by Corey Taylor
I know me. I know how worked up and completely hyper-caffeinated I can get, and I know that may cause poop disguised as theorems to fly from my lips like brown little epiphanies that smell as sweet as they sound. And honestly, what the fuck do I care? On too much coffee and too many cigarettes, I can expound with my fellow Irish poets and laureates till they sound last call and send us staggering drunkenly into the streets of Limerick, still going on and on about the romance but still clinging to the common sense. I do not let little things like perception or social status keep me from giving it large and telling it like it is. I would rather believe I can learn the truth than cling stubbornly to an antiquated opinion. There are enough of those acerbic hypocrites around without me helping to swell their ranks. You do not believe me? I can prove it. You know those crotchety racist pricks at the shitty bar your mom goes to? I rest my case.
A good guess is just as good as a straight answer, and a straight answer would be “maybe he is not that far off with some of this shit.” It only takes common sense to sort through the recycling bin on the curb of life. And I may not have much, but I would like to think I earned my common sense badge through trial and error. If I were a real author, or at least if I were not constantly dressing as a pirate while this book was being written, I might actually concede that some of these traits are in fact not what I would call “positive behavior.” Believe me, I have the scars to prove it. If that is not selling you at all, let’s just put it this way: I have not jumped into any more ceiling fans and I will not be lying down in any bathtubs in Pittsburgh any time soon. So I have at least figured out that these big dogs will hunt the life right out of you if you do not keep them in check. Fair enough? Fair assumption? Fair game? Fair play? No? Aw, go fuck yourself.
I guess I will end this tawdry little tome the same way we came in, by sharing a quaint moment I experienced a while back. It was May 15, 2008. I was in L.A. doing some songwriting with a band called Halestorm. That night I was planning to do a show with an all-star cover band called Camp Freddy. It turned out to be the night I met my future wife and the night I remembered what it was like to be on a stage with no other feeling but sheer enjoyment. It was truly incredible: We jammed, we danced, and we tore the roof off the Roxy. After the club had cleared out and the energy had died down and someone finally took the J.D. away from me, a bunch of us ended up at the diner in the Standard Hotel. My future wife actually dropped me off there. As she drove away, I vowed that that would not be the last time I saw her and, after checking my phone to make sure I had truly stored her number in it, I stumbled past the seemingly unnecessary velvet ropes in the valet parking area and into the restaurant.
It was dimly lit and eerily quiet for Hollywood at 2 a.m., but that did not stop me from having an Algonquin Table moment once I was inside. Jerry Cantrell and Mike Inez from Alice In Chains were there as well as Lars Ulrich from Metallica. We were sitting at a table, talking shop and shit and anything else we could think of when the half dozen cocktails I had partaken finally caught up with me and I decided it was time to head back to my hotel for some sleep. I stepped outside past the clubbers and scene freaks parading through the lobby. But I suddenly opted against a cab. Tonight was not a night for sitting in the backseat. Tonight was a night for getting a feel for the landscape spinning around me. So I slipped my jacket on to kill the chill and, tapping out a Marlboro into my eager hands, proceeded down the street into the city.
This was Hollywood—unfiltered, unadulterated, and unflinching. I had spent a lot of time there over the last ten years. I recorded my first major album there. I had my first taste of fame and all the excessive trimmings that come with it there. I had dirty sex and whiskey-drenched adventures and violent outbursts all over this fetish wonderland. I had taken every chance and risk, transforming into a vagabond rock star. But I was aimless and crazy. I was blending in more and more with the very elements of Hollywood that I despised. I suddenly had so much in common with people I had never felt akin to in my life. So my long road back to reality came with high prices and low self-esteem. I had to dismantle an ego that was growing out of control and start from scratch. I had been famous pretty much since I was seventeen, at least on a local level. I was used to infamy. I was not used to spiraling into madness for no other reason than to see what the abyss had in store for me. I wanted more than Behind the Music. I wanted the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
As I kept walking, all of these hurdles ran through my mind. I was the Rosetta Stone, a keyhole between two worlds that needed to coexist if I was going to survive. I made peace with my demons and held onto the grudge against my angels. I remembered my goals. I remembered my dreams. I remembered myself. It was like coming out of a coma. Suddenly the orgies and the booze and the flattery and the money and the bullshit did not matter. What mattered the most was the fact that I was back on the road toward my own immortality.
