snowpants make anyone look like a little kid

this'll probably be a bit disjointed and it's not like anyone isn't used to my disjointed ass reads these anyway, but my apologies in advance.
at the risk of sounding like some irrelevant "scenester fuck" i realized a little while back that i've spent more than half of my life in hardcore punk, with about what you'd expect to show for it; quite a few scars, a shit-ton of memories, some great, some awful, the ability to drive a van hundreds of miles overnight after playing myself to the point that my vision is tunneling, a long list of people (some of whose names i can't remember) who have offered up floor space, food and showers to a bunch of crazed strangers, and generally just a whole life that very few people can understand.
it's still funny to me to watch "normal" people's faces while i tell them that, no, we don't make a bunch of money playing in our band and, no, we don't have a "real" record label doing anything for us but somehow we manage to tour the country and put out records despite it all. the older i get the less likely people are to get that i do this because there's nothing else i'd rather do and maybe because i can't do anything else and no matter which it is, that i'd rather be going nuts at a show than navel-gazing trying to figure out if something went drastically wrong with me at some crucial developmental stage. i prefer to think that i knew EXACTLY who the fuck i was at an early age and that when i tried to "figure out who i was" it always ended badly because i wasn't being myself, i was trying to be other people because i had a near-constant onslaught of people telling me that there was NO WAY that this is really who i am or that i've known it since i was 14.
so i have played my "last" shows with IN DEFENCE, the hardcore band i've been writing for and playing in for the last year and a half or so, as of last weekend and it's kind of a wierd feeling. i didn't quit the band because i was going to school or getting hitched or trying to "make something of myself" or anything, i just can't commit to the ambitious touring schedule ben and company are trying to do in the next 12 months. it's that simple. no "i'm too old for this shit" bitterness although, in all fairness, hardcore isn't a positive, uplifting, feelgood experience for me. i write and play from a place of extreme negativity, all of the shit that goes on in my head, all of the stress, frustration, alienation, depression, anger, isolation, and disillusionment with the world and the people in it is where what i do comes from and i'm not a "performer", i dredge that shit out of all the dark places inside of myself in order to play. it starts to take a "psychic toll" on me, as i heard scott and steve from NEUROSIS put it, in addition to the physical punishment of drumming as hard and fast as i can for 25 minutes at a time after driving a few hundred miles and loading gear every day for a couple of weeks on end. don't get me wrong, i love it, but it wears me out and i start feeling like an entertainer instead of an artist if i can be that pretentious for a minute.
now that i'm "done" for a while i realize how much this is a part of me, like a girlfriend or an addiction. it's a kind of loss that doesn't so much hurt as it just feels gone, an empty place where something used to be like when you lose a tooth or the place you used to live gets torn down.
it just makes me think about when i used to paint graffiti, it wasn't because i was a vandal and wanted to deface shit, i was just trying to scream "i'm here" because i wasn't ok with just being some faceless person in a city full of them. it was about making an impact, leaving a mark. i wonder if the douchebag who grabbed me by the throat after throwing me into the floor on my previous trip around the moshpit knows how close he came to getting his ass fucking kicked, not because i'm a big tough guy, but because that's not how you act at a show. i wonder if anyone had ever seen a band say "fuck gang vocals man, it's all about the gang stagedive!". i can pretty much guarantee that no one had ever seen ben in a pink gorilla suit try to crowd surf through an entire D4 set. same goes for a pizza vs. tacos wall of death, you're welcome hardcore that's MY fucking song, now go have fun in the pit with it. i mean it.
for all the lame people who decide to act like shitheads at shows because they think that shit's "punk as fuck" there were a couple of hundred kids who just wanted to go off and have fun and all i can think of is this is why i do this, this is where i belong, that "normal people" are never going to understand it and that this has been a crazy 14 years and i'm not gonna stop.
one last thing, go check out GET RAD's page. they are a great fucking band and the last show i played with IN DEFENCE was for dave from GET RAD's 30th birthday. dave's a great guy and has made some awesome hardcore over the years with various bands and we were stoked as fuck and priveleged to play such an amazing show with so many great bands.