rattsoup

[rattsoup]

It’s my sophmore year of high school. It’s nighttime. I’m barefoot. I skateboard to the grocery store and find a pack of Timeless Time Red 100s on the sidewalk. There are 17 left. I pocket them because I am sad and filled with self-destructive urges constantly. Smoking these is how I get addicted to cigarettes.

It’s June of 2018, and I make the 9-hour drive to Ehrenberg, Arizona and back in a single day because the legal smoking age is 18 there and 21 in California, where I live. I don’t tell anyone I’ve left until I get there. I don’t tell my parents at all, but they find out anyway. Everyone I know hates that I did this. I’ve been thinking about making this trip for so long that getting cigarettes is maybe 30% of the reason I go, even if it’s 100% of the reason I decided to leave in the first place.

It’s fall of 2019, and I’m in New York. I have a breakdown walking to the gas station because my girlfriend calls and begs me not to start smoking again. I’m miserable, but I think ‘at least she cares about my health.’

The entirety of 2020 I ask other people to buy me cigarettes because you have to be 21 everywhere now. It’s embarrassing. I hate it every time. I feel so guilty. The people I’m dating respect my autonomy now, but there’s still so much shame tied up in being addicted to something.

It’s April 12th, 2021. On the 1st, I planned to limit myself to one cigarette a day for 20 days. I’ve gone through two packs since then. I walk 40 minutes in the wind and rain to a gas station I hope won’t card me. If they do I hope 4/21/2000 looks enough like 4/12/2000 that they won’t scan the back of my license. If they do, I hope the date doesn’t matter. This is a 21 and up license, after all. What are the odds that the scan shows up as invalid until my actual birthday, right? I don’t anticipate that level of competence from the DMV. I walk up to the counter and he scans my ID. It says I’m too young. Fuck.

I resign myself to not smoking for the next week and a half. It’s the next day, and I don’t know if I can do this.

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Please unfollow me if you are THE KILLER

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they called him bernie madoff because he made off with all that money

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I TOOK YOUR GIRL TO THE TULGEY WOOD AND WE HELD HANDS

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I’m Catholic

So?

Cry Me A River

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Eyes 8

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i refuse 2 b taste full

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- Blythe Baird

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I’m literally so over people who build their online brand around those milquetoast “doing xyz is punk” takes that just revolve around praising uncontroversially compassionate actions. It feels like you’re:

1. regurgitating platitudes to confirm to your followers that you aren’t problematic.

2. Forgoing the strong DIY ethic and history of punk music/subculture by speaking as an authority who knows what is & isn’t “real” punk in order to gatekeep center-right republians even though there are none in your audience.

or 3. Promising in-group acceptance as a reward for doing good deeds because your followers look up to you and will take your word that you understand the scene better than they do.

I understand that politics are an inherent part of punk music, but leveraging your clout in whatever online punk scene there is to ask your followers to respect people’s pronouns doesn’t feel much to me like following in Crass’ footsteps, and I don’t think it will do much to convince anyone who reads it to empathize with trans people either. Punk ethos absolutely has it’s foundations in leftism and anarchism, and a lot of the people saying things like these are anarchists or communists, but saying ‘trans rights’ on your commie punk blog doesn’t do it for me, especially when I agree with the political opinion but the way it’s phrased makes me uncomfortable.

The #3 listed above mostly applies to those statements like “being respectful towards children is punk” or “giving up your seat on the bus so an elderly person can sit down is punk”. Those are absolutely nice things that you should do, but is that punk? I try to extend compassion and empathy to people I know as much as possible. Does that make me a punk? How far removed from the genre of music must an action be before people stop saying that it’s quintessential to the subculture?

I don’t need you to virtue signal that you think I’m a woman; I need you to give me a concussion in a barn in Filmore.

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The Bridgeport Telegram, Connecticut, May 5, 1955