In retrospect, it’s amazing how much—especially in those veal-tender formative years—of my valuable time was spent on people who didn’t care if I live or die. As a teenager who listened to mostly very sad British music and cut himself on the reg, I was sure that by wearing mostly a modicum of black clothing—mainly under the radar of my genre-despising parents, natch—I would at least gain some form of entry into the various underground lairs of alternative coolness and back-having cliques, only to learn that, for the chubby likes of me, at least, acceptance as it was and should be really didn’t work that way.
But I tried, aye Dios mio I tried. I would frequent various punk and Goth establishments around the Metro hoping to find my place in that world of supposed welcomed angst and teenage darkness, but Heaven knows all it did was make me more and more miserable now. This yearning, sadly, continued on into college where, eventually, thanks to a total and complete Brian Wilson-style nervous bloatdown, I gave up on trying to impress anyone and everyone ever again.