Note: This essay covers a lot of earlier ground and comes of otherwise collage-like because it was actually conceived as part of a book tentatively titled Burn Everything. Or that was the hope. The writing of this piece rebelled against my original conception of a sarcastic rejoinder to all those 69 Rules for Pleasing Your Yacht tomes. Partly because that idea would require a pre-existing comedy career in order to be justified, and partly because that idea sucks all around. So at the moment it’s not clear what sort of “everything” is being burned. But if I see it through, I’ll dedicate it to the fox that tried to murder me.

When you are in kindergarten you are in a state of relative innocence about the tragic nature of existence and the fallen state of mankind. The world of the kindergartner is smaller, and therefore brighter, more innocent, and free of hostility and fear. It is certainly free of loneliness. Every other kindergartener is your friend and you are glad to be the friend of every other kindergartner. Things like chemistry, taste, and flag colors do not enter into the equation. Kindergartners have the same simple chemistry, the same dumb taste, and the same behavioral blindspots. The trappings of refinement and the discriminating urge are problems that don’t need to be confronted until at least third grade.

As such it is not unusual to have birthday parties where you and everyone else are invited, because these are the only people you know, and “knowledge” is a fluid concept. I was no different. My life between 1989 and 1991 felt equal to that of a socialite’s. Parties, parties, parties. Almost chainlike in procession. The kinds of parties with hats, noisemakers, balloons, goodie bags, over-rich cake, bowling, ball pits, and, on extremely halting occasions, clowns. And being as much a child as my mandated friends, they were as subject to my celebrations as I was to theirs, how fortunate for them, right?

My birthday is in the beginning of the summer, so we’d often celebrate it outdoors in the afternoon heat. The one I’m thinking of took place in the spacious backyard of my childhood home in 1990. I believe almost all of my classmates from my out-of-town school and a handful of neighborhood kids were in attendance. We had a wooden swing set where all the kids crowded around. There were some plastic cups and sand pails strewn about as well that one of the attendees gathered up, filled with water, and carefully placed on one of the planks next to the slide. I had no idea why my classmate was doing this, but without much thought I proceeded to grab a stick and knock over every container, spilling the water in all directions. My mom chastened me and I probably felt some degree of chastisement, but not so much that I could totally suppress similarly disruptive urges at the gift-opening stage of things. No present was spared my harsh analysis. Even if I liked a present I still found grounds to excoriate it and, by extension, the giver, whom I probably made cry. If I ever had a birthday party after that one, I have no memory of them.

Just going off of that, you might map my progress from childhood to right now with some fairly safe assumptions centered on a pattern of disciplinary havoc. That I would have profaned every available behavioral norm just before and maybe a little bit over the threshold of legality. That I would have treated basic academic competence with the utmost indifference, to the extent that no GPA could possibly be low enough. That, living by my own lights, any kind of personal relationship—familial, social, romantic, professional—would have been impossible. I would have been a source of grief to my parents, a bane to my teachers, a terror to my peers, a known presence to law enforcement, and a source of income to therapists. All told, I would have taken a course of life making maturity a hard-won prize.

Well, of course that’s not what happened. Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this.

Being a hellion seemed pretty natural to me, yet I made an unusual choice not to carry it over into the remainder of my childhood. Instead I acquired a self-seriousness that was almost morose in appearance. I became fretful in following the rules and sensitive to the weight of hierarchical authority. And of course I did not think twice about holding my classmates to the same rigid standard in which I held myself. In fact on my kindergarten graduation, my teacher handed out superlatives to each of her students. (It was a small “special needs” class to be sure.) Mine was “class reporter,” because if I happened to see what I considered to be an infraction, the nearest adult was absolutely going to hear about it regardless of whether or not they wanted to know. It was a nice joke, lost on me having so committed myself to a life with no trace of humor.

Not that this turned me into a dutiful child. Actually it sent me into the opposite extreme from hellionhood. The tyranny I’d earlier exerted over others had been internalized. From that point on, any indiscipline or any bad grade was a harbinger of chaos. Tantrums were a bizarre rarity; and I despised them in others. Instead I’d given myself over to anxieties and compulsive behaviors that were as disruptive as any antagonism. And those external tyrants, with whom I coexisted in a low social stratum, were acutely sensitive to that sort of self-loathing and not shy in accentuating it for their benefit. All of which was given over to a succession of public and private counselors who could apply any number of disorders and find a corresponding prescription. Like, there were so many; some I’d forgotten about until sitting down to write this. Not that this resolved what I consider a broader philosophical dilemma: I was a child who was contemptuous of childhood.

