Boring Adults

Remember when you were a teenager and you looked around at adults and thought they were incredibly boring? No matter what, adults seemed old to me. For example, my cousins may have been 20 when I was 10, but that was an adult, so now that I'm 42 and they're 52, they still seem old to me even though we're not that much different in decades. Then I see silly kids in the store and I realize, they're looking at me and thinking I'm just some old, boring adult, too. And compared to being a stupid teenager, I am.

I sometimes wonder how any of my high school friends made it to adulthood without a major crisis. I was not that much of a risk-taker, other than running through cemeteries (and that's a whole other story), but some of my friends had serious issues. Like take my friend Joe (we'll call him). Joe was a great alcoholic our senior year of high school. Back then, the legal drinking age was 18, so it's not like he was breaking 50 major laws to buy the stuff...it was the driving afterward that was a problem.

Joe also liked to steal road signs, along with a couple of other friends, and he decorated his room with them. Of course, that turned out to be a really bad idea the time he drove drunk, sped, ran two red lights and four stop signs running from the police...and led them right back to his house, where he hid in his room.

But there was this one time that Joe pulled a great funny with the help of a sober friend. Joe's parents were out of town, so Joe was having the obligatory teen party. It was summer, so kids were milling around outside, inside - this is a half-acre lot, so plenty of milling room. I was in the den with a group of kids watching that horror classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Well, Joe's girlfriend picked that night to break up with him, so Joe picked that night to stand in the middle of the den, down an entire bottle of vodka and give her the bird along with the words that go with the bird.

Then he passed out on the floor, and since the show was over, we went back to the movie. (Remember, we were too young and stupid to think he might be dead) So Joe wakes up and slinks off to the garage. A sober friend followed him and caught him getting ready to fire up the chainsaw. NOT a good idea when sober, much less after a bottle of vodka and when said ex-girlfriend is still "milling" in the backyard. So the sober friend takes control - he removes the chain from the saw, fires it up and sends Joe in the house to terrorize people.

I have never seen people move so fast. Kids ran out doors, jumped out windows. It's a miracle things weren't broken in the fray - including kids. But it was funny. And still makes me wonder how some of us made it to be adults. Or heck, maybe some of us never did. I don't know where Joe is, but maybe he's still drinking vodka and playing with chainsaws.

What about you - surprised you or some of your friends lasted beyond the teen years?

Deadly DeLeon