Punk Rock Warlord 5x

How do you go about re-imaging yourself.

Have you ever done this? Got the new clothes and the swank haircut, and the physical trappings du jour. I have a couple of times. Once was when I was a sophomore in high school and I figured out that being a metal head is lame and that being a Punk Rock Warlord (as Joe Strummer would say) is the tits. The other time was to get a job to please J. (I'm resolving to not call her my ex-wife because that cnotes a kind of ownership that I don't have and do not want). And to be frank, that time around I was in an overall re-imaging that lasted until not so long ago.

Now I think I'm in a third one. But this one is a reverse imaging. I'm going back. Digging deep to see who the fuck I am. Because I forgot for a long time. I've spent a lot of years trying to be someone that pleases someone else, and I forgot how to be a Punk Rock Warlord. And I don't want to forget how to be that. Because who doesn't want to be a Punk Rock Warlord.

Hell I just want to type that one more time it is so damn cool. Punk Rock Warlord.

I remember those heady days of high school, and the time shortly after. F.C. was the real deal. We toured and destroyed the Earth on a regular basis. And I loved it.

But on top of that, I was being mentered. This guy, C., he was like some bizzare demi-god to me. He knew all about bands I'd never heard of (and still love), he had porn that had chicks with tattoos, he did a bad ass zine, he could beat the shit out of anyone, he smoked, and drank, and watched arty movies without bitching about the subtitles, and had a smoking hot girlfriend, and he was a great parent (you weren't expecting that were you). And in so many ways I wanted to be like him.

So now I'm faced with this new life situation. Where I want to drink and smoke and have a smoking hot girlfriend and be a good parent. I'm looking at re-imaging myself into the person that I want to be. The person that I always could have been if I wouldn't have been so busy catering to everyone else's will. Not that a little compromise isn't good, but I was a fucking push over.

No more.

And what a Punk Rock Warlord says.

Goes.

File under Virtue.