scottvalid
FROM THE AGES of 15-17 I attended a high school where—due to the school’s geography and related demographics—achievement and the acquisition of credentials were communicated as the highest aim of intellectual development.
Never mind the fact that most of the school’s students and their parents couldn’t have told you the difference between Socrates and Sophocles, much less Groucho and Karl Marx, there remained the amorphous notion that ‘education’ was ‘important,’ or, in other words, that it was incumbent upon the student population to excel at the memorization and regurgitation of facts and figures in order to graduate into a sufficiently prestigious institute of higher learning. Afterwards the individual student would then be rewarded with a corresponding level of social and/or financial stature, in turn establishing the student’s ego, along with the egos of his or her parents and family.
For those who took well to such a system, said system functioned neatly and efficiently, however, for those with whom the system was not a natural fit, a disservice was done. Since the high school I attended communicated to us that an individual’s choice was either the Ivy League or Skid Row, those of us choosing neither were faced with three years of wasted, directionless time.
Some poor souls were fortunate enough to have parents who steered them helpfully toward GEDs, the local Junior College, a form of trade or artisanship, or some corresponding alternative. Other folks were determined and resourceful enough to seek out these or similar directions on their own. Yours truly however, being cowardly and weak, did little more than to go half-heartedly along with the flow, scraping by with C’s and D’s while skulking through the hallways. Still, thanks to the nebulous and hard-to-pin-down subculture that is ‘punk rock,’ my high school years weren’t a complete loss in the ‘learning’ department.
Through my before, after, and eventually during-school forays into the world of loud three chord music, malt liquor, caffeine, nicotine, and naive political idealism, I received lessons—some hilarious, some crushing, some heart-warming, some painful—in everything from the practicalities of small business, to the differences between intentions and actions, to the distinction between the social and the personal, to the concepts of death and dying, and many points in between, though this can be summed up most succinctly by the fact that I learned how to sleep anywhere.
It may sound trivial, but it’s true. Due to the travels and circumstances related to my involvement in ‘punk rock’ as a high schooler, I’ve slept everywhere from comfortable beds to rocky terrain. From houses where someone’s mom took pity on a rag tag bunch of losers and even made us breakfast, to houses where we were told that if we weren’t gone by 6am, the owner would be calling the cops. There was even the crack house in Little Rock, Arkansas where I laid myself down to rest amidst a pile of feral kittens and their feces, and, while this particular setting stretched my abilities to their limits, I still managed to catch a few Z’s.
Years later, well after high school had come and gone, I returned to my hometown after having moved away for awhile. I was broke, alone, and fairly despondent, completely at my wits end as to what I was going to ‘do’ with my life. I’d been absent from punk for a few years, and it hadn’t occured to me that I’d ever return in any capacity, yet here I was, back where it all began, moving into a run-down house in a relatively sketchy hood with two fellow ne’er-do-wells.
The first night I moved in, I didn’t have a bed, and, after downing any number of cans of Tecate amidst the background of a meandering, blustery conversation running the gamut from French literature, to Japanese cinema, to mixed martial arts fighting, to feminism, all punctuated by the rattling of nose-rings and flashes of bright tattoo ink, I crushed my last cigarette of the night into an ashtray on top of the coffee table, and laid back on the filthy living room carpet, immediately falling asleep.
I woke up the next morning with a pounding headache and a burning in my stomach, and the first thing that occurred to me was the fact that—by virtue of my punk rock youth—I could indeed sleep anywhere at anytime with relatively little regard for personal comfort. My own system of education may not have been as neat or efficient as the one presented to me by my high school, but it was effective in its own right, and, paradoxically, it left me both better and worse equipped to deal with this life than the system I was supposed to have embraced. At the time, I set this realization aside, though I never let it stray too far away, allowing that morning to linger at the fringes of my thought for the next ten years.
Recently, a decade later, I found out that one of the two guys I’d roomed with at that house, the place where I’d first stumbled across this metaphor of ‘sleeping anywhere,’ killed himself a few years back. Suicide is a phenomenon that’s become startlingly familiar to me over the years, watching people I know both well and peripherally inflict it upon themselves with either dramatic finality, or slow, drawn out longing. For those who take or have attempted to take the slow, measured approach, there is, thankfully, the hope of changing course midstream. For those like my former roommate, there is, sadly, no such hope.
When I was in my teens and 20’s it never occurred to me that suicide would be so familiar by the time I was in my 30’s, but from where I stand now it’s no surprise. We live in a world that, from the surface, is both devoid of meaning and in denial of death. ‘Arrange the right combination of interests, activities, and consumer goods, and you too can live forever!’ There’s only so long the affected individual can swallow this line without being consumed by voidness and despair.
