This November, I’m telling 30 stories about 30 albums. The albums on this list are not necessarily my favorite albums, but they are the ones that are instantly associated with a time and place. All of these albums represent a chapter of my life. This is the story of those albums, and by extension, the story of me, presented mostly chronologically.

Album 9: Mommy’s Little Monster by Social Distortion.

This album is notable for the fact that it’s the first band I remember discovering on my own and not through someone I knew. There was a record store that I went to all the time, and one day, they were playing this album. I asked who it was and bought it. I bought every album they did after that, too. It’s all good.

There’s a funny thing about this band though. For about ten years, nearly every single car accident I was in, even the ones where I was a passenger, Social Distortion was playing on the radio, including the one I got into just a few days before my traumatic brain injury. I noticed the pattern, because, for the longest time, I was in an accident in every car I owned and I’ve owned a lot of cars. In my whole life, I’ve only been in one accident that was actually my fault. The rest were just wrong place, wrong time.

I’m not a superstitious person at all, but the Social D/car accident thing got so annoying that I stopped listening to them in the car. The hypothesis that Social D was causing car accidents was thoroughly debunked, since even after I stopped listening to them in the car, I still got into accidents. Thankfully, the accident in every car phenomena seems to have abated somewhat, too, since I’ve avoided that fate with three out of four cars in the past decade.

Anyway, Social D. I loved this band immensely and still do. I used to have a black motorcycle jacket, one of many that I’ve had over the years, that I painted the skull logo on the back of (just the logo without the words), until some asshat stole it.

When their guitar player suddenly died of a brain aneurysm in 2000, I went to the benefit they had for his family. That was the last time I saw them perform. They will always hold a place in my heart and whenever they come on full shuffle, my brain goes, “Awww, Social D” and I start singing along, even in the car.

Favorite track:

This one, because it’s exactly what I was (we’ll get to that in future posts).