You know what they need at the start of high school? They need to get a bunch of 24 year olds to go into the school and find the poor teenager who looks most like they looked at the same age. They need to sit down with the kid for… I want to say day but I think it would need to be a week… and set out a 5-year plan for them. For many kids, this would include things like “whatever you do, do not ever… EVER drink from the drink fountains in the upper quad” or “don’t eat so many pies, eating pies every day will not only make you a fatty but it will also cause severe bowel concerns at an age that may be embarrassing” and that would be terribly helpful information. You could have a conversation about bullying, about which kids to hang out with and that it doesn’t really matter what group you are in… AS LONG AS YOU HAVE FRIENDS. But whatever, none of that mattered for me. I got through high school just fine, made some good friends and enjoyed myself. But I tend to forget a lot of the early years…
If I could wish to have been told one thing by a 24 year old messenger it would be this:
“Do not ever in your entire life, listen to 28 Days.”
And I wouldn’t have to forget year 8. My life would be pretty much complete… but now I have this hole inside me – it’s contained now. I have some kind of Iron Man-style contraption that keeps the 28 Days shrapnel away from my vital organs, but one day it will fail, and that day… I don’t even want to know what is going to happen on that day. I may as well go ride a horse home to Perth and sob into my Holden bedspread while getting stabbed in the face with a knife by some dude with a dirty mullet while he raps to me some beautiful rhymes about checkin’ his style.
In all fairness, I was 13 and trying to make it as a cool dude in high school. I even had a skateboard. After remembering the music I listened to in my early high school years, I really wish that I had been an emo or a punk or ANYTHING other than a gross bogan douche. Because that’s exactly what this music makes me out to be AND THAT IS NOT WHO I AM. And, as much as my girlfriend will tell you otherwise, I wasn’t a gross bogan, I was just trying to fit in.