It was a good thing for a teenager that nobody had eyes. They weren't blind. They could see, they just weren't watching. If they were watching they were watching for something specific. They weren't just looking. In the 1970s adults were interesting, not interested in what human transformers, adolescents, like me were doing.

That of course all changed in the grabmore glambore other people are a grabbag to take from 19hades. I felt it so strongly. I remember thinking, as the new decade clanged into the Wall Street Belle of the Dark Curve Ball, what are people looking at and why are they looking. Worse, much worse, they wanted to be looked at back. Are you kidding me? Still, that was still to come for me, a jus' past being a kid kid in late 70s nyc.

I liked it, that, then, because when you're half-way between half-way, where the glass is not half-full or half-empty but is sliding awkwardly off the counter-top ready to spill everything, the last thing you want is commentary.

There was room in New York City. Room to bleed. Yeah, you might want someone to offer you a tourniquet, but only if your hemorrhage was real. Otherwise let me nurse my imaginary wounds with an imaginary nurse; she might be bionic, or at least her hair would be, like Farrah.

Punk Rock, Club Music, and Hip-Hop all grew out of this time for a reason. You could dress up funny, love the same sex, and plug amplifiers into lampposts, because well you could. Everybody's a critic, that's why if you want cool things to happen, everybody better be ignoring you.

The Bronx was burning and I was molting in Manhattan. I was allowed to grow. I felt safe cuz there were grown-ups around who liked being grown-ups. It made me wanna grow-up. I knew it wasn't easy. I knew I had things to learn. I had mistakes to make. It was gonna take time. I had to develop something, not just, well you know, not just. It made me understand poet Delmore Schwartz's use of the phrase "in dreams begin responsibilities." I saw what I had to do, had to become. Like any ethical system such as coolness, and to me, properly expressed, coolness is an ethical system, it's what you do when no one's looking that matters most.

It's then you better be at your coolest behavior.