I am writing (I guess) about delinquency as in leather jackets, smoking, no school. You know the images from those old rebel movies and James Dean, Marlon Brando and the rest of the wild ones. It’s not a term that is much used anymore, although when I was around sixteen, seventeen I would have loved to have been called a juvenile delinquent. How cool is that! The words have power. Much better than being called a slut or one of the other epithets lame people throw out at young girls. We pranced around feeling all outrageous and dangerous in our gear with our bright mohawks and bad attitudes but we were pretty harmless really except for a few, you know, PRANKS.
We definitely had something we wanted to say and there was a certain amount of art and idealism in it. We were (cringe) trying to change the world in some ways, but not I hasten to announce in the same way those hippies tried to do it with their peace and love and stoned poems. We might have wanted an end to war but we had studded bracelets and pierced noses and we wore tons of black. And you could say we dropped out (except those damn hippies did that first too.)
My worst fear is that adults thought we were just sullen and unhappy. That it was merely growing pains. I won’t go into much of it now, but we had a truly alternative lifestyle (which we maintained), a grassroots movement which was global and although we lived outside of society we answered to a higher code of ethics. We also rocked out.
So what I was really going to write about was that because I’ve been submerged in the 1980’s writing about my two new favorite punk girls, Janie Boots and Holly Would, I have been delinquent about writing my blog but, ummmmm, I seem to have caught up with that now. So everyone carry on.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////