THE GABBLER

The following personal essay describes the journey of Jen Burgess, a young New Jersey woman, as she navigates through a variety of American subcultures. From punk to hipster to survivalist, Jen unsuccessfully tries to find herself and eventually ends up claiming the only identity left to her: poseur.

 

It’s finally time to stop pretending. To drop all of these carefully crafted facades that I’ve tried to live behind for years. So here’s my confession: I’m not a survivalist. Or a fangirl. Or an otherkin. Or a non-hipster who shies away from any cultural definition. Or a punk. The only truth I can live authentically is that of a poseur. I am an Authentic Poseur.

It started out innocently enough. Lost in the college town of New Brunswick, New Jersey, eaten alive by large lecture rooms and petty dorm room politics, I had nowhere to turn for a friend who wasn’t vomit covered and semen stained by 2 A.M. every Saturday. And then one late night, drifting home from a particularly frustrating shift spent waitressing at The Greasy Spoon, a local diner, I heard the music floating angrily from the flyer-spattered doors of a dive bar. Punk.

I may just be a poseur sell-out, but I’ll never forget the impact of walking into that much rage. It was like a knife of white hot anger to my chest. But in a good way. It was fucking hardcore, you know? I had found my new family, my new home.

Because you know what the thing was, right? I’d tried my whole life to be America’s fucking sweetheart, but you know what, America? FUCK America. This whole land of the free and home of the brave, it’s like the ORIGINAL poseur. It’s not free, it’s not brave, it’s like this giant big military industrial complex wasteland. It was like this painting I once saw from the Soviet Union, where a line of people who all looked the same were jumping off a cliff. That really hit home, in my fucking chest, man, and I never knew why until I found punk. Because it was like then-President Bush was trying to force me off that cliff into some other phony War on Terror. Fuck that.

Man, I was so fucking into it. I went to every show, my dorm walls were just one giant CrimethInc poster, my iPod was stocked full of Bikini Kill, X Ray Spex, the Misfits and every single local band’s LP, EP, whatever. I even had a little Poison the Well for when I was really pissed off or depressed. I was the only girl in the New Brunswick scene with the balls and the cheekbones to rock a mohawk.

And it wasn’t just the music, you know? It was this philosophy, this ideology, this love, this anarchy. It was like a complete challenge to this system that had let me down. I mean, when in my life had I ever felt truly free until I wind milled my limbs around a mosh pit? Never. And the pit, man, the pit is the only embodiment of anarchy that this lameass nation will allow us. And it was love, too. You know that first show, I was standing tentatively on the edge of the pit, terrified to take the plunge, sure I would be trampled to death. And there was this little kid, he must have been like eight years old, I don’t even know how he got into the bar in the first place, and he was just going at it and then suddenly he tripped and fell. Just like that they all stopped, reached down to pick him up and started moshing again. Because, like anarchy, the pit is really just freedom plus love.

I didn’t just spout this bullshit, though, opining over espresso for hours at some punk-oriented coffee shop. I lived it. When James OD’ed, I visited him in the hospital every day, bringing him his favorite blueberry muffins every time. When Erin’s heart was broken by Rectal Thermometer’s lead singer, I held her while she cried and kept her from carving his name into her arm with her roommate’s steak knife.  Instead of going home for the holiday, I ate fucking TOFURKY at Vegan Kim’s Punk Rock Thanksgiving so that she wouldn’t be depressed about not being able to afford a plane ticket home. I was a good friend, a good person.

And then it all crumbled away so quickly. First, Vegan Kim was ruffling through the papers on my desk when she found a receipt from Hot Topic.

She held it up, glanced it over and said “I hope this is because you’re finally fucking gauging your ears and everywhere else was closed.”

I mumbled something about how it must have fallen out of my little sister’s purse when she visited a few weekends ago.

Then, James was rifling through my closet, looking for a kilt to wear to that night’s show, when he found an old Tommy Hilfiger polo. I tried to shake it off by pretending that I had planned to safety pin an anarchy symbol over the Tommy Hilfiger logo as a sign of true rebellion, but a shadow passed through his eyes and I could tell he didn’t believe me.

