You Can Never Go Home Again  

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“You can never go home again,” is something they say. Ok, but if home is where the heart is, we go home every day. No, they’re saying, you can’t go back to your childhood home ever again. I lived in my dad’s house for twenty years, and then I moved somewhere else a bunch of times for the next twenty years. After my dad passed on, I moved back into my dad’s home, and I went home again. It’s a different home now, but it’s still home, and it’s the same home I grew up in. 

“How can you stand it there?” the theys ask when they find out what city you call home. “It must be so boring.” Ok, but I view home as the place we return to after we go out. I don’t think time at home should be exciting. The definition of home should be home base, or place we return to after our exciting adventures.  

“That’s kind of the point,” they say. “Where do you go in your small city/big town to have exciting adventures?” 

“I realize you live in a bigger city with more people in it,” we say to them, “but what are you doing outside your home that is so much more exciting?”   

“I’m saying you don’t have as many options as we do.” Ok, but anytime we put a bunch of people together, they develop things to do. They post about functions and get-togethers, they build buildings to do things in, and they pay people to come to our city to entertain us. What are you doing that’s so much better? What’s the difference between Big City entertainment and Big Town/Small City entertainment?” No one has even been able to answer those latter two questions in a way that made me rethink my relative definitions of home, boring, and things to do. 

When residents of big towns, and small cities want to go out and have big adventures, they travel to “exciting” locales with their “exotic” sights, and when they’re done, they can’t wait to return to their boring home in their boring hometown.  

The big city, city slicker cannot imagine living in a city as small as small as ours, because they’re just too exciting, and they have to constantly have exciting things to do. That’s the headline, the thesis statement, and the takeaway we’re supposed to have in this conversation. Once we become friends with the city slicker, he concedes, “We don’t go out much. We’re pretty much homebodies.” We’re not supposed to catch the inconsistency, but when we do, and we call them out on it, we can tell that they didn’t catch their own inconsistency. Are they dumb? As a small city resident, I don’t believe we’re allowed to ask that question if we live in a smaller, less populated city, because we’re required to assume that size matters when it comes to intelligence, and I think we’re supposed to naturally assume that size matters when it comes to how exciting an individual is too. It genuinely surprises most city slickers to consider that they fell prey to their own big city fallacies. “I think I’ve heard that people question small city/big town residents on the excitement in their town so often that I never considered realities of it.”

***

All my people were boring, and I was born and raised in a boring house in a boring hometown. As a result, I’ve been boring most of my life. There were times when I went crazy with the boredom, and I made friends who said things like, “What are we doing here fellas, let’s do something.” They were boring guys who knew they were boring, from boring homes in a boring hometown, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t fill their lives with constant excitement. They, like me, were the literal definition of home boys, but that didn’t mean we had to sit around watching Who’s the Boss reruns, or chat in the boring manner my people did. I hung out with these friends separately, for the most part, and they kept me on the go, constantly, until we branched out to other boring fellas doing other boring things all the time in our boring hometown. We did so many ‘things to do’ that a lot of these things began to run together, until we didn’t appreciate most of the things we were doing. At some point, we just wanted to go back our boring home with our boring people, until we finally got back home, and we couldn’t wait to go out and do something again. 

There’s the rub, I’ve had blocks of my life with people like me who never wanted to go home after a shift, and we’ve partied so hard and so often that the parties started to lose their edge. What is “that edge”? That edge is a thrilling, momentary escape from the mundane activities of the every day. Yet, if you’ve ever had a block of life where you had so many friends, wanting to do so many things, we reach a point where we party so often and so much that we’re no longer escaping the mundane. We reach a point where we want to return to the boring side of life, so that the next parties are more exciting. The Big City, city-slickers purport to live exciting lives that the rest of us would never understand, but my experience with this fast-paced lifestyle is that if we don’t return to a base norm it starts to become more commonplace and it loses its edge?    

