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| She is the daughter of a Punk Rocker; Jon Steen |
TWO YEARS LATER
It is impossible to summarize, completely that is, the
events that have taken place to shape my life and the process-to-completion of
Barred For Life, since I returned from tour on January 1st, 2010.
However, I will present to you a series of entries that will connect dots that
may be unconnected if you are new to the project, old to the project, or just
asking yourself, “WHEN THE FUCK IS THIS THING GOING TO COME OUT.”
Over the next few weeks I will attempt to reconstruct the
important events, important people, and the important thoughts that crossed my
plate in moving from conceptualizing to collecting to writing to finishing, and
highlight the various nouns (people, places, things, and themes) that have made
the past two years both enlightening and infuriating in equal measure.
Not everybody is equipped to do what I did..! I am not
saying that what I did was heroic, or even brave, and at times I feel that I
had made a huge mistake, so what I am saying is that when it comes to seeing a
path, taking it, and somehow making it work (even when it doesn’t want to), God
gave me karma to burn. In terms of the bridges I burned, friends I betrayed,
and the not-so-awesome things that I had to do to make an idea into reality, well,
there are repercussions. I will touch on all of these things if you will simply
listen.
So, here goes…
PUNK FUCKING ROCK
At age 15 or 16 I just didn’t want to do what was expected
of me anymore. My family had ideas of how I should live my life. My community
had ideas of how I should live my life. My school had ideas of how I should
live my life. In fact, just about everybody (and every thing) had an idea of
how “I” should live my life. I had other ideas, but apparently I was just young
and stupid, and didn’t realize that I was not supposed to have ideas outside
the normal ones being puked on to me by people I had very little to call “in
common.” Really, I despise you and you want for me to be MORE LIKE YOU…? How
can I be LESS LIKE YOU… Really… I want to be less like you (fill in the name of
your favorite authority figure).
At age 16 I remember my mom asking me why I had to be so
difficult all of the time. Difficult to my mom was me wanting to buy what I
wanted to wear to school, or not dating her friend’s daughter, or not smiling
for my class photo. I wasn’t Goth-ie or dark, but the little voice inside just
told me that everything that I was hearing streaming in at me like a hail of
arrows, well, it wasn’t exactly real. It was made up. It was more or less a
lie, and somehow everybody bought into it except for me. Even my siblings
thought that I was on a path to nowhere, and I thought the same of them at
times.
Finding Punk Rock was a lifesaver for me. I wasn’t suicidal,
but I was starting to think that there was not a fucking soul on this planet
that felt as trapped as I did. I was basically conscious enough to know that
most kids go through a period of alienation, but my reasons for feeling so
alien seemed more other-worldly than most kids. I wasn’t dealing with a bad
break up or guilt related to why I didn’t make the football team, but was
handling very mature existential problems at a very tender age. I couldn’t
exactly talk to my guidance counselor about having feelings that I was born
years too early for my thought patterns because, well, predictably,
psychological evaluations would have followed. My friends at school were no
more helpful. My family, um, even less helpful…
Punk Rockers, at least those of the early 1980’s, proved to
me that I was not alone. Not only was I not alone in my thoughts and fears, but
I had some pretty solid people standing beside me. While to the outside world
Punk Rock just seemed like this pointless musical fad, what those people were
missing was the part of the story about how not every person on the planet has
the same wants and desires as they do. Sure, Aerosmith might have gotten the
average person through a torturing adolescence, but not me. In fact, if popular
music did anything to me it just made me feel more like a loser for not really
liking it, relating to it, or trying to achieve its high ideals. I just didn’t
like popular things, which made me quite unpopular.
Finding a group of weirdoes and losers just like me,
suffering the same defeat at the hands of a world that just didn’t seem worth
accepting, was pretty amazing ammunition for me. However, even deeper than
that, it seemed that the bands we were loving were speaking both against the
standing dynamic and speaking directly to us in every lyric. It is possible to
listen to, um, say, a, Black Flag’s classic anthem RISE ABOVE and hear it not
only attacking the mainstream for trying to pigeonhole our culture, but it was
telling us to get our shit together and move our dreams forward. If you can
imagine life as a silly Civil War movie, those bands and songs were that
colonel who was sitting on his horse in front of his army and screaming CHARGE.
Not only were you obligated to attack what you feared, but you were being
implored to put something better in its place after you defeat it.
Do you get it…? We weren’t just fighting an empty fight, we
were planning on changing the fucking world people. WE WERE MAKING PLANS TO
CHANGE THE FUCKING WORLD..! That is bold. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted
to change the fucking world…!
So, let us just say, as I call it a night, to know me, to
know that I am something of an iconoclastic asshole (only at times) is to know
that I never changed, and that there are many moments in my own personal life
where I am asked to give up the shit and just make nice with the outside world,
and I just cannot do it. I am not stubborn, I am just an alien. I can no more
change the voice of my heart than I can build a skyscraper of my own two hands.
And so, next time you say to me, “YOU SEE THE WORLD ALL WRONG,” just remember
that you were one of them and I was against you. To me, you saw the world all
wrong.
So, let us pick up from there next time, shall we...?
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