Stupid Boy Tricks

Being politically aware in high school still didn’t stop me from achieving new and greater heights of male stupidity. I think my favorite by far was the time I spent jumping on a trampoline with Heather and Erin in the middle of a thunderstorm. Outside, of course. I don’t think we clued in to the dangers until a huge bolt of lightning snaked down and cracked right as Heather was suspended in mid air. I remember we all asked “Are you okay? Did you get hit?” And she really didn’t know, I mean, she could have been hit, her hair went all funny for a second. She’s a 911 dispatcher now. She used to drive us around and around on the speedway in her second hand car. Anyway, after jumping up and down on a trampoline in the middle of a thunderstorm, we ran across the neighborhood to my crushes house, and I remember she gave me this weird look like “Why do you do stupid shit? What the hell?” But I was also in a wet t-shirt, so that “You nitwit” look didn’t last long.

I was a clumsy boy though. So clumsy. My body didn’t make any sense. I showed my cousins how I could bend my arms once and they were like “OMG! You’re a freak!” I had to stop hitting myself in the chest for fun and that sucked. And then all my tomboy girl friends suddenly started trying to be girly and figuring out how that worked, and that was really funny because they usually ended up thinking the whole world sucked. I remember I had one friend who just had this run on commentary on how people sucked and I was just like, yes, that has some factual truths to it. And then my masculinity model was James Dean of course, so it got more bizarre because suddenly I was a rebel and a girl. And I remember part of trying to understand femmes lead me to rent every Marilyn Monroe movie. And I thought, this sucks, all she does is stand around smoking! Is that what girls do? Of course Marilyn in real life had her own deep issues.

And then my cousin had a porn stash that the family tried to burn, but there was a prohibition on burning in the city so they had to put it out. And when I raked the leaves, which was always my job, I started raking up all kinds of hardcore porn. I was like, what the hell? Why do I get the weird jobs all the time?

When my model airplane paint spilled under my bed and got me high in the middle of the night, yeah, that was probably another really good stupid boy trick. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to clean up oil based paint while high, but it’s not much fun. I only ever finished one model, the Titanic. And that seemed good enough for me. Such a pain in the ass. I tried to make Kit, the car from Night Rider, but someone vacuumed up part of the internal combustion engine and I was so picky that I never bothered to finish.