As I sat on the Project Graduation bus headed for Sugarloaf Mountain watching Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s ode to teenage aimlessness, I realized that not only did I envy the characters’ near-impossible good looks as a group, but also their ability to sit back and relax.
The film takes place on the last day of school for a throng of Texas high school students. Other than repeat senior and perpetual asshole O’Bannion (played by Ben Affleck with unbeatable asshole energy), none of them have needed to take any time to reflect on what life might mean as they leave those hallowed halls once and for all the following year. They know what awaits them when the summer sun stops shining and it’s time to report for early football practice. Come next school year they will see their usual friends, taunt some incoming freshman, study… perhaps, get high, hang out and maybe even sign the pledge that will allow them to play football, provided they don’t partake in any of the things just mentioned. Matthew McConaughey’s character will still be hanging out at the pool hall, handing out beers to the underaged boys and his phone number to the underaged girls. On this last day of school, they’re all secure in the fact that their biggest worry is where they’re going to party that night and if they’ll be able to score Aerosmith tickets the following morning. The worries of GRADUATION are still a full school year away.
For me and my classmates, graduation was an unclear and present danger. We had collectively waited for this day for an entire year. There had been sittings for awkward and instantly dated senior pictures, often airbrushed despite our shining, and in my case, sweaty youthful glow. We’d never look better and more unlike ourselves again. Senior quotes had been carefully plucked from songs and favorite books, thought out and repeatedly changed, never quite satisfied with how those one or two sentences encapsulated us and our angsty, ever-evolving identities. College applications, endless financial aid forms, enlistment papers, and countless other government papers had been collectively filled out. Each signature line getting us one step closer to who we were supposed to be once our adult lives began … which would be at the end of this trip in less than twenty-four hours. I couldn’t speak for the roughly fifty people that I’d been seated next to on buses all my so-called life, but I knew I had no fucking idea what I was going to do.
So while the teachers and chaperones on our fun bus watched the movie alongside us on tiny televisions with a growing sense of unease about everything on screen, one question popped into my mind and stayed there with tenacity the rest of the evening.
Why had I never bothered to make a bong in shop class?
Did I limit myself by only making ceramic Santa Clauses for my mother and plexiglass keychains for myself? I was going to go to college for engineering so surely I could’ve said it was something else when the church-going Industrial Ed teacher would question its construction. Why didn’t I manufacture something as illicit and reputation building as a bong?
The answer to that question is sadly rather simple to answer. I was, for the most part, a goody-two-shoes. (Don’t drink, don’t smoke … what do you do?) Everyone in my hometown either grew pot or knew someone who could get it, so it was readily available to my peers. Same with alcohol. Everyone had at least one alcoholic relative who kept too much around and didn’t keep tabs on it. So other than the rare drinking binge my senior year, once I’d been early accepted to college, why didn’t I get high? At the time I would’ve told you I just didn’t feel the need, but anyone who has sat and listened to a story about a good time that you weren’t invited to can easily convince yourself that you didn’t want to do that anyway, so it certainly doesn’t hurt you even the slightest that you weren’t invited. They probably didn’t ask you because they knew you’d just say no. Right? But damn, despite years of cultivating an image as someone who was above that type of behavior, I can tell you now I would’ve sold my ass out in a heartbeat to at least have the opportunity to say yes or no. I guess when I said all through high school that I didn’t drink because I didn’t want to be like my father, people might’ve actually listened. Or more likely they didn’t want someone around who could’ve been a potential killjoy to their adolescent bacchanalias.
Truth be told, despite desperately wanting to be invited to those parties, I still would’ve probably said no. While it was easy to say that I was afraid I might turn into my dad, it was beyond difficult to admit that I was just simply afraid. I did well in school because I was afraid if I didn’t get accepted into a good school with enough scholarships then I’d never escape the limited opportunities of my hometown. Hell, I was even a self-described pacifist, complete with a t-shirt adorned with an MLK speech advocating non-violence because I was fearful that if I ever threw a punch back during an altercation it’d likely result in a more significant beating. Despite desperately wanting attention, accolades, and admiration from those around me, I was afraid to be myself because I had no real sense of identity other than what had been assigned to me over the years of small-town living.
Dazed and Confused understood that. Characters like Pink, Mike, and Tony (played by Jason London, Adam Goldberg, and Anthony Rapp respectively) had one more year to figure out who they wanted to be and were already asking questions of themselves a year before they needed to definitively state an answer. Like the majority of my high school assignments, I’d waited until the very last minute to start. As the movie ended and we rolled into Sugarloaf Mountain ski resort, which felt completely useless in the early summer, the teachers assured us with their last bit of instruction, that we were destined for a night of fun instead of the actual bad food and unwanted events that lay within, and combine that with a necessary desire to stay awake because there was nowhere to sleep other than benches and chairs. I came to the realization that my adult life was going to commence at sunrise and so began my night of existential crisis and weak fruit punch.
