I can’t believe no one ever told me about Fugazi. I mean, come on, it’s Fugazi. Fugazi, man. I remember a poster in the basement as a kid, what I remember as a Fugazi poster anyway, with a caricatured figure of a colourful man with long hair, shirtless and maybe grabbing his dong, an advertisement for a Fugazi show in the summer of 2001 that my brothers likely attended, but I did not. Since then the band has long been a familiar name but not a familiar sound; a band that no longer existed and thus I believed was not worthy of my music-loving time. Until recently.

The bands you discover yourself are often more influential than those that are shown to you. The same goes for food, books, haircuts, shoes, contraceptives, lifestyle choices. I don’t know when, but at some point I discovered hummus. Hummus the spread, the dip. The ultimate replacement for sandwich mayonnaise, for cream cheese based dips, for ranch dressing, for anything spreadable. I am not claiming to be the first man on earth to make his own hummus, to be the inventor of a fabulous elixir of which none have seen or heard, but I discovered it, likely on my own, lonely and confused in the grocery aisle. It now means that much more to me. And since I have recently run out, I will spend the majority of my day off taking the bus to the south end to use my parents’ twenty-five-year-old food processor. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Let the man figure out how to fish for his goddamn self, he actually enjoys eating the fish and doesn’t crave beef.

There is something to be said of personal discovery. When the TV tells you what to buy and your friends recommendations and online suggestions and reviews and software that tells you what you’d like based on your previous decisions, discovery is being drowned by expert advice. This may explain my hesitance to accept advice on bands, books, movies, restaurants from anyone. A personal discovery is more than just searching alphabetically through a library for a recommended title, a robot’s reaction. It is a mystic bond, a fatalistic event that brought you and the other together for an ultimate purpose. It is true love on the dance floor compared to a date set up by a friend.

For some yet unknown reason, I have recently stumbled upon Fugazi, a meeting of the souls that will doubtlessly bring about a fruitful relationship of love, connection, and life-long discovery. Thanks to those who neglected to tell me about Fugazi, and I would be forever grateful if you neglected to recommend anything to me ever again.

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