April 6, 2987:

Weather: Hace sol
Mood: even-keeled
Music: Velvet Underground - Heroin

Dear Diary,

I founded a new band today.

Well, this phase comes around twice a decade, like clockwork. Usually, I hear a great bassline in some song, and the next day, I find myself playing the same bassline by ear, and wishing I had somebody to jam with.

Sometimes it's the absence of a bassline. I'll jam along and fill in the hole where there should be more bass, and it'll remind of my very first band. We were called The Sombreros. We never wore any sombreros, of course.

It was a simple setup: Chad, he was a cyclops, and he played rhythm guitar. Josephine was a vampire chick, a political dissident who later got shanked by the Empress' forces; she played lead and sang backup. We had about a dozen drummers at different times. I taught myself bass just to have something to do with my hands as I sang.

But for a shining moment in the East Coast underground scene, we were rockstars. We were too punky to be goth and too goth to be true post-punk, but we jammed hard and people liked it. Man, the goths got along with the hardcore punks when we played, and that didn't just happen. Our signature song was called "The Book of Changes." I guess I'm telling you things you already know, Diary, but people related to that song, and it took me a century to figure out why.

One day, I was in a back lot (and I never wrote this down,) in a back lot, taking pictures of the wildflowers with a camera and some kind of special lens that my girlfriend at the time had for taking pictures of bugs. I don't remember why anyone was taking pictures of bugs a hundred and twenty years after the war, but whatever. You'd look through the camera and a little flower ten feet away would fill up the whole view-finder, and you'd see all the little specks of dust and bugs crawling on it.

A woman came up to me back there in that lot, crossing engine parts and little clumps of dirt with patchy grass on them. Through the fence and down a steep hill, waves were breaking in what was left of the Chesapeake Bay, and they caught the light in a way I've seen only three times, sea-green and sunset red and orange playing together like in a stained-glass window. When she got to me, I was swearing because I didn't have a regular lens to take a picture of the water.

We save moments when we can, but I wonder if we really ever feel again what we felt the first time-does memory recall with any accuracy what you were feeling when you took a picture, when you look at it ten years later?

So sometimes it's better not to take a picture, I think.

But I was young, and because I'd "lost" that moment, I was swearing like Simon on his worst days. She startled me when she said "Maybe this is a bad time."

Ironically, I was swearing because it was a good time. How I fuck up my best moments.

"No, it's fine," I said, after I got over it. "Do I know you?" I asked. I drank back then, before I got on the harder stuff, enough to live my life in a kind of haze sometimes. I guess I took her for a half-forgotten one-night-stand for a moment. She was a timid little girl of about twenty, in the very last generation of unmutated humans. Her hair was almost white and it covered one of her eyes. They were what people used to call "hazel," which is a mix of all the colors that the sea was at that moment.

"No. I just... I wanted to tell you that that song you sing with the line about 'Running through the high grass as childhood gives in to rust'? That song has my whole life in it."

"Really?" I asked.

But she was running away. I guess it had been hard even to approach me. That shook me, in a way. Some people are that timid with everybody, but I guess it was worse because I was somebody. It's not easy to realize you're somebody.

The song, of course, was "The Book of Changes." I realized centuries later that it was the song where I stopped trying to be edgy and just started to be. It's the only thing from back then that I still sing.

I've actually heard somebody cover it in this century. I was really proud when I heard it.

Glob, I miss that band, though.. All dead, of course; dead for centuries, and the underground crowd is literally under the ground now, for the most part; food for worms, I mean. I used to say that I avenged Jo when I shanked the Empress, and that one day I'd shank Death himself and avenge Chad and... and all those drummers. Glob knows I loved a few of them too, in one sense or another.

So day before yesterday, I decided to form my first college band. That's how they used to do it, before the war. Most bands formed in college, it seems like. I put out advertisements on a bunch of the school bulletin boards.

Today, Saturday, I got three answers.

First, a familiar little purple lump floated into my dorm room without knocking.

Lumpy Space Princess is a mystery to me. I can't tell whether she's just that self-centered, or what. Still, she's good for a laugh.

She came in and said "Like, I wish I'd know you were here earlier, Marceline! I'm just visiting some friends, but, uh, I saw your advertisement."

I almost asked her to sit down, but I caught myself. "You interested, LSP?"

"I'm the best. lumping. drummer. that I even know. You need me, gurl."

So she talked herself up for a while, and I guess I kinda agreed that she should be in the band. An hour after she'd left to get her drum-kit from Lumpy Space, another surprising person entered.

It was a skeleton. No, it was worse. It was a skeleton with a dog skull or something. It had an evil glare in its bare eyeballs, and it was dressed all in white, which is a nice touch for a skeleton. Black would have been cliché, I must admit.

I'm a little enamoured. Skeleton people aren't my type, but still!

So I asked the person his or her name, and deep, raspy voice half-spoke, half-sung "I am Death, none can excel, an' I open the door to heaven'r'hell..."

"Hey, the Stanley Brothers, cool. No seriously, who are you?"

"No, Marceline, I'm seriously Death. That's my name, my title, and my job."

It was at this point that I tried to shank him and fulfill my oath.

But I couldn't move against him. I picked up my axe, but I couldn't make my arms swing it. I couldn't even make my feet step any closer to him.

"So I guess it's my time to die, huh? I'd wondered," I said, "wondered if you'd just show up one day."

"Wait, what?"

"Aren't you here to kill me?"

"Naw, sis. I'm here to kill a professor, but he won't die."

