Amanda was fine – a term used predominately in the late 1980s by most high school kids, me included. She had all the telltale signs of a rocker chick, and I wouldn’t be shocked if she smoked pot and drank some kind of alcohol just to fit in with the others wearing her style. The short jean skirt, the ripped top layer with a couple of, I don’t know what . . . tank tops or teddys? I’m not sure. I was a teenager in the latter half of the 1980s. 

               Music was everything back then. Popular groups included rockers like Van Halen, Guns-N-Roses, Slayer, Dokken, KISS, Def Leppard, Winger, and many others. I listened to it all, including alternative music, like the Cure, The Smiths, The Clash, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Ozzy Osborne and Metalica. Yeah, I know those last two weren’t a part of the alternative music scene, but the point is I was a junkie for rock and roll, no matter where it came from. But I refused, adamantly, to listen to country. The truth was these bands were new. And what I mean by that is they were new to a record deal, new to the MTV generation, namely Generation X. We gave these bands the airtime they needed to make it big. Plus, like an added bonus for us, they were hot! Their music rocked. For us GenXers? That’s all that mattered. We didn’t need a reason to rebel. We just did it.

               Sure, we had so many reasons to rebel against our parents. They left us home alone, deciding that the outdoors and the outside world had much more to offer us than they did. They concerned themselves with making money. At least my mom did. She didn’t have much and had to work much harder to keep it, especially after the divorce from my Dad.

               None of that meant anything to me. Not at the time. The critical part of what was going on here was my story. What was in it for me? So, yeah. Back then, I really was the clinical definition of a narcissist. Everything was for my benefit, even if I claimed to do it for someone else’s benefit. That was never the truth. The fact is I did it for me. And only me. That’s all that mattered. Weird to think about that and how self-serving I was. I still struggle with that, if I’m candid about it. Coming clean about being selfish? That’s a bit challenging in and of itself. But here we are. The truth is the truth. No matter what it looks like, you can’t outrun it. It’s still true, like it or not.