Back when I was in high school, I always fell for the bad boys. The rebels. The ones with cars, the ones who drank and smoke. Me? I was a little nerd, a good girl, a band geek, an honor society member. But OH did I lust after those bad boys.
One of them was named Pete. Tall, with dark hair and a beautiful smile. EXTREMELY good-looking. He always hung out on Smokers' Hill behind the school, and you KNEW he drank and got in trouble with the best of them.
I am confident that Pete did not know I existed, but I sure had a crush on him.
And here we are, thirty-five years out from high school, and I saw on the news this past weekend that Pete got busted for running a meth lab. (!) Time (and meth) has not treated ol' Pete kindly:
That's his wife there on the right. I don't think meth's been doing HER any favors, either. All Pete needs is a swastika on his forehead and he'd be a dead ringer for Charlie Manson.
Wow. You know, I always just assumed that the bad boys straightened up after high school. Sowed their wild oats, so to speak, got it out of their systems, and carried on with life like the rest of us. I know *I* did my share of carousing in my twenties, but eventually that got old, and responsibilities ensued, and I, well, grew up.
Guess not everybody did. Holy cow.
7 comments:
Yea, those bad boys always looked great. Had a few of those myself.
Gee. Maybe all he needed to change course was a good woman. (Snicker...)
Yeah, I don't know of any who straightened up. Two of my class bad boys murdered their girlfriends by the age of 30.
I think it's path dependence. Diminishing brain cells, foreclosed opportunities, hanging around with other deadbeats so that you think your ethically poor choices are somehow socially acceptable...yeah, I get how that can happen. Now that I'm thirty years out of high school, I see how people wind up going the way you could have predicted. The juvie kids now have to excuse themselves from the table to go contact their parole officer, the kind-hearted stoners are still affably vacant, the bitchy popular girls are on their second or third husband and can't figure out what happened, the male jocks are trying to hang onto their alpha maleness and sporting the team colors of their kids' teams, and the band nerds are having quiet happy lives doing peculiar but satisfying stuff.
fmcetc., glad I wasn't the only one who thought the bad boys were IT.
~~Silk, you mean I could have SAVED HIM??!! (haaaaaaaaa)
Holly, murder? Yikes ...
and bridgett, it's said that people can be anything they want to be ... I guess only if they stop being what they already are. (Is that what "path dependence" means?) I'm glad the band nerd in me won out!
Path dependence means that the choices you have moving forward are limited to some extent based on what you have already done. (Despite what the positive thinking posters tell you, sometimes it is far too late to become what you might have been.) It will seem easier (and sometimes is easier) to just do more of the same or head in the same direction rather than suck it up and bear the expense (in money, time, effort, broken relationships, risk of not succeeding) of making a change. And there's also the implied idea that you can only see the choices visible from the spot you happen to find yourself in life -- though in theory, all choices are available to all people all the time, we know for sure that this just isn't the case.
That's interesting, Bridgett! And depressing. :)
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