Every time I watch a movie or show with young adults at parties that drip down the edges of the room with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, I, for the briefest of moments, catch myself reminiscing about my own years spent young, horny, and carefree. I then remember that the only time I ever went to a beach for spring break while in college I spent most of that time reading a copy of Watchmen in the hotel room because I didn’t know how to talk to girls at parties and, besides, I’d probably get busted for drinking while under age. Never mind the fact I was six months from turning twenty-one.
I never really felt like a teenager. As a kid, I enjoyed toys and adventures outside with friends and Saturday morning cartoons, and then, one day, I realized I was a few months from graduating high school. I went from being a kid to an adult and never got to enjoy the life promised to me by AMERICAN PIE and its ilk. As I entered my senior year of high school, I looked around and realized that, while I had been carefully organizing my superhero trading cards into binders for the last three years, my friends had been spending their Saturdays at parties, Whataburger parking lots and, in general, anywhere else teenagers might get into the type of trouble expected of them
It wasn’t like I didn’t know any better. CAN’T HARDLY WAIT was one of my favorite films from high school but the rowdiest party I ever went to while in school involved a Playstation, a copy of CRASH BANDICOOT, two extra-large pies from Pizza Hut, and, after dinner, a VHS copy of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT for those whose parents let them spend the night. I could chalk it up to being a nerd, but I didn’t even get to enjoy the good grades that usually come with being a geek.
I often wonder about how my youth might have looked with access to social media. I came of age in the era of AOL. I remember, palms sweating, asking a girl for her AIM screenname on the bus after school. I also remember trying to cruise X-FILES chatrooms looking for teenage girls I might be able to flirt with. In other words, the briefest of tastes with the Internet I had as a kid were not healthy experiences. Social media probably would have killed me. I look at stories of incels ranting on Reddit and watch ultra cringe-inducing TikTok videos recorded by lonely dudes in their anime statue-filled bedrooms and I think, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
I’m happy to report that in college I finally blossomed and went to proper parties, perhaps even overdoing it on occasion when it came to drinking. Whether or not that time I passed out after puking up Tobasco sauce and tequila all over my roommate was because I spent my Saturday nights in high school doing puzzles with my mom is a question that may never truly be answered but here’s what I do know: I have no regrets when it comes to my college years.
High school, though, feels like a big missed opportunity, at least socially. This has weighed on me recently as I started thinking about a writing project I’ve been noodling on. I want to write something that might be traditionally classified as YA - a story about teens doing teen stuff - but I don’t know if I have the lived experience to write about what it feels like to be a teenager since my teenage years are a black hole of social experiences.
I could always write about being a lonely 16 year-old-boy - the type of male specimen who, after two back-to-back viewings of SWINGERS, buys a Dean Martin CD and starts shopping from the rockabilly section of Hot Topic, but maybe there are already enough stories like that out there in the world.
You can’t change the past. My teenage years are gone and they’re never coming back - evidenced by the fact that nowadays thirty percent of my body aches in a way that signals that’s just how my life is going to be now. I don’t think I would necessarily even want to go back if I could. I watch these movies about young people at parties and it all just looks so exhausting and wet. Not my scene at all.
Maybe I should write a book about a 16-year-old whose ideal weekend plans involve designing an Angelfire website dedicated to the Mighty Mutanimals. After all, that certainly sounds like exactly the kind of low-stakes, limited-wetness thing a 39-year-old man whose elbows hurt from a day spent working at a computer would want to read as he’s getting ready for his 11 PM bedtime.