The calendar has switched to June, my favorite month, since it used to signify the end of the school year, still marks the beginning of summer, and this June, I cross the threshold of twenty-five! Birthdays make me analyze who I am, and how I’ve gotten here, so this week, I’d like to answer the age-old question: “If I could go back and do it all over again, would I do it the same way?” Would I? Are you serious? There’s no way—not again.
In retrospect, my life seems to be one quirky, random embarrassment followed by another, with the occasional pleasure carrot surfacing here and there in the soup bowl that is my life. The result is the alien reporting weekly to you, overflowing with semi and fully irrational fears and paranoia; an insomniac for life. I think by exploring why “I wouldn’t do it all over again,” I may convince some of you that my irrational fears are actually fully rational, and if anything, I’m surprisingly well adjusted, given my past. My first irrational fear is based on trust. As in, I trust no one. This fear and mistrust has arisen from my earliest childhood memory. Please, take a walk in time with me to 1985, in Vermont, near Lake Champlain. My family is at a family summer camp, and I’m on a camp rowboat trip. The day was bright and sunny, the weather mild and less humid than usual, and my 4 ½ year-old self was seated on the rowboat, next to a camp counselor in charge of about six of us rug rats. Before we left, I had told the counselor that I had to go to the bathroom, but she promised me that it was a short trip to the island. She promised.
I trusted her, because she was older, and therefore wise. But as the urge to go became too much, and despite my repeated warnings, the counselor refused to return to shore. She simply continued to row us along on her Cambodian Death March version of playtime. I imagine that she must have assumed that because I was so precocious (it’s my memory), I could hold it in like a big boy. Well, she was wrong (I still don’t feel like a big boy, Counselor Pol Pot) and to my horror, the water at the bottom of the boat developed a golden, rocky mountain Coors glow, as all the kids laughed at me. I thereby learned to fear transportation without bathroom access, and to distrust my elders and all authority. This was just the first rung on a ladder of failures that continue to plague me to this very day (I also fear ladders, STBY #3). Before I even got a chance to think about this whole “living” thing, I was thrust into the ruthless compulsory education system, beginning with a terrifying class called “kinder-gar-ten,” a governmentally mandated program that forces normal kids to play with malicious, sociopath kids who have most likely grown up to become successful military torturers, convicts, prison guards, or middle managers. But it was in this very pit of hell that I discovered love: I wouldn’t be the incredibly insecure alien that I am today if it weren’t for the first girl who would drive me crazy, by being everything I wanted, except that she wasn’t everything I wanted. But she was the first.
My first true love, Macy, was five and a third years old, and I was a far older, more mature five and two thirds. Macy would kiss me behind a tree after school when I stayed late enough to rendezvous, and I would leave basking in our love. But one day, I found out that she was two-timing me with my best friend, Michael L, who was equally crushed by the news that she was not his one and only either. Michael and I developed a strong bond over our mutually broken hearts, forming the first Alt. Rock Band in my High School history, “Evil Trout,” but I forever fear any girl who can make my heart leap.
Let’s jump to high school, where I learned that people come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and personalities: for example, there were morons, jerks, twits, nerds, snitches, brown-noses, jocks, druggies, dorks, dweebs, losers, and popular kids. I was fortunate enough to have a split personality that meant pulling off amazing, split second personality changes, going from a moron, to a jerk, to a loser, and back again, much to my parents’ dismay. In high school I learned how to smoke cigarettes, and then to lie about smoking to my parents and teachers. I also learned how to overeat, not exercise, and to drink too much soda, and by my senior year, to drink alcohol. The result was that by my graduation, I weighed in at nearly 275 lbs., again, to the dismay of myself, and probably my parents.
I also learned how to lie to cops. Two weeks after I finally got my driver’s license, I was pulled over for speeding in a school zone, and I cried to the cop to avoid the ticket, citing ‘a family emergency’ because my parents had warned me that any speeding violations would result in the loss of my privilege to drive – a threat akin to taking away a scuba diver’s oxygen tank, so, it was clearly a family emergency! But the thought of losing my license, the car, and my social life was actually enough to make me bawl like a little girl in front of a local officer – and it worked! I think I told so many lies to my parents and myself, that by the end of the journey, I was telling the truth to everyone, just to switch things up and keep everyone off guard. And I somehow managed to get into a college.