This took a moment to sink in. "So you're not here to kill me."

"Naw. I'm here to play bass in your band."

"I... um."

"Look, I'm not going to kill you, sis. You're famous for being the best bassist in Ooo, and I want to learn from you. Do you want me in your band, or not?"

"Uh, two basses?"

"It worked for The Malkoviches."

I suddenly noticed that we were both sitting down on the two beds, facing each-other. We hadn't been just a second before. He was showing off his powers, as if to remind me that he might not really be just asking.

"The Malkoviches," I said, when I'd recovered my cool; "you follow my work."

"In more ways than one. I worked with you closely during the vampire war, if you remember."

I felt rebellious when he said that last part. It's not like he's actually the concept of death.

...right?

"Look," I said, getting up. "I appreciate that you're a fan and all, but I... I got all the bass I need, right here."

"I'd be a good friend for you, sis," he said, standing up as if to walk to the door. "I'm good luck if you're on my side."

"Is that a threat?" I said.

"Why would I threaten you? I'm already going to kill you one day, when the time is right. What would even be the point?"

I wanted desperately to be able to smoke, so I could light up a cigarette and look like I didn't care that Death was in my room talking about killing me. "You could kill me earlier if I didn't do what you want," I said.

"Um."

"Wait, wait, wait," I said. "You do actually choose when to kill people, right?"

"Um..."

"My Gob, you actually can't kill people whenever you want, can you?"

He hung his head, and muttered as if to himself, "mortals, man. They always think I'm threatening them."

"Whoa, Death," I said. "Is that how you normally make friends?"

"Yeah. Some people take it right, some people don't."

"Like who?" I asked. I probably shouldn't've.

"That peppermint dude."

"He's like, working for my father, isn't he? Of course he likes you."

"Working for your father or vice versa."

I thought about that for a moment. Holy shit, I thought. Which way would be worse? I don't even know.

We both looked at each other. I reached a decision, probably an unwise one, but I've been in his place, and I know how it feels. "Hey, look, you want to start this over, dude?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Despite the massive self-pitying buttshit, I like you. Come back tomorrow, bring your bass, and don't try to manipulate me again," I said. He vanished in a puff of smoke.

The third visitor was none other than Sir Susan. I thought she'd come to get her book. See, I'd been surprised for a second when I'd found a green, hardback book titled "Audubon - The Birds of America" in my Knights-issued knapsack, but then I remembered that she'd handed it to me right after the fighting broke out and I'd shoved it in my pack to keep it safe. I had set it one of the little desks in the room.

"So," she said, without bringing up the book. "You like music, right? That's the kind of band you meant on the flier, right?"

"Yeah," I said.

She sat down on Melissa's bed, near where there was still a depression from where Death had sat.

"Well, I'm not like... I'm untrained, but I can kinda play piano. But I understand if that's not good enough!"

"Well, I didn't know shit when I started. Let's see what you can do."

So we walked over to the music building to find a practice room, under cover of a magic cloud she created for me. It cast a beautiful little circle of rain and shade.

The piano we found was in a cramped square room, and it was awkwardly wedged in at an angle just to fit. She sat down at the bench, and I managed to float up and hang down from up near the ceiling, where I could be out of her way but still watch.

I noticed her hands were shaking a little. "I really don't do this."

"I won't judge."

So she started playing this... I don't know how to describe it. It was mostly these huge, strange chords, but they moved up and down the keyboard in an unusual way, making a kind of melody.

In her music, I saw myself leaving the ruined city where I was born, hand in hand with the man who raised me from that day on, looking back and seeing crumbling towers hanging in the mist, with the trees already taking over the streets.

Her sense of rhythm was unsteady and she often lost her place, but fupp, I could listen to that piece all day.

"Did... did you write that?" I asked when she was done.

"Yeah. I was thinking about home the other day and I just kind-of made it up."

"You made me think of home."

"Is that good? I'm sorry if I made you sad! I... I..."

"It's good, Sir Sue. It's good."

So we all jammed together for the first time that day, on a vacant stage in the theater building, Death, LSP, Sir Sue and I.

The two basses thing is still uneasy, and Sue's sense of rhythm is not actually that great, despite everything else. But we managed to play through "Cirrus Minor" by Pink Floyd twice, and the second time, there was this moment.

I was singing, of course. It turns out Death doesn't like to sing in front of people. I mean, Grod, it just hit me that I'm in a band with Death... the fucking grim reaper. And I'm the frontwoman.

I think I can work with that.

So I was singing and playing. There's a line in that song. I don't even know what it means, but it's a great line.

"Saw a crater in the sun... a million miles of moonlight later."

And it made a chill run down my spine-only the second time, for some reason. And I looked around, at my homegurl the drumming purple lump, at the two beautiful killing machines who were in the band with us, and I loved them. I loved all three of them.

Maybe romantic love, for at least one of them.

But I loved them. And I loved the music I was singing, and the music we were playing, and the bass in my hands felt like a beautiful and good thing, not a weapon forged in the Nightosphere. And I thought for a moment that everything was all right in the world, or at least all the world that I could see at that moment.

And nothing tarnished it. No demon showed up, no one arrived to tell me that someone I loved had died-nothing. But I guess I kinda tarnished it myself, by worrying. Usually when I'm happy like that, something happens, so I worried.

Glob, I worry about these things. Am I going to be forever ruining my own best moments with a casual thought that spirals out of hand, or because I don't have a camera or a book to write it down in? Am I just crazy like that?

But this is going to be a good band, I can tell you that, diary.