The Gloucester Clam

Knowing it was high time I got out of Gloucester for an evening over the weekend, my buddy and all around super cool dude Joey said, “Let’s go to NH to this hardcore show. It’s at a Chinese food place, so, you know, Mai Tais.” Sold. This is how I grew up, after all – crappy bars that let underage kids in as long as they weren’t drinking, screaming punk rock played at top volume and somewhat varied in quality – anywhere between “moderately terrible” and “sorta listenable”, where there was always someone in a mohawk manning a merch table of buttons and cassette tapes.

I’ll pretend it was as cool as this but it so never was.

The good part about having a lot of tattoos, pink hair, and an enviable, rainbow assortment of Chuck Taylors is that it allows me to shapeshift, somewhat and fit in with a younger crowd. I’m 31, for the record – which is actually a fucking weird age, these days. But when I got to the show I realized that sure, I look like these kids, I’m even the same age as some of them; but times have changed for me.

You have no idea how deep into Facebook I had to search for relics of my teenage life. Why did we love 40ozs so much?

There’s a line from Scenes From an Italian Restaurant, a barely-passable Billy Joel song, about Brenda and Eddy, who got married young (in the summer of 75!), and then divorced – and struggled with their identities after that, not being able to return to the lives they led before they got married. “They couldn’t go back to the greasers, the best they could do was pick up their pieces.” And for whatever stupid reason, that line keeps echoing through my head…like a life lesson I’m about to learn the hard way. Not that Billy Joel should give anybody life lessons.

I got in to the bar, which was unbearably lit, and immediately ordered a drink. Turns out it’s been a long time since I’ve been to a bar that tapes the empty cardboard 12 pack boxes to the wall to let you know their current beer selection. I’m kind of used to charcuterie plates and small-batch locally crafted cider, because I’m a dick. I dug through my wallet for cash. After all, I couldn’t go giving the bartender my Platinum Cashback Rewards Card, that says “Member since ’06” along the bottom, because they’d be on to me right quick, sniffing me out as a total square. Nothing says “punk kid” like a solid line of credit nearly a decade in length, right?

Damnit. I really could have used the cashback rewards.

Pushing on into a small, square room with a parquet floor, a band started up which I swear to blog was playing the exact same chords, the exact same style,  the exact same unintelligibly growling vocals as the last show I’d been to. It was like I had walked away at the age of 19, and the entire underground, young, hardcore/punk scene had just paused, awaiting my return. The outfits were the same as everything my friends and I wore back then – a teenage girl wearing a spiked vest with a Casualties patch, someone with a Crass tattoo, two or three G.G Allin shirts. Of course. Of course! And why not? It’s not like my generation invented punk rock or even improved it. We were mimicking our cool older cousins and siblings, uncles, and aunts. And so down the line it goes, the same as it was before and probably always will be.

Your humble author as a 17 year old badass (clearly).

I was nostalgic, I admit. I even drank a PBR. It was fun to watch these kids, still full of zeal and hope, do their thing. Until the mosh pit started. Oh, those. Yeah, they’re still happening. I moved further and further back, while Joey enjoyed himself knocking against other people’s fleshy parts and bones, until I was in the rear, up on a chair like I’d seen a family of wharf rats scampering across the carpet, wondering how much insurance this place had in case someone snapped their damn neck. This used to be fun! I used to do this on weekends! What was I thinking?

But time, marriage, kids age you. My life is elementary school pickups, trash day, and the detritus of separating my life from my former husband’s after an entire decade of togetherness, the first adult decade I had. What separated me from that crowd isn’t all about my age, it’s about being in a world where my kids are always begging to play Mario Kart before they’ve finished their chores, property tax hikes, writing deadlines and nagging back pain.

In the end, it was nice to be punk rock KT for a night – surrounded by kids (and adults) creating music, and a scene, and being noisy and imperfect and ALIVE, but it’s a world I can’t return to.

But I’ll find a way to get by.

