N1rvana!

I was born on the tenth of December, 1991, in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Just a few months earlier, Nirvana released Nevermind. Obviously I cannot recall when this record was released, or even a time when Kurt Cobain was alive, but in my early teenage years I convinced myself that this album's spirit somehow formed me. In a confused haze of young adolescence I saw myself as the product of a Seattle garage. At one point, the band was more important to me than my real family. N1rvana! became my password to everything as if it held the key to some secret part of me. It was all that mattered at school. My friends would quiz each other on Krist Novoselic's height, which albums Pat Smear played on, how many steps Kurt took before arriving in the greenhouse where he ended his life, whether the rifle was small enough for him to use his finger on the trigger or whether he would have had to use his big toe, etc.. One boy whose mother had died when he was young proudly proclaimed that if he could bring one person on earth back to life it would be Kurt Cobain.

When I was eleven I went to visit family in Australia. I read Kurt Cobain's biography, Heavier than Heaven, and became obsessed with suicide and heroin. To this day, I still have not tried either.