This was a condition that no therapy could remedy. And any therapist who heard it expressed in the terms with which I’m choosing to express it would probably give up their practice. I was on my own. Experimentation of a flawed nature ensued. Rather than socialize, I devoured a set of Cold War-era encyclopedias gathering dust in the back of my third grade classroom. When I got tired of everyday rules, I took an interest in Catholic aesthetics and ritual that is considered fetishistic even in adults. For a good portion of my elementary and middle school years, I lacked for any more plausible opportunities to satisfy my precocious drive for self-discipline or to soothe the effects of the solipsistic detachment from my peers. At least before punk, anyway.

I cannot now, nor could I then, offer a precise rationale for adopting punk. In hindsight it seemed as good a way as any to unburden myself of the pose of maturity that by high school had come to look pretty childish. The punks offered their own sort of stability, rooted in separateness from the surrounding student body, which I myself felt more vaguely, and in the culture through which they expressed it, which I wanted to imbibe more fully. Doing so proved difficult. The group, though hardly uniform in social status or personality or even preferred subgenre, was tight-knit with established bonds that my more direct involvement seemed to disrupt. But even if that was not problem, I was not making it easier on myself. A callus of self-consciousness had formed out of the friction between the knowledge of what I was and the anticipation of what I could become. It put me at a distance that felt similar to anthropological field work. Actually it was worse because it brought back old habits. The Yahoo! directory revived my encyclopedic reflex and with it, once that had led me to straight-edge, my pious reflex.

It would have been a great lapse of the cosmic order for me to have missed straight-edge. It was almost as if it was languishing for years waiting for me to find it. If punk was about gestures and hardcore was about ethics, straight-edge was about rules. What is more punk, straight-edge asks, than obeying the rules? What, in other words, is more punk than denying yourself—and if need be others—the temptations of decadence and waste that doomed earlier punks to oblivion? Leaving aside crust grind and d-beat, no offshoot of punk negated harder, even if what they exhorted was positive: living healthy, thinking clearly, sticking with your friends, forgiving others, etc. Straight-edge somehow got through to me more effectively than youth group or the DARE program put together. A cynic would put it to branding. American culture will approve of both abstinence and risk-taking in moderation, whatever that means. Taken to excess or just for their own sake is cause for scrutiny. But at least for abstinence a nice aesthetic will ease America’s nerves. Just look at Liquid Death.

So I familiarized myself with the straight-edge canon. The canon is more diverse than it is given credit for, but it laid down a visual and rhetorical style best suited to a message that was stupidly simple. At its peak it had a near-uniform style of buzzcuts, high-top sneakers, camo-pattern shorts, and hooded sweatshirts. Straight-edgers had a reputation for aggression, and for a sincerity that bordered on camp. They were also prolific. Between 1988 and 1990, Revelation Records, cofounded by Youth of Today frontman Ray Cappo, put out one genre-defining record after the next: Youth of Today’s Break Down the Walls, Bold’s Speak Out, Chain of Strength’s True til’ Death, Gorilla Biscuits’ Start Today, and Judge’s Bringin’ It Down.

To a listener casually processing these works on Spotify, they may conjure a response similar to what Kenneth Tynan said of Eugene Ionesco: if you’ve heard every straight-edge album, you’ve heard one of them. But to the adherent, that was exactly the point. Straight-edge songs, even the good ones written by Gorilla Biscuits and Turning Point, are designed for breakdowns and group chants of catchy slogans (“Can’t close my eyes”; “Nailed to the X”; “Let’s start today”). They are sonic team-building exercises; evangelization was privileged over expression. And largely because of that, the “brand” was actually in decline by the time I came to it. I acquired a lot of stuff and accepted the dogma, but I didn’t adopt the lifestyle. I didn’t run with a youth crew or do windmills in the pit while Mouthpiece played at Krome. It had run its course. In school, my own adherence became something to observe when it seemed I wasn’t being true to it, like when I was taking whatever pill I was on; psychiatry was privileged over philosophy.

