I’m back from the first leg of my Werewolves Across America tour. I spent exactly two weeks on the road - visiting ten Texas movie theaters to screen different werewolf films and sell copies of WHERE WOLF before taking a week off to visit the Southwest with my girlfriend as we slowly made our way back to Houston across Arizona and New Mexico.
One of my favorite parts of the first half of the trip was getting to reconnect with old friends from college. Whether it was a pal I worked at The Battalion with while attending Texas A&M or my three college roommates, I had a tremendous time catching up and reminiscing about the good ol’ days. As we swapped stories about our hellraising days, I was struck with just how different a person I am than I was in my twenties. Especially when it comes to my sense of humor.
(For the record, I still think it’s funny that I once pitched an article to The Battalion where I would take an Ouiji board to Kyle Field and set up a table next to the graves of the fallen Revilies, asking pedestrians if they’d like to ask the dead mascots a question. All the answers would, of course, be “B-A-R-K.”)
I was reminded of jokes I told, stunts I pulled and boasts I made - some ranging from fairly innocuous jests told by an immature twenty-year-old to some which would have rightfully gotten me canceled and shunned by the public if I made them today. I told my friend Aaron about a habit I have gotten into where - every day - I look back at my Facebook Memories and delete posts that I now cringe at. The first year I did this, most of the posts I deleted were ones in which Aaron and I roasted each other - calling each other horrible names and slurs in an effort to be more shocking than the other.
I described my daily habit as inoculating myself from consequences but it is also very much an effort to bury the parts of my past that I’m embarrassed about.
When we are young, we make stupid decisions. Sometimes those decisions are relatively harmless, like putting a Pop-Tart still in its packaging into a microwave and accidentally causing a small fire. Sometimes, though, those decisions can have more lasting consequences. As somebody who has always tried my hardest to make my friends laugh, I have been guilty of crossing the line of good taste too many times. I’ve told jokes that are not only offensive but are cruel and put actual harm out into the world. I, of course, regret those jokes, and - thankfully - 95 percent of them immediately dissipated into the ether of communal memory because they were told over a beer or microwave Ramen Noodle package instead of posted on social media.
I believe that a big part of being a young writer is trying to figure out what your voice is. I’m still figuring out my voice as a writer. There’s a joke in WHERE WOLF I’m actually really embarrassed about and regret including in the book. Sometimes that self-discovery process means pushing against the boundaries of acceptable taste. Writers feel a need to see just how shocking and outrageous we are comfortable being before we pull back into our permanent safety net of good taste. The problem is that, when I was in my twenties, social media was in its infancy and so much of the outrageous content I would post was never seen by the world at large. Nowadays, though, kids’ Tweets and TikTok videos can go viral and become a permanent part of Internet history - an inescapable tether the poster must then wear latched around the leg for the rest of their life.
I feel bad for today’s generation of kids - on one hand, they are more connected to the world than any previous generation. They can share their art and words with the entire globe and find an audience out there, no matter how niche that audience might be. On the other hand, today’s kids are having to figure out their mistakes in a public forum, for that same entire world to see and laugh at.
I really enjoyed catching up with my friends, even if I cringed at some of my behavior from my twenties. We can learn from the past, but we can also laugh at it. It becomes harder to laugh at the past, though, when it never becomes the past - when the things you say and do when you’re twenty-three are still permanently etched on your identity as you turn forty-three.
It’ll be interesting to see what society looks like in another fifteen years. Will our goldfish brains just learn how to conveniently ignore the mistakes of our past, even as those mistakes are easily accessible to look up on the Internet? Will we become a more forgiving society, willing to acknowledge the fact that people grow and change? Will we learn to just be on our best behavior at all times in all places, regardless of how old we are?
For several years after I graduated college, I was asked during job interviews about a picture of me that would show up when you Googled my name - that of me being attacked with a Stun Gun. Recruiters would ask about the photo and why it was on the Internet. I learned to tell the best possible version of the story (“It was for an article I wrote for my student newspaper”) and omit the details (“I wanted to see if I was potentially immune to the effects of stun guns so I could embark on a life of crime”). Eventually, I posted enough crap on social media and wrote enough articles and reviews for online publications that the photo of me was pushed off the front page of my Google search results. I was able to escape that part of my past, like a snake shedding its skin. I only hope that today’s kids are also given that opportunity.
By the way, you have to look pretty hard to find that photo of me being Tased.
Or just look below: