College Mythology.

February 16, 2004, 01:52 pm

As a little kid, nearly every night my sister and I would climb in our parents' bed. We'd watch shows like Family Ties on this crappy little 13" TV. And sometimes we would play a tape in our little tape players and lip sync to Bruce Springsteen songs. But frequently, we would beg our parents to tell us stories from their college days.

My dad was a fraternity president and my mom was in a sorririty; don't ask me how two cool kids had the dorkiest, most socially-inept children ever! My dad was freakin' Prom King! They would tell us about these crazy friends they had with nicknames like Zock, Stumpy, Studly Go Faster, Gross Bag of Shit, et al. And they would speak of epic pranks and mythological hijinks involving fraternity brothers that could scale walls and creating costumes involving fake axe impalements.

I can't speak for my sister, but I was caught up in it. I hung on every word.

Another time, my mother picked me up from baseball practice and didn't have time to take me home before her class (she was finishing her degree at the community college) so I got to tag along. After class, she asked me what I thought about it and I told her I couldn't wait for college for three reasons:

You could wear hats in class.

Hats were very important issue to me at the time, because if it were possible for me to be wearing a hat, I would be. I once wore a corduroy hat my dad gave me nearly every day for a number of years. It became a thing of legend and is being preserved in my closet.

You could eat and drink in class.

I hadn't had dinner and my mom got me a candy bar and a coke from some vending machines. She was probably unhappy about my nutrient-void dinner, but I couldn't have been happier.

You got to cuss in class.

Sitting in the back of the class, I lit up with enthusiasm when I heard the teacher say “shit.” It doesn't get any better than that.

At this point, I couldn't wait to go to college.

But in reality, my college life was incredibly tame and mostly boring. I didn't get arrested for drinking a few days before my birthday. I didn't have lots of bizarre-ly named friends. I don't really have any college-related stories to tell of. It bummed me out at first, imagining that I would have nothing interesting to tell my kids, nothing that they would hear and think I was cool.

But I've been in a couple bands and I'm proud of the music that we've written. I expect that I'll still be playing music when I have kids and maybe they'll want to hear things that I recorded now and they'll think I'm cool.