The final nail in my punk rock coffin came during my last finals week of college senior year. I was just so stressed, but also just so sick of all the rage, you know? I wanted to listen to something fun. And not like shitty college ska band fun. Like Avril Lavigne “Sk8er Boi” fun. Like pre-packaged poseur ass sell out fun. I wanted to turn it up and belt it out while I took a quick shower study break. I didn’t even hear them open my door. I just came out of the shower to the horrified faces of my friends. Erin yelled out “Poseur!” and they all turned and left, shaking their heads in disappointment. From that day on, none of my friends answered my calls and they all ignored me at shows. My punk days were over.

I drifted for months, friendless and alone. By then I had graduated and accepted a position in Rutgers’ admissions department, so the extent of my social interaction consisted of an occasional lunch with a well-meaning, older colleague.

Until one Saturday, when I set out to my favorite Starbucks, armed with my Macbook and ready to update some Rutgers social media feeds and write a quick blog post for the admissions website. When I arrived at Starbucks, though, it was completely full, with not an empty table in sight. I slipped out and wandered until I found some new artisanal café, with all the prices of Starbucks but without the delicious Salted Caramel Mocha Frappuccinos.

At this point, I had finally managed to grow out my old mohawk into what my hairdresser referred to as “a little bit sexy, a little bit androgynous, choppy, layered masterpiece.” Mostly, it just flopped into my eyes a lot. I had also officially given up my punk wardrobe in favor of comfortably stretchy skinny jeans and grungy old t-shirts leftover from various admissions department events. To top it all off, due to a slight eye infection, I had traded in my contacts for my glasses from 2001, the last year I actually got a new pair. I was what my blonde, sorority loving little sister would have called “a hot mess.”

That’s why I was shocked when, as the café filled up, a man locked eyes with me, smiled charmingly and swaggered over to my small table. I was less shocked when he asked if he could share my table in a woman’s voice. Turns out, he was a she. Just a 95 pound she with a man’s hair and clothes.

“Tables are just so conventional, you know? But, like, my Macbook’s not charged and the outlets are all near tables. It’s like, totally mainstream, but what can you do?”

And that really got me thinking. I mean, who are tables and chairs to tell me where to sit, right? Like, it IS just so mainstream that they, like, try to dictate where I can BE. There’s just this whole big world of space where I can live and these tables are just like, no, you’ll be nhere and it’s just so conventional and who wants to be conventional? It was like–when I thought I was a punk, which I was totally wrong about because that’s just so cliché, like EVERYONE tries to be a punk at some point, it’s just so mainstream–but when I thought I was I kept going on and on about conformity and poseur and blah blah blah but like that’s so conventional. I as an individual transcend those labels and those subcultures and I’m just so outside the mainstream there was just no word to describe me. And my stupid ex-friends just didn’t get it because they’re too conformist to see how incredible and original I am.

So, like, I told this girl who sat at my table about this whole epiphany and we had a really long talk about the inherent fascism of furniture. She eventually invited me to a show that night and introduced herself as Scorpio, so-named because she was an Aries.

I’m not going to lie, I was still a little overly attached to the punk rock mainstream and I hadn’t really fully committed to bucking convention and living a deck life above and beyond labels, so I may have shown up to the show in my punk finest, dug out from the bottom of my closet (another convention I was learning about…like who was this box of wood to tell me where to keep my clothes?).

But the thing was, I was just being ironic. Like, look at me! Trying to embody this totally conformist subculture with its labels and fashions and stuff. Or at least that’s what Scorpio told me when she saw me at the show.

The show itself was SO refreshing. I was used to the same cliché, poseur anger at every punk rock show, you know? Like, I get it, government sucks, whatever, punk, you’ve had the same rallying cry since the 70s, can you even TRY to be more current? But at this show, most of the performers did some variation of a spoken word version of 90s gangster rap songs, accompanied by a kazoo. One even did a few Tupac songs translated into Quechua, the native language of Tupac Amaru, an Incan rebel and Tupac Shakur’s namesake. It was, like, so deck.

Really, it was just so nice to have finally found a way that I could be a true individual and express myself completely. I totally got to buck convention and like Scorpio used to say, bucking is almost as a good as fucking. Whatever that means. But, like, I got rid of most of my furniture after I realized that it was all fascist. And I got to join this a capella group that did ironic covers of early punk rock songs, which was perfect, since I already knew most of the words and I still got to rock my old clothes for most of our shows.

