This is sort of a story, sort of a memory, and sort of whatever lies between.
If you’ve seen the not-all-that-good movie Mr. Destiny, starring James “I’m Not my Brother” Belushi, you will surely remember the only truly meaningful parts of the movie: the moment where how history/destiny works is explained to the protagonist, by Michael Caine as taxi cab God, as the most boring and generalized version of a rhizome of sequential events. This leads the protagonist to a weird moment of euphoria by finding a new life where his greatest mistake was “righted” followed by his discovery that what he really wanted was the life he had as a lovable loser.
I saw that movie when it was a new video release, in 1991. I was a freshman in high school.
Not long after seeing the movie, my best friend and I had a weird moment. We were, as I said, freshmen, and my mom had dropped us off at the mall to hang out. In our Jay and Silent Bob style mall adventures (I guess we were more Broady and whoever you want to characterize my best friend as), we happened upon two senior girls who chatted us up for a bit then offered us a ride home. We did not take said ride, for my mother was coming to pick us up and in those days there weren’t cell phones in everyone’s pockets, so we had no way of calling her off.
I am 99% certain these two girls had a plan to haze the living daylights out of us, but with my best friend, this became our sort of young-in-high-school Mr. Destiny moment. One of the two girls was the gorgeous older sister of the first girl I ever had a crush on, the girl who in the fifth grade insisted I was her “husband” and who copied off me on all of our super difficult school work. As such, it wasn’t hard at all for my friend to embarrass me about how much I was surely attracted to the older sister. And in his version of the story, we’d have been suave super-hunks, sort of a Gerardo for the midwest set. He was positive that had we gotten in the car, life would have been different for two nerds.
I had no illusions about that. Ever. There’s no world in which I think that it would have been any more than at best an awkward ride back to our side of town and at worst a scarring hazing on the level of being stripped and having our underwear run up the flag pole. Even at such a young age, while I was a dreamer, I was also a realist. Popular older kids didn’t scoop us up and rescue us, and it was weird to think there was a world in which they would have.
But my friend literally never let this go. At our senior prom, he lamented how cool we’d have been if we’d brought college girls, convinced that had we gotten into that old El Camino the senior cheerleader and the vice president of the student body would have fallen not only madly in love with us but would have retained the oddest of all relationships, the young-cougar-reversed-girl-goes-to-college-and-still-dates-high-school-guy, or in other words the full unicorn. At various times he’d talk to me about this weird opportunity we missed, our Mr. Destiny moment.
It always made me laugh because of the simplicity of his logic. We were both teenagers with raging hormones, like you do. We talked about girls frequently, but unlike him, I wasn’t obsessed with sex. I never told him, but I’d refused my first sexual encounter numerous times, as I wasn’t ready myself. For him, though, that car ride was THE sexual fantasy: the older girls that in porn-movie-plot insanity wanted to pick up and deflower the honors student guys standing in front of the arcade in batman shirts.
If I were going to pick my Mr. Destiny moment from high school, it would have been one of these three:
- If I were going to think back on a missed love connection, there was this super-cool girl from a high school about 100 miles away that we saw three or four times a year at speech competitions. She’d hang out with us and play euchre between rounds, presumably because her duo partner– a guy– was friends with my best friend (who was my duo partner the first year before he swapped out and I ended up doing the same skit as this girl and her partner with one of the girls from our school). At the end of our senior year– at regionals– I was competing solo as was the girl from Blue River. For fun, between rounds, we did our old skit together, just to see how we’d do having never practiced with each other. We did… really well. Then we had that sitcom moment (which I feel so like I’m making up, but I swear, it happened) where she told me she wished I’d gone to her high school, or that she wished I’d come to their town to hang out. I jokingly said, “I should have asked you out,” and she said “yes, you should have.” I kind of wish I had.
- If I hadn’t destroyed my knee in a basketball game, I might have carried on the family tradition (ha!) of winning the county championship. That would have led to a different social status for me, if nothing else.
- If you read my post last week about my art teacher, I wish I hadn’t gone to him for advice the day that memory was from.
But honestly, I don’t believe in looking back, which is why the whole Mr. Destiny thing was sort of fascinating to me. He… messed up by undoing his big mistake. Like the Flash in Flashpoint, or like Dr. Who warns almost every episode. And my friend and I not riding across town with two attractive older girls is hardly going back in time to kill Hitler. Still, I’ve caught myself a few times falling into that rut of thinking “what if I’d just…” but I urge anyone who does that to follow this process, what I’ve been doing my whole life when I hit those moments:
- Ask yourself, realistically, what you think you missed out on, then logic check yourself
- Ask yourself what you might have actually missed out on if you’re realistic, if you don’t pretend that one little thing going different would have changed the essence of you and your life and your experiences
- Ask yourself if you honestly think you’d be in a different place— a better place– had you done one thing differently.
The truth is that it’s easy to dream, and it’s easy to second guess. But if there truly is a destiny for all of us, logic dictates that it’s built with more failsafes than for one little thing going different to change it all. We can’t romanticize the idea of destiny then pretend it’s as fragile as a robin’s egg.
If I look at my life–it’s been a bumpy ride. Anyone who has watched me knows that. I’ve almost died a few times. I’ve had to give up on well laid plans to read and react to many times I have lost count. I gave up on things that people thought were my dreams. I’ve walked away from things that might have gotten me within a finger’s grasp of those dreams.
But what did I want? Where was I going? What did I ever lose that I didn’t let go of first?
