Dear Bonzi,
Thank you for being a beast in the first four games of the playoffs. I couldn’t be happier that you came to Sacramento in a contract year. If our friends Mr. Petrie and the Maloofs reach an agreement to bring you back next season, I hope you bring the same intensity. We love it. That’s why we chanted your name at the game tonight.
Please do not make us compare you to Jerome James next year. It would warm our hearts to discover this outstanding play had nothing to do with the pursuit of a big ol’ check.
Your pal,
Jeff
P.S. I really wish the nicknames “The Bonz” or “Arthur Bonzarelli” had stuck. It would have been so awesome if everyone in the crowd yelled “eeeyyyyyy” every time you made a shot.
You’d think the warning signs would be hard to miss. It seems obvious that a singer in an emo band would make for a vindictive, immature ex, yet they continue to sing about their inability to maintain an adult relationship and people keep dating them.
We occasionally run promotions at work where we give away autographed CD booklets to people who pre-order certain albums. I have to imagine the touring and the radio and the TV that comes with the lead-up to an album launch leaves few free hours, and blowing two of them sitting in a room signing your name a thousand times has to get a little tedious. It’s not surprising when bands have a little fun and get creative with the signatures.
Taking Back Sunday, whose album Louder Now just came out this week, definitely got creative.
When the booklets arrive at the office, one of the people on my team usually takes a break to stuff them into jewel cases so our warehouse can pack them and ship them off. It sounds boring, but, on rare occasions, it’s actually kind of nice to zone out for a while and do something that doesn’t require even the tiniest notion of creative thought.
Anyway, I had less on my plate that day than any of my other co-workers, so I volunteered to stuff the Taking Back Sunday liner notes. As I made my way through them, I noticed the band made some drawings on a few of the booklets. There was an anthropomorphized cloud on one, a beer can on another. On some of the others, they wrote little notes to their fans. Here are a few nuggets of Taking Back Sunday wisdom, as found on their autographed CD booklets:
* Adam is YAY!
* Korn is terrible
* R. Kelly Pee’s [sic]
* Figure 4 Leg lock= Ric Flair’s finishing move
* What happened to hip hop…
In addition to their musings on music and professional wrestling, there were also some fake signatures, like Sir Mix-a-lot and Herbie Hancock. Others featured one-word statements with questionable punctuation. “PANTS.” got a period, “BOOBIES!” got an exclamation point, but “Pancakes” was left mysteriously naked, no punctuation at all.
This sort of stuff is pretty standard. What isn’t standard, though, is that a few of these booklets had a phone number on them.
I was bored and, curiosity being the cure for boredom and all, I decided to get my Scooby Doo on and do some investigation. At first, I thought it was one of the dudes in the band screwing with one of his bandmates because the ink-thickness of the phone number didn’t match the name next to it.
Eventually, I decided to text message the number. Here’s a transcript of my conversation.
Me: Hey, dude.
Mystery Number: Whos this
Me: Is this Matt?
Mystery Number: Nope sorry
Me: If you’re in Taking Back Sunday, one of your bandmates is effing with you. If you’re not in TBS, someone in the band is effing with you.
Mystery Number: Adam is my ex boyfriend, I gues hes messin w/u
Me: Ha. Just a heads up, he put your phone number on a bunch of autographed CDs going out to their fans. I think I pulled them all, but you might get calls from some randoms. Sorry.
About three seconds later, my phone rings. A girl, out to dinner with someone, worried, shouts “IS WHAT YOU TEXTED ME TRUE!?”
I tried to stifle the laughter while I explained to her that I wasn’t lying and that I think I rescued all of the booklets with her number on it, but I couldn’t be sure. She should’ve thanked me, but she kept going on and on. Eventually, I had to say, “I don’t really want to talk about this anymore” and hang up. And laugh. And laugh and laugh and laugh.
You should know you’re playing with fire when you date an emo dude. When you break up—and you will break up—he might write a song about you, he might say unflattering things about you in an interview or he might give your phone number out to other girls who will call you and dream about how they would have made it work with that same emo dude, who would surely break up with her, write a song about her, say unflattering things about her in an interview and distribute her number to other girls and so on and so on.
