“Knife-Throwing Academy” is the 8th song on our first full-length, Bear Hair. It’s about some very real middle-school-type stuff, and it’s also one of those songs that we rarely play anymore, unless it’s an acoustic show. This song has also been recorded three times: once as a demo recorded by our old bass player, Spiros Loukopoulos, once for the original demos of Bear Hair with Evan (with the organ part being played on a really cheap air-organ), and for the final time with Chris French. Brandon Lutmer from Joie De Vivre did guest vocals, which I’m grateful for all the time.

It’s about going to St. Beatrice Catholic School (R.I.P., it closed a few years ago), but more specifically, the “middle school” part of my time there. I attended St. Beatrice from grades 4-8, but the last three were by far the most significant and formative years. I know it sounds really stupid to write a song about middle school when you’re 17, but my time there definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things which became relevant later.

There’s a path lined with pines and some spray-painted steel,
and some brains like bike wheels, humming hornets
There are piles of notebooks and textbooks and things
ripped by teachers from lockers with no lock upon them

I’ve never really explained the last two lines of this to anybody before, because the fact that my teachers did this was ludicrous. The first two lines are merely descriptions of the school inside and outside, but the last two lines refer to what the middle school teachers did to the lockers that didn’t have their lock actually locked, or lockers that didn’t HAVE a lock for some reason. They would open up the locker and dump all of its contents out into the hall, as if to tell you, “Look what I can do while you’re eating lunch!!! I can severely inconvenience you and ruin your day/mood! That’ll teach you to do something completely inconsequential in this crime-free environment!”

What I’m trying to say was, it was very annoying, and it happened to me a lot.

I see beads on our rosaries feed on our memories;
each prayer correlates to my conscience
Teach me each nuance of God, teach me how to sin right

We did the rosary once a week, and it was very intense. My legs fell asleep every time. The last line just refers to certain people in the school being awful examples.

Show me the face of the Virgin Mary
Wash with the water of her mercy
while I lie in the parking lot bleeding
The brutal youth Costello’s preaching

We would play football in the parking lot, which was the playground; any intense contact led to landing hard on the blacktop, which in turn led to tears from me. I ended up getting hurt a lot because I was sort of a big nancy-boy (my mom preferred “gentle giant”), and I would cry every time. The last line does not refer to an actual preacher at all; it just refers to Elvis Costello’s “Brutal Youth.”

Show me the face of my old math teacher,
took us to church and taught us proverbs
Then he cheated on his wife with a colleague
while we watched some Spanish movie

This is an absolutely true story about a man who really betrayed my trust, as well as the trust of almost everyone he taught. Mr. French was my old math and science teacher (the one who was the big “locker puller outer”). He was a very smart man with a very, very prominent indentation on his upper lip. He was the one who would take us to church once a week, and after he would do that, he’d talk to us with a lot of insight about the Gospel and the mass in general. He also, every once in a while, would take ONLY THE GUYS and have very special “GUY TALKS” with them, which we loved a lot.

Mr. French’s beloved ass was caught cheating with one of the worst teachers/people in the school, Ms. Hurtado, who was ALSO married to a really cool guy. The worst part of all this was that he tried to rationalize it all so that he didn’t do anything wrong. He was one of the first “role models” for both my religion and my life, and to see him do that and lose everyone and STILL think he was right set me off. The “spanish movie” was El Norte, and we were watching it because Mr. French let Ms. Hurtado “teach us Spanish,” which I believe was a pretty thinly-veiled code.

I see John hugging her on the steps of the church
We learned much about love, but not the right kind
I see me between the trees with a menacing look,
lost in thoughts way too grim for the 8th grade
Like, “How many miles in the sky must I be
to be happy, while air-loss kills thinking?
And at that high altitude, could that new bloodless brain hold no guilt?”

The “her” that John was hugging was Lauren Venlos, who is a very, very important figure in my life. She was the first girl I ever fell in love with (I use “love” because that was just how vivid the feeling was), and if it wasn’t for her actually listening to the very first songs I was writing, and caring enough to CRITIQUE them, then IOMT and anything before/after that would’ve never happened. She was dating one of my closest friends, and it made me want to fight everything/anything I saw. I was furious every single day, because I was very high-strung and immature.

The last four lines don’t rhyme because they are directly culled from the only “diary” I ever kept, which was pretty much a chronicle of how much I hated their relationship. PRETTY COOL, HUH?

Show me the face of Jesus smiling,
not the ones where he’s nearly dying
Christ, I love all you’ve done and stated,
but your double-edged sword’s too serrated
Show me each phase of my social slumber
when I loved antique counter-culture
Please don’t stop this song in its tracks
I know it’s rambling; let me point the point back

Some churches and interpretations of Christianity portray Jesus smiling in their art. I love this, because I’m used to REALLY HEAVY Catholic imagery of all the miserable moments in his life. The “antique counter-culture” refers to my old fascination with the 60s and all the hippie-dom that wrought activism back in that day, a fascination that 1. Kind of made having friends hard, and 2. Has ENTIRELY DISAPPEARED.

Which leads me to the final lyrics of the song, which are about the little graffiti messages I would write all over the place. The last lines speak for themselves:

So I look him in the feet, and I tell him that I can calm down
But I’m stapled to defacement of desks, and I can’t stop now
And the best little thoughts will arrive when I circle the school
So to make sure the messages project, I need bigger tools
Like, “Fuck it; you’ll fly just like I am when without
And believe me, I’m going and gone with no ripcord allowed”
So I hope that these markers dried so tight to the bricks
so that when this building’s torn down, the sentiment sticks
It’ll always exist
And with every second replaying every day
it’s hard to live like this