Pilgrimage

I remember being in high school and seeing the letters NIN scratched into desks (some kind of secret society sealed in wood)? and printed on grungy t shirts, probably nestled in plaid, roaming the halls. I had no idea what Nine Inch Nails was, until I started college.

Immediately, I was hooked. I drove alone with Trents aching voice echoing in the car and watched, mesmerized as his music videos told the raw stories and pushed all the limits.

And there, it was like I knew what he was saying because it was how I felt too. It was what I saw in my life. And really it might not have been true. He may have been saying something very different, but thats the beauty of art. We make it and it reaches us, one way or another. And through that connection, we suddenly aren’t alone.

And growing up in this country was never easy.

NIN can be about a lot of things to a lot of people, but one can definitely always agree that it is about being honest. Trent reznor writes like a banshee. He keens into the universe, he has grown up and changed and made new amazing work but his constant is to look directly at himself. And while he is two decades older than me and we grew up at different times, I find it encouraging that we both faced our demons and moved into new stages of our lives. What I mean is I am happy to see he pulled from the darkness, but emerged from it too.

When we do that we become better versions than what we were. Than maybe who we feared we were. Or believed we were at the time.

What I am getting at is that a creation as powerful as this summons a kind of aura around it. Kids carve its name in desks and wear it on their clothes. It sends messages in lyrics and people brand themselves with them.

Everyone knows what they mean without saying a word for decades.

And when a band like NIN tours, people come from hours away to gather all at once and commune with that creation- which years ago grew a life of its own and continued on ever since.

We drove 8 hours today to Raleigh NC to see him live. As we got closer, we saw NIN bumper stickers and people dressed in black. The uber driver who took us to the venue from the hotel had it blasting on the radio.

NIN was in town. You could feel it. Everyone knew it, whether they loved the band or not. Its energy was everywhere.

Its the epitome of magic,

the gravity something can have

That compelled all of us to be there tonight

Us, who all screamed in our cars and listened through broken hearts in the 90s on cassettes and cds and in basements while watching music videos all throughout this cursed and beautiful country

(for who would know america and its evils better or worse than a musician from Pennsylvania)

And we all convened in one spot for one night and screamed again, together, the lyrics we all had sung alone- for years.

The whole stadium sang in unison, the base taking over my heart.

And he thanked us.

And we thanked him. The best religion- which requires no fealty except to give and receive

To carry with you an open heart.

To be ok with leaving with nothing

except memory and sound.

And i felt my heart, broken, healed, something halfway, explode into the hallowed hall of rage and honesty and the good kind of magic that finds its truth in strong willed beautiful artists who create with their whole souls and humble themselves before it.

We all grew up. We all met at the stage.

I blew trent reznor kisses and felt my body melt away, consumed in fog and sound and light.