The Misery of Exposure

Emo or Goth?

The debate rages among teens with nothing better to do in their spare hours online.  Am I a perfectly normal and rational Emo-kind or do I possess within me that which makes me a deviant Goth?  Odd distinction, as a Google image search pulls similar items for each query.

The teenage niece of a very close friend expounded eloquently on the basic genetic differences between the two quite recently.  I can't remember the exact wording and, being that she is a modern teenager, I'm quite grateful that my limited memory has allowed that paragraph to pass into "data no longer necessary."  However, the gist of her explanation of the difference between the two dark states-of-being is that today's teens invariably land squarely in the Emo camp due to the sheer amount of emotions they find themselves experiencing.  Very few teens are truly Goth.  You see, Goths are always angry at everything, Emo disciples freely express all emotions even though they seem angry with everything.  It should be understood that they get depressed as well.

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I recently read something that made me pretty sad.  It involves absent friends and present friends and the inability for past transgressions to be resolved.  There was a large falling out among a previously tight-knit group of people and it so happens that it occurred about ten years ago.  Ten years ago, I was in another city trying to get a handle on who I wanted to be, so the details of the Yoko Ono-zation of this group aren't a part of my personal mythology.

Emo or Goth?

I had a brief but tormented love affair with a person who considered herself a Goth.  She was a bit too old to be one of the 24-hour-New-York-City-Subway-lurking-style Goths.  In fact, she frequently ridiculed that particular tribe.  I always considered her to be a sort of super-hero-style Goth.  The type of Goth that held a real day job at a respectable retail outlet in Midtown Manhattan who even occasionally wore spectacles and tied her thick, dark, curly locks into a pony-tail.  Perhaps today's teens would consider her more Emo, but that tribe would have considerable difficulty reconciling the tattoos.

I'm beginning to understand the poison brewed from long-held grudges.  It acts very slowly and appears at first to not do any damage at all.  Eventually, it eats away a part of the victim that he/she never really misses.  Is it a tragedy to lose something you realized you never had in the first place?  Does it really matter when friendships expire like buttermilk?

Emo or Goth?

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There has been quite a bit of discovery for me lately.  I'm finding ancient acquaintances everywhere these days.  Nostalgia sets in quickly, memories of good times passed.  I've crossed paths with a lot of people in my life and I've recently looked back on the tangle of cobwebs those crossings have left.  Not sure if this recent melancholy falls in the Emo or Goth realm.  We'll see.

Now for a random picture: