The Curator of Chaos

Some people collect things. Not me. I curate them.

Not just “memorabilia” — real, charged objects that carry energy and memory — artifacts I chose because they meant something. Each one hums with its own frequency, and together they form a map of who I am: a constellation of chaos, music, mischief, code, and to me; pure, unfiltered wonder.

I’ve always been drawn to objects that speak louder than their physical form — pieces that take up space not because they’re rare, but because they hold stories.

Take my deluxe Ghosts vinyl, for example — the version that came with that eerie lithograph that practically breathed. I carried it into a meet-and-greet line at a charity fundraiser before a Nine Inch Nails / Jane’s Addiction show.

But that wasn’t even the rarest thing I brought that night.

No — tucked in a padded sleeve was something far more dangerous:

A bootleg CD labeled Halo 0.

It wasn’t official. It wasn’t polished. It was borderline mythological — the kind of thing purists whisper about, almost like folklore. Black-and-white, photocopied cover art. A crude drawing of a woman with… something grotesque in her mouth. It was so raw and odd that it felt alive.

And then there was the tiny splash of red on the spine: the number 4565 — a mark that, among those who knew, signified its rarity and secret status. Only the truest devotees even knew of its existence, because it wasn’t hidden in a vault — it was buried in chaos, tucked between stacks of records nobody else cared to search through. 

I found it in Yesterday and Today Records in Miami back in ’92, when digging meant physically crawling through crates and talking to people who had equally strange tastes. That moment taught me the difference between collecting and curating.

Inside that CD were two tracks:

The first was “Suck” — a synth-forward pulse, industrial flirting with the dance floor. Raw, unpolished, close enough to feel like you were three feet from the amps, sweat dripping, heart pounding. On that disc, the song didn’t feel like a “single” — it felt like being inside the music.

The second was even more primal: a feral, blistering cover of Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut” — not shiny, not rehearsed… just human sound pushed to its edge. 

When I handed that artifact to Trent that night — this half-legendary, mythologized relic — something happened I never expected.

He laughed.

A genuine laugh.

Not a polite entertainer chuckle, but a real, surprised laugh — like someone had just handed back a piece of themselves they didn’t know they’d lost.

Then I asked, without hesitation:

“This means a lot to me… but would you like to have it?”

And in that pause — that beat between worlds — I could see it: he wasn’t thinking, he was feeling. And maybe in that moment we were just two people who loved the same sonic chaos.

He took it.

Then the photo: all of us — Trent, me, Jacquie, the band. We stood there, knowing it was one of those moments no one could reproduce. Moments like that aren’t manufactured. They’re curated. 

That’s what I learned: I’m not a collector.

I’m a curator of chaos — not in the sense of hoarding things, but in the sense of honoring the stories they carry.

And that’s the real artifact I keep.