Ate It Twice - Boston Spaceships - Brown Submarine - 2008

So, the second time a guy broke his hand on my face, I was 15, and if time #3 is the better story...then time #2 is the stranger one.

I was a freshman in highschool and was just starting to get comfortable with this notion of having a friend who was a girl (as comfortable as any man ever can be with it) and I had a friend named Jen. She was a shy, bookish girl who would later go on to become a doctor and we had a sort of low key lunch table friendship that was helped by the fact that she wasn't particularly my type. Now the problem was this kid named Aaron.

Aaron was a very particular midwest type...short, scrawny and even whiter than me Aaron adopted the pose of the "Bad Ass". He kept his head shaved and wore combat boots every single day and was convinced that he could kick the shit out of anyone who got in his way. He ran with a dopey flunky, who's name I can no longer remember (though we called him Wing Nut). Anyway, Aaron and his flunky would frequently make stops at my lunch table to toss game at Jen.

Now at the time, I found the notion of him and Jen together ridiculous. As I said, she was studiuos and shy and in my mind was so far above that little twirp that she shouldn't have even given him the time of day...I was too inexperienced to realize that women will often date men wildly beneath them. So I spent the entirity of Aaron's visits belittling him while he was trying to get his groove on. And I was a smartass, so my belittling was probably fairly brutal...but even then I was six inches taller and probably 40 pounds heavier than the kid. This started a sort of mini-cold war between me and Aaron, with me constantly ripping on him while he seethed and postured. This goes on for a few weeks.

So one Friday night, I'm on a date...one that was already disastoriously bad BEFORE the violence erupted. My friend Bryan, who was immune to shame and as such always had dates lined up, had fixed me up with the friend of whoever his current girl was. And as usual in this arrangement it was a terribly bad match, because the friend was always a shy quiet girl...so we'd both sit in awkward silence while Bryan pawed his girl.

That particular night we'd also chosen a particularly bad venue for our date...the school play. Now granted, there isn't a ton of stuff you can do on a high school date in the Midwest, and even less before you can drive...but still, the school production of Little Shop of Horrors was probably a bad call. And it was an even worse call for me, because the sole reason I was attending was because I had a massive ungodly brutal crush on the senior who was the lead in the play...my date was so little the object of my attention at that play that I even forgot her name (Incidentally, it was also Jennifer, a fact that I'll never forget NOW).

So anyway, the play lets out, my date is going horribly and I'm standing on the corner with my friend and the girl's waiting for Bryan's mom to pick us up. I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around. At that point, Aaron grabs a hold of my shoulder and uses this to leverage himself to jump up and punch me in the face.

To Be Continued...

Bob Pollard's Boston Spaceships seems to be the closest thing we'll get to a "return to form" from Uncle Bob. Stripped of his prog rock leanings that he's cultivated over his past few solo albums (and the last few GBV albums), he returns to straight ahead guitar rock and by and large it serves him well. I haven't enjoyed a Pollard Release this much since...well at least since Half Smiles of the Decomposed.