#there's probably a mod where it just autofills

[theemeraldforestafterdark]

Exiting the woods

[myalgicpierrot]

plain text: Afterword

Frank Iero, My Chemical Romance/ L.S. Dunes

2006?

There's not a ton of things I remember about 2006 firsthand. Most of my memories are like those of your childhood: bulked up by photos you've seen or anecdotes other people have told you about your life. I actually tried to google "2006 my chemical romance" in order to prepare myself to write about some of the things that happened around that time. My browser autofilled the search bar to "2006 my chemical romance calendar," and I thought to myself, "Oh, that's actually super helpful, that way I can see where I was that year," and I electronically ran with it. The results that popped up were just hundreds of scans of a high gloss calendar the band sold as a merch item back then. And it strangely felt kinda fitting.

In 2006, I definitely remember thinking I was crazy at one point, and I went to see a doctor who in turn overmedicated me to the point where I lost days and weeks at a time to the ether. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds, bars and blackouts. I remember feeling like we worked for a big corporation, and I don't recall if I ever met the boss. If Wikipedia is correct, it tells me My Chem released our docu-mentary/live album, Life on the Murder Scene, in March and then our third record, The Black Parade, in October of that same year. Damn. There's a pretty striking disparity between those two releases… Hell, there's a pretty big difference between those two bands. Quite the learning curve. I don't know if I did as much growing up in those six to seven months as I should or could have, maybe not as much as everyone else did, and definitely not as much as I needed to in order to deal with what was about to come. I felt sad a lot of the time, and awkward, and desperately out of place. We didn't see our friends as much, we didn't see many people other than the crowd really… and no one was seen outside of the gray concrete walls of an arena underground parking structure. We were all fast approaching that time in your life where older loved ones started passing away, and the people you left back home a few years ago were growing tired of your absence and assumed you deserved to be brought down a notch whenever necessary. Maybe it's a natural reaction or a defense mecha-nism, but these types of occurrences will make you retreat even more, and it becomes increasingly dif. ficult when you don't know where you belong, if anywhere. So you put your head down, pop a pill, and play a show.

I get anxiety when people ask about the time frame surrounding The Black Parade. I don't know if my reality was like everyone else's. A lot of the time I felt like I was standing in the center of a tornado… not spinning myself really, but a bewildering force immediately surrounding me was changing the topography of the world in a very visceral and violent way and I had no way of controlling it. I didn't feel a part of anything other than the parade, and even then I was probably more apart than a part. Maybe we all were. Now, financially and from an outside career perspective type situation, things were booming! So you'll find that no one wants to hear about anything else, and no one wants to say they're unhappy when it seems like so much is going right for them. But times were different then, and they were changing faster than they ever had before.

When it comes down to it, I wouldn't change anything if I had a magic wand, as everything that happened got me to where I am today. And for the first time in my life, I think I can say I'm happy and actually mean it.

I love the things my friends and I accomplished together, all of them… even if I can't really remember being there. One day, maybe I'll sit down with someone who can dig out the things I have misplaced or buried in my subconscious and l'Il tell you about them, but today is not that day.

Part of me thinks that type of thing is best left when the job is done… and I'm currently writing this in my Notes app on airplane mode flying to the next gig. Keep the faith.

-xofrnk, 2023 in a plane over an ocean

(Photo by Justin Borucki. Warped Tour, Randall's Island. New York, NY. 2005.)

That essay that Frank wrote for negatives…ROUGH. But actually really good