When I listen to Liar by The Jesus Lizard

When I listen to Liar by The Jesus Lizard, I end up recalling the time I stood in a UPS parking lot in Seattle with my dad in May or June 2009. The Jesus Lizard had reunited and had announced a US tour. I'd finished my second year at the University of Washington and Dad and I had just sent the last boxes of my stuff home to California. I would move to Washington, DC in a few months. The weather was starting to turn. I never spent a summer in Seattle, but I knew from prior visits and from the beginnings and ends of school years that the area was gorgeous for the few months I was back home. And so summer was beginning and the sky didn't look like a wet rag.

I'd had a terrible time in Seattle and hoped DC would be better but had no idea if that would be the case. Looking back, so many of my problems with Seattle were sparked by introversion, depression, undiagnosed OCD, and those things follow you. It's very easy to blame a place for your own failings/issues. Places can suck, to be sure, but it took an embarrassingly long time for me to recognize my end of the bargain. Maybe that immaturity helped at first in DC– maybe I was so convinced that Seattle was this monolithic problem that a new environment felt like more of a restart than it actually was.

But I didn't have that clarity in 2009, in the parking lot of the U District UPS Store, all of the CDs I'd bought from the soon-to-shutter Cellophane Square, all the comics I'd bought from Zanadu boxed up and headed for my high school bedroom. I mailed my stuff south and in August I'd move it east. I had no idea what was coming. And I remember thinking, "Whatever happens, I'll get to see The Jesus Lizard in November."