Just because, Brendan?

Just because...of this?

I only mention it because it brings me to a story: When I was a teenager, I bought and brought home a Gas Huffer t-shirt from one of the band's many, many shows at the Old Firehouse. The shirt depicted an ugly cartoon dude with x-ed out eyes slumped over the fumes emanating from a bottle of "rocket fuel." Seemed like a pretty literal, self-explanatory shirt to promote a band called Gas Huffer, right? Well, my mom didn't see it that way. My mom thought the shirt promoted drug use, specifically gas huffing. I think I argued at the time that Gas Huffer was just the name of the band, so mellow out, mom. If I'd been a little quicker on my feet as a teen, I might have argued that, look, obviously the band is having a laugh at gas huffing, ridiculing it—hell, the guy on the shirt has x-ed out eyes, he's dead; this is, if anything, an anti-gas huffing t-shirt.

Whatever arguments I made in the shirt's favor, my mom ultimately ruled against it, cutting it up with a pair of scissors and throwing it in the trash while I looked on, not even reimbursing me for the money (my own, earned from working part-time at any number of shitty after-school fast-food jobs) that I'd paid for it. This was at a time when my folks were waging an ultimately unwinnable war against my casual drug use, motivated no doubt by the usual parental fears that a little pot (or, I guess, gas) would keep me from amounting to anything (and, as ever with these generational conflicts, completely forgetting their own youthful dalliances). Point being, even if I had been huffing gas, I still could've grown up to become a successful writer for the Stranger. So there.*

*Although, I guess this still doesn't prove how much more either of us could've achieved (the New Yorker? we'll never know) if we hadn't been huffing gas or smoking pot...damn it.