The “How do you continue to live in such a boring place with nothing to offer?” question reminds me of the old “Mean People Suck!” bumper sticker. One of the latter’s primary purposes was to inform those of us who see the bumper sticker that its owner is NICE!, as in all caps with an exclamation point nice. We don’t see this self-serving bumper sticker any more, but I would’ve to ask them to define the difference between mean and nice. I’m quite sure their reply would be just as self-serving, to which I would say, “Doesn’t this bumper sticker imply that you’re nice, and isn’t that a characterization you’re required to allow others make of you?” I have the same question for the The Big City, city-slickers who want to leave us with the impression that they’re movers-and-shakers, cosmopolitan types with so much culture in their system that it’s now bubbling up and out of their pores. They can’t identify with country bumpkins who don’t mind being bored. That’s their headline and their takeaway impression of themselves, but after listening to their bio, I often find them just as boring and unsophisticated as I am, you are, and the rest of the 50% of the planet that they just assumed they were better than.   

The Beauty and the Not Ugly 

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Women love a funny guy, but there’s one thing they love more than a funny guy, a guy who considers them funny.

I found this out when an extremely attractive woman named Julie agreed to go out with me. On this date, she informed me that I was “not ugly.” The idea that she and I were operating from opposite poles of the beauty spectrum was obvious to anyone who saw me walking into a restaurant with her. “What is HE doing with HER?” was such an obvious question on the faces of the other patrons in the restaurant that if one of them gave voice to their look, I wouldn’t have been too surprised.

I wasn’t sure whether I should feel more insulted or complimented by those looks, but I really enjoyed playing the “HE” role for the first time in my life. I wanted to be seen with Julie in public more than once, and then I wanted to do some awful things to her in private. After she allowed both without a fight, I let her make condescending assessments of my physical appearance without a fight.

And I don’t think I would’ve been able to do any of that if I didn’t laugh at just about every joke she told. Based on my very brief dating experiences with Julie, my first piece of advice to my not-ugly-guy contingent is if you want to date excessively beautiful women, be funny. If you’re not funny AND you’re not ugly, however, you won’t have a shot in hell dating a woman as beautiful as Julie, and I don’t care what those loser-dates-the-lovely-lady, 90s movies taught us about hope. There is no hope, because the excessively beautiful just have far too many options. They won’t even look in our general vicinity, because they don’t want to get us started.

I wouldn’t have had a shot in hell at dating Julie either if I hadn’t accidentally discovered an end around, loophole, or whatever you want to call it in the not-ugly-and-the-beautiful natural laws of dating: Beautiful women love it when men find them funny.

I know what you’re thinking right here, you’re thinking I faked it to try to seduce her. I had no master plan, and I have no talent for deception, and you can ask anyone who has ever played poker, chess, or any game with me that requires some form of deception. I cannot bluff. I learned at a very young age what a horrible liar I was, and how much I hated getting caught in a lie. I felt so bad about lying that I made the decision that I wouldn’t go through what I assume good liars have to go through to get better at it. Long story short, my laughter was not fake or deceptive. I genuinely considered her funny, but I must admit if a guy, or a not ugly woman, told the exact same jokes Julie did, I would’ve been much more critical. I was so attracted to Julie’s physical appearance that I found her jokes funny. Was I giddy? I think I was as giddy as a schoolgirl who has such a huge crush on a cute boy that she giggles at everything he says. It’s an embarrassing admission, but it worked. 

It worked, because Julie, like everyone else in the world, loves it when someone considers them funny. The one caveat I would tell any man who tries this is that you will have to avoid the temptation of telling your own jokes, and that’s tougher than you think. When the jokes start flying, we get caught up in the moment. We want to add a nugget here and there to the tail end of their joke, or we might be the type who just wants to keep the jokes going, so we add our little bits. Don’t! They don’t like that. They only want us to laugh at their jokes. My little, tiny attempts to add to the levity in room revealed to her that not only was I not ugly, but I was not funny too, which led her to decide that I was not dating material.  