I didn’t know my roommate that well, and I hadn’t seen him in years. I don’t know anything about the circumstances surrounding his death, nor am I ghoulishly interested in seeking them out. I am, however, filled with a strange sense of urgent anxiety when I think of the fact that someone I lived with in such close proximity for 365 days is just gone. I can picture him so vividly doing the most mundane of tasks—sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette and watching TV, getting a beer out of the refrigerator, frying potatoes on the stove. This presence, that seems so real and tangible in my memory, is just gone.
How could I live that close to someone, yet not be close to them at all? How could someone be so disconnected from everything, yet seem so present on the surface? I ask myself those questions, and, while I don’t have any answers, I’m reminded again of learning how to sleep anywhere.
As a teenager, by participating in a superficially deviant counterculture, I was benefitted with the experience of having to live in multiple worlds at once, and, as such, was exposed to many different kinds of people following many different kind of paths. For whatever reason, rather than aligning myself with one of these kinds of people and paths over others or grossly relativizing the whole lot and proclaiming it, ‘all good,’ my youthful reaction was to begin to see the fragmented multiplicity that exists in most things.
A pile of rocks sucks to sleep on because it’s uncomfortable, but no one is going to come roust you in the morning. By the same token, a plush couch in a multi-story Houston, Texas tract home is very comfortable, but it’s hampered by its 6am leave-or-cops wake up call. There is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and every shade in between in all but the most extreme of experiences, and, this being the case, we inhabit a life of simultaneous beauty and ugliness, love and hate, life and death. By learning to ‘sleep anywhere,’ I’ve been able to see that multiplicity in things, and it’s been at once both crippling and liberating.
Through the happy accident of my experiences, I’ve been able to let go of a lot of fear that was socially instilled in me as a child. You CAN drop out of school and the bogeyman won’t come rend you in two. You CAN choose to follow a socially unconventional path in life and you won’t spontaneously combust. Life is both good and bad no matter what path you take, and, while pain and hardship are fundamentally unalleviable by anyone through any means, so too are peace and meaning usually lurking close by, if only for a moment here or there, should one be still enough to find them.
At the same time, through the unfortunate coincidence of my experiences, I’ve seen just how ugly and unrelenting this world can be. Disillusionment with the readymade system presented by my high school led to a cynicism regarding a lot of things, a cynicism that was exacerbated when I began to feel the same disillusionment in the very system—‘punk rock’—that I’d seen as my salvation.
Where many are able to see the smiling intentions of others at face value, those same intentions are often twisted into sickening grimaces of actuality from my own vantage point (and this includes looking at myself in the mirror). People, even people with the best of stated intentions and the purest of motivations, are capable of such callous cruelty that, when seen clearly (again, both in myself and others), it sometimes makes it hard to even get out of bed in the morning.
Because of this, I have mixed feelings regarding the system I chose to immerse myself in all those years ago. It’s no surprise, I guess, that a social system whose confines allowed me to notice the multiplicity of things would, by its very nature, peer back at me with more than one face. Sometimes I love the people, places, and things from my teenage years. Sometimes I hate them. Sometimes I’m totally indifferent. Sometimes it’s a mixture of all these feelings and something else besides. Ultimately, I think, ‘punk rock’ became, for me, the proverbial Buddha on the road that needed to be killed. I’ve tried to commit said murder several times through detachment and non-involvement, but each of those times its proven to be an ineffective method of killing. Much more effective, for now, has been what I’m struggling with today—patching fragments of my past on to the fabric of my future, in order to make my present. ‘Punk’ still has, and always will have, meaning to me, but these days it’s a meaning that’s much more personal and idiosyncratic.
In the end, I’m thankful. Thankful that the randomness of my life has thrown together the right puzzle pieces to disturb me without causing me to careen totally over the edge. While the debilitation that sometimes comes with my disturbance—the depression, the mania, the paranoia, the fear—can be horrendous, I can’t imagine a life without it or, inversely, the depth I feel when I encounter its flip side—the elation, the wonderment, the inspiration, the joy. In the meantime, I mourn for my roommate. I mourn for the fact that he wasn’t able to channel whatever emptiness he felt into a vessel to carry something else, something new, instead allowing that emptiness to consume him. I wish he could have seen the things that I’ve seen since, the things that were still to come. I can see him right now, his pierced brow arched, skinny and smoking a cigarette. I wish he’d figured out that he could sleep anywhere, too, the way he played a part in helping me figure out the same thing ten years ago. These days I can still sleep anywhere, most of the time, but those nights when the ghosts sit in the room with me, staring back and smoking…those nights are harder than the rest.
