i was not

I was not always the freethinker I am today.

In Jr. High School, at a church lock-in (friend's church - I had stopped going to church already), after a taped seminar about the "evils of rock'n'roll", complete with backmasking and satanism I
actually raised my hand and said something to the effect of,
"I always knew rock'n'roll was bad,
I just didn't know why or how bad."

true story.

I know now that the "evil" of rock'n'roll is its portrayal of a world without consequences. Back in jr. high I was still listening to country music exclusively. There will never be a great rock'n'roll song about a hangover - most country songs about drinking are not about partying, but about hard drinking - drinking alone - drinking to forget -

here I am again
mixing misery & gin
sitting with all my friends
and talking to myself

in the world of rock'n'roll it is always Saturday night. In the country, Sunday morning comes all too soon and it is a reckoning...whether it is Sunday Morning Coming Down or That Word Broadminded is Spelled S-I-N there is a sense of consequences to yr actions - a sense of the cost of being lost.


In high school I berated and lectured my girlfriend when she
got drunk. She snuck liquor out of her parents liquor cabinet
and when she told me I got crazy mad...
I only get that mad now when people take away my whiskey.


have to go to work now -
this post came about because Atrios mentioned
growing up at the height of neo-puritanism,
"Reagan and A.I.D.S.",
and I think often
of how that era shaped me and people my age...
and I don't even have time to go into how
the neo-puritans warped my ideas about sex...