Soundwave Epiphany 2 of 2

My second epiphany was that I'm not alone, there's a lot of people like me I never see that don't come out of the woodwork until a band like Faith No More or whatever brings us out in numbers.

So what there's a diaspora of band fans. But what I mean is that there are abunch of guys and girls like me that don't at least look like they've sold out, gone corporate or whatever. They seem arrested in their development as evidenced by the number of basketball jerseys, black band t-shirts and camo shorts. It certainly wasn't everyone, for example we didn't look like the teenagers at the festival, we looked like the teenagers we once were, just with receeding hairlines, faded tattoos, non-athletic builds.

And it made me realise, that the adolescent rebellion is a structured part of our lifes contract. The teenager was invented with the transistor radio that for the first time in history allowed them to listen to different music than their parents and that was a start.

Teenagers have since rebelled against their parents as part of forging their own identity.

Then we crush their dreams with VCE/HSC or throw the stone into the barrel (as I believe it is called in Queensland). The adolescent rebellion is lip service only, we get to have haircuts and clothing for a couple of years, but not actually drop out of the shitty system.

What shitty system? The protracted university entrance process known as our primary and secondary education system, that then puts us in university courses geared towards the vocations a corporate community desires yet will not pay for.

Then laden with a debt most people aren't conscious they are accumulating - they start out in a junior position in a 'safe' job performing some rote unimaginative task day in day out to get a mortgage which is just renting your accomodation from a bank (since they typically absorb all or more than all of the rent, the only productive income a house can generate, the rest is paper income vulnerable to sudden dramatic wright downs). Then you have kids and put them into a private school in the hope they can have an even more safe, secure, rote unimaginative job than you did permitting them 3-4 years of rebellion mostly geared towards their clothing and hair style.

The rebellion just needs to be taken to the next level. There's a huge market for all these isolated people that want to rock. People like me, and cant stand the thought that the most imaginitive vision of the future 'our country' has is: stable economic growth driven by foreign demand for raw materials in our resource based economy.

Nobody wants to be a cog in that great machine, I'm not even sure if its worth anybody being a cog in that machine.

This epiphany was much shorter but possibly more significant than my other one.