It's A Teenage Wasteland

It's all the same, only the names will change, every day, it seems we're wasting away.

What lines from a song better describe the angst of a teenager in the eighties and nineties. Boy, Bon Jovi was great at capturing the mentality of young men in the times. He was also capturing the hearts, minds, and if he'd let them souls of teen girls everywhere. Which, was something that young boys wanted to do.

Going from the bottle you drink to being in love, and all you'll do is think, was like every broken teen romance in my high school. Being wanted, Dead Or Alive, was the part of all of us that just didn't care. When you are broken hearted in high school there's nothing else you care about in the world except for her. Anger and rage are all you feel when you're alone, your imagination running wild, forgetting that there's still a tomorrow. It's no wonder that Wanted Dead Or Alive scores the highest spot on my teen angst list.

18 and Life is perhaps the song that I'll remember almost as fondly as Wanted Dead Or Alive. We all had that one friend in high school. The one that was spirited, to their own detriment. The one that had little luck and even less of a chance in the world than most. 18 and Life reminds me of my most spirited friend back in the day. We partied together, we fought together, we chased women together, and we would have "died" for one another. He was eighteen, a year older, and when he went off to prison told me to change or "you'll get eaten alive" in here. God rest his soul, he got eaten alive, by the angst he never let go of.

In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins. It spoke to the adventurous side of my youth. I constantly found myself playing both sides of the fence, between good kid, and bad guy. When it all came down on my head, like the world was falling "literally" on my shoulders, this song was on the radio. It reminded me that the things that mattered were real, it reminded me that the cost of the life I was heading into was expensive, and it reminded me that there might be someone that mattered more than me. Teenagers aren't ready to be selfless, not yet.

Lisa, by Lita Ford, remained on my angst list as one of the grandest mistakes of my young life. Youth is all about mistakes. One of mine, literally, was Lisa. When you find yourself filled with hormones, no longer that shy awkward kid, things going on that you don't understand, and won't understand even in your adult years, there's bound to be a broken heart or two. This song reminds me of a time I wasn't ready for a good thing and ruined it because of my foolishness.

Blaze Of Glory, the way each would be, heroic, rebellious, self-proclaimed tough guy wants to go out. None of us in our youth that lived a "colorful" life saw ourselves making it past twenty-five. Most certainly, forty seemed impossible. We were young, head strung, and still learning our way in the world. Fighting on Friday, drinking away the pain of our wounds on Saturday, and planning our next adventure on Sunday. Somewhere in there, we still had family telling us what we needed to do, school to finish, and identities to find.

Welcome to The Jungle! That was every day in high school, after high school, and for a good part of my life. It is the one song from my teenage years' angst list that stood the test of time. Every day felt like a jungle from the time the hoods took over the school all the way to the end of high school. Fights in the halls were a regular thing. Nothing, by my senior year, was settled with a fist, but rather a weapon. Things evolved into a jungle-like mentality where only the truly savage-minded got out unscathed. It got so bad, that by my senior year, cops heard rumors I'd be fighting some gangsta, over something, and they'd just show up at my house and ask.