STORY OF MY LIFE - Here's Your Fuckin' Double Burger

It was the brutally cold winter of 1997 when I strongly began to question the consistency with which I awoke at 6:30am to floor my 1988 Ford Escort down the most dangerous freeway within 100 miles.

Destination?

Earth Science 101, where I had the pleasure of either A) actually rewriting the text word for word for 90 grueling minutes, or B) finding a hand written note taped to the door stating that class was canceled due to weather, with something like “Rewrite chapters 12-15 by next week” scrawled across the bottom.

This was the first course that I dropped. It was the correct decision. I was so angry on mornings like this that I'd go roaring back down Rt 47, stopping off for fast food & another pack of the same cigarettes that I swore I was giving up the day prior.

Double burgers, Newports, Bud Heavies, and a brooding resentment of the American Dream... the diet of miserable teenagers everywhere.

Community College was not the place for me. I fully understood that it saved my parents some serious cash. Plus I could also work & save during my 2 year stint and not have to take up employment once I took foot in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in the fall of 1999...

Well, that was my plan out of high school, but as the days grew shorter and the nights ever more frigid, so too grew the fear that I had no idea why I was taking these classes in the first place. I wasn't learning much and as far as I was concerned (based upon the books that I was unable to read due to the assigned literature) was possibly in reverse, becoming even dumber by the day.

It was on one of these obscenely cold nights over Christmas break that I was coerced by some little fast assed girl home from the University of Becoming a Slut to go see the freshly released theatrical giant, Titanic. It was a fair enough trade as far as I was concerned and certainly nothing smoking weed couldn't turn bearable. As we ran across the icy pavement from the car to the ticket booth, I saw my buddy Sebastian off in the distance under similarly deplorable circumstances.

We laughed and made fun of each other for the girls in tow and were throroghly amused that we'd both been conned into seeing Titanic. It quickly became apparent that we were happier to see each other than to be seen with our dates, and he suggested that we ditch 'em at once to go see some shit called Good Will Hunting.

“I heard it's great...”, I can still remember him saying.

“Yeah, whatever dude, let's break the news to these broads & get inside... Fuckin' arctic chill out here!”

This still goes down as my greatest movie date of all-time. For anyone who knows Sebi knows that he is significantly better looking than anyone else I'd have been at the movies with in 1997, and WOW this movie... Good Will Hunting... I'd never seen anything like it.

I loved the story, the dialect, the screenplay, the cinematography, the score, and was dying to know who was singing the songs that I assumed would fill the soundtrack.

I spent the better part of the next few years suggesting Good Will Hunting to anyone who seemed interested. At the same time I was trying my damnedest to come to grips with the fact that I was done with school without any direction what-so-ever. I had no idea what I was doing or how, but a damn good sense of what I wasn't going to become as a result. I spent much of that time contemplating the misery of my options & surroundings listening to Elliott Smith songs while drinking Johnnie Walker Red.

It's a hell of a path to take, but it always seems that in these darkest hours I've found the most interesting people with the insight to expose the sham for all it's worth.

Good Will Hunting, the movie, armed me with all the ammo I needed to justify a lot of the questionable decisions I've made over the years.

Its soundtrack, guided by Elliott Smith, has comforted me in the fact that most people like me aren't ever that happy with day-to-day Americana. I'm an angry, resentful, seething at the fangs muthafucker... quite polite really, but unable to buy into happiness via the path of anyone else... Especially those poor souls too caught up in the show to admit the shame behind the makeup of any suburb near you.

Sebi eventually went on to find his way as a social worker, I've always felt largely due to the impact this movie made on his life.

And in some ways I guess I still feel a lot like Will, driving down the road in his old junker of a car with nothing but unanswered questions on the horizon.

The people you've been before / that you don't want around anymore / that push and shove but won't bend to your will... I'll keep them still.