The rules of straight-edge had become formulaic. Even the militancy, where it wasn’t a pose, had been turned inward. A chief example of this curdling was the Kansas City, MO band Restrain, whose sole EP Armageddon (1993) is so generic as to play out like a project of immersive cliché. Consider the lyrics to “Breached” in their entirety:

Exposed to the guise of humanity a gift of reasoning perverted to justification as your ax drops dropping numbers spilling blood staining our species, you are numbering our days as well we are left to decide black and white no indecisive grey moderation in all things inconsistent for it will leave no place to moderate.

I have only the vaguest conception of what they’re trying to say beyond sending a very specific audience into a frenzy and their perceived enemies into something like terror. This was not lost on the writer of those lyrics, Sean Ingram, whose subsequent band Coalesce sought to undo everything Restrain had embodied, sometimes explicitly so. The band’s original 1994 to 1999 run being bookended by anthems of straight-edge apostasy, “Harvest of Maturity” and “Burn Everything That Bears Our Name.” “If you need to see an ‘X’ before and after every title before it’s relevant, then I’ve wasted six years of my life on the simple notion that this was an open forum,” Ingram wrote more pointedly in the latter.

Controversy followed Coalesce in that era to the extent that they appear now like a cerebral reflection of Limp Bizkit. But they were among a vanguard of bands who initiated a shift in hardcore in which “the rules” no longer mattered. Not that blending metal with punk or substituting programmatic lyrics with introspective or narrative lyrics was especially kaleidoscopic, let alone new. It was more a matter of taking parts and reassembling them in the preferred image of the rising generation. It’s hard to glean exactly what the generation at the turn of the millennium wanted. They wanted to be tough yet vulnerable; they wanted to be flexible yet niche. They wanted their youthful liberty and their sincere maturity blended together. They wanted ultimately to be better in every sense than what the mainstream offered, which was mindless neanderthal junk. Meaning that something as nakedly sincere and unabashedly simplistic as straight-edge was not so much objectionable as it was embarrassing to have to explain.

Straight-edge was framed in a paradox that ultimately cancelled it out. You could not take the mantle of punk on the one hand and pursue an increasingly ascetic and uncompromising militancy on the other. Being clear in your principles, while good in the abstract, relies on a certain irrationality to be carried into action. Earth Crisis stayed the course, releasing album after album of hardline animal rights proselytizing. Ray Cappo went from a barking pied piper to a spokesman for Krishna consciousness through his band Shelter. Both seem stuck on a loop, unlike Ian MacKaye or Kevin Seconds who unstuck themselves at the right time to readapt, and to mature. What is more punk than growing up? And what is more grown up than discernment? It’s like seeing all your tropes and signifiers in one convenient place and choosing what you like best, like you’re at the Gap—or a graveyard. It’s not paradoxical if it’s the necessity of survival in the face of hostile conditions. One’s more nuanced sound is another’s better-resourced label, just as one’s dark cloud of MTV is another’s endless maze of YouTube.

Not even the most militant hardcore devotee can escape maturity. Aside from an elite, possibly prideful few, you are destined to abandon straight-edge as quickly as you embraced it. It was typical in the early days of the internet to celebrate “breaking” edge when it didn’t entail a full-on drug overdose (the latter of which was either very common or over-reported in scene gossip). True enough, I achieved what feels like an unfathomable inertia while I was in straight-edge. But it wasn’t the inertia as typically assumed. Its peripheral status was as comforting as its rigors were undemanding. In so acting, I absolutely profaned it; less because I took Paxil sometimes or drank soda, but more in having failed to take its core tenet seriously.

Straight-edge morality is rigid because it is framed within the confines of the body. You only have one, and you abuse it at a cost. Engaging earnestly with straight-edge requires confronting your environment in relation to your physical limitations and opting to make necessary adjustments. Seeing only the needs at hand and not feeling otherwise environmentally threatened, I exempted myself from that test and just slipped on a t-shirt—a t-shirt I still own, as it happens. The birthday party ended long ago, but I always found new ways to remain the dyspeptic birthday boy. I kept my childish things close at hand whether or not I chose to acknowledge them. It is not the immaturity of a straight-edge lifer, it is the immaturity of a corpse, something distinct from the punk grave robber by slight, probably inferior degrees.