First of all, I’d like to thank Pete Wentz. I never thought that opening up my iTunes this evening would lead to a surge of inspiration and nostalgia this grand. But your song titles are fucking incredible (Sorry Mom, aunts, and uncles, and even clients, for swearing, its not my fault you signed up for Facebook; and it’s not my fault my limited profile doesn’t block you from reading my shit).
But seriously. “Champagne For My Real Friends, Real Pain For My Sham Friends”, “A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More ‘Touch Me’”, “Don’t You Know Who I Think I Am”, “I’m Like A Lawyer With The Way I’m Always Trying To Get You Off”, “The Carpal Tunnel Of Love”, “Chicago is so Two Years Ago”, “You’re Crashing, But You’re No Wave”.
Magic.
Some of you may be laughing at me right now, thanking Pete Wentz and all. Before I dig deeper into my train of thought with 10 more pages, let’s have fun with this and respond to my note with your favorite Fall Out Boy lyric or song title. Come on! I’ve got 450 some friends on here. At least 300 of you are young enough to know that Take This To Your Grave could be the most influential album of our era, or could just be old farts who have Peter Pan Syndrome like me, or maybe you went through that phase where your quote driven AOL away message was the most important part of your day.
Comment away, for my entertainment, and for the sake of Annie’s probable hysteric laughter at my lame ass right this second. After all, she is everywhere.
Ok lets get back to why 90% of you are reading this. I promised over 1,500 people at this little event we had called Annie’s Wake last month that I would keep writing. Why do they call it a “Wake”. I don’t get that at all. She wasn’t awake, she wasn’t technically sleeping. I never read the Bible, does it have Christian roots? Someone educate me, I’m too busy listening to Fall Out Boy to google this.
I got side-tracked again.
Thank you Pete Wentz. Someone forward him this please. I know I have some readers who are little socialites with closets full of Decaydence hoodies.
He needs to know that even though his band’s latest album is on the list of greatest disappointments in my life, that if it weren’t for Fall Out Boy, I’m not sure that I’d be so okay with the fact that Annie was taken from me oh so rudely on January 20th. Yes, I literally watched her take her last breath, say her morbid last words, and I’ll never forget her final shade of blue and that stale smell.
I’m NOT okay with her death by any means. But it’s cool. Annie took me to a Fall Out Boy concert once and life is clear.
Let’s backtrack. I guess I’ll just tell you a little story about Stevie & Annie and then you’ll understand how Pete Wentz gets any credit at all.
The truth is we had a sibling relationship that was beyond normal. I’m 15 months older than her yet 9 out of 10 people surveyed in the latest polls believe us to be identical twins. I was the accident, she was the second lightning bolt that wasn’t supposed to strike again. If you want to discuss mortality, I was supposed to die a long time ago. In fact, my parents were told so. Annie walked on her own two feet for some time. I never did. But I was the protective big brother from the get go, carrying her around on the back of my sweet ride until she got her own set of wheels. We were a magnificent team, the dynamic duo as some newspaper proclaimed when I was 6 years old. We went around hustling people for money on behalf of the Muscular Dystrophy Association and were on our way to becoming the cutest poster children on earth. I was the brains, she was the braun. I was the beast, she was the beauty. I was the smartass wit, she was the smile. Left to watch the house? I’d answer the phone, she’d open the fridge and get us some grub! We were unstoppable. Somewhat opposite, but would work in perfect tandem with one another from a very early age. Brilliant codependency or a beautiful disaster?
Then we got fat. I’m not kidding. Really husky, like 110lbs for 4′5 frames. You don’t have to go too far back in the photo albums in my house to get a glimpse of the era of chunk.
Not only did we add some weight thanks to microwavable french fries and my mom’s amazing cooking, but we hit that big P word – Purgatory, or Puberty, whatever you want to call it.
The gender roles started becoming more apparent. Not even our awesomeness could stop proven sociological theories. I started playing video games, listening to really loud obnoxious music, watching sports. She loved shopping, dressing up, giggling about the cute boys. I thought all of her female friends had cooties, but secretly probably had the hots for all of them. She wrote in her diary about all of my friends, we’d steal that diary and make sure the whole world knew her little fantasy world. I could do algebra without picking up a pencil, she sucked at math and I’d let her know as I did her homework. She won talent show after talent show for her incredible voice, I wished she would just shut the hell up.
We hated each other. Despised one another. For a good 6-8 years I’d say, probably in the shape of a bell curve if the y-axis is hatred level and the x-axis is chronological scale of our lifetime. Roughly this lasted from sometime in middle school to early college, obviously with a few fights here and there outside of that bubble. We are siblings afterall. What we had before we got fat and had hormones was extremely abnormal. We are allowed to bite and pull hair, and tell mom and dad all the bad stuff the other did.
