by Liam Strong

Tiny Moving Parts, the Minnesotan punk band, often came off as a sexual play-on-words to me. The more I think of torsion springs, the less I think of allen wrenches. Gratefulness could be that I’ve never known an Allen or an Alan. But tiny and moving and parts are a kind of joyful tinkering, like you’re with him, Alan, like he’s your hex key, learning how all his buttons work, how the nipple is a countdown to nuclear reaction, his lips the alarm you do not touch at all costs. The littlest socket screws millage a factory up from turning in circles until they can’t pry themselves free. I saw the Parts live three times in my life. The patch of my red knitted TMP beanie, the one that makes me feel like a park ranger, keeps losing thread. It’s my fault. I pluck the tiny strands from the seam as I prepare myself in the mirror in the morning. I move the folded edge over, a cloth omelet, so that my ears can’t be seen. The part in my hair, somewhere above my left eye, is a river removed from modern cartography. I remember losing my shoes during the first set, nineteen like Tegan and Sara, nineteen and chipping a tooth on abandoned gymnasium flooring, nineteen and parting my hair for the first time to steer sweat from my eyes. You have to think of the mosh as a tiny avocado pit. Keep moving. Keep moving. Keep forgetting about the consequences if you stop. Some act of celebration it is to perceive humid apparitions in an audience, boys and all their parts, a fanfare of wind chimes. Some joke it is to laugh with tiny bones in our mouths with clattering, parting light that might have been reaching out for us, a Rickenbacker moving on stage like a Promethean god. The unknown is just another boy, his hand an operation of bolts, who knows just what to press.