Gothic Revival

Monday afternoon, while strolling, I was 18 again for 10 minutes.

I have been listening to some pretty rough music recently, fueled by stress and some sort of early mid-life crisis. I hadn’t really noticed it having any effect on my behaviour, but I realized my attitude had become retrograded when a Yuppie breeder and his little brood passed me on their oh-so-middle-class mountain bikes.

The guy took one long look at me, from my army boots, over the black “Columbine Special” trench, all the way up to my black hair, and I could tell the moment he came to his decision of “Thug!” There was almost a little DING! when he was done processing it. He very nearly clutched his precious little children to keep them from looking upon alternate modes of being.

This was fair play, of course, because I was mentally vomiting rivers over the way that his three little girls were dressed in identical pink, as if not dressing them in pink would mean they might grow up to be men.

Then, having shaken my head at a reminder of the subtle social-class warfare all around me, I passed a 17 year old girl with more metal in her face than is held by Fort Knox. “OMG!” she moaned. “Your t-shirt is AWE-some! I loooooove (Marilyn) Manson!” she gushed.

Looking at her, and simultaneously thinking, “Do you actually know the theological implications of the word ‘awesome’?” and “Yeah, I’m sure Manson loves you, too, bimbo,” I nodded, and kept going.

So, suddenly, I am "down" with “the young people”? I wasn’t even "down" with “the young people” when I was young.

Then a jock on a bike passed me, dinging his little bell at me (despite having a clear path), to which I promptly snarled, “You know where I’d like to shove that?” with a semi-evil grin. He looked back, startled, and I lit a smoke, feeling every inch the James Dean. I very nearly said, “Whaddaya got?”

So, for some reason, my adolescent attitude problems seem to have returned from out of the blue (complete with chip on shoulder), the same clothes I wore in 1996 seem to be making a comeback, and all my fears that I was turning into a Yuppie seem to have been unfounded.

That was probably the most rebellious walk back from Kinko’s a PhD student ever lived through. Go me!

(And, yes, the photo above is me in my salad days… There goes any future election, folks.)
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