Looking back most recently, Annie would often joke that we didn’t hate each other, we were just struggling with each other’s greatness. I’m not going to disagree with her, but I’m also not going to toot my own horn right now. I’ll meet her somewhere in the middle and say that we were just trying to find our own way. It’s hard enough to find independence as a tween when you have a disability and can’t wipe your own ass. Try going on the school bus every single day with, eating every single meal with, sharing every single friend and social circle with, never getting a minute alone from, not experiencing anything in life without…… a shadow.
For the majority of our lives, we both lived side by side. Not by choice at all, but by codependency forced upon us by a situation not to our liking. And those years of hatred were just us realizing our grim struggle and wishing that we could fly away from one another. Ya know, normal sibling lives. Spend time on holidays, hang out at mom and dad’s for thanksgiving, fly out to California to see your new nephew. Ya know, movie-like shit.
This desire was so strong to be apart and try flying without our other half, that Annie highly considered going to Whitewater College up in Wisconsin instead of joining me at Illinois. In fact, I remember, and this could probably be the only thought that brings me to a tear as of late, I remember secretly wishing that she wouldn’t get into U of I. Our need to be apart was so strong that I for one time in my life wished harm onto her, and she was willing to sacrifice not coming here but going elsewhere for what would be the most important four years of her life.
The thing is, I don’t have many good memories of college from freshman year, but when she came my second year, even though we kept somewhat distant, everything felt normal again. Beckwith Hall, with its smelly hallways and interesting characters, was home.
The next year and a half, we eased back into our codependency and again became known as Stevie & Annie. For one year I existed as an individual. It sucked.
Then came Pete Wentz and Fall Out Boy. Yes, we are back!
See, all those years we hated one another, we still shared one commonality other than matching wheelchairs and -ie at the end of our names.
Music.
Melody! Rhythm! Harmony! Music was the heartbeat that kept us alive. Early on in life we both loved nothing more than sitting in the station wagon on the way up to Oshkosh bee-bopping at very young ages to Motown’s greatest hits. Going to weddings dancing in our chairs, going to our favorite pizza joint and playing the same song on the jukebox. Even during the fat dark ages, me blasting Slipknot throughout the house and her singing her best rendition of Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”.
But even music, we fought about. Or disagreed as to what was good and what was bad. In reality, I was probably just the elitist big brother who didn’t want his sister going to concerts with him. Concerts with my friends was one of my few excuses to get away from my little twin-like shadow.
Then in college, I believe it was the spring of 04, Junior Year for me, we went to see a sold-out Fall Out Boy show at the Canopy Club in Urbana. I didn’t really know anything about them. I still hadn’t gotten over the depressing sounds of Dashboard. Annie got us tickets, though, and was determined to take me to a show, and not the other way around. It wasn’t the first time she took initiative in our friendship, I’m sure, but it was the first time that I can remember her pushing my boundaries of comfort and me not giving into an excuse or criticize her in return. She took the reigns and I let her.
And it ruled. I’ll never forget sitting there 20 feet from the stage in the rowdiest environment I’ve ever been in at that point, Wentz flying from the speaker towers bass in hand into the crowd during “Saturday”. I didn’t know a single word but my mouth was wide open in awe of the energy the entire time. It was the perfect blend of all the crap I had been listening to for a few years prior.
It was heaven to a music fiend such as myself. Changed my mp3 collection forever and changed my life. Mark Rose of Spitalfield would probably argue that Annie and I went to a concert of theirs maybe a month earlier. But seriously, you never did folllow up Remember Right Now and you were never on TRL.
So Fall Out Boy changed my life. More importantly, Annie took me to a show that changed my life for the better. Annie changed my life. That’s a mathematical property. Transitive property, mmhmmmmm. I still got game.
Back to my gushy story. From that concert on, Annie and I did more and more together. We were no longer separate, we were equals, and slowly but surely I think we came closer to achieving that beautiful disaster of a symbiotic relationship we had when we were cute little tots.
Going to concerts together led to so much more. Eating every meal with one another. Again, me ordering the pizza, her picking it up and feeding me if necessary. Not a lot changed since the days of glory. We enjoyed having the same PAs, the same friends, partying with each other, and even sharing our deepest secrets, only years after doing anything to hide the simplest of flaws from the other.
Most everyone reading this has been our friends more recently, so I’m not going to spend anymore time explaining our closeness the last 5 years. Plus, I’m not going to lie, its 1 AM, I am a little choked up and I don’t want anyone thinking I am more of a sissy than they already do.
I guess I just wanted to thank Pete Wentz and Fall Out Boy for bringing us back together for five years of awesome.
And now that you’ve gotten through my abridged version of what went through my head tonight, it leads me perfectly into probably what my next note will be.
What’s Stevie going to do without Annie? I could easily just melt away and live off of the past. Fight off pneumonia until it consumes me one day. I could choose death.
But, I choose now to get busy living. Talk to you soon.
Thanks Pete, Hope this increases this months iTunes royalty check. Keep mentioning 2*Sweet in your blogs, mine’s hurtin.
Stevie
Inseparable lightning bolts in the same dark storm, lighting up the sky for a better tomorrow.
