My Secret Career 33: Rite Of Passage, 1996

New York. Upper West Side. 1996ish.

I wasn’t admitting a lot to myself or anyone else. It took a lot to speak as plainly as I do in this song.

I had been expressing myself like someone transmitting sensitive details across enemy lines. Truth could not be plainly spoken. I twisted my words into impossible knots in order to remain camouflaged.

This was as direct as I was able to be. I avoided reflective surfaces. Every piece of clothing I owned was used in service of a disguise.

The pose was exhausting and exhaustive. The only way to decode the content was to have access to the cryptography program that encrypted the information in the first place.

And even I didn’t have access to that key. This song was a shocking breach of security.

Here is Rite Of Passage off of 1996’s “Beauty Is Ordinary” by Onion.