In the course of the past four hours I've been crushed, stepped on, kicked in the head, and gotten into a shoving match with a 200+ pound guy with a shaved head. I've wrecked a pair of jeans, lost my favorite pair of leather cuffs, and accumulated an impressive collection of sore spots that will definitely turn ugly shades of black and blue by morning.
I can't remember the last time I felt this happy.
***
I have a beastly temper.
It doesn't take much to trigger it either. Or rather, it wouldn't take much to trigger it if it weren't under such tight control. I keep it coiled up inside of me in a box that makes the Pandorica look like a dollar store lockbox.
It's the reality of being an adult, is it not? You assess your personality for assets and liabilities. You amplify your assets and make every attempt to limit your liabilities and square them away as best as possible. Over the years I've learned to deal with my liabilities (depression, anxiety, a hair-trigger temper) pretty productively (usually by channeling them into some sort of grueling endurance event). And it works. It works really, really well for the depression and anxiety. The anger is another issue. I find that after a hard run or long uphill bike ride it's not that I'm not angry. It's that I'm too tired to care.
So the anger is always there, just below the surface, even though most people wouldn't guess its existence.
***
Tonight found me in a ton of smudgey black makeup and knee high boots congenially kicking the shit out of a bunch of people (predominately dudes) that I'd never met.
Have I mentioned that I love punks?
I cut my teeth on post-hardcore, post-punk bands. I was in my first mosh pit at fourteen and have been in so many that I've lost count. As I've grown older and my musical tastes have diversified, I've been to fewer punk shows, but I still love the wacky sense of community in a good pit. There's angry dancing and elbows and intense physical pain. There's getting kicked in the head by a crowd-surfer. There's shoving matches that look like they might break out into actual fights until the crowd swirls again and people move away from one another. There's also the knowledge that if you slip and fall, someone will be there to pick you up. There's the ability to reach out and grab someone around the waist when the crowd behind you is pushing too hard. There are the hugs that happen when your favorite song comes on and you're standing next to an equally sweaty, beer-drenched person who also happens to love the same song.
Have I mentioned that I love mosh pits?
There's an elegance and a beauty to the ebb and flow of the people dancing and ricocheting off one another. I can never throw myself into a pit without thinking about Dylan Thomas:
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.My adult life is unbelievably buttoned-up. It's tailored dresses and briefcases. Budgets and bills. Meeting someone who doesn't necessarily want to stay up until 4am talking existentialism and Michel Foucault and Waiting for Godot but who you can take home and introduce to your family. Adulthood is about learning to quiet anger and frustration, finding ways to accept them as part of your daily existence and ignore them until they go away.
Punk shows aren't like that.
They're a place where you get to be furious and frustrated, where anger isn't a liability, but an asset. You can rage against all the things that piss you off about your life and the world around you without having to turn the volume down. Your anger can be let out of its box and people either won't notice or won't care.
No, it's note quite that they won't care. It's that they'll understand.
It's amazing how once you get the space just let it all out that rage gets transformed into something else--a kind of crazy exuberance, a strange, mad joy that doesn't just belong to you but to the entire pit, the whole show. You're still raging against the dying of the light, but about halfway through the show it also becomes a celebration that you've experienced any light at all.
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