Scratch Acid - Owner’s Lament [mp3]
Enoch had just started smoking when a man approached. The man said in an English accent some things about cigarette smoking and drugs. Enoch thought the man funny and enjoyed using an English accent himself so he responded to the man with an atrocious attempt at sounding English. The man laughed and tilted his accent more toward terrible and the two of them held a conversation about cigarette smoking and drugs. Jason occasionally interjected using words that were easy to say in an English accent and he too spoke with an awful English accent. The CC Club had just closed and some of the employees were leaving by the time the man, Enoch and Jason had formulated a plan for the evening. It was nearing 2:30 AM when it was decided that Jason would return home with his bicycle and Enoch would join the man for a late night ride to a building purported to contain drugs. Jason bid farewell to the man and Enoch in a rapidly improving English accent and departed.
Due to the late hour and the large quantity of alcohol consumed that evening, Jason deemed it unnecessary to go to into the office the next day. This feat of absence was accomplished without punishment thanks to the fact that Jason’s employers had two Twin Cities office locations that he could conceivably report to on any given day and an exceedingly uninterested management. He simply had to tell his manager at the primary office that he was at the other office and since the managers at the other office don’t really notice him anyway, they would unwittingly answer if asked that, “Yes, I think I did see Jason in the break room at one point.”
At 10 AM, Jason awoke to find his drinking partner and roommate still missing. There was no worry however and Jason proceeded to pour a cup of coffee and join his other roommate on the porch for a cigarette. The day was bright and spring was just starting to have a restorative effect on the Minneapolis environs. The leaves on the tree were almost the same color as the sunlight and the shadows cast by the large apartment complexes could do nothing to shield the brightness of the light. Anton asked Jason where Enoch was at about the time Enoch returned without his bicycle. Anton asked him where his bicycle was and Enoch responded that he did not know, that he wasn’t sure even what happened last night, that he rode his bicycle (which really wasn’t his bicycle, it was more of a group bicycle that was used often by drifters and the homeless who occasionally stayed at our apartment) with a pretend English man to do drugs, that he did drugs and that this morning he awoke laying in the grass along the Greenway under a tree apparently foiled thickly enough to protect his eyes from the blinding bright, that the drugs he did were nice and he would perhaps do them again but under different circumstances probably. He asked for a cigarette and I asked him if he had ever heard Scratch Acid. He said, “Scratch Acid are fucking rad man. Kurt Cobain really liked them.”
Scratch Acid are a rhythm and blues band from Austin. The featured song is from the album The Greatest Gift (which is a compilation of all three of their albums, the song appeared specifically on their self-titled debut). Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
