against me! - walking is still honest
“can anybody tell me why god won’t speak to me? why jesus never called on me to part the fucking seas? why death is easier than living? you can be almost everything, when you’re on your fucking knees. not today, not my son, not my family. not while walking is still honest and you haven’t given up on me.”
the ages of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen mostly sucked. i’m sure a lot of it was just general teen angst bullshit but some of it was because i just wasn’t able to deal with things happening around me. reinventing axl rose helped a lot. i think i got into against me! the same way i got into a lot of bands back then — some band i liked either mentioned them in passing or in the CD liner notes. whatever it was, this was one of the first CDs i ever bought with my own money (it was the same day i bought three saves the day albums and, i think, the rushmore soundtrack). i was fifteen and i wore it out.
so here’s the long story: “walking is still honest” immediately became my favorite song. i was raised catholic and spent twelve years in a catholic school but by the time i hit high school, i was pretty much completely against the religion. most of this was directly related to the death of my grandmother who was, hands down, the most religious person i’ve ever known but she also had the most unfortunate luck in life and i couldn’t really understand that at all. it fucked me up a lot as a kid because when she got sick, she quickly went from being a little off center to like really crazy/violent and would threaten to kill me and then scream at me about jesus. i dealt with it for a decade and then she died and all of my teachers, relatives, etc. kept saying that her entire life was god’s plan and i had this crazy freak-out as overdramatic teenagers tend to do and stopped going to school. because it was also in these three years when i started having a lot of issues at school, and i was also sick, and my dad went to iraq for a year or two. so i just didn’t go to school. for three years. i’d stay home and spend all day alternating between watching movies and listening to reinventing axl rose from 9:00 to 3:00pm. and i would often put this song on repeat for an hour or two. this happened about 2-5 days a week. i have no fucking idea how i graduated high school. i latched onto this song and i still haven’t really let go. they’re still one of the best bands i’ve ever heard. i don’t remember much about the first time i saw them but the last was maybe one of the best nights of my life.
