I had the second biggest crush of my youth on a girl named Lindsay, and I would spend the next paragraph or two describing and rebuilding the memory of her but, honestly, I don’t remember much about her. I see only a faded outline with blurred features when I try to think of her, there isn’t a whole lot there—there is however, afi.
I still think that the album Black Sails in the Sunset is one of the greatest albums ever written—that’s just me.
Black Sails in the Sunset is a great album and again still one of my favorites, by the time I discovered them they had recently released The Art of Drowning, which although very different also made a lasting impact on me, and of course I ventured into the earlier releases, Answer That and Stay Fashionable, Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes, and others. My relationship with afi would last much, much longer than my relationship with Lindsay.
I even started attending Warped Tour because of them and would soon discover more Punk and Ska bands, and music that I was previously unfamiliar with.
Apparently, if you follow the mainstream sound, you’ll be familiar with afi (I’m only now just learning this). The generations after my own which would include the middle to younger aged Millennials (although I cannot consider myself a Millennial, I firmly believe that since Facebook and the first-generation iPhone the generation gaps are much, much smaller than they used to be spanning, maybe three or five years as opposed to the previous fifteen, or greater). The point being, that although you might be familiar with afi and whatever sound they’ve adopted in the decades since you have not heard afi until you pull up Black Sails and the albums they recorded before, between 94’ and 2000.
I do have another memory of Lindsay. I don’t remember why but I found myself needing $50, urgently. Lindsay and I were working together at the time, and I guess I asked her I can’t really recall, but she gave me her bank card and pin number and let me pull the money from her account; I don’t think about that a lot, I still cannot process that completely, why she did it. Lindsay basically disappeared after high school, as far as I know there’s still no easily accessible record of her at least for someone who isn’t so tech savvy. I could do a basic Facebook search, and nothing would pop up and, “well, she doesn’t exist.”