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On the completion of the first issue of my zine

When I was a child, the mysterious narratives and imagery of the paranormal terrified me. I stayed up late with my father watching low budget TV documentaries detailing surprise encounters with Big Foot, chilling accounts of ghostly activity, and witness testimony of otherworldly aerial phenomenon.

As I grew older I relegated these stories to the realm or fiction without realizing that they were already firmly woven into the fabric of my identity. My exposure to this material at a young age planted a seed that has blossomed into a healthy and fruitful sense of wonder. These fringe topics inspire a sense of wonder in those who are honest about their limited understanding of human experience.

After all, what is a sense of wonder but a sense of maybe?

Maybe we do not have all the answers. Maybe the world is not as we take for granted. At the very least, good lore should strike a nerve in an audience threatened by their dwindling monopoly on truth. A truth consistently challenged by the proliferation of extraordinary experiences throughout human history.

As such, it isn’t particularly relevant to me if the body of knowledge within this community is founded largely on dishonesty or ignorance. It only takes one truthful account to significantly impact reality as we know it. I invite you to join me in cultivating this sense of maybe and consider that maybe one person—among the hoaxers, the ignorant, the drunks, the misinformation agents, etc.—is telling the truth.

A truth that reflects the nature of our humanity, secrets of our past, and glimpses of our future. This is Paragnosis.

Paragnosis is a zine dedicated to exploring strange topics and the art they inspire. It examines lore within Virginia, the United States, and the world at large while featuring artistic contributions that inspire a sense of maybe.



Why my high school metal band sucked

The feedback from my Peavey amplifier quickly drowned out the muffled voices of the audience who all at once turned to face the sudden ear-splitting disturbance. Park View High School erected a collapsible stage on the east-end of their faculty parking lot and the black surface absorbed an extraordinary amount of heat from the June sun.  I stood stage left in a black tee that matched my tattered skate-shoes.  My long red hair was slicked back with nervous sweat. The crescendo of feedback plateaued to a steady round hum.  I positioned my fingers on the neck of my newly purchased ESP MH-1000 and nodded to the drummer to count us in.  This was the first show my death metal band ever played.  

I drew the short straw two weeks prior to this at the official meeting for the high school battle of the bands. This isn’t just a figure of speech.  I literally chose a short straw from the hand of the event sponsor—the arbitrary metric by which the organizers decided when and where each competing band would play.  We were scheduled to play first and were concerned that no one would show up on time to witness the face-melting debut of Condemned to Destruction.   Despite these concerns, the audience was punctual and full of our peers, local musicians, and strange new faces.  It was clear to me that the flyers we circulated online through strategic Myspace Whoring were effective in generating interest.

These flyers also adorned the halls of my high school.  They bore the band’s name in a gothic typeface below a large depiction of reanimated skeletons waging war.  A few of the figures were collapsed in the background with arrows protruding from the cavities in their torsos. I often embraced an aesthetic that far exceeded macabre and instead soared effortlessly into the realm of violent, tacky, and thematically inconsistent.  Our graphic design was wrought with blood splatters, zombies, and warfare.  I stitched the gore-soaked imagery together recklessly on a pirated copy of Photoshop. My underdeveloped artistic vision and deficient technical know-how contributed to a product that was visually abusive.  The remarkable illegibility of our logo, a tangled web of skeletal lettering, perfectly represented our loud, belligerent, and confusing presence in the then-thriving scene.

The baby-faced band behind the logo rehearsed in my mother’s basement.  I was the self-appointed leader of the band at fifteen years of age.  I had never been in a fight but one time I accidentally spin-kicked a kid in the face while slam dancing at an In Alcatraz 1962 show. I had not experimented with drugs  but once I snorted Pixy Stix during lunch to impress my peers. I didn’t have a girlfriend but every so often I did chat with a couple girls on AIM who I thought were “totally into me”.  I was a teenager who, unsurprisingly, knew very little about life and knew especially little about the brutality of a dark existence ladened with struggle and pain.

Despite my limited life-experience I had been a bystander in the scene long enough to know how I should present myself. I sought to curate a brand that was aggressive and self-important. I pulled all-nighters tinkering with the html on our Myspace page, postured arrogantly on stage, and pushed pre-sale tickets on scene-queens at Hot Topic. I sought to develop all the trappings that make legitimate bands appear legitimate but it was missing something. It was a lemonade stand. Like I was role-playing. Like I was a poser.

Not really though.

My passion for what I did was not fake despite the desperation in my overcompensation.  I was young, inexperienced, and learning through emulation as I swung my arms wildly in a mosh pit of the existential uncertainties.  All the while I was grasping for anything that could help me to navigate adolescence and preserve my endangered creativity.  My perception of the hyper-masculine rigidity of the scene curbed any interest I had in representing myself and the world I inhabited honestly.  I was afraid that displays of vulnerability would’ve invited ridicule.  I didn’t want to be called emo or worse.  It is no wonder then—amidst the pressure, uncertainty, and B.O.—that my band had nothing of significance to voice when we finally got our chance behind the microphone.   We chose to be both voiceless and the loudest thing in the room.

