Somewhere around the third “song” I sort of saw the big picture. “What the hell am I doing?” And I answer back to myself, “This is fucking awesome!”

By day I run a lab where we test software we developed making interactive television and video on demand possible. I’m a tech guy with a growing number of years spent around miles of cables and countless hours watching progress bars sweep from empty to full. I’m pushing thirty, drive a nice car, keep to myself, not attracted to crowds, and an overall quiet guy.

Here I am in my polo shirt (black for good measure) and white tennis shoes, toilet paper jammed in my ears, pounding finger tips on the hand rail to the beat of double-kick drums, bouncing head at half speed to some of the most brutal metal to make it onto a larger record label. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to like this music but I love it. Every song is capped with the raised devil-horn-fists and the f-word. I can’t understand a single word. Each song is new to me and I love it.

I have more in common with the fifty-something “hall monitor” keeping folks out of the aisles. He sure as hell doesn’t get this music. What makes me think I do? I still hang onto my high school roots of skateboarding (back when it was not a sport and it meant being more on the outcast side clicks), punk rock, and metal. My pants are still baggy, I have what looks like a staple in my ear, I still go to shows and feel like the old man, my hair is all fucked up, and for some reason like tattooed chicks in spite of the lack of desire to date one with said adornments. Where do I fit in the world? What happens when even my theoretical kids wonder what the hell I’m listening to?

The fact is I like the contrast. I like that I don’t fit molds. I look around me and I see a bunch of degenerates whipping me with their so-metal hair. On one hand it is easy to criticize these guys (and both girls who came to the show) for being dirt bags (my cop-friend says he hasn’t unleashed that one on TEH criminals yet). They are dirt bags. But they aren’t different from the masses of “clean” bags out there. So the other hand is that while they are all flying the bird and enjoying the vulgar, blood and gore lyrics, they too will wear collared shirts, drink beer and wash the cars on the weekends, and bang the wife on an odd Thursday night. Just another death-metal loving cog in the great capitalist wheel.

Just like me.

I might be inclined to argue that these guys have a bit more unity among them than most. When you isolate yourself from society you still need people to call your friends. This might be especially true of those who hide behind their typecast and odd style choices because they are too insecure to deal with the things that hold them back. The exterior is often a comfort zone that simultaneously keeps others away and prevents you from having to feel whatever it is that makes you feel so uncomfortable at the same time keeping you away from the people you deep down want to feel comfortable with. There are many fewer tests to the insecure soul when girls won’t talk to you; at least not the ones you really want to talk to.

I digress. If you want to find the kind of person I speak of, an easy target is this crowd. But in reality, I bet this crowd is about as normal as any other when it comes to people being people.

Somewhere toward the beginning of the night, roughly four shots of rum chased by Vanilla-Cherry-Doctor-Pepper (yeah it already has 32 flavors in it, or whatever, so why not mix two more) I wished I was in the mosh pit instead of the goddamn balcony with a padded seat at the back of my knees. I wanted to smash into a bunch of rowdy metal guys, feeding off the wave of heavy riffs and snarling vocals. I wanted to feel a little pain. That’s when I wondered if music of the Iraq War era is death metal. Viet Nam had rock. The people united and were heard. Lord knows if it did anything but create a decade to remember. If we are the new generation; the ones with the energy to spend being angry at the way things are and mobilizing to change it; the ones with voices and time to shout with them, then we are not going to be heard. Politics doesn’t work that way any more and they aren’t listening to anybody that greets their favorite band with, “Fuck you!” as the band greets likewise. Commercialization has killed the common voice. It just isn’t effective. Commercialization has co-opted every morsel of heart-felt pleas and natural movements of dissent. We get confused when a corporate tag line doesn’t show up at the end.

I don’t have a lot of hope for the future. Not while Bushy is up there shitting all over the place. Not while people in this country still think he was the best candidate. Not while the gay marriage phobia can mobilize voters. Not while we don’t vomit at the state of consumption in this country and the world. Not while evolution has phased out the thinking mind. I don’t have a lot of hope for the future. We need a social revolution; a complete upheaval of current mindsets on what’s important to society, the planet, and family. I just don’t know how this can happen. The seeds look like they’re dead.