I don’t wanna grow up!

blue chucks :: lawrence, ma :: sometime in two thousand four

My dad used to make fun of me for wearing Chucks.  He used to make fun of a lot of the things I did in high school. 

There was a song by King Missle whose name escapes me, but there’s a bit in it where the guy goes “I want to be different like everyone else I want to be like.”  Once my dad heard that, it was all over.  I don’t know why I did the things I did - I was a teenager! Somethings came and went.  My fascination with The Cure is better left in the 1990’s. My love for Chucks and flannel shirts? I was grunge before grunge was ever cool.  Now I’m into Doc Martens again (better for the corporate world), but as I order them off the web,  I find myself thinking about how hard it was to find them “back in the day”.

Seriously.

Kids have it too easy.  They want to dress all punk rock, they buy it off the rack in their neighborhood mall. I used to spend hours in Army Navy stores, buying shoes out of magazines… I even went to the pet store for a dog collar at one particularly alarming point in my life. (Now I hear you can buy them at Hot Topic, with or without the optional padlock.)  There was no internet - there was only word of mouth and you had to hang out with the totally freaky people if you wanted to find out where they got those cool plaid combat boots.

It’s a good thing I like being a dinosaur.  I’m just going to sit here doing my homework in my flannel shirt with Chucks on my feet, and a little Poison pumping out my speakers.  I’m partying like it’s 1986-1992 over here tonight.