Gone was the young man who, while not exactly oozing self-confidence a few days prior, had spent an unprecedented evening of uninhibited revelry at a friend’s summer camp, mixing drinks out of any available alcohol we’d managed to bring (mainly gin, vodka, orange soda, and Sunny Delight), dancing the night away listening to Rage Against the Machine, and 100% meaning it when we screamed along “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.” As we walked into the lodge, the 80-proof courage had since dissipated and I desperately wanted an adult figure to please tell me exactly what to do.
At the time I blamed it solely on our uninformed choice of venue. As I said, Sugarloaf Mountain is well renowned for its winter skiing, but here we were in early June, expected to stay up all night in order to keep ourselves statistically safe, but somehow forgetting that we had all sat through a painfully dull graduation ceremony, then the obligatory family gathering where everyone told you how proud of you they were for essentially completing the expectation, and finally topping it off with a two-hour bus ride. Despite the power of adolescent hormones and adrenaline, many in the group were obviously ready for a nap and keeping us awake through mostly sugar was sure to fuel at least a few bad choices. So instead of the chance to catch up on our missing sleep we instead indulged in packed lunches, bags of chips, and activities that most of us would’ve passed on given the opportunity to do literally anything else. Who fondly remembers the mismatched sport of Wallyball? I wish I did, said no one ever.
Had we followed the leads of the film, we could’ve spent our night bouncing from the pool hall, to a fire tower (or acceptable location) party, and ended the night on a sports field where we waxed philosophy 101. It might’ve been a pleasurable evening. Instead, we ate disgusting sandwiches, played the aforementioned abomination of a sport, and hopped into the sauna hoping to relax … not realizing that those activities are more likely to result in death instead of a good time. Myself, I spent a good portion of the night lightheaded and nauseous, an experience I could’ve more pleasurably replicated with a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best.
The sole purpose of Project Graduation, much like the clean living pledge Pink refused to sign for his football coach, was to ensure that we would have a safe, responsible, drug and alcohol-free place to celebrate checking off one of life’s little boxes. Within an hour, I was certain the entire evening was bullshit and as soon as we returned home I was going to get high the first chance I got, for the first time no less. Somehow the combination of misery and crushing expectations had actually been my gateway to drug use and not the expected peer pressure. It took all of one day. Many of those same Project Graduation alums and I smoked literally all the weed we could find in the safety of my friend’s parents’ backyard. Perhaps a continual week of partying with interrupted sobriety and sleeping wasn’t the best way to deal with impending adulthood anxiety, but it certainly worked better than a trip to a ski resort. Who knew? Maybe the perpetually stoned character of Slater knew exactly what he was doing.
It’s been almost thirty years since Dazed and Confused came out during my senior year in high school. At the time, I viewed it as nothing more than a fun stoner comedy about fellow youths living their lives. There were no big reveals, no end of teenage world problems, no life-altering decisions that needed to be made. Just a bunch of teenagers enjoying the moments they had with each other and not overly worrying about what the future was going to bring. I spent too much of my young adult life in a state of apprehension, not taking enough chances – not, as Wooderson so eloquently put it, L-I-V-I-N. I didn’t do “the best I could while I was stuck in this place. Had as much fun as I could while I was stuck in this place. Played as hard as I could while I was stuck in this place,” because years of adulthood have taught me that a form my PTSD took was hypervigilance. I always expected things to turn out for the worse and so my brain was always worried about any sign of impending doom and formulating ten different plans to combat it when the sky inevitably came falling down. For me, it was all I knew. Viewing the movie now reminds me that the worst rarely came to pass. Instead of crazy teenage hijinx, I came away with some feelings of regret.
I’m thankfully at an age now where I can look back at my capricious youth and recognize when I made the wrong choice, or more accurately, the safe choice. The times when I didn’t step far enough out on the ledge because I overthought every potential outcome. I think of Mike at the party, unable to enjoy himself because some macho asshole name Clint called him a pussy and ruined his good time. Although his plan to throw one punch and hope the crowd would interject backfired horrifically, resulting in a brutal ass-kicking, I have to at least admire his decision to act because at 18 I would’ve just sat with my anger, anxiety, and embarrassment.
It took me years to not be afraid of life. There are still moments I feel it, but it doesn’t paralyze me the way it once did. Much like the characters in Dazed and Confused, it takes a group of good friends and a loving partner to give me enough support and feelings of safety to take chances, to enjoy the moments in life that present themselves without overanalyzing, and to not worry about what tomorrow is going to bring.
To keep living.
Got healthy coping mechanisms and emotional support? It’d be a lot cooler if you did.
