My high school years were fraught with unrefined tastes. Four
of the five hobbies and phases detailed herein occurred during the Pre-Book
Brandon era—that is, the time spanning from birth to when I first willingly read
a book (age 19). I can make no better
argument for the importance of reading than the horror that you, brave reader,
are apparently poised to confront.
5) Linkin Park
Linkin Park released Hybrid
Theory fourteen years ago, and this album’s presence in my cache of CDs
serves as my personal warning against tattoos. In other words, what I consider
cool, refined, or exemplary of me will eventually be dishonorable, brutish and antithetical
to Future Brandon.
While working for my university’s newspaper staff one night,
a fellow editor denounced my musical taste as “average,” alluding to the chorus
of “Crawling” as evidence:
Crawling in my skin
These wounds they
will not heal
Fear is how I fall
Confusing what is real
Not exactly Shakespeare, I granted him. My friend seized the
opportunity, suggesting that liking Linkin Park and being snobby about
literature was a form of cognitive dissonance. While I did not care for that person at the
time and have since contented myself with the subjective nature of my own
musical taste, the encounter devastated me. He had deftly exposed that my very
core featured a rube and a faux-intellectual failing miserably to coexist. And
a Brandon divided against itself cannot stand.
4) Phog.net
A common interest forum for fans of KU athletics, this site
contains separate forums for different sports, as well as for politics and the
aptly named Ape Room (religion, pop culture, movies, Kate Upton, etc.). I spend nearly every waking minute with Phog.net
up on my browser. Even now, in the waning minutes of the work week, the tab is
there, beckoning and tantalizing me like the lights of Las Vegas. I am mesmerized
and compulsively drawn to it, like those who take their social security checks
straight to the slot machines.
The understandable aspect of the hobby is the thirst for
knowledge. Since KU basketball viewing is unabashedly my primary hobby, I wish
to be abreast of any development or piece of information affecting the team.
Are there any injuries? What is the spread for Saturday’s game? Is Doug
Gottlieb trolling us on Twitter again?
Unfortunately, my crippling addiction to this site also owes
to the omnipresence of debate. As a younger man, I avoided conflict—even virtual
conflict—at any and all cost. These days, I exchange verbal fisticuffs with faceless
strangers on all of, but not limited to, the following subjects: gun control, The
Walking Dead, soccer, the JFK assassination, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a
source of empathy, and whether Perry Ellis is a deserving whipping boy for the
board on the heels of a KU loss.
The realm is further appealing because typing things from behind
a computer screen is easier than actually speaking to other people who happen
to share my interests. (It’s both a warm memory and a harsh reminder of my
gutlessness that I first approached my wife on Facebook.) And though there’s no
mute button for people you’d like to ignore in real life, Phog.net extends the
handy Ignore feature for those posters who reek suspiciously of K-State trolls.
When I reflect with dismay on my diminishing social skills, I don’t have far to
look for the culprit.
At this moment, my go-to time waster “is temporarily
unavailable” due to scheduled maintenance. I feel like I’m missing a limb.
3) “A blind disregard for things other people liked until you somehow discovered their merit on your own” –Nick Sayre
Somewhere amid the tragic-comedy that was high school, I inexplicably
developed a contrarian nature. That is, I willfully resisted anything that was
wildly popular, perhaps as an unconscious attempt at recompense for some of
the regrettable dalliances yet to come in this post. If I clearly could not
trust others to tell me what was cool or worth my time, I would categorically
reject anything and everything that attained mass appeal. Beneath the veneer of
a Pro Cuts fade and GAP clothing beat the heart of a burgeoning hipster before
hipsters existed. I was anti for the sake of being anti.
And so it was that I refused to read Harry Potter until the
summer of the final book’s release. I also insulted my brother’s favorite band
with the witless epithet “Jimmy Eat Poop.” Those who know me at all don’t need
help in appreciating the irony, so I will only impart the following: One of the
best and most memorable nights of my life included both a Jimmy Eat World
concert in downtown Lawrence and the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. I sang along, word for word,
to every song. I devoured all 759 pages of the book the next day.
2) Dragon Ball Z
Commonly abbreviated DBZ, Dragon Ball Z is a Japanese anime
television series that was eventually dubbed into English. The show follows the
affable and casually powerful Goku, his son Gohan and the rest of the ragtag “Z
team”—defenders of a world that is unaware of their existence or the various
alien tyrants threatening to Alderaan the planet. The most appealing aspect of
the show is that the characters possess otherworldly powers: They can fly
(sometimes through mountains), move faster than agents in the Matrix, and shoot balls of energy through their hands.
In this respect, at least, the show is not unlike many of the science fiction
and fantasy films that have captured the imaginations of dorks across time and
cultures.
Why the embarrassment, then? The first reason is
self-evident: Dragon Ball Z is geared toward children. Though ostensibly a
violent show—even the weakest characters pack more punch than all of Pakistan’s
WMDs—viewers only occasionally wrestle with the concept of death. When a main
character does die, he can be revived
by a reptilian genie who can only be summoned when all of his “balls” have been
located. The second reason is that the show sacrifices everything for suspense.
Entire episodes pass with characters
hunched over, balling their fists and “powering up.” Between constipated
grunts, heroes and foes may exchange some terse dialogue. Though there are
plenty of titanic bouts between wild-haired combatants with powers that put the
Twelve Olympians to shame, the show’s creators devote most of their attention
in building up the importance of a given fight. In revisiting the epic Cell and
Gohan tilt, I discovered that seven minutes and forty seconds of show-time pass
before the two exchange a single blow.
