Monday, July 16, 2007

Stoned Eternal

I spent alot of time over the last week with my brother-in-law Matthew who is a freshman in High School. Matt is on the wrestling team and I've seen more pubescent boys grinding on each other while wearing orange spandex singlets than anyone should ever see...Unless your into that kind of thing in which case I wonder: why are you into 14 year old boys in orange singlets, ya freak?!
So, i've been in and around a high school for the first time in many a long moon. When I was Matt's age...(wavy flashback lines here)
The year was 1992. Nirvana was on the radio, rational intelligent people actually wore flannels and long johns in 97 degree Houston weather, people still wore the mullet with no sense or irony, and I was not the vigorous specimen of manhood you know and admire. I was a pudgy chipmunk-looking doofus in a Catholic School boy uniform reading Plato in the back of a class full mostly with Neaderthals.
What I noticed this week how much had not changed in the 13 years since I was a high school freshman. For example the stoner kids were still wearing bell bottomed raver pants or baggy jeans and a Nirvana/Doors/Jimi Hendrix shirt. It was like a glimpse into the past where the stoners wore Doors/Jimi shirts even though both had died years before our birth as Kurt Cobain too had died before these kids were born. They spent hours brooding and drinking coffee at Ihop/Denny's/Waffle House and smoking endless packs of Marloboro Light 100's along with the Gothkids who also bear a striking resemblance to the dousche's that applied eyeliner to themselves over a decade ago.
Kids like Matt are kids like me. Dorks that play video games and watch movies and hang out with other dorks oblivious to the fact that there are these things called girls and vaginas. While I remember lamenting girls not liking me because I was dork and not a jock, I also remember how much fun I had with my friends many of whom I still count as my closest friends to this day. I'm also consoled in the fact that I am getting a Master's in Film and have already had a movie in a major film festival and am happily married while most of the popular kids in high school are working at Jiffy Lube and have 5 kids and live in a double wide in Sugarland and the burnout stoners mostly still work at Starbucks in Clear Lake.
We dorks and nerds are like the Buddhist middle road, neither the hyper reality of the Jock nor the delusional blacklight and patchouli haze of the stoner and Gothkid. We are the poridge goldilocks ate. Then I ate her...OOOH! (sorry)

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