SLACKER SUCKFEST

I’m so fucking bummed I can hardly see straight, and if I don’t get it off my chest, I’m afraid my eyes will stay crossed permanently.

My day job took me and one of my co-workers (he uses the name Ullr when he comments on this site) to Oakland yesterday. We finished what we had to do and we had the whole night to kill before our return flight to Seattle this morning.

To celebrate Cinco de Mayo, we ate some awesome Central American food, including grilled, endorphin-inducing serrano peppers, and pounded down some tasty margaritas with chile salt at a place called Tamarindo, and then Ullr got on his iPhone to see if there was any live music we could hit up.

And what a fucking bonanza he found! The Evisceration Plague Tour was scheduled to play at Slim’s in San Francisco, with the doors opening at 7:00. If you don’t know about that tour, it’s a sick line-up: Cannibal Corpse, 1349, Skeletonwitch, and Lecherous Nocturne.  And it was only 6:30 when Ullr stumbled across that bonanza. What could possibly go wrong? Lots, as it turned out. (more of this suckfest saga after the jump . . .)

Now, by way of background, Ullr is not a metalhead, but he’s adventurous enough to read this site every day and listen to the music we stream, and he actually seemed kinda excited about the prospect of seeing his first live metal show.

So of course I had to explain to him that with this line-up, he wasn’t going through the dog-paddling stage first. He was immediately diving into deep waters from a high platform. He was about to go from a standing start to about 60 mph. He was going to have his lower intestinal track pulled out through his mouth. And other metaphors.

I was doubly stoked — not just to see that line-up of bands but to be an eye-witness as Ullr was exposed to a lethal dose of radioactive music for the first time.

Ullr figured out that we could get on a BART train in Oakland, cross the submarine tunnel to SF, and then make it to Slim’s with a 15-minute walk from a BART stop on the SF side of the water. All good.

So after I wasted time fucking around with some shit I won’t bore you with, Ullr and I boarded the BART train in Oakland, getting increasingly stoked about this show. I’m giving him the back stories on these bands as we clatter along on the BART. We get to SF and make the 15-minute walk to Slim’s.

When we get there (at 7:30), there’s a line immediately in front of us on the sidewalk. So we get in the line. Like fucking lemmings. Do we have tickets? Of course not. Do we pause a moment to wonder where the line we’re in is going, i.e., is it going to a ticket window or is it going through the pat-down check and then on into the venue? Of course not. We just stand in that fucking line, yacking away like a couple of brain-dead slackers.

This is particularly moronic, even for me, because I can actually see up the block that there’s a second line on the other side of the doors facing us, i.e., heading in the direction of the doors from the opposite direction. Does that cause any light-bulbs to go off in my empty head? Fuck no!

We start getting closer to the front of the line we’re in, and then one of the burly staff dudes yells out in a near-death-metal guttural, “This line is for people who have tickets! If you don’t have tickets, you need to be in the other line!”

Big groan. Not just from Ullr and me, but from about a half-dozen other brain-dead slackers in the same line. So we go over to the other line — which is winding its way to the ticket window. Of course, we’re now at the back of another line, starting over on our worm-like crawl to metal nirvana that awaits within.

Fuck, I don’t know if I can finish this story. It’s so goddamned painful to tell that my eyes are starting to cross again.

We shuffle forward in the ticket line. Two dudes in front of us had moved over from the first line at the same time we did. They finally got to the ticket window. Just as they got their tickets, the burly staff dude bellows out to all within earshot (in a voice heard throughout the Bay Area, including by ancient incontinent people in area nursing homes):

“THIS SHOW IS NOW SOLD OUT! IF YOU ARE NOT IN LINE FOR WILL-CALL TICKETS, THEN YOU WILL NOT GET IN!”

In other words, they pulled up the fucking drawbridge just as Ullr and I were about to cross it. We were totally fucking gobsmacked. Our mouths were so far open in cretinous amazement that we would have immediately been welcome at an Ozark family reunion.

We tried to think of some argument we could make, some expression of outrage at the injustice that had been inflicted upon us. But nothing came to mind — because, of course, we had no one to blame but our own brain-dead, mouth-breathing, in-bred, slacker-inflicted, fucktarded selves.

If I hadn’t dawdled around in Oakland before leaving with Ullr for the BART station, if we had walked just a little faster from the BART station in SF to Slim’s, if I had walked further up the block to see what that other fucking line was leading to, if we hadn’t had that last round of margaritas at Tamarindo, if I had been born with just a few extra IQ points —

if any of those things had happened, we’d have been inside Slim’s getting our skulls cored out instead of sitting in our hotel bar drowning our sorrows after a dreary BART ride back to the East Bay. As Ullr said, “That’s an hour and half out of our lives that we’ll never get back.”

I’d like to say that this was a lesson learned. I live in Seattle, where extreme metal shows basically never sell out. I forget that there are cities where enough extreme metalheads exist to actually sell out a decent-sized venue. But is it realistic to think I learned a lesson and won’t do something equally stupid in the future? Fuck no.

So instead of actually hearing those awesome bands in the flesh, I have to make do with a digital experience. Like listening to this, which could easily be the theme song for last night’s dismal disappointment:

Cannibal Corpse: Fucked With A Knife

Oh, what the fuck, why stop there? Here are a samples from the latest releases of some other bands we missed. They could also be good theme songs for the suckfest we experienced last night:

1349: Atomic Chapel

Skeletonwitch: Submit to the Suffering

P.S. Please tell us about your own moronic metal experiences. I really need some reinforcement in believing that I’m not the only slacker fucktard in the extreme metal world.