Ridiculous Opinions #216
Sometimes, I sit back and I think about how strange my life is. Sure, everyone feels like their lives are strange to a certain extent, but when I truly sit back and examine my existence, I sometimes get weirded out by how odd it is.
Yesterday, I had phone calls and conversations with people literally all across the globe. Tracey is in Denmark. My daughters are in Canada. My sister is in Tulsa. I did a Google Meet with four former students in Savannah, Vancouver, New York, and Abu Dhabi (Hello, former students!). And I ended the evening trading witty retorts with my best friend from high school, who lives in Arizona.
I was born in Oklahoma. How did I end up here? How did this dude end up living in Canada, China, Bangladesh, Ghana, and the UAE? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? I don’t know the answer to this question.
If you want some answers to some of these questions…questions of how I came to reach this point…then I offer you two examples. There are two television shows that I have watched in my life where I have sat back and said, Yes, that’s ME up there on screen.
One of those shows is Freaks and Geeks. This was my existence in high school, as both a freak AND a geek.
I was pretty much the Seth Rogan character in those clips.
Funny story as you watch the clip above. When I was sixteen, I got a fake ID. It was a legit Oklahoma license that I got from a guy named Mike who worked at a video store with me. I don’t know why he was so generous in giving me his driver’s license (something that wouldn’t work in this day and age), but he gave it to me and I ended up using it a LOT, because it actually looked like me. I was somewhat notorious amongst my peers as a 10th grader because everyone knew that I could purchase alcohol, so people would come to me to get them stuff for the weekend. I could get into bars! And the weirdest part was that, towards the end of that time with my ID, no one would even ID me! I would just walk in, grab a case of beer, pay for it, and leave. It would work because I was confident! I knew that if they ID’ed me, I’d just whip out my wallet, show them that I was 26 years old, and go on about my business.
That lasted around six months. Then, I went floating down the Illinois River with some friends and lost my glorious fake ID in the water. That was a sad, sad day for me and the loss of that ID was also the loss of the confidence that I had to go in and purchase alcohol. At that point, I would walk in, put the beer on the counter, and the cashier would say, “ID?” I would have no answer and suffer from the shame of being a lying liar. (Which might have precipitated a decline in confidence across the board, because I’m not sure I was the same person anymore after I lost that ID…maybe I lost who I really was as well! Oh, the symbolism!).
If you haven’t watched Freaks and Geeks, then you’re truly missing out on one of the greatest shows ever made.
The other show that I’ve come to realize symbolizes my youth is Reservation Dogs. It’s odd to say that about a show that deals strictly with Native Americans, but this was my youth! Half of my cousins were Cherokee (as my brothers are as well), so watching this show kind of flips me out a bit.
These are the people I grew up with. Those are the houses that I would visit on the weekends. These are the conversations that were had around me as a kid.
When I was a little boy, my uncle Plez (yes, that’s his name) used to pick me up on the weekends. He used to feel sorry for me, I guess, sitting around the house all the time, and Plez enjoyed being social (which he still does to this day). At the time, Plez was married to a Cherokee woman and it was an event to spend the afternoon with him, because we would go over to his mother-in-law’s house, which was a tiny place on the north end of town. Her name was Mrs. Drywater.
Mrs. Drywater’s house was the central hub for everyone on the weekends, and inevitably, we would hang out for a bit and then head off to the lake or the river to spend the afternoon barbecuing or swimming. I would hang with my Cherokee cousins, who would inevitably give me a hard time for being too chicken to jump off the bluff into the river or make fun of me for my complete and utter inability to walk barefoot across the rocks on the shoreline.
I bring these things up because, as one gets older, one starts to examine how they became who they are. This usually presents more questions than answers, because this kid who had a bitter high school existence and a childhood hanging out with his Native American cousins has been around the world many times over. Where is the through-line from point A to point B? How did I end up like this? It’s really a question for the ages.
So, as I sit here on a Saturday morning, writing this, that’s where my brain is at. Where’s your brain at?
