and so it begins....
At a young age I always knew I felt different than everyone else around me. I never really knew why I didn’t feel any connection with kids I went to school with but there was nothing I had in common with them. Maybe I felt different because they made me feel different, I was teased, beat up, made fun of on a constant basis for my weight and the clothes I wore to school. That could be it, or it might be the fact that all the kids I grew up with in Georgia were redneck retards and I wasn’t. I hated school and I hated waking up every morning to go to it. Around 6th grade I finally started to make a few friends and I got into skating, for once I actually felt like I was a part of something and I made two real friends. Chuck and Travis , both lived a few miles down the road from me and were in most of my classes. Me and them were in the same boat, didn’t really fit in with anyone, def didn’t have girlfriends and just generally weren’t “cool enough” to talk to anyone else in our grade. We would chill at each other’s houses, play video games, find places to skate, go to skater’s extreme the skate park in my town…It was rad. We started getting into “alternative” music I guess you could say, this was about 1996? I think… I was all about bands like 311, No doubt, a lot of 90’s rock which still rules to this day. I was finally starting to get happy and then when everything was going cool, my dad told us we were going to move back to New Jersey. This was completely fine with me though, my dad had been traveling Monday-Friday from Georgia to NJ for years now and I only got to see him on weekends. It was taking too much of a toll on my family and we needed to be together so it was a great thing happening. I was pretty siked because I seriously thought that moving from Georgia to NJ would be a great change. I just assumed all the kids would be nicer and it wouldn’t be the same at all. When we moved back and I went to my first day at West Windsor Plainsboro middle school I was right….it wasn’t the same at all…. The kids were 10 times as awful and unwelcoming. One of the first things my teach asked on the first day of school was “is there anyone new to the district?” I raised my hand and told her and the class I had just moved back to New Jersey from Georgia. Some other kids raised their hand and while that was going on this kid Geoff turned around to me and goes “you’re from Georgia?” I responded with a friendly “yeah” and he looks me dead in the eye and says “why don’t you fucking go back because no one wants you here.” So that was the first thing anyone ever said to me in school when I moved back to New Jersey. So yeah, that was pretty cool. I sat at lunch by myself for a few weeks, didn’t talk to anyone, came home every day and did absolutely nothing. We lived in an apartment while our house was finished being built, I would get in fights with kids around the neighborhood. One kid made fun of my grandma for being overweight one day when we got off the bus; he lived in the building next to us and had seen her a few times so I beat the fucking shit out of him next to a dumpster one day when we got off the bus. Two cars pulled over to the side of the road to break it up… one of the more weird situations I’ve ever gotten to in my life. I came home so mad I seriously just wanted to end my life. I thought New Jersey was going to be a better place for me, but I was so wrong. Around school I started to notice some kids who skated and dressed different (its so corny to say that but when you’re in 6th grade you really notice that kind of stuff) and I really wanted to be friends with them. So one day I got up the nerve to just approach some of them at lunch, I went up to the table of kids and just asked if I could sit with them. I was really sick of being stuck sitting by myself at lunch, there were only two other kids who sat by themselves…one of them was foreign and smelled really bad and the other ones name was BOONE. So yeah, I really wasn’t trying to be clumped into that category of kids anyone. So anyone, they let me sit with them and it was awkward at first but then everything started falling into place. I met a kid named Jeff Katz, who at the time was really my only friend. He lived in the town over from me and he skated too. Through him I met a few kids I would be friends with other the next few years. Andrew Barone, Jeff Zito and through them I met a few other kids who would become my core group of friends up until about sophomore year of highschool. We would hang, skate at school, tried starting a band (which just didn’t work) and it was pretty awesome. I was still getting picked on by a lot of kids at school but for once I was actually starting to get happy. Up until this point I was only into bigger alternative rock bands and basically nu-metal. Around 7th or 8th grade when I had met Jeff, Andrew, I started getting into the hardcore / punk scene. Jeff made me a mix with a lot of bands on it and one of them really struck out to me…they were called Propagandhi and they were something that I never even knew existed. People who were angry over things that were important, things going on in the world that needed to be fixed. I soon became very political (dumb right?) I was in 8th grade talking about burning flags and not standing for the pledge of allegiance. (pretty cool right?) Here I was… an 8th grade suburban white kid who had nothing but privilege his whole life….growing up in a nice house, great family, and everything I needed given to me and I was the angriest kid in the world. I hated everyone and everything who was “normal.” I hated the kids who were “jocks” I hated the “preps” and I hated girls. Unless I was in my small group of friends I was miserable and wanted to fight the world. It doesn’t make any sense to me now, and It sure as hell didn’t make any sense to me then, I have no clue what was going through my head… maybe I liked being different? Maybe I acted like that because no one ever gave me the time of day in the first place and I needed attention? I was miserable and you can pretty much blame Propagandhi for me acting like that. Have you ever handed in a paper about how much you hated a country you lived in when you were like 14 years old? I’m surprised my teachers didn’t laugh in my face. At this time I was still into a lot of nu-metal, but I was also getting into a lot of punk bands. I had never been to a show and wouldn’t go to one till I was a freshmen in high school. By this time I was mostly listening to street punk…. Bands like propagandhi, the casualties, the unseen…but another genre of music had also struck my year that Jeff had gotten me into through these mix cds he would give me. I was also getting into bands like You and I, Saetia, page 99, Joshua fit for battle, botch and other “screamo” or heavier melodic hardcore bands. I still had never been to a show and I was really itching to get to one. I went to my first show in January 2000, 2 months after I started high school. I went with Andrew Barone, his little sister and his mother and father. It was at the Electric Factory and the bands that played with the Distillers, AFI and Rancid. Walking up to the place was unreal to me, it was hundreds of kids who looked like they belonged nowhere at all, A bunch of kids who were just lost in the mix of the world that happened to find each other at this sketchy looking place in Philadelphia Pa. I was so taken back by the whole thing, I loved AFI and Rancid at this point and I remember walking into the place and the crazy rush that came over my body during it. The Distillers were playing as we walked in and they were fucking awful, but then AFI came on and it was insane. This was around the point where they were just getting bigger but not like they are today, they still played old songs and the set was just wild. It’s so hard to even remember considering it was 8 years ago but I remember them playing Total immortal and me feeling at home knowing all the words to it. The concept of going to a place with a bunch of people you don’t know, to sing along to a band who you’ve never met, singing along to another person’s lyrics and feelings with a room full of people was so different and new to me. People were smashing each other and it was okay, everything was okay. If you bump into someone at school, you get into a fight or something dumb happens, in this place…at that moment with everyone just going nuts on each other, singing, dancing, dozens of people around you touching you that you’ve never met before, feeling close to these people who were into the same thing I was. It was so surreal… I walked out of that show that night after getting bruised and battered with a smile on my face knowing I was at home.
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