It’s no secret that we all love it when someone considers us funny, but if you’re not ugly, and you have regular interactions with someone who is so far out of your league that you don’t have a chance in hell of being seen in public with her, try laughing as hard as you can at her jokes. It might not work, depending on how far down the not ugly scale you are, but if you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, what do you have to lose?  

The Not Ugly Limelight

I had a moment in my not-ugly life when I thought I might be attractive. It was a strange, almost inexplicable time that happened when I was barely a teenager, in the seventh grade. Three eighth grade girls and a couple of seventh grade girls expressed interest at the same time. This all too brief window in time made no sense to me, until I later learned that planets transit through zodiac signs to create aspects that affect an individual’s natal chart to trigger, amplify, or challenge energies. When I heard this, I rejected the notion outright, until I remembered this moment in my life. These weren’t the typical girls either, they were the most popular, best looking girls in the two grades. I don’t understand how the movements of celestial bodies could affect what we think, how we act, or how we verify it, but I’ve found no satisfactory explanation this. My guess is that my otherwise excessively pale face probably had some color to it for that brief moment in time, and that combined with the fact that someone convinced me that the center-part of my hair was no longer working for me. Not only did I start parting on the side, but I decided to start feathering my hair. I still don’t know if it was Uranus in retrograde, or my side part, but I do know I didn’t sell my should to the devil to experience what only the beautiful know for an all too brief moment of my life, but having this many females attracted to me at the same time never happened before all that and it hasn’t happened since. 

That’s right, my idea of what it must feel like to be a sex symbol peaked at age thirteen. When I received hints of their attraction, I decided that I was not going to get excited just because some girl just happened to look in my general direction, then at me, then lock eyes with mine, and smile. I simply pretended that it wasn’t happening, because I wasn’t going to allow my overactive imagination to begin interpreting what I thought I was seeing. I also didn’t want my aspirations to meet the tenets of the “The Bigger they are the Harder they fall” analogy. It took more than a couple of instances for me to realize these looks weren’t coincidences, this wasn’t a dream, and I wasn’t imagining it. I was shocked, stunned, overwhelmed, and a little terrified. I didn’t know what was happening, I didn’t know how to act, or if I should do something to end it before they found out I wasn’t who they thought I was. I wanted it to last, of course, but I had no idea how I could make this intoxicating idea that girls, real, live girls were actually interested in me, last. It was the closest I ever came to knowing what a Beatle, Elvis, and Marlon Brando must go through when multiple women are attracted to them, and I did not handle it well.  

I didn’t have to stress about it too long, however, as it ended almost as quickly as it began. Before I could consult with someone, or something, like a TV show, or an astrology reading, most of it was over. I don’t know if the tan faded, the hair wasn’t quite right, or the planets transited across other zodiac signs, but my options were limited to one girl: Rhonda.  

Now, when I say I was only left with Rhonda that might sound like I settled, but Rhonda might have been the best looking girl of the bunch. She was so beautiful that I remember having trouble getting to sleep when I thought of her. I couldn’t believe a beautiful girl found me physically attractive. It eventually became known, through intermediaries, that she wanted my phone number! Holy Larry! I thought this would prove to be an epoch in my timeline, a B.C./A.D. life-altering moment. It might have had a lot to do with my age I was at the time, how impressionable we all are at that age, or a reflection on how boring my life has been since, but the time I spent waiting for that phone call were some of the scariest, most exciting moments of my life.

The phone call obviously went well, as Rhonda and I shared approximately three more phone calls. I never thought this would last forever, but when she passed final judgement on me with a, “You’re boring!” ruling, the click on the other end of the phone reminded me of sound of a gavel pounding. It hurt like the dickens. It taught me that what a woman says about you stings far worse than anything a fella can do to you. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that I knew nothing about her, and she knew nothing about me. We absolutely had nothing in common, and therefore nothing to talk about. I should’ve been more interesting, but I was a thirteen-year-old, and my idea interesting subjects involved the NFL, the music of KISS, and Evel Knievel. I wasn’t well versed in topics that females find interesting, and the wife might say that I’m still not great at it. 

