Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The focus is on notable new music emerging from the unconventional metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels, or even releases from unsigned acts.
As of this writing, I'm getting married in just over a week; I wake up almost every morning with a suffocating panic attack, as if a safe has been placed directly on my chest of guilt, leaving me gasping for air. These events, as far as I know, are not related. There is a brutality to life, not so much a randomness, which would imply a blunt and opaque acausality, but something substantially more opaque, a causal network of contingency and relationship that is exposed beyond comprehension, so that, when we catch glimpses of it in our days and lives, feels random, lacking meaning or importance.
If I were to draw a simple line through these two sensations in fact, it would be this: On the verge of marriage at age 35, I have become more reflective of a life that for a long period had been lived sincerely with the understanding of that can die. Sometimes friends are lost, often for idiotic causes, the heartbreakingly inhumane way addicts and the undercarriage of society are torn from the wheels of the world. I'm no longer trapped in those machines, or at least not on those levels, but there's always a lingering terror, a carpe diemic urge. Days, by their nature, are numbered. This is a mere fact.
But I have always been reflective. It is both a curse of my general manners and, as I have learned in adulthood, an artifact of autism. I don't mean that those who aren't on the spectrum don't have rich inner worlds (that would be crazy!), but rather a life where any external projection feels drowned out by sheets of meaningless distorting noise (God, I wonder why (I came to like the extreme). metal and jazz) requires at some point that that same energy be turned inward. I am brooding; I wallow in my juices. It's my way, I learned it from my father, who learned it from his father, over and over again. So such a brutal link between these two juxtapositional sensations of fact seems inaccurate or, worse, something I greatly detest: an oversimplification intended for convenience but replacing a real perception of the connection between things.
And anyway, this is alleviated by the genuine and deep peace I feel with my future spouse. We've been together for eight years, twice as long as my longest relationship before this. I feel a patience and acceptance, but also a challenge and motivation that comes naturally from them and that I struggle to feel I deserve, but that they give freely and without hesitation. They are my rock. I spoke of a great game against the misogynistic roots of both traditional Western monogamy and the artificial construct of marriage, and while aspects of those criticisms are still borne out in the way my partner and I lead our lives, the desire to Getting married was as natural as: I love you. I am better with you and for you. Stay with me. The peace of this depth is disturbing because of how concrete and logical it seems. At times, the only solid thing in the world. This is perhaps the second thing I am really sure of, after my desire to write.
– Langdon Hickman
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