In college I learned to actually smoke cigarettes like a real adult, which means instead of chain smoking two cigarettes in a dirty creek behind the school on certain weekdays, I was buying packs in the morning, and sometimes the packs were empty that night. All in all, smoking has been the stupidest decision that I’ve made thus far, but they helped me to feel better about myself, and to do the only thing I really craved at the time, meeting girls. I was fortunate enough to date two incredible girls in college, and I always kept just enough distance between our hearts, thanks to Macy, that I never quite solidified what I would call a healthy relationship, but when you’re in college, you shouldn’t be focusing on health – unless it’s your major, and even then, you have to give a little to live a little.
After college I started my first serious rock band in Ithaca, New York. I can’t explain why I thought Ithaca would be an appropriate home base for a rock band, given that it’s the hippie Mecca of the East Coast, a town filled with jam bands and blue grass (as well as great grass to smoke), but nonetheless, I made the bitter icy tundra of Ithaca my home for two years, and it was there that I made the second biggest mistake of my life; beginning a career in the service industry. The only difference between a slave and a servant is that servants get paid for their servitude, and the only thing that made me feel any better about my indentured servitude at the time was when they aired Roots on PBS, because I was never literally chained up, and, uh, well, just think about actual slavery!
My older brother is a serial dater, enslaved to the chase for the perfect wife. Ever since he left for college, he’s used the Internet, blind dates, and even ‘speed dating’ to meet all sorts of girls. Me? When it comes to dating and relationships, I’m about as old fashioned as Root Beer, as shy as J.D. Salinger, as cool as Jerry Lewis, and as boring as an ant farm after you’ve had the thing for a week. This means that I believe in courting.
I rue the lost art of courting. It’s probably because I’m overly sensitive when it comes to trusting women, because of a camp counselor, some girl named Macy, and also because I’ve been cheated on and I was obese in high school. I’ve also witnessed so many awful relationship neurosis via my friends, that I usually can spot the demise of a relationship with a girl before the two of us have even began to date, let alone kissed one another. Call me crazy, but I like to know a girl for a year or so before I trust them enough to get to know each other on an intimate level. If only my camp counselor hadn’t lied to me in ’86, the world could have been my oyster, instead of a leftover Sloppy Joe in the fridge.
But the most baggage I carry from my past extends from being overweight in high school. It’s truly horrible to hate own body because of its weight, BUT—you do get what you deserve, and if you are overweight, and don’t like it, then do something about it, and this does not mean giving up and ordering a double whopper combo at Burger King. For me, after years of denying my own obesity, one day I realized that I was fat, when a kid in my high school gym class spent more than half an hour making fun of my body as we ran around the track. I should have realized it earlier, but I was too busy playing video games, double fisting lays’ potato chips, twizzlers, and coca-cola classics to take notice.
The funniest part about being an overweight male is that most women don’t really seem to care about the shallow qualities that most men focus on, like your build or culinary skills – and I wish to thank women for being so silly, I mean wonderful. Women tend to seek out men who have a nice smile or sense of humor, but few men will only date a girl that is well read and intelligent. I fall for girls who tell me how not to dress, who think philosophically, and who like to get drunk, because I hate shopping, I think too much, and drinking slows down the thinking. But physical attraction is important to me, and after losing more than a hundred pounds; I find that girls are less attracted to me than before, because I don’t have a cute beer gut. I missed another memo; beer guts are cute?
I’d like to close by offering some life lessons, from a man who has circled the sun nearly 25 times. And I hope that I don’t get any more comparisons to Andy Rooney, because he’s a cranky old moron, and I’m no moron, just old and cranky**. I’ve learned that you can’t please the right while you please the left, but you can piss off everyone if you declare yourself a libertarian, and speak your mind freely. I’ve learned that no matter what I write, someone will get offended or ticked off, and someone else will laugh, and doing both at once is fun. I’ve learned that in addition to the “I am a moron” asterisk, there should be an “I am a hypocrite” asterisk. I’ve learned that it’s okay to hate…Nazis. Hating something that is truly evil is not bad; because anything less can be construed as sympathy, and you don’t want to be a nazi sympathizer, do you? So here I am, nearly 25, still single, still smoking, still hating my body, and still chock full of personal issues. If I could go back and do it all over again, just to get back to where I am, why would I? Right now, I’m crazy and directionless. I don’t need to repeat the past, it wasn’t that much fun. No, I would change a lot: I would avoid rowboats, girls with sparkling eyes, potato chips, cigarettes, high school, and Ithaca, New York. And I would lose all the weight I did, yet somehow retain my beer gut. Because it would be fun to be “cute.”