I found myself sitting on an old stone bench on Sunset Boulevard, smoking a cigarette and smiling, watching the traffic roll by me. For some reason it had just come to me to sit right there, where so many had before, and reflect on that night’s events. But my memories were not stuck on that particular evening alone. As I inhaled the smoke, my vision was sweeping back and looking at the culmination of three and a half decades of my life so far. I had lived in poverty and survived long enough to sit and have breakfast at 3 a.m. with people I grew up idolizing. I had suffered the wrath of karmic justice but had seen a rebirth come in the guise of great opportunities and a little positive reinforcement. I had committed every sin imaginable on a list as old as time, and somehow I was perched on a concrete slab reveling in the good fortune my efforts had sown. I was unscathed and relatively none the worse for wear, and I was in control of my own destiny, which is strange because I had always had doubt about destiny; I had seen and felt too many examples to the contrary. But there I was, a silent king on a languid street taking stock of my blessings and letting go of my curses like the smoke I was blowing into the dark. I was a ghost from the middle of nowhere. Now I was a soul on top of the world.
I let my guilt go like a handful of dust on a strong breeze. I have come to accept myself for what I am: human. I am not perfect. I am not immune to fate, but I am not automatically doomed for being alive. I feel temptations every second of every day and I am not controlled by them. I do what I want anyway, so who is to say I want anything else? When I want, I let these peculiarities run across me like dogs to their masters. When I do not, I keep them at bay with my will and my testimony. I do not cut myself off from what makes me feel; I just refuse to feel anything that cuts me off from what matters most. It is called will power. With a little practice, you can accomplish great things.
So let me clarify in a few words what I have strived to convey with this entire book: The Seven Deadly Sins are bullshit. They are ancient guidelines from a simpler time that have outlived their menace. In the wrong hands, they are just more weapons used to lord over decent, simple people who are trying to live life with the least amount of drama as possible. Humans will always be prone to taking advantage of any means to feel better about their downfalls. Deflection is the biggest trait of denial, so believing you are better than everyone else is the most deflective form of ignorance. Selfish malice is as genetic as the brow line we get from our parents, but what this species does not need is more ammunition to fire on our fellow earthlings. The Seven Deadly Sins are character flaws for a reality show that has been on TV since time began. When we do anything more than silently accept them, we put unneeded emphasis on things that we all deal with but have no need to debate anymore. We are human, people! Get used to it! Instead, we waste years, even decades’ worth of time on other people’s garbage, using a moral meter stick that was last relevant when people wore robes and sandals to be chic.
We all travel through the hallways of life looking for the right doors, but we never check the handles in front of us; we are always convinced the exit is around the corner. It has made me believe th
at too many of us spend too much time either worried about the past or fretting over the future. No one truly embraces the now. No one stretches their legs out and snuggles down in the moment, that moving dot between A and B that lets you know you are here. Our focus has become a system of what has happened and what might happen, and this inevitably leaves you missing what is actually happening. The same goes for this tired grocery list of outdated dogmatic sins: The sweat from the stains has not even dried on our actions and we are so busy rushing to classify them that we forget to let some shit slide every now and then. Just because we might act like assholes sometimes does not mean we are defined as assholes forever. We can accept what has been done and accept what will be so we can pay a little more attention to what we are doing. There are people in this world who are going to demonize everything we do for the rest of time; let them be miserable if they want to. We will have our parties and they are not invited. If there is one thing that will never ever change, it is simply that you cannot and will not please everyone. That is a fact—trying to do so is an exercise in limp futility, and the only person who gets screwed in the end is you. Get used to giving yourself a little slack, man. Besides, who can you possibly be pleasing if you are not happy in the end? Does anything else matter past that?