As such, instead of focusing on meaningful lyrical content or expressive melodies I made myself comfortable in the profane, material, and technical.  I became an artistically vacuous machine that wrote structurally focused compositions. The trite creative output of our contemporaries was probably due to a similar insecurity.  The music we consumed was flashy, overproduced, formulaic, and sometimes intentionally ironic.  It was meta-core; it was not socially conscious, artistic, or particularly innovative.   It was empty.  Thus, the rigidity of the standards that we constructed robbed us of honest and insightful contributions that could have had an artistic impact beyond our scene. Instead, all that remains of the Sterling hardcore scene are distorted memories and dead hyper-links.

I’ve resolved since those years to embrace vulnerability and value artistic exploration for its own sake.  In light of this, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that years following the dissolution of my metal band welcomed a new era marked by artistic productivity as a singer song-writer, a participant in diverse collaborative projects, and as a shameless dabbler in the nightcore inspired remixing of pop songs I wouldn’t have even considered music a decade ago.  In this sense I’m thankful for my participation in the Sterling hardcore scene.  I’m also proud of myself for recognizing diminishing returns, taking leave to evaluate my mission as an artist, and approaching song writing from new perspectives.

Our last note washed over the high school parking lot and the audience welcomed it with applause.   An acquaintance approached me while I loaded equipment into my mom’s van.  She politely expressed her wonderment at the entertaining albeit alarming display and sheepishly remarked that she could not discern a single word over the instrumental cacophony.  It sounded scary to her.  I greeted her feedback with a smirk.  The usual reaction to the guttural vocalizations we employed was that of concern.  Adults suggested we were too aggressive or violent.  I always welcomed this criticism.  It satisfied my insecurity and propagated the brand I worked tirelessly to develop.  I never told them that if they listened carefully—past the layers distorted guitars, the busy drumming, and the punching bass—they would find no objectionable content.  In fact, if they listened really carefully to each grunt and growl they may uncover that our band had no lyrics at all.

 

 



Stride gum and high hopes

I was cleaning out my car last night and found a piece of trash that triggered a frustrating memory from a decade ago. It was a wrapper for Stride, a brand of chewing gum that was introduced in 2006 and marketed as The Ridiculously Long Lasting Gum.   In fact, one of their initial marketing campaigns included the CEO lamenting that the long-lasting flavor of Stride’s gum was having a negative impact on the sales of returning customers.

While these ads were widely well-received by consumers there was a serious shortcoming in Stride’s marketing: the name of their flagship flavor was absolutely uninspiring.

Seriously though . . .

Nonstop Mint sounds like a placeholder name that, due to the error of an intern at corporate, found itself sharing shelf space with some of the most competitive and recognizable international brands. Eventually Stride’s marketing team realized this and in 2009 they hosted a contest for the public to rename the flavor.

This contest allowed consumers to log on to Stride’s website, submit alternative names, and vote for their favorite suggestions. The participant with the winning submission stood to gain $10,000, a year’s supply of Stride gum, and bragging rights to the rebranding of the underwhelming young legacy of Nonstop Mint.

At this point I was 19 years old, enrolled at community college, and working in a shoe store at the mall. I wasn’t much of a gum-chewer but the novelty of my submission gracing the checkout aisles of grocery stores and pharmacies enticed me. The cash prize, of course, was also a welcomed incentive that would’ve eased my transition out of my parents’ home and into a university.

“Maybe I’d even consider changing my major to marketing,” I thought as I logged onto the site, already pretty certain I’d hit a homerun.

I wasn’t particularly conservative with my suggestions. From what I can remember, there was no limit to the amount of submissions you could make. I took advantage of this freedom to showcase my genius without restraint. I would estimate that I submitted about 10 names but 7 or 8 of them were obvious jokes or flops.

One name, however, stood out as especially promising.   I submitted it in the evening and it grew legs while I slept. I woke up to find that my submission—Infimint—was a crowd favorite. I became pretty confident that my name was a strong contender for first place. First of all, it already proved popular among the voters and secured itself a position with the top-ten finalists. Secondly, even though it’s a bit lame, it propagated the marketing angle that Stride sells Ridiculously Long Lasting Gum.

How ridiculously long lasting? Infinitely!

I kept an eye on the results over the next few weeks and, while I tried to stay level, couldn’t help but revel in the thought of winning the competition.   I’d quit my job at the shoe store, transfer  to a new school, and make interesting small talk with the cashier at Kroger about how I named Stride’s most popular flavor—Infimint—from the comfort of my bedroom.

But I didn’t win. No one did as far as I know. No one received $10,000, a comically large supply of gum, or an anecdote to recite at 7-11’s register. The competition was terminated due to a “technical glitch”. I don’t know the details regarding this glitch and have tried researching for information recently but the internet has nearly entirely forgotten about this event.

As a finalist I received a letter thanking me for my participation in addition to a box containing about ten packs of Stride gum bearing the name Infimint. I kept these packs of gum in my car and they served as an upsetting conversation piece for years before I eventually threw them away.

I don’t chew gum that often but the disappointing outcome of that competition has driven me into the arms of Stride’s competitors and other minty alternatives in the candy aisle. And after all this—a successful international launch, a competition to rename their flavor, and damage control following the implosion of the competition—the flavor’s packaging still reads Nonstop Mint.



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