Every American Boy

When I was a skinny underdeveloped teenager in my quaint rural-industrial hometown (an old railroad town and site of several mills and factories that had closed and left much of the citizenry jobless), I used to cope with my own intrapsychic tension - the fire was already raging even back then - by skateboarding. Many a schoolnight found me skating in the deserted streets and parking lots, trying to perfect kick flips, no comply variations, and tail-slides. Every now and then, I'd run into another kid doing the same damn thing and we'd skate together awhile, eventually going our separate ways, as we all must. Often, on the way home, I would hear artillery shells exploding into faint rumbles across the valley as "soldiers" (kids not much older than me, from other hometowns in the U.S.A.) at nearby Fort Benning trained to fuck up The Enemy.

Growing up in a husk of a town, every American boy needs an escape plan (whether they admit it or not). Mine was to join the Air Force, like my dad, and go to college on the G.I. Bill. Images of Maverick and Goose were lodged in my head. Even though my head rejected those images as somehow toxic, another part of me connected with the idea of brotherly belonging and national heroism...but, after listening to The Descendents (a skate metal band that had a fairly wide audience back then) and other hardcore bands that conditioned my mind to reject, well, everything, those sentiments eventually melted off and evaporated into the ethers of late adolescence. So I had to find another way out.