In the world of beautiful women, I learned that I was not ugly, not funny, and not very interesting. I was not what they expected, and the one step forward two steps back taught me my station in life, until I met Joel. Joel was a not ugly, not funny, and not very interesting compatriot who moved effortlessly from one table to the other in a singles bar. The women at the first table politely informed him that he was not welcome at their table, and the next one purposefully continued the conversation they were having before he interrupted it. I don’t know what was said at a third table, but when he left the women were laughing, and he was a darker shade of red. Joel came back to us, the fellas, his home base after each rejection, and he chatted with us until he spotted another table of women he found interesting. “How do you do that?” I asked him. “How do you just move to another table after being rejected like that?” Joel responded, but I can’t remember what he said. If he said something profound to sum up a philosophy that motivated him, I would’ve remembered it, but far more important to me was what he did as opposed to what motivated him to do it. My takeaway was, there will be moments in our life when someone will reject us for failing to be who they expect us to be, but we should use it to become who we want to be. How do you use being not ugly, not funny, and not very interesting? That’s up to you to figure out and find out. 

“That’s My Name, Don’t Wear it Out!” 

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“That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” was a sassy, cheeky way to respond to someone calling us out in the 1970s.

Generations who weren’t on planet earth when this line was in the hot space can’t believe we were so into it. When I put it in context for them and informed them that this was our playful way of saying that we did not fear confrontation, they didn’t say anything. I told them it was the equivalent of, ‘Hey, I heard you the first time,’ when someone confrontationally called our name out a second time. When I told them that line could engender a “Woh!” from onlookers, they couldn’t understand it. “It’s not funny, it doesn’t sound effective, and are you sure this wasn’t just a you thing?” ‘No, it was all over the movies, the TV shows, and the commercials,’ I informed them. ‘We really thought we were onto something with this line.’ I twisted and contorted this so many ways I wasn’t sure if I was trying to defend the line or pursuing the most objective response I could possibly get from the other generation, but when they said, “It just doesn’t work on any level,” the matter just closed. 

I could not be objective on this topic, because when this idiomatic expression, or saying, first hit the streets, I was in grade school, and all the cool kids were saying it. For a short time, it was the definition of a wise-cracking, cool fella making his way through the world. I tried to make it work for me to make it work for them, but I either didn’t have the level of creativity or the intellectual heft necessarily to pull it off. It was too situational, and I could never find the perfect situation. I don’t know if I needed an older brother, or a neighborhood kid to bully me into perfecting the nuances of such a situational joke, but it always sounded awkward coming out of my mouth. My struggle with this, even decades ago, left me almost incapable of providing an objective viewpoint.

Since I didn’t have anyone to teach me, when I’d hear the cool kids around me say the same thing more than once, I would ask them where they got it. How uncool is that? 

“It’s just something I say,” the cool kids responded, and I’d drop it after that. I didn’t know how to be cool, but I knew the pratfalls to avoid to appearing too uncool, and I knew it was so uncool to try too hard to figure out how or why something is cool. Cool is what it is, as they say. I knew trying to define the indefinable was not only difficult, it was self-defeating, but I’d obsess over trying to figure it out.

As usual, with someone trying to figure out something so nebulous and ever-changing, I overestimated my peers. I was always late to the party, but when I found out that the cool kids learned their favorite sayings from TV, movies, and music lyrics I couldn’t help but be disillusioned by the whole process. I thought the difference between cool kids and me was their ability to organically create sayings. I wanted to be them, so I copied them, and I thought more of them. Learning that their sources were as simple as mine made it feel like all that I wasted a lot of time idolizing them. Then, when I saw one of their favorite sayings appear in a wiener commercial, and I realized I really needed to figure this out because I impulsively thought less of them, but I also realized that it said something about me too, because they were my personal inspiration for what it meant to be cool?

