The times they are a changin... for the worse

Today I walked the downtown streets in slow motion. The cars and people of the city frenziedly passing by like vivid dreams then disappearing, faceless and forgotten, like dreams often do. I felt the emptiness of it all as they passed. I waited dismally for someone real to crawl into my head and say something meaningful, something inspiring that would make this clatter of city life momentous. Sorrowfully, people passed coldly careful not to stand too close to me. After all, I was in my work polo and and had the look of a man on tilt, to the hip passersby in the Exploited shirt(purchased at Hot Topic), I am part of the system they hate but know nothing of. I went unnoticed as I continued to spit obnoxious brown spatters of Redman chewing tobacco on a tree with concrete roots. That's not punk rock I suppose, only certain forms of tobacco are punk rock and you must be careful to know what they are. I sat alone on a bus stop bench quizzical of where these faces were going and who they were really inside. I questioned if the swarms of teenagers grouped in sets by their trendy punk or nu-metal fashion were what they wanted to be, or simply products of their desire for acceptance. Likely influenced by the possible truly "individualistic punks (the ones who copied their big brother) they secretly idolized in school, while futilely knowing they had to conform to the scene for acceptance. Can you blame them? We were faced with that at times.

We have become a society dominated by trends marketed by suits, true individuality is hard to come by, and you can get a The Casualties shirt at Hot Topic while your picking up the new Fall Out Boy CD, and its convenient because it's right near The Gap. How many of the bands albums do these kids emblazoned with Ramones shirts own? Hordes of these kids passed by in flocks by wearing shirts of bands they didn't really know or like. As a group passed, I contemplated the legitimacy that one of them may be a great man someday. Maybe he would selflessly donated his kidney, perceptive the danger of the operation to his own life, to a dying boy at St Jude's, while the hipster kid leading the faction, adorned in skinny pants, studded belt and black Poison The Well shirt, would end up shanked and castrated in a bleak, pale-tiled prison shower room by self righteous thugs doing life for murderer. Doomed to be disregarded and forgotten as just another rapist who couldn't survive gen-pop. I imagined his scarlet blood trickling slowly channeled by the sullied, dirty shower water slowly oozing and swirling together like an elegant, abstract oil painting, so beautiful in that moment, destined for the sewer as he gasped for breath and wished for death with hollow eyes. The blood and water was to be purified in a water processing plant to be consumed at the public drinking fountain at a park one sunny Saturday by an exuberant eight year old in a yellow jersey with the number 6 on the back and grass stained shin pads who just scored his first goal while his proud parents loaded up the minivan to take him to Denny's for a Belgian waffle topped with strawberries and whipped cream. His teenage years looming, drugs and needles in hand, waiting for him patiently to forget those celebratory dinners after games, soccer goals, proud parents, and innocent childlike dreams for his future, to become disillusioned where he will probably spill drops of his own with a blood with a safety razor in a white walled rehab center for heroin addiction.

Mixed in with the wandering youth, old men marched along stoically with t-shirts emblazoned with American flags and I questioned myself with a mix of admiration and loathing; will I be patriotic when I get old? Is that a right of passage? Or simply the after-effects of a lifetime of being propagandized that we are the greatest country in the world? In all probability, as jaded and sickened I am with the state of this proud nation, I'm condemned to be a bitter and cynical grey hair ranting on a street corner because the revolution we strived for in youth had no chance of ever changing. Those young punk now blowing me off as a crazy guttersnipe. Will our generation have our proud white haired old men? Was Dr. Hunter Thompson right? Are we the "Doomed Generation"? Has the American dream passed us by leaving corporate domination and an ever imposing government to rape our future and drain us of our individuality? Take a walk through the city in slow motion you will see all sorts of rebellion being sold to us.