What the fuck was I thinking?

The hot wife and I took a trip down memory lane the other night. We pulled out two boxes of stuff from the past. She went thru all of our old love letters to each other from high school, and I rummaged thru old cassette tapes. Some of it, music I haven't heard probably since CD players came out. We even have some taped practice sessions from our old punk band Wicked Pete. Of course, the music and sound quality is so awful that it's hard to listen to... but I was amazed I still had some of this stuff. And I was having a grand time going thru it, until I pulled out one tape. It was labeled - Skinhead Mix.

When I was kid, maybe 13 or 14 years old, there weren't any skinheads in our city. We were all just punks. Of course, we didn't have many minorities either. Not until the later years of high school did the skinheads start showing up. And there were never any Klan rallies or anything, but they were there. And some of the kids I hung out with became associated with them. Naturally, being the young, dumb, easily-moldable mind I was, I became associated with some of them. I was never a skinhead myself. I never had a problem with minorities, or Jewish people, or the government, or whatever else skinheads claim to be against. Though I listened to and read their nonsense propaganda, and I listened to the music, the message never really caught on with me.

I did a lot of really stupid things when I was a kid. Just the drug use alone... sometimes I wonder how I've gotten to be where I am. When I think of how different things would be if that cop who busted us smoking weed in our car had been a dick and actually arrested us. Or if my sophmore Biology teacher would have caught me selling acid to the kid sitting next to me. Sometimes I wonder - what the fuck was I thinking?

But I don't have any regrets about that stuff. I don't regret getting drunk for the first time when I was 12, or smoking weed for the first time when I was 13, or all the acid and mushrooms we did.

I do regret being so stupid and close-minded that I would hang out with skinheads. That I would listen to the music and not realize what it was really saying. To not have the guts or the sense of mind to just walk away from all that crap... it bothers me now. It bothered me as I looked at that tape.

I wonder if I ran into myself at 16, if I would recognize myself. And I wonder how soon after trying to talk sense into the 16 year old me, that I would just give up and kick my own ass...

I give myself about 3 minutes.

Nick