Punk Phenomena
... none of which were severe until, I was right about to sneak up on Jason when I was nailed in the neck with tennis bomb. The blow took me straight to the ground as I fell like a wounded animal. When I finally looked at it in the mirror my whole neck and the left hand side of my face was bruised. All the punk leisure actives were a musing but relatively harmful in the end. School would prove to be a test and a challenge of my character. I showed up to school with my average extraordinary look. I was not real ambitious about school, but I wanted decent grades like most students. The first day in my Earth Science class the teacher introduced the material that the class would cover. And the average boring long lecture I got every hour in each class on the first day of school. I was meaninglessly drawling an anarchy sign on my backpack when I heard the teacher, Mr. Wizzer say a racial commit. I sternly moved in my chair with anti-Nazis thoughts racing in my mind. I raised my hand and voiced my opinion on what he said, most of the words rushed out of my mouth with aggressive enthusiasm. And maybe I overstepped my boundaries a little bit calling him a “Modern day Socialist Pig”. Since that day he made the class a pain in the shoe knowing the rite place to step on me in any situation, he would make me sit in fort of the class isolated by myself with no one to socialize with, or grade me harshly on presentations and tests. Not all my classes were as difficult as Science, yet school was still hard being so much different from anyone else. At home things weren’t any better then they were at school. My father hated me and refused to see me on weekends or holidays. My parents had divorced along time ago when I was merely a child of ten. I would still visit my dad in Boise about every other weekend and on holidays like Christmas. Since I had changed my mode of expression to that of a punk, he wanted nothing to do with me. When I would spend time at his home for the weekend, he constantly argued with me about my poor grades in school, the friends I was hanging around, and the way I looked. On one weekend he started to preach to me. Telling me I was becoming a heathen. The argument even heated up to some physical action. We were yelling and pushing each other in the living room, my younger brothers and sisters watched in amazement. My dad told me if I didn’t take out my new nipple ring I had priced in. He would tear it out of my chest. After I refused to take it out, he reached for my chest almost grabbing the ring with his hand. I backed up and socked him in the eye with my right. He staggered a bit as I ran out the door. I ran to a nearby highway to hitchhike home, never to see my dad again. A friendly truck driver picked me up; I informed him I didn’t have any money, but if he would drive me home my mom would pay him. He laughed and offered to take me home for the exchange of a good conversation. Even though I valued my appearance and friends, I didn’t realize was how much people are judged by their appearances. I had a lot of adventurous times when I would attend punk concerts or design clothes that screamed bizarre. There were many downsides to dressing with chains, spikes, and abnormal clothing, I was stereotyped. The moment I walked through the doors of a store, school, or restaurant. Society put an invisible label on me that read “trouble maker.” That was not accurate sure I made bombs and thru them at people and stole a few stop signs, but that was only once in a while for the most part I was a good kid. There was a tremendous amount of distress in my life most of it relating to problems I had at school. My peers labeled me a crack head, druggy, and stoner. I heard these names constantly as I walked down the hall. It surprised me because up to that point I never used illegal drugs and didn’t think I appeared to have done so. The worse part about being labeled a drug user was the problems I had with the police. The Cop at the school was Officer Spanker (the nickname I gave him because of his chunky physic) was my neighbor. That knew me since I was a young child that looked normal; he had it in for me from the beginning. He checked my locker and bag frequently for drugs, weapons, eye drops, and Twinkies. None of which they found in my possession, besides the Twinkies I always stored in my looker. I was given various drug tests: urine samples, hair samples, and spit samples. However, the only thing Officer Spanker had that was close to probably cause to search my locker or to test me for drugs was my crazy look and my year supply of Twinkies. This made going to school hard and at times unbearably. I felt myself being trapped in a small town that was paranoid of anything different. I learned to overcome false assumptions society would place on me. I was pretty miserable when I expressed myself as a punk, for the reason that I was a victim of stereotypes and false judgments. One day at a family reunion the answer came to me. My cousin Austin, who served nine years in the state penitentiary, was talking to some family about how his life changed when he started to dress nice and change his image from that of a grungy criminal to a well-dres...