A question I receive often is: Why did you choose to become straight-edge? I grew up in Podunk Town,USA (AKA Jacksonville,IL). Everyone in this town is infatuated with being drunk, getting high, and anything else that will help numb their brain from the fact that they live in a shithole of a town. When I was in 8th grade I met someone that would change my life, I didn’t know it then, but it’s true. I was wearing a Name Taken shirt at a local show in Jacksonville,IL and was approached by a kid roughly the same age as me named Brindan Freeman (and his shady friend/future fuckup Stephen McFadden). In a town full of thugs and rednecks, country & rap were the “musical stylings of choice”, but Brindan approached me and is like: You listen to Name Taken?!? The same band that wrote “The Safety Of Routine”?!?! I answered yes to both of his questions. Over the next 3 years or so we became really good friends, even after I moved to Springfield,IL after my freshman year of High School. Him, Matt Smith, & Future Fuckup would come visit me and we’d hang out and do random things and we’d have a good time.Something that initially bugged me about Brindan & Company was their incessant need for drugs, alcohol, and anything else they could use to escape their world. Brindan would always persistently offer me a cigarette, or a beer, or a hit from his blunt (among other drugs). I would always respectfully decline it, because I saw no point in any of these things. Flash forward two years into the future, I moved back to Jacksonville the summer prior to my Senior year of High School. Two months into the school year I was sitting in English class like any normal day first period. Over the announcements I hear: “We would like to send our deepest condolences out to the friends and family of Brindan Freeman. He was found dead in his car this past weekend at the age of 19”. I almost fell out of my desk, I was shocked and freaked out by this news. Brindan had overdosed on weed laced with crystal meth. So if I don’t seem too eager to drink, smoke, or do drugs, then I apologize, but some things come before highs, and it took a low in someone else’s life for me to come to that 100% realization. Along with Brindan’s death, I knew various people that had their stomachs pumped in High School, friends & strangers that have lung cancer and or voiceboxes thanks to cigarettes, and not to mention the fact that when my mom was in college she downed a bottle of everclear and had to get her stomach pumped and almost died then. If you think about that, I wouldn’t be here today if my aunt Alicia wouldn’t have found my mom unconcious on the floor and rushed her to the hospital. Also as a lot of you know, my mom died of sclerosis of the liver when I was 14 years old, a cause of this is due to her overdosing on morphine and the fact that it was pretty much eating away at her insides. I had a tough choice early on in life, I could’ve taken the path of drugs and been numb and not myself or I could’ve chosen to be myself and avoid altered states of conciousness, I chose the latter. You decide: Drugs or Me?