It’s no problem, I don’t mind explaining when someone is respectful. Someone on another forum I cruise and post once said that he’d be alarmed if someone never tried marijuana. He also recommended that people snort coke once or twice and try every kind of food there is. Talk like that is one of the reasons I’ve abstained from drinking and drugging all these years. I actually like that it grinds gears of some. From a young age I never had much interest. I thought it was cool to shun it all in a world where shunning those things was completely not cool. When I was 13 I discovered the hardcore punk scene and bands like Minor Threat, Youth Of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, Judge, SS Decontrol and stuff like that. Most were broken up before I got into them. A band called Floorpunch from NJ who were active and just coming up at the time. Mouthpiece was another NJ band. And I got into straight edge. I thought it was out of this world that these people were into this aggressive music and they sang about how they didn’t drink alcohol. It was a sharp contrast from listening to Alice In Chains and Layne Staley singing about shooting dope or seeing Slash with a cigarette dangling out his mouth in every shot.
I was also an outcast and the music was a lot more personal to me than whatever Krock was playing at the time in the middle 90’s. I still listened to plenty of punk bands that sang about sniffing glue and drinking beer and they were cool, too. I just loved that I discovered this straight edge thing. I would even draw X’s on my hands at school. That’s how into it I was. And in high school and through my early 20’s I would always be told I would grow out of it. Well, I stopped drawing X’s on my hands at school by 10th grade, save for when I attended a hardcore show sometimes. I was made to feel a fool about it hundreds, if not thousands of times. Even in my 30’s. My now-wife tried to get me to smoke up with her multiple times when we first met and I would never do it. I didn’t shun those that chose to live differently and my wife was even a cigarette smoker when we met, though, has since quit. I never tried to get anyone to stop because I was always angered when someone tried to get me to start. I’m still really into straight edge today and I’ve been living this way for over 21 or 22 years.
And that’s how it all started for me. I don’t mind answering questions about it when people ask. As long as they’re respectful and not passing judgement that I never snorted a line of junk. And you were very respectful.