How Ozzy Gave Me Balls

I miss the days of kids delivering newspapers by foot or bike.  It’s mostly because at the age of thirteen, I was pulling $40 per week, a fortune to a middle-class kid in a two-parent household.  I’d gotten a savings account, which my Dad had nudged me to put in $10 toward every week.  Every Christmas and summer, I’d take $200 I’d saved and go nuts at the mall, buying VHS tapes, cassettes, and clothing.

During the summer before 10th grade, I’d gone to a camp where my bunkmates all indulged in impressions of Beavis and Butthead (huh huh huh), which got me watching it.  After summer ended, I started watching it, where I saw it.  Beavis and Butthead banging their heads to Black Sabbath’s classic, “Iron Man” and vocalizing that classic guitar riff.  I was hooked on it.  So during the following spree, I looked through the Sabbath cassettes and found a double-sided cassette of Paranoid and Heaven and Hell.  It played nonstop on my stereo while Dad mused, “So, you’re a headbanger now, eh?”  How prophetic a statement.

Thanks to Beavis and Butthead, I became exposed to AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” and Metallica’s “One.”  A friend, Steven, played Megadeth’s “Symphony of Destruction” and an acquaintance, Robert, made me a tape of Iron Maiden’s Fear of the Dark; all I had to do was ask.

I had friends, but I was a shy teen.  I wasn’t the best student, but I generally was polite and tried to do my best.  Some people say metal can lead to bad behavior; in my case, it did cause me to start pushing boundaries.  I tried to grow my hair long (though it seemed to grow out instead of down).  I befriended some of the “freaks.”  I took up smoking cigarettes.  I started ditching classes. At one point, I mouthed off to a Spanish teacher who, in my mind, was picking on me.  When I attempted to ride home on my friend Evan’s bus, and the driver tried to kick me off because I wasn’t on his route, I stood there and stared him down.  Classmates helped me hide under a seat and clothed me in a hoodie while said driver grabbed a security guard (he didn’t think to check under the seat?).

I also picked up the guitar, which I’ve played on and off as an adult; I’ve been known to bust it out for my students on occasion.  And as someone who’s “joined the system” (tenured professorship and mortgage), my hair’s shortened back up, and if a security guard tells me to do something, I’ll generally do it, even if I think the rule is ridiculous.

I’ve widened my musical tastes; I was a peripheral part of the jamband scene for years, although that’s giving way to more varied forms of entertainment.  But that rebellious streak remains, and I channel it in my work.  Singlism and matrimania are rampant in our world; it exists in our policies, our media tropes, our business practices, and our everyday interactions.  I can be a bit pointed in the way I push back at times, but I’ve sought to help bring it to others’ attention through my writing; it’s become my brand, enough that I’ve published, presented, and been asked to speak on the subject on radio and TV.

I’ve heard it said that our core self never changes.  Even as a child, when my first-grade teacher would have us repeat, “A city is a place with lots of people,” I would substitute “people” with “cars,” “buses,” and “buildings.”  It never got a reaction.  But even then, I was questioning things most people take for granted.
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Celebrity deaths don’t usually hit me that hard; not since Neal Peart of Rush passed was I so affected.  While I don’t have Ozzy’s entire discography, his music marked the beginnings of a key transition in my adolescence, and, subsequently, my personality and outlook.  And I still bang my head to his tunes; as I write this in a Starbucks, “After Forever” plays on my headphones, and I bang my head lightly.  He’ll always fuel my life and work, even if it’s subliminal.