Things can get tough out there. I am in no way saying life is easy and we should breeze through it like a fart through a silk filter; we are going to take our lumps and deal with our own unique adversity. What I am saying is that in all the chaos, remember to breathe, remember to smile, and remember that the only time to panic is when there is truly no tomorrow. Fortunately for the majority of us, tomorrow will always meet us in the morning with a cup of coffee and a fresh deck of cigarettes, ready to crack its cocoon and mature into today. So ease the grip on your moralities and be yourself. Fantastic is really just the flaws. Nobody is perfect—not you, not me, not Jesus, Buddha, Jehovah, nor God. But the great thing is that you do not have to be perfect to be alive, and that is what makes life absolutely perfect.
Do yourself a favor. Every night, before you go to bed, run down a mental list of everything you did that day. Check these so-called sins against it. Do not be as dramatic and drastic as most zealots or purists would be—just a quick skim across your moral waters. If at the end you do not feel like you have to turn yourself into the police or practice self-deprecation or, what’s worse, flog yourself with some kind of cat o’ nine tails under some weird religious doctrine, then fluff that hypoallergenic pillow, rest your head and sleep like a saint. If you left everything on the stage and all the bodies in dark alleys, then what is the problem, right? It is hard enough when people preach the way they believe you are supposed to live at you. Do not beat yourself up for no good reason. People are like pants cuffs: They can come clean with a little effort. But the longer you hold onto shit, the tighter it holds onto you.
We are all connected by unseen threads and unbidden desires, distant relatives in a massive family in which no one looks alike but we all seem the same. If music is the universal language, then sins are a universal birthright. We earn our sins through mistakes and rapture. We earn our humanity through our ability to mend. This is why when a person commits true atrocities against the species, they lose their right to claim colors. But the brutality of the extreme is as the lull of the unspectacular: rare and ultimately too coarse for common consumption. The majority of us just want to get home in time to enjoy a moment to ourselves. Do not waste one second of that time on dilemmas that hold as much water as a shot glass. Let yourself be alive, for better or for worse. Give your mind and your soul a little credit—they can take it. We are as resilient as we are reticent. There is one statement I want you to keep after you are finished with this book. It is more of a mantra, really. Nonetheless, let it crawl across your mind any time you feel you have been backed into a corner spiritually. It is very simple: Live your life, no matter what that life is.
Take that with you.
Live your life.
No matter what that life is.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people for helping me make this dream come true:
Cory Brennan, who put this idea in my head in the first place; Marc Gerald, who helped me narrow down my extreme imagination and focus on a single topic; Ben Schafer and everyone at Perseus for helping me shape and mold this thing into something readable (and for fending off any lawsuits—haha); Paul Brown, who took my ramblings about the art and channeled them into fantastic visuals; Dave, Shawn, Monke, Amber, Jason, Brenna, Jackie, Christine, and everyone else who brought these “sins” to life; Bob Johnsen, Evange Livanos, and everyone at 5B Management for running rampant and helping me deliver; Stubbs and Kirby for pulling the creativity out of me and helping me find the visuals for the photos; and last but not least, my wife Stephanie Taylor, my partner in crime, who always keeps me driven, who went above and beyond to help me get this all together, and who understood just how important this was to me. I couldn’t have done this without you, Steph.
Copyright © 2011 by Corey Taylor
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142.
Taylor, Corey.
The seven deadly sins : settling the argument between born bad and damaged good / Corey Taylor.—1st Da Capo Press ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-306-81975-9
BV4626.T29 2011
241’.3—dc22
2010047735
First Da Capo Press edition 2011
Published by Da Capo Press
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