."
So yeah young and drunk (got that from the Sounds of Science Beastie Boys anthology) and playing the guitar and moving to Dayton Ohio to study how to be a ninja and discovering the Clash and the Ramones and the Strokes and the Hives and the White Stripes and 9/11 and the turn of the century disasters. I need a break, this has derailed into too much of a stream of consciousness. In the next section I will describe my "3 days of darkness," my psychotic episode during "The Harmonic Concodance of 2003." I need to sit and reflect and space out a bit and it will come to me... Harmonic Concordance Footnote
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