Reverend In Peace
Not So Normal Day
Tokyo, Japan is ahead of Huntington Beach, California by seventeen hours.
Time Zones are so confusing.
If you want to be really technical; on the day of December 29, 2009 at approximately one in the afternoon I was asleep. That night I had stayed at my best friend’s house. We actually went to sleep at five in the morning.
When we did wake up that afternoon, it was from nightmares. Although we tried to feel like it was going to be a good day, deep down we knew it wasn’t. Neither of us did anything truly note worthy. Just the usual things teenagers do. Shower, joke around, hang out and all of that fun stuff.
It was one of those moments, when you don’t really know the significance. But that moment happened in such detail. A friend, Brian, joked and held up an older Avenged Sevenfold album saying, “Look, they finally sell the good stuff.” A joke on how the Navy Exchange where we live has nothing truly worth buying. He held up the City Of Evil Album, I remember it so vividly.
When my best friend and I actually went back to her house, which we both call home, we jumped down on the couch and watched Moulin Rouge. We laughed, we sang, and we cried like babies to that movie.
We joked, saying, “We’re the toughest kids in our school, the kids no one and their mother expects to even have tear ducts- but put in Moulin Rouge and we become sobbing, blubbering babies.” It was funny, so we laughed. Then we switched the movie, deciding that it was time to judge and see if Jenifer’s Body was worth anything.
I don’t know why, but it all happened so fast. There was a line in the movie where Jenifer or her friends, who ever, commenting something about how there aren’t singing drummers or something like that. I laughed, because it made me think of Jimmy.
Then my phone rang so we paused the movie.
Throwing caller ID to the wind I answered. I could hear a good old friend of mine on the phone. He sounded so heartbroken. My first thought was that his girlfriend broke up with him and he needed someone to talk to. So of course I ask him was wrong. It was a line that is kind of haunting.
“I have some bad news, some really bad news.” All I did in response was incoherent grunts, thinking that I could take it. “The Rev died today.” He read the passage from the Sevenfold website. Like everyone else I thought it was all just a cruel sick joke. But apparently it wasn’t. I sobbed, harder than I had during Moulin Rouge. I couldn’t stop crying, it was so difficult to tell my best friend. I had been famed for being the “bearer of bad news” with her. I was the one who kept telling her of famous people who died.
She never had much of a good breathing system, but I didn’t realize that when I told her that The Rev died she would need her inhaler again. I had successfully given my best friend more breathing problems with that sentence. She poured us two drinks… I drank both of them.
I honestly idolized the man. He was the reason I wanted to play the drums, he is the reason I do play the drums. I cry for a man I’ve never met, I cry for a man because he played really good, but honestly, I cried myself to sleep that night because I heard a song. It wasn’t a song on any record, just a slight hallucination.
The guitars, they cried out sad and alone, the bass was low and pulled at my heart strings the way the look of a beaten puppy does, there were no lyrics, just specific notes sung on a single syllable but they were so empty and lost. There was a simple, yet complicated drum beat that dropped so abruptly, and all I could hear was how lost it all was.
I don’t know, maybe that was my insanity. But in the back of my mind, all I can think of now, the only question I can ask any more is…
How did the band take it?
Time Zones are so confusing.
If you want to be really technical; on the day of December 29, 2009 at approximately one in the afternoon I was asleep. That night I had stayed at my best friend’s house. We actually went to sleep at five in the morning.
When we did wake up that afternoon, it was from nightmares. Although we tried to feel like it was going to be a good day, deep down we knew it wasn’t. Neither of us did anything truly note worthy. Just the usual things teenagers do. Shower, joke around, hang out and all of that fun stuff.
It was one of those moments, when you don’t really know the significance. But that moment happened in such detail. A friend, Brian, joked and held up an older Avenged Sevenfold album saying, “Look, they finally sell the good stuff.” A joke on how the Navy Exchange where we live has nothing truly worth buying. He held up the City Of Evil Album, I remember it so vividly.
When my best friend and I actually went back to her house, which we both call home, we jumped down on the couch and watched Moulin Rouge. We laughed, we sang, and we cried like babies to that movie.
We joked, saying, “We’re the toughest kids in our school, the kids no one and their mother expects to even have tear ducts- but put in Moulin Rouge and we become sobbing, blubbering babies.” It was funny, so we laughed. Then we switched the movie, deciding that it was time to judge and see if Jenifer’s Body was worth anything.
I don’t know why, but it all happened so fast. There was a line in the movie where Jenifer or her friends, who ever, commenting something about how there aren’t singing drummers or something like that. I laughed, because it made me think of Jimmy.
Then my phone rang so we paused the movie.
Throwing caller ID to the wind I answered. I could hear a good old friend of mine on the phone. He sounded so heartbroken. My first thought was that his girlfriend broke up with him and he needed someone to talk to. So of course I ask him was wrong. It was a line that is kind of haunting.
“I have some bad news, some really bad news.” All I did in response was incoherent grunts, thinking that I could take it. “The Rev died today.” He read the passage from the Sevenfold website. Like everyone else I thought it was all just a cruel sick joke. But apparently it wasn’t. I sobbed, harder than I had during Moulin Rouge. I couldn’t stop crying, it was so difficult to tell my best friend. I had been famed for being the “bearer of bad news” with her. I was the one who kept telling her of famous people who died.
She never had much of a good breathing system, but I didn’t realize that when I told her that The Rev died she would need her inhaler again. I had successfully given my best friend more breathing problems with that sentence. She poured us two drinks… I drank both of them.
I honestly idolized the man. He was the reason I wanted to play the drums, he is the reason I do play the drums. I cry for a man I’ve never met, I cry for a man because he played really good, but honestly, I cried myself to sleep that night because I heard a song. It wasn’t a song on any record, just a slight hallucination.
The guitars, they cried out sad and alone, the bass was low and pulled at my heart strings the way the look of a beaten puppy does, there were no lyrics, just specific notes sung on a single syllable but they were so empty and lost. There was a simple, yet complicated drum beat that dropped so abruptly, and all I could hear was how lost it all was.
I don’t know, maybe that was my insanity. But in the back of my mind, all I can think of now, the only question I can ask any more is…
How did the band take it?