Obsession

"Pink Floyd, Pink Floyd, Pink Floyd" chanted the mobs of the impatient hormones. Were they going to tear down the wall? Bury an axe in the wall? Shine on like a crazy diamond?

Actually, we were just going to watch our VERY FIRST PINK FLOYD LIGHT AND LASER SHOW uh huh, yeah buddy. It was emotionally, captivating, riveting, and we were storming the gates just like they did in the movie. You know, the movie, "The Wall," the one that we watched ten million times and in every type of altered state of mind we could find. It was great. We were fanatics. We knew the lyrics. We owned every piece of music published, including the solo albums of Syd Barret and Roger Waters. Our arguments rolled around facts on which lead singer made Pink Floyd so pink...I was a Roger Waters fan. You know they totally fell apart once that "other" guy took over. We were impassioned, obsessed, zealously, fanatically driven! We were against air pollution, politics, loved hair spray (not the movie the actual stuff), and wanted to save the whales.

Down with conformists, down with establishment, down with religion, down with anything that made you grow up.

Where did that go? Oh, not the love of good music. I still listen to the good stuff, the new stuff, sometimes the bad stuff, never the horrible stuff,but where did the being so totally passionate over something that I'd stand outside of a rinky dink civic center impatiently waiting to have my retinas burned out by a light and laser show go? The drive to be socially different from everyone else. The desire to be.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not some totally devoid of emotion lifeless lump of Swiss cheese sitting on the sofa waiting to be spread on a cracker (that just sounds gross). There are issues that stir me...the education system, abuse of children, pollution, stupids. And trust me, I rant and rave and get emotionally wound up, but find it hard to walk the walk and not just talk. Have I become the grown up? No way. I couldn't have. And really, I haven't. At least not like the grown ups I didn't want to be. Okay, so I didn't move to New York, live with Robert Smith from The Cure, and become a fabulously famous Broadway actress, but I did live, and with gusto. Sure, traveling around the country with a small, one-roomed travel trailer hitched to the back of a run down Ford may not equal to the flash and flair of living with Robert Smith in New York City, but I had some really good times. Really. Good. Times. I miss those times, and I miss the friends I made along the way. I will never see them again. But I like what I've become as well.

Is obsession just for the young? Because we don't obsess loudly, vocally, and with great vigor are we lacking passion?

Nah, I don't think so.

My youngest son is awake. He's lying in his crib with a blanket playing peek-a-boo. He has no clue that his mom once had a black mohawk, rallied protests against society, and wore combat boots. When he gets older, I'll be even older. He'll never know that his sixty year old uncool mom would drive through the streets in the middle of winter's cold night with her windows down and the radio blaring. He'll never know that sometimes, I still do.