I wish I'd timed this better. I'm going to talk about my brother Dan because I've been thinking about family because Mother's Day is the center of everyone's next weekend. My mom is a million kilometers away, both in the cross-continental sense and by way of years of disappointment, on both our parts. Like the kind of shit that leads to a sort of strained relational-apathy that hasn't led to a complete estrangement in order to avoid sudden moves. So we still exchange e-mails; I say, Hi, I bought an old junky van, I got a raise, it's still snowing, how are you? She says, It's raining, my back's out again, your dad was layed off. I say, Oh, Happy Mother's Day.

My conflict is that by the time you read this, mother's day was last month and you're over it, I bet. Not me. I'm awkward. I want to go to the Sunday flea market to buy stolen car stereos but my friends are doing brunch and/or lunch and/or tea. Lame.

I wish I researched this better because I wanted to start this column by talking about outsider punk bands as a source of camaraderie that I feel like I need at this time in my life. A sisterhood with other isolated devotees living in a region of “Who gives a shit?” and “What are you listening to?” I mean, I could point out that, paradoxically, I feel it's impossible to write about outsider punk as an outsider because if you were an outsider punk you would not know about other outsider punk bands. But this is the 00s and there's the internet and a new issue of MRR gets sent to my remote home every month so I have no fucking excuse. The truth is that I'm still confused because I don't have punk handed to me on a silver platter anymore, like I'm not all overstimulated from having the chance to see all the bands from the top ten list of this magazine playing up the street or in my back yard or, if the band was too lazy or criminally-recorded to cross the border, it was just a two-hour drive to Seattle or Olympia anyway. What's two hours from here? Come By Chance, Newfoundland, an oil-refinery town with population of 265. No joke.

Anyway, so I'm recovering from being a spoiled scene punk who is still in shock of the idea of having to research things for my column or having to seek out bands for myself, which I haven't had to do for myself since I was like 16 and doing Lookout! Records mail orders with my brother. Because of involvement with “actual punks,” dedicated research has given way to grandious generalizations based on personal anecdote that are presented as fact. Like this: One of my favorite parts of outsider punk is the prevalence of siblings within bands. You know, like how weirdo punk bands from small towns, from faraway places, always have siblings in them. Seriously, have you been to Ireland? Every single band there has a set of brothers in it. Every single one. It's a fact.

I used to find that annoying, things like twins playing music together. It seemed too convenient. Shouldn't we challenging the status quo of who we are stuck with and rejecting nuclear family and whatever? But now I'm in the thought-camp of punk being about getting shit done with what's around. Like not giving a shit about who's the coolest and who you know that writes the most blazing riffs, but instead, just starting a project with whomever you end up spending the most time with and writing blazing riffs together. Siblings. Your best friend from grade four that you made because her dad moved in next door to you. Your roommates. Your partners (does that make me a total nerd? Come on, guys, DEAD MOON?!).

I wish I was in a band with my brother, but I don't think it'll happen, although he recently face-booked me to tell me he created a simulation of me in his RockBand band. I hated RockBand with a hardline punx stance until I worked with an eight-year-old who I could only be sure wouldn't try to stab me when he was concentrating on playing the fake drums along to the YEAH YEAH YEAHS. His name was coincdentally also Daniel, but my brother never would've tried to stab me, no sir. Vice versa? Sure. Maybe. I had an extreme seein' red phase. Call it puberty, call it the realization that every thing was fucked and nothing would ever be fair. Whichever.

Despite my violent pubescent rage period, my brother and I started to get along the summer after I ended junior high. I wonder how opportunistic that was on my part, since that was also the time when my he got his driver's license and we were given reign over our parents' old mini-van and its cassette player. It was also right after he had shaved his head into a mohawk to spite his ex-girlfriend and was consequentially given some dubbed tapes by these socially anxious punk nerds eager to find new recruits. I was especially into this one tape mistakenly dubbed MUSTARD PLUG. It was actually OPERATION IVY, which I didn't figure out until years later. Man, I think I even listed MUSTARD PLUG as one of my top favorite bands on my ICQ profile. Boy, is my face red now.

So we spent like a year driving to all-ages shows in the city and listening to tapes. If there were boy and girl parts, we'd do them respectively, like BLATZ and SUBMISSION HOLD. It was great. It was a good year. He had my back. We lived together. And then summer after he graduated, he went to basic training so that he could promote pacifism within the Canadian military and then went to college the next year to try to be an engineering major but just drank too much instead and failed out and moved back home. But by the time that happened I had gotten kicked out of there after my mom and I got in a fight and I was too stubborn to ever move back in with her again so instead I went to live with my internet boyfriend's parents. And my brother and I have never lived in the same city since. Now I have bands and he has RockBand. Oh well.

Stay punk, start a band with your little sister.

julsgeneric@hotmail.com