There are approximately one zillion flags on Stacey Boulevard. There was a flag so big there the other day it was touching the ground (bad form). Also we have a snappy new WW II Memorial, which is great.

But we at The Clam would love it if you’d also stop by the Gloucester Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the High School and pay your respects today. Like a lot of the vets from that war, this memorial is sort of tucked out of the way.

To be honest, The Clam supports digging that memorial right the fuck up and putting it next to the WW II one. Those guys deserve no less.

From us, to all our Vets and families a sincere thank you. And especially to those from a war some would rather forget.

Matthew P. Amaral III
Killed 12/14/1967

[From Your Fearless Clam Editors Jim and KT]

The first post on this blog was on May 5 2014, over a year ago. Your humble clameditors had been bouncing around the same threads on Facebook, cracking people up to the point where there were numerous cries of “You two should go start a blog!” In retrospect this may have just been friends trying to stop us from filling their feeds with obscene references to the alien races of Star Wars (“Is Wookie-style” a sexual position?”) and photos of the the life-sized David Hasselhoff mannequin we found on the Internet which was endlessly amusing to us for obvious reasons and turned into an elaborate murder-mystery. Well the joke’s on you guys! We did it! Ha!

The Hoffcart approves, and then results in your mysterious untimely death.

Since then it’s been an insanely amusing ride. People have stopped each of us on the street to say, “I love your blog!” Fans have contributed real cash money to help pay for hosting and some of our operating expenses (read: scorpion bowls at Midori that one time, and mostly the Clam parties (so). KT wrote a piece on the Market Basket controversy last summer that literally had hundreds of thousands of hits and was picked up by Esquire and other real news outlets staffed by actual journalists and not just two local wags trying to find mildly off-color mashups of 90’s alt hits and local landmarks (I just went down Stacy’s Mom Boulevard).

We knew going in we wanted to be an alternate voice. Slightly punk rock, edgy, shouty and PG-13 (language). We felt at the time, and even more so a year out, that Gloucester needs a little shaking up. It needs to have its assumptions questioned and to laugh at itself more. 99.9% of you agree, even some well known local figures who call or email or text and say, “I love what you guys are doing, dear God never stop, but of course I can’t put my name behind that so don’t quote me.”

There have been haters too, of course. That’s fine. It’s a big Internet, they can go somewhere else and complain about us or whatever. Oh, and of course (this being Gloucester) there are also one million experts in everything who keep telling us what to do. Apparently they know for a fact we would “do better,” for instance, if we stopped swearing so much. Or that young fellow KT should learn to respect women. Or that Jim Dowd never should have been elected to Parliament as the Labor MP from Lewisham (He has also failed to bring the funk). Their “expertise” is betrayed by our hit stats which plainly demonstrate you people like pretty much two things: Swearing and dirty lists, especially on Friday afternoons (our stats suggest most of you are surfing the web completely plowed by 2:00 pm any given Friday).

Here is a short list of our biggest surprises:

1. How widespread our readership is: Who the fuck are you people in New York City? We see you on our analytics, hundreds a day. We’re probably coming down there at some point and having a drink with you all, unless it turns out reading The Clam aloud in some basement dungeon on Christoper Street is the daily ritual of a creepy fetish group. Actually, if that’s the case we’re definitely coming down. Looking at the Google we see consistent readers in LA, Chicago, London, Australia, Portland Oregon, Russia and Finland. A bunch in Finland, actually. WHY FINLAND? WHY????
2. How mobile our readers are: Most of you guys apparently read us on your phones or tablets. We assume killing time while you are waiting for your arraignment or something. It helps confirm for us most readers consume The Clam as an “infosnack” between things. We try and respect that.
3. How easy it’s been to come up with content: We worried hard about doing this daily. Every couple of weeks KT would text Jim and say, “Holy fuck we have nothing for next week!” Jim, playing the role of the sage old hand would say, “Don’t worry, some crazy bullshit will happen in the next 72 hours and we’ll have a topic.” This came true EVERY TIME. We had flat-out zip to write about the day before Beardy McCrimespree robbed the Ipswich Bank downtown and fled by taxi. There were snowstorms, strikes, school craziness, elections and drones. Lord so much drones. And more drone-nerdery is coming. This will be a full-on drone erotica site by July. But the point is, drones aside, Gloucester is a rich well of topics for a satire blog and for that we are eternally grateful.
   

