Depeche Mode 101,The Basement With The Red Carpet & The Drawer Where Cassettes Went To Die

Shayne arrived home from his grade 9 trip to Ottawa, armed with Depeche Mode's 101 on cassette, and that was the day my entire world changed.

I was raised in a strict Christian household and up until that day, had really only ever heard Colin & Colleen Green, Mark Moore, DC Talk, Petra, Degarmo & Key, Micheal W. Smith, Amy Grant (pre-divorce of course) and Whiteheart. The day Shayne got home and I watched him unfold the Depeche Mode cassette from it's booklet in our basement with the red squared carpet and insert it into the black Sony double tape player, was the day my mind was blown open.

'Everything Counts' became my theme song, I had the lyrics to 'Somebody' posted on my wall dreaming of the day I wouldn't throw up when talking to someone of the opposite sex and what a life that would be, 'Blasphemous Rumours' became a song that I listened to in secret, knowing that if my parents ever heard me listening to a song referring to God having a sick sense of humour, the tape would end up in my mom's top underwear drawer, never to be seen again; a similar fate to most of Shayne's cassettes from the 80's.

I never looked back. From that day forward, I entered my MOD phase. Obsessed with this new world, I listened to The Cure, The Smiths & Depeche Mode. I drew on cat eyes when I got to school and wiped them off before I got home, I parted my hair down the middle, letting my long straight hair live it's fullest straight life without the interruption of a curling iron. I had a new found crush on Martin Gore. My friend Tammy and I went to her cabin out in Grand Beach and wore all black. Neither of us did drugs but we carried around pill bottles in our hands so it looked like we did. To this day, I have no recollection of whose pills they were (probably her mothers) and what they were for and if she was desperately looking for them.

My MOD stage didn't last very long, probably only a few weeks. But near the beach, in the crunchiness of fish flies, on a diet of plain white rice with butter and pepper and a hobby of stealing ice cream sandwiches, lived that phase. I was someone else in Grand Beach and behind the fake and perfectly dramatized 'I'm dying' look in my thick eyeliner blackened 16 year old eyes, I was very much alive.

But as quickly as I found my new life, it was to leave. We met a couple of older boys that week that we planned to meet up with later that night, but my mother's annoyingly ALWAYS right intuition told her that I was going to get myself into some sort of trouble, and she showed up 3 days early and whisked me back to my world of Degarmo & Key, Colin & Colleen Green, and Larry Norman.

Sometimes I wonder who I might have become had I not been whisked away? Would I have dated the older boy with the broken leg? Would I have become another teenage disaster story? Would I have tried my friend’s mothers pills? Would I have actually gotten into any trouble at all?

Well, I’ll never know. Another thing I’ll never know is what became of the underwear drawer tapes. I remember whisperings of melting them in a fire, but I have no actual evidence of that.

*Straight from my MOD phase, enjoy The Cure - Close To Me. Best paired with thick eyeliner, a bowl of butter rice, and a handful of your friends mothers pills*