You may be worried about me

Phew!  Did you hear that?  That massive exhalation?

Did you feel it?  The collective tension - the hands, gripping arm rests - slowly released?

Breathe, my friends.  It doesn't get worse than what we've just been through.

I'll be honest.  There have been moments since I started typing 1984 when I thought I'd better stop.  You got the point a long time ago - prisons, pain, and the monsters that lurk inside.  I don't know why I kept on.  I wanted to laugh, and put up a big, garish emoticon that said, "JUST KIDDING!"  I wanted to tell you it was all fiction, and I was just trying to pass the time when I wrote all that.

But I don't want to shortchange you of the journey.  I have to let myself speak for myself.  I want you to discover, as I discovered over time, the way out of the monster's clutches.

You may be worried about me.  As I think of the person I was and the words I wrote, my thoughts fall on the anarchy shirts, the trenchcoats and the graphic depictions in my poems of suicide and boredom and emotional violence.  I can't help thinking of Columbine.  I can see how you might, too.  But if you're making that connection, you're missing the point.  

I was never a nihilist.  Even through all of this, believe me when I say I hoped for the best.  Not just for me, but for the people I loved, for my community, and for all humanity.  The world was surely going to shit, but my reaction was never, never, NEVER to trash the joint because we were all going to die anyway.  I just wanted to know who was going to pick us up?  Who was going to STEP UP and make a change?

I can tell you that none of the "punks" that I ever encountered were violent people.  The skinheads came later, and we all hated them.  We were screaming at the top of our lungs for people to wake up and fix the fucking mess.  We were trying to force a paradigm shift - a violent paradigm shift, maybe, that wasn't ultimately effective.  But the underlying point was that we DIDN'T want to die.  It was the cold war, for chrissakes.  We were swarmed with statistics of nuclear warheads pointed at our home towns, and the calculated chance that even if no one meant it, MISTAKES COULD BE MADE.  We didn't want to die.  We didn't want to kill.  And we sure as hell did not want anyone - ANYONE - to be killed in our names.

I may have looked like the one to look out for, back then.  The one your mother warned you about.  I may have written things that will now be interpreted as an affirmation of someone's suicidal/genocidal ambitions.  And I just want to say, you got it wrong.  You're aiming at the wrong targets.  You're fetishizing armageddon now, and that was never the fucking point.  All I ever wanted was to live.  Live free.  Live not having to fear the other and fear the end.  The answer to your fear is not a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The answer is to break free.  Painfully, maybe.  Unpopularly.  Alone, even.  But to emerge alive, and as a reflection of your genuine, unique, unmarketable spirit.

Wake up and thrive.

Wake up and thrive in spite of pain.  

Wake up and invent your own way out to a better day.

THAT is what I meant.