Plus, I was still, like a really good friend. I mean, sure, these people weren’t as into the whole love each other thing as my old punk friends, but they didn’t seem to mind if I took care of them as long as we covered up our embarrassment by pretending we loved each other ironically. So when Scorpio got syphilis from her latest polyamorous relationship, I went with her to the clinic and held her hand in the waiting room while they processed her testing results. And I didn’t even tell anyone that Johnboy cried un-ironically every time he watched The Waltons. Also, I helped Jeremiah bury his childhood cat when she died. I even planned a whole funeral and made a playlist with only the most deck bands.

Still, though, I guess I couldn’t run from convention for too long. Like before, I was undone in phases, each instance stripping me of some credibility. The first clue was my beer. Scorpio, too lazy to get up and get herself a new PBR took a sip from mine one night while we were hosting a group philosophical debate about the role of underwear in fashion in our now-shared apartment. Little did she know that I always carefully replaced the contents of my PBR with some nice, smooth Sam Adams Cherry Wheat. I always just emptied out one of the PBRs while she wasn’t looking, refilled it and drank it down. It was delicious and far less disgusting than PBR.

Well, Scorpio, a supposed PBR drinker since her 12th birthday, ended up spraying beer all over the floor in horror. There was no hiding behind irony, either, since I had clearly been enjoying Sam Adams all night long, without even a wince.

The next day, Scorpio, already suspicious now that she knew my beer drinking preferences, was moving my mattress, apparently so that I wouldn’t have to be held to the convention of sleeping in the same place every night, only to find a few copies of People magazine and the entire Fifty Shades trilogy. It was over. She asked me to move out and I never heard from them again. I was once again frozen out by all my friends.

At this point, I realized that subcultures were my calling. I was clearly too quirky for the mainstream, I knew that much. So I just needed to find a subculture that fit me. I did a little research and found a group of otherkins in the area. I thought it was perfect—a group of people who ironically believed that they weren’t human. I still had a love for irony, after all. Unfortunately, though, it turned out that they actually completely and without irony believed that they were fairies. Things got pretty awkward pretty quickly when I couldn’t give them my fairy name or recited the “Ancient and Most Stringent Rules of the Fairy Kingdom.” I did get the first rule right, though: “The first rule of the Fairy Kindom is, you do not talk about the Fairy Kingdom.

I dabbled in other groups, trying to be a Lord of the Rings fangirl. I had seen all of the movies, so I figured it was a good fit. Unfortunately, I never could make it through the Slimarillion, so they figured out that I was a poseur pretty quickly.

I was really thrilled when I found the survivalists, though. They were so free, so easy to get along with. They didn’t care if I shopped at Hot Topic or read Fifty Shades of Grey. I could listen to Avril Lavigne and drink as much Sam Adams Cherry Wheat beer as my liver could handle and they still stood by me, as long as I believed that the world was soon going to come to a cataclysmic end. So I started prepping for the end. I stocked food, I stocked water, I attended survivalist classes about how to hunt, skin, and butcher animals, how to identify edible plants, how to build a fire over the ashes of civilization.

This time, though, I have to end it on my own. I’m sorry fellow survivalists, but I’m broke and the world doesn’t seem to be ending. My credit score still seems to matter and I’m kind of screwed. I’m almost $20,000 in debt from constantly updating my food and water supplies, not to mention the money I spent on that time-share bug out location up in the Pine Barrens, so that I could flee there should the world end any time in June or July.

The thing is, I am not just one subculture. Some days, all I want is to hear Kathleen Hanna’s angry growl as she asks me to “suck [her] left one,” some days I just want to drop all social conventions and eat off the floor because fuck tables, and some days I just want to lie in bed watching a Pixar marathon on ABC Family, unironically. But I never, ever want to buy another carton of non-perishable goods from BJ’s Wholesale Club. Because being a survivalist sucks.

Just like my one time idol, Stevo from SLC Punk, when all is said and done, I’m nothing more than a God-damned trendy-ass poseur. But, at the very least, I’m an authentic one.

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