Dick Says: Dick's Mental List of Youthful F*ck ups

People now ask me if I am married and/or have kids these days. My initial reaction to this question is often something along the lines of "brah, I just blew $200 on heavy metal records and spent last night drinking expensive craft beers while playing Doom", but I often opt for a significantly vaguer, more conservative reply. Regardless, this has made me come to realize that I am now a grown man.

Having successfully survived my adolescence without ending up rehab and with all limbs intact is quite an accomplishment. At times I will sit back, lukewarm slice of pizza in hand, and reminisce about my days of yore. A popular hypothetical question I often ponder is "if you could tell your childhood self anything, what would it be?"

WELL LEMME TELL YA!

1. Skateboards and playground equipment do not mix!

I was fourteen years of age and the summer before high school had just begun. I was out skateboarding around early dusk and the unsophisticated appeal of simple, flat pavement had proved to be intolerably tiresome for my session. Logically, I began to seek thrills elsewhere. The "ah-ha moment" occurred when I spotted a large, metal school playground slide in the distance. I climbed to the top, figured I could drop-in on this bitch no problem, and immediately ended up with a compound forearm fracture while screaming my brains out. For the remainder of the summer I was treated to having a massive, sweaty, stinky, neon-green cast to lug around with my dumb ass as some sort of makeshift scarlet letter to proclaim my stupidity. Other kids were busy enjoying themselves outdoors with the usual reckless abandon while I tried to figure out how to work a computer mouse with my left hand.

2. You can safely ignore 99.6% of what your school counselors tell you!

At the age of seventeen, no one knows what the hell they want out of life. College was this mystical beast where you supposedly got shipped off, set up with the coolest roommates in the world, laid, and then handed a respectable job after four years. Of course "HOLY shit, YOU AREN'T IN ALL THOSE ADVANCED PLACEMENT COURSES SO YOU MIGHT AS WELL ATTEND COMMUNITY COLLEGE AND PURSUE THE CUSTODIAL ARTS, KID" is more or less the response I managed to elicit from my guidance counselor. I ended up setting the bar a bit lower for the colleges I wished to pursue and when I finally got accepted, nearly grew peptic ulcers worrying about how I was going to survive my first year. Everything turned out fine and I deftly handled the new collegiate schedule of waking up at noon to attend classes where you weren't taught like a moron for once. I proceeded to graduate with a decent GPA and got a job that makes me want to not die.

3. That stupid digital storage media is going to be obsolete in a few years!

To call myself a teenage pack-rat wouldn't come close to doing justice. Somehow, my adolescent brain thought it was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to systematically preserve every piece of media I ever got my hands on because GOD KNOWS that 128kbps encode of NOFX's "Ribbed" was going to be IMPOSSIBLE to obtain twenty years from now. I had folder upon folder of burned CDs in every conceivable color and brand with chicken-scratches vaguely indicating what was contained. Better yet, who woulda thunk that my $19.99 DVD of Fight Club was going to be inevitably be replaced by a future format with greater fidelity and features? I've been tossing out mountains of CD-Rs for the past few years because now I can instantly simply hop on Netflix or load up a virtually lossless rip of something stored my multi-terabyte hard drive.

4. Wine has pretty high alcohol by volume content and does not bode well on an empty stomach aka "Hola, la cuidad de vomito! ¿Como estas? Me llamo Ricardo!"

After attending a Saturday night punk show at a local community hall, my teenage cohorts and I concluded it would be in our best interest to top the evening off with a glass or two of fine wine. After multiple heaping mugs of the driest, sweetest wine I've ever tasted ("Hey man, I AIN'T FEELIN' shit YET") things started to get ugly. I spent the majority of the evening ralphing in a laundry tub and was in a near-death state for the remainder of the weekend. Come Monday I was still hungover as a dog and unable to consume any sort of solid foods the Michigan public school system had graciously prepared for me.

Kids do some dumb shit, however, it was the great Nietzsche who once said "what does not kill me, makes me stronger". I'd say this applies adequately, minus the hoarding burned CDs part (for which I will quote Judy Carne with "sock it to me").