Thinking About Punk

Splashes of rain! Cold! Wet!
It's still too muggy to sleep so I am thinking about punk.
We had the sort of parents who didn't allow you to do anything. They were like a steamroller: if you had an idea they flattened it as soon as it popped up.
Protestant parents....
So when punk came along, it seemed three dimensional. All that energy and spikiness- and honesty.
It was almost as though everyone was turned inside out, and you could see the horrible bits as well as the nice bits.
I liked that!
I am such a crap judge of character, but during that time nobody bothered to hide anything, and the sly people who tried to manoeuvre their way in and manipulate people stuck out like a sore thumb.
If someone said or did something you didn't like, you told them and they did the same with you.
Punks gave short shrift to hypocrites and narcissists; it was almost as if those people were invisible to the punk eye. Their blather fell in a cascade of nonsense on to the pavement in front of them with a splat before it even got into anyone's ears.
Sometimes the honesty hurt, and sometimes the directness came as a shock; we were young, and young people aren't always very nice to each other. But it made reading people very easy and what I liked about that was that you knew who to avoid.
Being turned inside out by punk meant that you couldn't be shy, even if God made you that way. It also meant that if you were painfully thin like I was when I was a teenager, you fitted in perfectly because everyone was a different shape or size and nobody commented on it because it wasn't any of their business.
Coming from a bullyschool, this was bliss. At school, I felt so small and insignificant that I rarely spoke; being in a punk band not only allowed me to have a voice, it allowed me to have a loud one, and to rumble people's chests with the sound of the big bad bass. This was a completely astonishing reversal of power and at times I almost felt as though I had learned to fly.
It didn't last long, that moment in time. It was uncomfortable as well as thrilling and I can still feel it inside me like a virus that won't go away. It burned some people out really quickly, and some people are still trying to chase that thrill by looking in the wrong places for it.
The whole point is that it came from inside each of us, we saw it because we were inside out, and we recognised each other.
That's what it was all about.