Schrödinger rationalizes some unresolved anger

I recently found, on teh interwebz, a digital copy of a record that I absolutely adored when I was a wee lass. For reals, I nearly wept. I have purchased this record three times in my life. Copy 1 was used as a scratching post by my cat. Copy 2 mysteriously disappeared from my record collection. I tracked down copy 3 in Germany, and let me just say that it was quite an adventure navigating the all-German website to buy the damn thing. Since my turntable is back home in AZ, I wasn't able to play it right away. I discovered, months later, that copy 3 had a fine scratch that causes the damn thing to skip. Fuck me.

So I found this gem online and downloaded it. I love how after 12 years I still know every word. Awesome.

I was (and continue to be) a huge fan of punk rock. In fact, I can always tell how much the lab is sucking my soul by how much punk I listen to at work. It's a directly proportional relationship. More hatred = more punk rock. That being said, I never called myself a "punk." It just felt dirty - the reason being that by the time I started listening to it, punk was very dead.

I've long felt that punk is like Schrödinger's cat. What is Schrödinger's cat, you say? It's my favorite quantum paradox. Since quantum physics is pretty hard to comprehend, this paradox attempts to explain to us chimps the nature of subatomic particles in quantum states. For example, electrons, as they orbit the nucleus, can spin "up" or "down". The electrons in an object such as your body will spin both "up" and "down" at the same time. This is called a superposition of states.

Since this doesn't really make sense to us in the real world, Schrödinger came up with this theoretical scenario in which a cat is put in a totally enclosed box with a radioactive isotope, a geiger counter, and some poisonous acid. If the isotope decays, the geiger counter detects the radiation and releases the acid - which, of course, kills the cat. Equally likely, the isotope may not decay and the cat will remain alive. Since the box is totally enclosed, we will not know what happens until we open the box. Therefore, the cat is both dead and not dead - a superposition - until we "perform a measurement" and open the box. In so doing, we force the superposition in to a particular outcome: the cat will be dead, or it will not be dead. We forced it to adopt a state by measuring it.

Such as it is with punk rock. It existed only as punk rock until it was called punk rock. Then it was, as Schrödinger might say, dead. The very idea and nature of punk rock, arising organically out of the ether and totally anti-mainstream, stopped being punk as soon as someone called it punk and gave it a face and a uniform. I mean, it's an even bigger paradox to be against the mainstream while being a mainstream movement. It still exists as a genre of music, but as a movement? Nope.

Of course I'm sure some people might not like this interpretation, but fuck it. I'm not saying that individuals can't have the spirit of punk rock - far from it. There are tons of vagabonds who could easily be described as such. But to wear the uniform is just plain silly. It's no different than a poodle skirt.

These are the things I think about when I can't sleep. Then I think about my proposal and I'm quickly in dreamy-dream land.