scenosaur

So long ago. No internet or cell phones or iPods. Cut-and-paste involved sharp things and chemicals, both of which we were already intimately familiar with. Vinyl records and scratchy radio shows on far-off college stations at weird hours. Piles and stacks and oceans of cheap cassette tapes, endless combinations of nameless songs by bands whose names we never learned. A pathetic few of us huddling together under the disapproving stare of the rest of our species, and reveling in it. Sick of the masses sieg-heiling their pet guitar gods and Spandex-clad generic messiahs, the party-hearty cultural fog of the 1980's clinging to every surface, the faceless dread of being showered with ICBMs resolved into a bitterly cheerful resignation, the fever and push to become a something that does nothing but consumes and conforms and flees for its very non-life from anything that would cause an actual thought.
We were always hated and misunderstood, which sounds self-pitying and melodramatic even when it's true, but we didn't brood over it except for brief spells which we would help each other out of any way we could, be it a kind word or a slap in the head or an explosion in the backyard. What did the normals know about us, or care? We had each other, and we knew there were others of our kind all over the world. The power we wielded to rip holes in the illusory fabric of normalcy was intoxicating, whether at school watching the same tired drama day in and day out, or packing into Bunny's Escort to the Crystal Mall in full regalia to flaunt our outcast glory, or tormenting a house full of stoners and metalheads with "music" so bad other punks hated us.
Been on both sides of the stage at a million shows. Black Flag was my first. Leon and I must have been the youngest there by a fair bit, and damned well the scaredest, pasted up against the back wall of UConn's Student Union Ballroom. The Ramones, Husker Du, Supertouch, Sheer Terror, Chronic Disorder, Bloodbath, Forced Reality, Killing Time, Big Mistake, Hatebreed, 25 Ta Life, Eastcide, Follow Through, Stepkid, Smackdown, The Afflicted, Rotzkinder, The Enemies, Golgo 13, No Innocent Victim, Headnoise, Flatfoot 56, The Dropkick Murphys, The Last Hope, Madball, pH, Under Investigation, Suiciety, Think Tank, Crossthread, Warpiper. Some were huge, legendary, eternal, others were gone as fast as they formed with barely ten kids to remember they even existed, but it was still heat and sweat and leather and nicotine and beer and blunt-force trauma and grins and yells and boots and fists and patches and ratty old Chucks and one big happy dys-f*ckin'-functional family.
They are my tribe. I love them. Some are older than me, some young enough to be my progeny. They are all wonderful. I love their honesty, their feverish yearning for reality, their refusal to pretend that the world isn't going to hell. I mourn that their best efforts all too often short-circuit themselves, yet even so they struggle with all their heart to be so much more than just another clique with passwords and secret handshakes and uniforms. I grieve that they are millimeters away from understanding the One Who died at the hands of the authorities whose sham and hypocrisy He exposed, yet they revile Him because someone fed them the lie that He and the "authorities" are on the same team.
I fed that lie every time I caved in to the pressure to be someone else's idea of holy, every time I poked around someone's life and made arm's length judgments out of fear rather than speaking truth in love, every time I worried more about what my new church "friends" would think than what those beautiful, ragged, heart-kicking kids needed to hear from a God Whose love for them put Him on a cross.
I don't know what to do for them anymore. I don't know if I can even go back again. I want to, somehow. On God's terms, not mine. But dear God I want them to know Him. Fuck religion. If they meet - really meet - Jesus, they'll fall in love with Him, and religion will slide off them like snot off Teflon. They'll be just what the church needs. I think they already are.