   “Amazon said the craft would be ‘unmanned’ but oh how wrong they were…”

4. The number of people who assumed we were bonking: This came as a disappointment. There was apparently furtive talk in some corners about “what was going on” between us because known science clearly states two people of opposing genders can’t write comedy together or work closely together without a genital interchange of some type. We confronted a few folks when we heard the scuttlebutt, and somehow were given the impression that its up to us to prove to the world we’re NOT bonking. Okay….we’re open to suggestions on how to prove a negative, something every logical system says you can’t do, but sure. We’ll get right on that. Also feminist fail from folks who know better, and who should let two humans who work well together just do that and not have it be all be about what junk they happen to have. Sadface on this one, people.
5. The real, serious shit we talked about: Some of our best work came from thorny issues many of which we were initially loath to cover. We talked about the Ferguson violence, Robin Williams’ suicide, telling the truth about the schools (they are pretty damn good!), gun violence, the general crappiness of the Gloucester Daily Times and the massive third rail of a Gloucester future where groundfishing is a minor part of the economic equation. People got mad at us sometimes, but lots and lots more said, “I’m so glad someone is finally talking about this…” Basically we’ve become that obnoxious knowitall punk kid at Thanksgiving who blurts out, “Are we really going to let Grandma live in that big house at the edge of town all alone? Isn’t that sort of stupid?” That kid is a total pain in the ass (also what’s with the hair?) but they are frequently right about stuff, or at least right that the stuff needs to be talked about and not left as is. It’s a role we both know well.
   

   Find The Clam in this picture

6. How many people don’t get humor: Did you know there are people who don’t understand humor? Did you further know a substantial subset of this group regularly contact those who create actual comedy to explain the extent to which they don’t get it? I guess everyone has hobbies, but you don’t find either of us posting on the official website of the International Cricket Council to inform them we don’t get the concept of “rounders.”
7. The things we really liked that bombed: KT had this bit called “Sporthorse” we both loved. We were the only ones, apparently (except Paul Morrison: We love you, Paul). Jim wrote these Star Wars narratives he thought were the most amusing combinations of words every committed to electronic media, but KT’s eyes glazed over and she would start banging her head against the walls at ClamMedia Tower (TM). Stats show more people have read the Necronomicon and lived than those posts. It’s a strange thing sometimes, finding that place where what we think is funny and what you all will think is funny overlap. We try and strike a balance, to be honest. Sometimes you just gotta write what you like and to hell with the hits. But then again, there is an audience who is giving you the incredible privilege of their attention and it’s really shitty to take advantage of that.
   

   Now we will never learn the true identity of Sporthorse

8. We blew it also too: We’re not going to go too in-depth on this just to say we know there were a couple of times we went over the line, said the wrong thing, got the story wrong or were dicks about something we should have been less dickish about. We actually fret about this a lot more than you might imagine. In our defense, and we know some will laugh, but we actually believe The Clam has a not unimportant mission. And we believe that mission of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted is worth the risk of stepping on occasional toes and making ourselves look like assholes in the process. We’re going to try not to, we’ve learned a lot this past year, but somebody’s gotta say some of this stuff out loud or it’s never going to get fixed.

That’s it. Huge thanks to our Clamtributors: Brooke, Jeremy, Josh, Stevens and Adam (and a few others who have given us one-off submissions). I know we’re all over the place, but you guys have been a huge help in riding this thing out of the gate. And major thanks to the people who’ve read, laughed, forgiven and supported us. It’s been a privilege, and we’ve gotten more from this project than we ever thought possible.

More great things to come, folks. We’ve been working on some pretty crazy stuff.

–KT and Jim