I definitely chose those words carefully, and I stand behind them still. But you’ll notice for instance that the lyric is “Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t fuck, at least I can fucking think.” So first off, I use a grammatical trick in there: the fourth line modifies the first three. The first three sound like directives or order: “Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this.” The fourth line says: “But at least I can fucking think!” Which clearly says that I don’t do these things - but I can think; I may not be like other people, I may not party - but at least I can think, at least I got that. You can even see on the lyrics sheet that the world “I” is put in parenthesis, which was a result of long discussions within the band. Some people in the band were very concerned that kids might read the whole thing as a directive, while I was less concerned about it. But that’s part of me, I’m rather unapologetic about stuff. I’m more like, “Fuck it, tough on them!”

Then there is a second thing that’s important in those lyrics. If you look at the words “don’t smoke,” everyone figures I’m talking about smoking cigarettes, or grass, or hash; “don’t drink” - everyone figures I’m talking about alcohol; “don’t fuck” - everyone figures I’m saying, “No sex!” Think about that! Think about the word “drink”: what does “drink” mean? Do you think that people would ever figure, “Oh, he wants people to no longer take any beverages, or any liquids of any sort?” But when the word “fuck” comes on, they cannot understand it the same way. That just blew my mind. What I was clearly discussing was abusive, quest-oriented, manipulative sex. People who were not interested in other people’s feelings, but only in getting off. I saw as a teenager that people’s energies were so squarely caught up in getting laid that a lot of pain and hurt came with that. People were being hurt and damaged and traumatized by other people’s behavior. I knew women who were raped by people who did not care for anything other than getting off. And I just thought that this kind of obsession was not healthy.

So, straight edge, the whole idea, the whole concept was really anti-obsession. If your whole world is committed to this one thing, then clearly it’s not a good situation.