It all began with the goldfish.

To my teenaged self, zonked out on another dateless Saturday night, watching Rikki Rachtman plug the latest hair-metal bands after a long week of being tortured by my classmates, it was just another song about masturbating. "You want it all, but you just can't have it. It's in your face, but you can't grab it." Obviously, Faith No More's "Epic" was a song about trying to suck yourself off, an activity I have, of course, never attempted, not even on my 287th consecutive Saturday night home alone with a bottle of Vaseline, flipping back and forth to the Playboy channel, trying to make out some boobies between the bars of static.

And then, with the slow, emotional, piano outro, a shot of a goldfish, twisting and writhing as its primitive little brain tried to flip it back into an aquarium that just wasn't there. It seemed to personify the futility of human struggle, and the meaninglessness of life. Aren't we all fishes out of water? That goldfish enshrined Faith No More in a very special place in my heart.

When you're in high school, goldfish snuff is DEEP.

My love affair with Faith No More continued in college, when they played my school. Sure, I almost broke a hip landing on the SUNY Buffalo gym floor whilst crowd surfing (the frat boys love to shove you up from below). But, damn, that was a good concert. Alas, that was the last time they played with that lineup: the band fired their guitarist Jim Martin in 1993, my sophomore year in college. Ah, Jim, we miss you, man. To this day, I rent "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey" on lonely, rainy autumn evenings just to see him yelling "STATION!" for no particular reason.

Mike Patton has always been a sonic innovator—hell, one of his solo albums was "Adult Themes for Voice." Apparently, this extended to Jim Thirlwell-like sonic experimentation, for at their second local show, which I couldn't attend due to the fact I had no car, and couldn't get my friend Mike to drive me, he shoved the microphone up his ass just to see what it would sound like. (I know this was true, even though I wasn't there. Mike wouldn't lie to me, would he?) Unfortunately, this got them banned from Buffalo, which, as everyone knows, is the death of anyone's musical career.

Thank God, I can relive my glory days when I still had hair with Faith No More's just-released greatest hits album, This is It. (Thanks to the boys at Concrete Planet for sending us a review CD.) Not only does it include an oddly relevant cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," but I can play "We Care A Lot" over and over and reminisce about the Garbage Pail Kids and the Transformers ('cuz they're more than meets the eye!). Brilliant, brilliant stuff, sure to bring a tear to the eye of anyone who survived the eighties.

At least one thing hasn't changed since then: I still don't get dates on Saturday night.

Do you care a lot? E-mail editor@corporatemofo.com