Alcohol and testosterone; elixir of the teen Gods!

The teen years for young men are brutal years. Your body turns into a hormone factory that completely derails every sensible sentiment you ever held in your head or your heart. To whit; you just wanna get fucked. Or, as the Oracle from Ann Arbor famously put it; “get fucked, and get fucked up!” So we did. We drowned our teenage wasteland of insecurities in booze. As a lifestyle, perpetual drunken hooliganism had its drawbacks. A ride in a police car typically comes with thousands of dollars in legal costs. Pretty soon you realize that’s not a sustainable lifestyle. In my day, it was possible to change the road you were on. I’d like to believe it still is for kids coming up, but in 25 years of teaching high school, the odds of doing that got progressively worse. More than ever, if you’re born on the wrong side of town, you’re gonna die on the wrong side of town. And die young.