Then there are the transformations. Once a character reaches
a certain plateau in his training, and looks sufficiently constipated, he manages
to transform. For Goku, Gohan, and the other Saiyans (did I mention that the
show’s main protagonists are aliens, themselves?) this involves a change in
hair color and eye color along with a substantial upgrade in strength and
speed. The result is always a sight to behold, but you could listen to Don McLean’s
“American Pie” and deep clean the bathroom before anything happens.
I’m only going to say this once, but my teenage brothers and
I owned the following DBZ items:
- Actions figures
- Wall scrolls
- A Vegeta button-up shirt (mine)
- Most of the seasons on VHS cassettes
Also, for my film class’s final project, I constructed a DBZ music video to the timeless P.O.D. hit “Boom.” You may mock accordingly.
Though hardly a source of pride, I’m retrospectively pleased
that I did not latch onto the show because of its popularity. My brother
introduced me to Japanese animation and this show struck some chord1 with me. I
only later learned—much to my astonishment—that other people my age watched the
show. During one fateful basketball practice, my shoes squeaked so badly that
my teammate quipped, “You sound like Cell from Dragon Ball Z.”
My eyes widened in astonishment. “You watch Dragon Ball Z?” His reply serves as
one of my favorite memories from high school (which should tell you quite a bit
about my high school experience): “Man, EVERYBODY be watchin’ Dragon Ball Z.”
As great as that moment was, it was later tarnished to some
degree when I realized that some of my teammates used “Let’s go watch some
Dragon Ball Z” as their code for “Let’s go smoke weed.”
1) WWF
During my junior high years, everybody who was anybody
watched the World Wrestling Federation. It was as indispensable to late 90’s coolness
as wearing Abercrombie and Fitch. The only excuse I can offer up for the
following paragraphs would be that conformity is essential to social survival
when you’re a teenager. If left to view Wrestle Mania in a social strata vacuum,
without the tastes of Southwest Junior High’s crème de la crème impinging upon
me, I may never have developed a passing adoration for a beer swilling redneck
giving people the bird and yelling
monosyllabic words into a microphone. But that’s not a luxury you have when
you’re 15.
The essence of professional wrestling lies in the spectacle
of two mammoth humans pretending to fight one another in front of a live
audience. Prior to that, though, each participant waits for the cue of his distinctive
theme song before emerging from behind the curtains, fixing the audience with a
basilisk stare, and dramatically making his way to the ring where, depending on
whether he’s a Heel or a Face, he’s cascaded with boos or applause. If the show
were this simple, though, my dabbling
would not serve as such a source of lasting shame. You see, televised wrestling
attempts to combine its easily understood hand-to-hand combat element with actual
story lines and drama. There’s endless plotting, ever-shifting alliances, and
near-naked women occasionally tussling in a pool filled with some sort of lubricant.
In short, it’s a poor man’s Game of Thrones.2
The fact that I watched the show—to say nothing of the time
that passed before realizing every episode was fundamentally the same—should be
reason enough for deep regret. But alas, I dug a deeper hole. Here, I’m forced
to reflect upon and lament just how oppressive an elder sibling I was during my
adolescence. Not only did I obsessively watch Monday Night Raw and incorporate
Dwayne Johnson’s tired catch phrases3 into my daily speech, but I forcibly dragged my brother Nick into the muck.
My family used to own a trampoline—an omnipresent mowing
headache in the backyard—that served as the confluence of my Neanderthal
comportment and my brother’s passivity. Rather than filling his free time with
any number of constructive and enjoyable pastimes, Nick endured countless hours
of receiving The People’s
Elbow and the Stone
Cold Stunner. He became quite adept at feigning the appropriate reaction to
whichever move I performed. I even made him play my theme song on a portable CD
player as I emerged through the screen door and onto the deck. Van Halen’s
“Right Now” filled Biltmore Drive’s summer air as I pounded a can of caffeine
free Pepsi ala Stone Cold Steve Austin.
And since I’m so fond of mocking the linguistic choices of
others, I’d be remiss to neglect mentioning one of the most embarrassing items
to ever exist in my own lexicon, thanks in equal parts to this wrestling phase
and a certain friend I had at the time: “Beasted” (verb). My friend would boast
of “beasting” his sister into the family room couch with a Powerbomb or German
suplex. Such stories and elaborate descriptions, unfortunately, only inspired
me to up the ante with the backyard brawls. It was thus with much trepidation
that Nick granted assent to me launching him off the deck and onto the
trampoline below. I can only imagine the deluge of spite and terror filling his
mind while on the receiving end of these airborne beastings. When I informed
him of my intention to write on this subject, his response was a rather
incisive commentary of our adolescent relationship: “There were times I didn’t
like you very much, but we’re cool now. This is where I cross you off the
to-kill list and relax with my guns and lipstick.”
Did not make the list on account of awesomeness:
Being at the Lake, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, Reading, Viewing Sports, Playing Sports.1 Likely nothing more than that it sparked a desire to blast my teenage foes into oblivion with balls of energy—I remember actively fantasizing about this.
2 I'm talking Eddie Murphy in "Trading Places" poor.
3 The most famous of which involved telling other adults that "it doesn't matter what your name is" and threatening to turn an eclectic array of items "sideways" before shoving them up the victim's "candy ass."
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