reindeer games

i know you all love me for my rock&roll lifestyle full of cheap cars and fast women (or is it the other way around?) but you know it hasn't always been like that.

when i was in junior high i was not 'popular' but wanted to be, very badly. it's just that whenever i tried to talk to one of those kids my brain would seize up and i couldn't think of anything to say that would be cool enough, flip enough, witty enough. the worst was the time that a teacher needed someone to bring something to the office so she assigned me & a classmate to go. a popular classmate, a cool classmate, a classmate i wanted to impress with my boundless (but heretofore unexpressed) moxie.

but as we started walking my brain did that thing and i couldn't say anything and the longer we walked in silence the worse and worse it got because the monologue in my head kept escalating: "oh god now you haven't said anything at all for two whole minutes! say something! but it better be really damn GOOD after all this silence! now it's been even longer! you suck!!" the necessary perfection of whatever it was i was about to utter kept rising with each silent step. and so i never said a word the whole way there&back, and those ten minutes of selftorture are indelibly imprinted on my psyche, even all these years later.

and that stuff comes back in the weirdest ways. like when i've neglected my blog for a three-day weekend and i can't even say "oh i was too busy to write because i was earning my nobel prize" or anything worthy like that. the thing is, i was just lazy. and if the first post-silence post isn't mind meltingly impressive, maybe you'll let me sit at your lunch table anyway.