Another huge inspiration for my definition was Danny Zuko, but when I heard him say, “That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” I was so late to the party that I didn’t know that all of the cool kids got this line from that movie, because they saw Grease long before I did. I was also surprised to hear Danny Zuko say it, because I didn’t think he needed it. I thought he was so cool, so charismatic, and so everything that I wanted to be that I couldn’t believe he was saying what we were all saying to try to appear cool. It was the first time in my life that I thought someone was already so cool that they didn’t need to do anything to achieve that lofty title. I thought he was the personification of cool, and he had that it quality that the rest of us would never know. I wasn’t sure if I considered his effort redundant or overkill, but it tainted the character in a manner I couldn’t quite grasp. 

I was an eight-year-old who knew nothing about screenwriters and directors. I didn’t know that their primary job was to manipulate us into thinking their characters were cool, and I didn’t know that casting agencies were hired to hire supporting actors for the expressed purpose of further manipulating the audience into believing that Danny Zuko was cooler than we were. I didn’t even have a firm grasp on the idea that there was an actor named John Travolta playing the role of Danny Zuko who had makeup people to enhance his skin, hair stylists to fashion his hair, and wardrobe personnel to fashion him into a cool character. I knew I wasn’t seeing 90 minutes of a person’s life captured for my enjoyment, but I didn’t know how manufactured and choreographed the images on the screens were. I just thought Danny Zuko was the essence of cool, and when I envisioned what it meant to be cool, he was my prototype. 

I’d love to say I quickly processed the difference between the definition of cool and cooler than cool as effortlessly as John Travolta, and the team behind Grease did, but I didn’t. It took me a long time to grasp. The writers, directors, and supporting actors made it look so easy to be cool that I developed my personal definitions. We all did. We learned what lines to say and when to say them, but when Danny Zuko used that line we were all saying, it exposed the effort he put into it. If a Danny Zuko needed to learn the lines of the zeitgeist necessary to get in the club, in other words, then everyone did. When I later saw other screenwriters and other directors pursue the cool motif for the characters of their movies, it further exposed the effort to me. Danny Zuko and The Fonz were my prototypes for cool guys, and the rest of them were frauds chasing after that characterization.

If we could be cool by following their formula, my mind went to how do I become cooler than cool? If everyone followed that formula, what would they think of me if I refused to follow it? 

The first thing I learned is no one appreciates a ‘dare to be different’ motif when it’s subtle and silent. We prefer the shocking and provocative definitions of that term. Quiet nonconformity doesn’t sell. It doesn’t impress people to the point that they want to be our friends. It confuses them, and they rarely seek to define that confusion. They often just back away. When we want friendships, especially in our youth, we have to offer the kids around us a comfortable place they know. I struggled with all this, until I lost my conviction, and I didn’t try to find it again for years. No one who knew me then, or now, would say I found a “cooler than cool” place, and if you asked them if I was even cool, they’d probably laugh, “I don’t think so.” They would probably also add, “But I can tell you that I’ve never met anyone quite like him.”  

That was kind of it. They knew I was different, but they couldn’t see how those differences were in service of anything, so I didn’t really see a return for my efforts. They just thought I was weird. 

Between ages eight and whatever age led to my personal age of enlightenment, I had no writers feeding me lines, and no directors giving me notes on how to project cool. I realized that I was on my own when it came to trying to figure this big mess out, because I wasn’t good-looking enough to play Danny Zuko, and my supporting cast was either not able or willing to play their roles in such a way that would manipulate our audience into thinking I was cool. The best course of action I found was “To be [my]self, because everyone else was taken.” I knew I’d run the risk of “impersonating my shadow” and I’d eventually become a shadow of my former self, but I already tried to be other people, I tried those masks on, and while I admit that it was a lot more fun than playing myself in this production, it never worked out the way I thought it would.