Drunken Owls and Other Delights

(This is an experiment that I'm trying right now...most of my poetry has either been in akin to song lyrics or stream of consciousness thoughts. This is the first time I'm actively trying to get some kind of narrative into my poetry.)



Intro:
At thirty-nine I'm trying not to yell
at the kids to get off the lawn.
Not that I have one at the moment,
but point being--things aren't like they used to be.

I:
Back in the day,
I'd use those mottled black-and-white notebooks
to let out my frustration and anger at the world.
A bedroom revolutionary, a nonconformist in my own mind,
Thinking myself better than the jocks and the popular kids
(Screw 'em if they won't include me, if they don't like me!)
by embracing my intellect and my creativity.

Back in the day we didn't have the internet,
We didn't have Facebook or Twitter or the blogosphere
to vent our frustration with half-assed indignation.
Our problems were our own and not everyone else's,
except when we befriended similar lost souls.
We held it back, we kept it to ourselves, and moved on.


II:
Back in the day,
there was that elusive college radio station,
the one I found by accident back in '86,
the one that only came in on a good day during the school year.
By the time I was a junior, the station was ubiquitous in my bedroom--
on when I was getting ready for school, on when I got home,
when I did my homework, when I was writing or drawing or reading.
We thought college DJs were the coolest people, and we wanted to be them.
They were us, they were who we wanted to be.
I taped their sets off the radio, songs that were hard to find.
I borrowed albums and tapes from my friends,
dubbing them on blank cassettes we bought at the Radio Shack.
We were obsessed with music, our music.

Back in the day we didn't have a thousand different stations,
podcasts and feeds all ready to be streamed,
all of them alternative and yet all playing the same playlist.
We didn't have music blogs and file sharing,
with every single release awaiting a questionable download to my PC.
We were obsessed, but we were never this obsessed.

III:
Back in the day,
I wore the green trenchcoat of my friend's grandfathers',
my walkman in one front pocket and cassettes in the other.
I wore that Smiths tee-shirt I bought at Main Street Music,
probably more often than I should have, clean or not.
I let my hair grow away from that dreadful 80's spiky 'do,
because I chose to wear what I wanted to wear,
look how I wanted to look.

Back in the day we understood we were outcasts,
and reveled in that fact. We forgave our detractors.
We never saw the need to protect our own,
because we never saw the need to kill the poseurs.
We sought peace in a troubled world, that was all.


IV:
Back in the day,
we understood the meaning of a Cold War and the meaning of anger,
because we'd grown up with it.
We knew firsthand about making do with what we had,
and making do with not being able to reach any higher than we could.
We were fine with that, as long as we respected our creativity
and our sense of self, our sense of belonging.
As long as we knew we weren't alone, it wasn't so bad.

Back in the day we didn't feel lost in a global world,
unable to unplug and unable to stop feeding ourselves with information,
knowing--or seeming to know--more than we ever thought we would or could.
We might have wanted the world to be a smaller and more accessible place,
but we never thought it would become this overdriven, or this insane.


Outro:
If there's anyone to blame, it's myself.
I could easily back away at any time, away from this car crash of life,
because I'm the only one who can control the intravenous brainfeed.
If there's anyone to blame, it's myself,
in this big and terrifying world.

If there's anything to be done,
it's done now, on my own, on my own time,
from my own heart and from my own mind.

Okay, so last night I'd decided to add a tertiary (as in "there to fill some of the space") to a scene in Chapter 2 of LLB, and decided to name him Brian Getchell, after the Boston artist with the same last name (Scott Getchell--great artist for the Phoenix, but sadly his personal website is down).

Which made me think of when I used to live there during my college days and after--basically the whole of the 90s. Specifically of the comic strip newspaper that was out at the time that sold for fifty cents and was on sale pretty much everywhere. Thing is, I can't for the life of me remember what it was called (Boston Weekly Comics or something like that, but I could be mistaken). Does anyone remember what it was called, and if so, does one know if there is any mention online of said weekly?

And while we're at it, if anyone can come up with music, local or not, that they remember most fondly from that timeframe would be cool. It's partly research for the on-and-off-again Radio Radio project. Song titles, remembrances, whatnot, the floor's open. :)

If not, no big...just reliving old memories here. :p