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CONTACT
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NAME Jackson "Jack" Harling
AGE & DOB 26, August 11
JOURNAL & AIM harling & incidental jack
SOUNDS LIKE Brand New (The Incident) & The Faint (jackharling)
PLAYER PREFERENCES Random AIM is fun, threading prefered, EST time, on usually after 5pm until 11pm.
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BIOGRAPHY
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 Jack Harling hadn't always lived in New York. Moving from town to town, city to city, his family had never stayed in one place at one time. He's lived everywhere from Los Angeles, Boston, Kansas, Arizona and now New York. Went to college in Boston, where he met the one woman he has ever really truly loved. Which is a lot coming from Jack, as he really doesn't love anything or anyone. Ever. The girl was the best thing in his life, he had a budding music career, he was going places, he was in love and come that following week, Jack was going to propose to her. Life was fucking fantastic.
That was until she said no, freaked out and skipped town.
So Jack left Boston, didn't bother finishing college and drove to Los Angeles, uprooting his band as well. (That certainly pissed more than his fair share of people off, and god fucking lord they were pissed off.) But the band was going to go places. They were fucking good too. With members like the two guys he randomly met one day at a bar, the band was starting to really get together. The band even got a record contract, and they were set to start recording in December.
But then Jack thought he saw her. And he freaked out. Again.
It was during this freak out that he decided to try every fucking drug he could get his hands on. Decided he wanted to mix it all with alcohol, decided that he wanted to try to see if he was invincible or not. He wasn't. Ended up in a hospital, ended up getting looked at by a psychiatrist, but Jack didn't want to hear it. "Fuck what people say." He didn't care, so he checked himself out before he was supposed to, and packed his things and left. Drank a bottle of wine before getting on the plane to Arizona, drank on the plane, drank a bottle of wine once he got a hotel room. Went to a bar, where the owner was putting the lease up in a poker match. Jack entered the match, he won. The owner, relieved that the bar was out of his hands, gratefully gave Jack everything to the bar, handed over the bills, handed over the keys, handed over everything. Everything after that is a blur, simply because everything hit him at once and Jack passed out behind the bar, falling on his face to the ground.
Waking up that day was a fucking bitch. Realizing he owned the bar, that sucked. Realizing he had no way out of it, that sucked more. Realizing that he just left a good band and a record contract that would have given him tons of money, well that caused screaming and cursing for about three hours as he proceeded to try to break every chair in the bar. Which didn't fair well because he had to pay to get them all replaced. Sure, there had been banging at the bar door to ask what was wrong, who the fuck are you, and what the fuck happened to the old guy who owned the place, but it was all different now, and it didn't matter. So he got some paint, painted himself a fucking good sign that read Devil's Bar because he was still too drunk to think of anything better to call it, and painted the inside of the bar black. Got chrome everything and spent what was left of the bar's money. Oops. Now to make a profit.
But he was able to get some guys at the bar (locals and not) to start up a band. He'd try the music thing again, he'd get it right, and if he was given a record contract, he wouldn't have a nervous breakdown, and decide that jumping off the bar roof was a good idea. Well wait. He did that last night, and the band wasn't offered a contract then. The band was called The Incident. He wrote all the songs, screamed them into the microphone and most of them are about himself, his family (or lack there of, that�s another story for another time) or his ex-girlfriend. He had a not so secret obsession with her, one that his close friends tell him to give up. But anyone meeting her realizes that maybe this might be a mutual thing. Had he seen the girlfriend since he got to Arizona? Yeah. He didn't even know she was there. But word got around, close friends told him of her living in town for a while...and he set out to find her. Which could quite possibly bring out self-destruction again but who's counting? He believed life was too short to just sit around, so here's to putting his theory to test.
Jack Harling is a fuck up. He won't deny that. He drinks too much, smokes too much, thinks too much, obsesses too much, he's everything most people wouldn't want in anything other than a party buddy. And he's got issues, he's got baggage, he's got something, that's for sure. And did he fuck up again? Yeah. He did. And he left Arizona to get his head straight, went to back to Los Angeles and decided he hated everything about his life and wanted to start new. The last time he felt this strange was when he blew everything out of proportion and into the open water where he was eaten alive by the sharks and fish surrounding him. He could never survive in a place where he was though of destroying his own life, where the drugs were never as strong enough as they could be. Where Vegas was hours away, but you only got married because that particular day, the rope was too loose. And the therapists are more fucked than you, oh then you know, oh he knew he had to get out. Take his sister's lead and follow to the big city where everyone is part of a large melting pot but yet everyone is the same. You cannot get lost in a city where everyone knows your name because you look like every other dead beat musician on the street trying to make it big, trying to use their terrible connections to and any all magazines because their sister is fucking one of the editors and is engaged to the photographer. Had Jack had a normal brain cell left in him, he would had known to leave Los Angeles and just go back to anywhere he had never been before, because he could start fresh. Even his own narrative didn't make logical sense, nothing made sense and nothing had to. He was going to be lost in his head, lost in his mind, lost in the biggest city not made of plastic and he was still searching for a place to call home.
When he had finally decided on a lease on an apartment for a month, the first thing he did was flush his medication down the toilet, and walked up to the roof of the apartment building, wondering how long it would take for a penny to drop from this height to fall deeply into the heads of a passer-by below. It wasn't long before he was dancing on the ledge, drunk off of whiskey that he had kept with him to his drive to Los Angeles, and teeter-tottered back and forth from reality and becoming immortal. He could give up his wings, jump off the building and become human -- if Nicholas Cage could do it and make it possible, then Jack could do the same, right? But he didn't, and drank the whiskey rather than lose his wings, because in the end a broken angel seemed to be more appealing to the eyes anyways. Something he would never understand, nor would give himself the chance to understand.
But Los Angeles was not what it should have been. And so The Incident broke up. And he would go out on his own, do his own songs, his own demos, because the band was him, his words, his life, his guitar, he just needed others to help him make it happen. So he gave up, left, the band was destroyed for a lack of better word and he would move up and move on. Though the roof was a regular place to find him now, there was no reason why he wouldn't spend most of his times there. Wishing he wasn't in the largest city where he could lose himself, because he was fine staying lost in Los Angeles. Oh, it was good for a while. But maybe, maybe he just needed to give his life one final try, and to get himself back on track. So he moved to New York. That was in 2002.
Since living in New York since 2002, not only had Jack finally found his voice and got himself remotely clean, but he was also the owner of the relocated Devil�s Bar, the main thing that got him into his mess to begin with. He�s released one EP under his own name, and one LP, but the later recordings of The Incident have been discovered by fans and have since been released through www.jackharling.com. When 2003 came around, he decided to close down Devil�s Bar because of revenue problems and also the fact that he just didn't care to work for a bar anymore. There was more to life then that, right? But as 2004 continued on, he got into a slump of the worst kind: Jack was running out of money, running out of medication and running out of creative juices. He was convinced that this was going to be the end of his career, and quite possibly his life if he wanted to get that dramatic. He went into the studio for a last ditch effort, and put out a solo album that sold more than he imagined. So he was back in business. And soon, because of a certain woman he married one night in Vegas, he was back on his medication. Still messed up, but was actually trying, which was a first in Jack�s world. So now, with his career back where it should be, Jack is doing his best to avoid Natasha, despite the fact she legally owns half of everything he�s worth and vice versa, and still dates around, in an open relationship of the sort.
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CREDITS
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as the incident
the incident (1998)
the beginning (2000)
the death (2002)
the burning (2004)
the fucking (2007)
the untitled (2009)
as jackharling
last place (2005)
drug (2006)
black&white ep (2008)
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