The biggest regrets of my life are lined in the brightest silver, are so clearly things that had to happen. And I can’t say I ever didn’t get something that I held onto, that life ever literally took something from me. It sure made a number of things hard, and I’m sure someday death will take things from me, but so far, knock on wood, I’ve managed to lock my claws into the things I wanted and not let go in spite of the roughness of the ride. I think the secret is that it isn’t easy, and it isn’t pretty. As long as you can suffer, as long as you can withstand, destiny isn’t going to take anything away. It’ll play chicken with you, but if you aren’t willing to take the hit, you didn’t really want the thing. That’s what longing is.
Life is about risk and about determination. And love. I think that might be all it is.
I wish I hadn’t sacrificed my initial run at college to come home and take care of an adoptive grandmother that disowned me. On the surface, that looks like a bad move. But if I had stayed in Bloomington, I’d have had a radically different college experience and would likely have never had the chance to teach so early in my life. I might never have realized I wanted to teach.
I wish I hadn’t destroyed my credit trying to hold my mom and step-dad’s life together, but if I’m honest, all the stuff that came after would have broken my credit anyway. At least I always got to know my heart was in the right place.
I wish I hadn’t blown my knee out, again, and spent 18 months in agony waiting to figure out how to pay for it. But living in pain like that gave me a bracing sense of clarity as to how people are treated, and the discipline I needed to control that level of pain made me strong enough to deal with what came next.
I wish I hadn’t gone all the way to Berkeley and started moving in before I realized I’d be miserable as a lawyer, but I also got to see that I could have gone to a top 10 law school and I could have relocated my entire life all the way across the continent in a rickety old van. Got that van back home with a roll of duct tape and a dream, too. I was working a week later.
I wish I hadn’t chosen my PhD program because of who offered me the most money and had instead gone to the program I felt the best about, but if I hadn’t gone where I went, I wouldn’t have my wife. 5 years of lackluster education and feeling like I wasn’t really understood was worth it for her. I’d have suffered more for her, but don’t tell anyone. I don’t want them getting any ideas.
I wish I’d realized sooner that I needed to switch academic disciplines, but if I had figured it out too soon, I might not have randomly ended up invited to the pancake breakfast where I met Glenn, and had I never met Glenn, I wouldn’t have the job I have now. I tripped trying to be something else into the right fit for who I am. That’s a pretty lucky happenstance.
I had lots of dreams in my life, but the big ones, if I’m being honest, were:
- To find someone who “got me” so I wouldn’t die alone. I was pretty sure love wasn’t going to work out for me.
- I wanted to be a professor, to be able to work with smart young people, to give back
- I wanted to write a book. Like a real book.
- I wanted to have a house so I wasn’t at the whims of a landlord
- I wanted to be able to take care of my mom, because I knew that while she was breaking her back to make chances for me, someday she might need the favor returned.
And for all the “mistakes” and all the dreams of do-overs, I got all those things. I’m at that point. Not beautifully, of course. I have scars and made messes and there are things to still fix and improve and make right.
But that’s the mistake that I think really paralyzes people. We, as Americans, expect everything to be perfect. When it isn’t, we either blame others for taking things from us or doing things to us, or we blame ourselves for not being perfect enough to win the day. But things are not perfect. Things, by their nature, fall apart (there’s a great book about that). We have to learn to be thankful for what we have, happy with what we’ve got, and not chase the perfect image. Because it’s not there. Even if you get to the optics, you won’t feel perfect. You’ll just look for the next thing to compare to, the next unrealistic image, and pursue it. That cycle cannot end well. If it can even end.
There’s dust on my living room floor. And there are a few boxes I haven’t broken down yet sitting by the entry room table. My office, where I’m writing this, is cluttered. The master bedroom a few steps away is succumbing in places to the fact that we have two dogs with black and white hair who shed living in it, and as two hard-working academics who couldn’t take the summer off, we haven’t been able to stay on top of cleaning all of it. There’s laundry to be folded, dishes to be cleaned.
The side of my car is dented up really bad, and I’d have trouble passing a spritely turtle on the highway.
To which I say… big fucking deal.
I have the house. It’s my mess. It will be taken care of, when there is time. The car gets me to work. I am surviving. No one is without food or utilities or a roof over our heads.
But my dream isn’t any less realized, any less valid, because I let some dust add up, because I should have mowed the grass before it rained, because I wasn’t energetic enough to pick up every fallen twig and instead made a little mound out of them to address later.
Look at our world. People are seriously, seriously messed up. A guy today jabbed me on Facebook with the taunt that if the counter-protesters hadn’t been standing in the street, they wouldn’t have been hit, then he referred to them as “stupid fuckers” and was glad the woman died.
THAT is someone who has a thick pile of dust and dog hair on his soul, a person who is buried under a series of bad decisions and wishes he could blame the world. He needs help.
I, on the other hand, screwed up today and posted some commentary on the Tina Fey skit from Weekend Update. I became enamored with the idea of the cake being “America” and choking her as she voraciously gobbled it down but still tried to talk about major issues. And she mentioned Standing Rock, which is sort of my trigger point. In defending that imagery, I missed some really messed up things that Fey said. So I apologized for making a mistake and deleted the post.
I didn’t ruin my life, though. I made a mistake. I reacted. I went on. I own my mistakes, because I’m a person and I cannot be perfect.
I don’t wish I could go back and not do it. What’s the fun in that? Why erase the flaws that make us aware of our existence?
It’s messed up to re-write your life over and over in your head. You’ll miss that it’s actually happening to you, like the person who is too busy staring at their phone to see the road in front of them then posts to Twitter about how annoyed they are to have hit a tree.
Your destiny is in front of you, mister. Stop looking behind you.
And tear down the statues to your redneck past. Ben Folds doesn’t want you to remember it.
Better things are coming. You gotta trust me on this one.