What I'm writing is a memory. Of sorts. Why I'm writing it and what it means are a mystery to me, it's one of those static blurs you need to zero in on before it fades to obscurity.

I'm a teenager in this memory. I don't know the specific age, it's a decade of turbulence no matter how you split the hair. I had recently moved in with my grandparents. Along with my younger sister and my mother. I also had a brother, but he prematurely left home. My mother, addicted to legal opiates, found herself unable to keep a job and therefore unable to keep her own home. My siblings and myself found ourselves the family's tragedy.

I walk home from school. I walk up the crumbling sidewalk and into a house with flaking paint. My grandfather used to be a handyman, but the wear and tear of maintenance grew too much and the house suffered. The first room upon entering the door is the kitchen, there is an an orthodox cross fixed on the wall and it smells like cabbage. The house always smells like cabbage, burning it's scent into the foundation ever since my grandparents moved to Canada.

I say hi to my grandparents. They are overbearing and out of date, but I love them regardless. The closest thing that a teenager can have to love at least. They ask me how school was and how my friends are, but I only give short answers. If I keep the conversation going too long, they'll use it as a vehicle to ask if I'm on drugs. Or worse, they'll ask what I want to do after I graduate High School.

I head towards the staircase to the basement. My room is down there, it works well for me. It's my refuge. It's colder than the rest of the house and it feels safer. Like a bunker.

We'd always have to go down to the basement during tornado warnings as a kid, so basements have always felt more protected. More safe. Hiding among boxes of old clothes and Christmas decorations to wait for the wrath of God to pass.

To reach my room I have to go through the den. My mother is sitting in a lazy boy recliner. She probably hasn't left that chair all day. She is in that half asleep stupor that oxy users slump themselves into, her mouth gaping open like a decomposing trout. Some sort of trash tv is on, some sort of TLC freak show. The look of her disgusts me. It's a mix of shame, and anger, and disgust.

My fists clench. I want to turn that rotten fish face into a bloody mess. I want to put my hands around her neck and rob her of whatever remains of a life. I want to avenge a broken childhood, I want to restore honour lost from becoming a family charity case. I want to do something.

I don't know if she would struggle. I don't know if she has it left in her.

Instead I go to my room. I close the door and turn on the stereo. I shift through a stack of CD cases. Each one a different chunk of my formative years, each a piece to the puzzle. Never Mind the Bollocks was on the top of the pile, it's case empty and hollow. The CD itself was still in the stereo, I had been practicing the guitar the same way I had learned it, by following along to punk rock CDs. My guitar was leaned up against the dresser.

Years later, my kids will ask where I learned to play, and I won't tell them the truth.

I had a band. We were a punk band, by choice. Some people form punk bands because they can't play anything else. For us we didn't want to do anything else. Even if we could play something more technically advanced, I doubt we would. It was a crusade of sorts for us, a cause. The simplicity of the music just added accessibility. Made teenage rebellion within grasp. If the Germs could do it, so could we. The Clash, D.O.A, Black Flag, the Misfits. Names we held sacred and aspired to be.

We would gather at the drummer's house and take lessons learned from the Sex Pistols and put it in theory. We would frantically play our three chord chaos, taking breaks to spray paint our instruments and clothes or drink warm beer hidden in the drywall. Sometimes mutual friends would come over and watch us play, sometimes they'd bring their girlfriends. We would all talk about what we would do when we got famous. It was the closest thing I had to a social life. It was the closest thing I had to an escape.

Those were the only times I left the house. Today isn't one of those days. I sort through the CDs. I choose the Dead Kennedys. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables probably. Usually I lay on the bed and follow along to the lyrics in the booklet, but today isn't one of those days either. I'm not interested in the lyrics today. I want to get lost in the frantic energy unfolding. I want to exist in those brief milliseconds between guitar riffs and drum beats and nowhere else. I want to escape, I want to destroy. I came into this world to live out loud.

I get a knock on the door. It's my grandfather, he wants to know if I can wash the car when I'm finished listening to my "crash and burn" music. For some reason I like that term. Crash and burn. It sits with me well.