Tuesday, January 26, 2010

After obsessively reading an apocalypse how-to-survival guide, a man retreated to the backwoods of rural Pennsylvania. He had recently learned his mother, with whom he had been living with alone, had met a lover. His feelings of abandonment had prompted him to drive without rest for days through the back roads of New York state. Fueled by a steady overdose of his Ritalin prescription and cough syrup the man drove. Eventually, he pulled in to a lonely motel to get some sleep off Interstate 93. The motel's entrance had a flyswatter on the handle and a broken down stove with no door that sat underneath the side window of the main lobby. He ordered a room on credit while hunched over the counter, sweating and slightly distracted by nothing in particular. After checking in to the room, the man felt too restless to sleep while thoughts of his mother and his apocalypse how-to guide only added to his confusion. Inevitably, confusion led to paranoia as the weight of infinite possibilities, exhaustion, solitude and heartbreak usually do. He left in a panic. The man left the room and headed straight to the back of the motel leaving the door open behind him. The moonlit trees created shadows through the pathways but the man pushed on without notice. He had developed some sort of manic energy. He crossed ravines and hills, slept in fields and spent hours staring at the sun. He emerged from the vacation three days later appearing disheveled and confused but with a renewed focus that had elevated him to a new sense of connectedness. As he confidently swayed through the motel parking lot and into his room he happened upon a young Brooklyn-based post-punk, band called Pterodactyl. Neither he, nor they knew it at the time, but the woods the man had been lost in for the past few days would be the same woods this band called Pterodactyl would experience a feeling of interconnectedness to both the earth and each other and that these experiences would inspire the music on their next album, Worldwild.