Rebels, huh?  To me,  if you’re asking, three guys sitting on their deck smoking weed seems like conformity. 

Again. If you’re asking.

I mean never mind that it’s legal now. Never mind that you can more easily buy a mind-altering substance in a neatly packed plastic sleeve right there at the corner store than you can buy a box of chocolate chip cookies. It just seems so much like conformity now. Everyone is doing it. What’s counter about blurring your thoughts and losing yourself into a cloud of smoke?

We’ve mistaken substance abuse for rebellion, but it’s actually, to me at least, all kinda sorta just a different layer of the economy now, isn’t it?

Me, if I wanted to conform I’d buy a brown suit and a bible and go to church on Sundays and pray for my neighbour’s soul.

Or, if I wanted to conform, I’d sit at a desk job and attend meetings day after day after day, file some reports and then dutifuly die at my desk on a Thursday afternoon with a cold cup of coffee by my side.

Of course, if I wanted to conform I could also do just that by dropping a gummy in the backyard while my ass warmed a lawnchair and the dog slept at my feet and me there falling into a nap of my own and dreaming of speeding a noisy motorcycle down the freeway.

These are all basically the same damn things, aren’t they?

You disagree? Nah.

They feel different, but only just feel different. They aren’t really. That’s the illusion. That’s the trick. They used to be fresh and strange and counter, but if someone is earning money on your back—collecting a tithe, collecting a profit, collecting a tax—that’s just conformity after all, isn’t it?

If I wanted to rebel I’d quit my job and learn to cook my own food so I don’t need to tip a delivery guy for handing me a cardboard box or even the cute waitress just because she said some nice things to us sitting there at a table in her part time job. I’d make terrible art, spattering paint onto paper and pretending it had meaning when art has no meaning but what someone else wants it to mean and I’d keep it to myself for no one to see but me and hide it away to make people wonder how I spent all my free time. I’d write long novels that wandered through time and space and invented mindblowing ideas without care for purpose or practicality and then I’d promise to let everyone read them but secretly I would just keep writing them until I ran out of caring anymore and wrote something else instead.  If I wanted to rebel, to go out on the road of modern counter culture I’d find a trail that no one else was running and run on that even though there aren’t many of those left and the ones yet to be explored are often scorned for how foolhardy they are, how loose the footing, how vague the orientation. I’d run it anyways, and people would ask me if I was crazy and I would tell them that no, I just wanted to see something different and unexpected and that joining in the smoke up wasn’t my idea of a mind opening experience anyways. 

And that’s how I would rebel because there ain’t nothing rebellious in much of anything these days, not even the things we got used to thinking of that way.