When I was a kid, I never cared about social status. I knew I lived in a shithole apartment complex but I was never envious of my friends that grew up in houses, had cars at 16 and always had some kind of money on them. I really didn’t care. I wasn’t about myself either, although I knew there were plenty of people that looked up to me and the few friends I kept around. Back in the early eighties it was social suicide to wear thrift store clothes, combat boots and spike your hair… at least where I grew up. Most of the kids doing it were from the same grain I was – poor. We were the ones that dropped out of school, ran away from home, got arrested and slept in squats. We didn’t go to college, our lives weren’t written out as the doctors and lawyers of the future. We didn’t talk about what our careers would be, we didn’t care. When reality hit in my late teens, a time when I realized I have to somehow take care of myself, the last place I looked was to my parents. I was on my own at eighteen and it never crossed my mind to look to any of my relatives to help -I never had money growing up so what could they do for me?
The construction industry is full of people just like me. The trades are a great place for those of us who let all the important years slip by and if you end up good at what you do, you’re gonna end up making a lot of money. The mechanical trades have the most knowledgeable of all the trades. We not only need to know what we’re there to do, in my case, heating and cooling, we also need to know plumbing, signal/control wiring and electrical theory as well as all the building and structural standards. Needless to say, only the smart ones are truly gonna “make it” in this end of the business. I can tell just talking to a mechanic how serious he takes what he does -and if he’s talking like he’s there for the 40 hour paycheck, I lose all respect for him no matter what he knows. There are so many mechanics that run like that, makes me insane. So the few mechanics I do like, I have mega respect for.
Ok, got all that?
I was doing a commercial steam boiler replacement in town last week. I love jobs like that because it’s non stop heavy work, by the end of the day you really feel like you’ve accomplished something, ya know? Anyway, there’s a guy that helps us out every now and then. He’s been in the business about seven years or so and he works for a commercial service company. I used to work with him briefly at an oil company a little while back where I was helping him with understanding water and steam heating. Since then I’ve seen him here and there on side work when his company is slow. He was helping us on this boiler and I’m not sure why it took me more than half the day to notice that he was wearing an old school Social Distortion shirt. I was all, “Yo, you dig Social Distortion?” Ends up he and his wife grew up in the nineties Philly Punk scene. All the times I’ve worked with this dude and I never knew that. Our common friend was about Heavy Metal growing up so I always just kinda figured he was from that scene. We ended up talking for the next hour about the differences between the eighties and nineties Punk scenes and how the Skins went to shit in the nineties with all the Nazi bullshit. It was cool to hear someone from that scene agree with me that there hasn’t been a real Skin in Philly since 1986 and how the end of the nineties brought the entire Punk scene from a group of individuals to just another mall scene. It was good, I never talked to this dude about anything more than business up to this point. Cool how things work out.
I started my blog back in 2004 with the hopes of running into some old Punks from the scene I grew up in. I never thought to just look around me… where else would they be?
Operation Ivy – Knowledge
When this album came out, back in ‘89 we played it so much, I think the stylus cut right through it. To be 19 again.
0 Responses to “Punks and Skins”