The Bum List

Ten years ago, I was a very different person. You were too, of course, even if you don't know it or won't admit it. However, I would wager that I was a vastly different person than I am today, not just the kind of different that comes without having gained any knowledge just by simply aging and picking up on how life works.

In 1998 I was a fourth-year junior (yeah, that's right) going nowhere fast. I was ostensibly a graphic design student at a state college but really, I was just a raging alcoholic who was afraid of himself, afraid of any ability he may have possessed, secretly disliked (and was disliked by) most of his friends, who didn't attend class much and drank to extreme excess at least four nights a week. I was extremely overweight and unhappy about it, and really was unhappy about everything most of the time. Instead of being outwardly sad all the time, though, I was outwardly mean. Really mean. Also fairly racist, pretty homophobic, and just generally unpleasant to be around. Eventually, I found a close friend in BT, who brought out the worst in me to that end and I in him. We were horrible to everyone and everything. I once made a girl who had turned me down for a second date cry in front of an entire basement full of people solely for his entertainment. Yeah, that's what kind of a guy I was. No remorse, a sharp, bitter tongue always primed for use. People, especially girls, avoided us and I always figured it was because the girls knew we were "badass city kids" but the truth is painfully obvious.

BT and I had our own language much of which revolved around quotes from "The Simpsons" and various movies. Everyone would know what the line was from, but only we knew what it really meant--we always assigned a double meaning to each quote. In addition to that, if something sucked we would often say "You can slap a rainbow sticker on this.", be it a movie, party, long drive, anything. We also assigned "alternative" derogatory names to many minority cultures, but they weren't "offensive" so much as "funny" to us, since they were our terms (and if you're hoping I'll list any of them here, you're out of luck). Yeah, we were a great guys, you would have loved us.

For years we and a large group of our friends would attend "Edgefest" which then morphed into "X-Fest" which was put on by a local radio station (the radio station changed formats at one point leading to a name change.) during Memorial Day weekend every year. Two days of concerts, thousands of people camping, thousands of people that we deemed "white trash" drinking and camping around us. We managed to nearly ruin an entire day for everyone there, too. A beautiful day that found almost everyone else we were with heading down to a nearby river to get some sun and wash off the previous night's detritus and that morning's hangover. BT and I quickly pooh-poohed that idea, grabbed lawn chairs, planted ourselves under a tree and played "Count The Mullet" for about five hours, drinking beer after beer after beer. I don't remember the final count, mostly because I'm mortified that I wasted most of a perfectly good day doing this. We then spent the afternoon constantly referring to a friend's older brother, who drank two entire bottles of cheap tequila straight from the bottle during the course of the day, as Mankind, and could not figure out why he was pissed off at us, because it was hilarious. Now granted, he looked like him, but, to be honest, he showed great restraint after two bottles of cheap tequila in not beating us both senseless. We were just pointlessly mean, to anybody and anything we could be mean to and the most amazing thing about it was that we didn't see it, we thought we were the two funniest people alive.

However, chief among the things that we did on a near-constant basis that were just all around negative was managing The Bum List. This was an ongoing, ever-shifting list of people, famous or not so, that we decided were bums (we--thankfully--never wrote this list down, even ten years later it would have been just too much to bear to know I had done it) and it was was added to almost daily. This wasn't the meanest thing we did but it gives the best idea of who we were, I think. It all started one night when were were watching 48 Hrs. and realized that Nick Nolte, in nearly every film he is in, gets fed up and utters something along the lines of "Awww, God dammit!" We decided he was a huge bum right on the spot. The list never stopped, we added so many people to it I can't even remember half of them, I'd bet. More importantly, I would never try. It was such a waste of time and such a mammoth exercise in negativity there are hardly words. You couldn't go anywhere with us and not hear "Dude, that guy is a such a bum!" at least once while you were with us. After a while, to add people to the list all one of us would have to utter was "Aww, God dammit!" and The Bum List had grown. Eventually, like all relationships forged in negativity like this, we turned on each other and we very quickly grew apart. Realtionships like this often have a limited shelf life, they sour, get old. I was not as sorry as I thought I would be to see him go.

I got married a couple of weeks ago and my one remaining college friend, The Scribe, came in for the event. Nine months ago I watched him tie the knot in L.A. We have spoken not less than once a month since we reconnected via MySpace about three years ago (when people say social networking sites are useless, I use this an example of why they are not). He is one of my favorite people ever. We didn't hang around in college as much as we should have and I could never figure out why, but he told me while he was here that it was because of BT, he couldn't stand him. The negativity, the way I changed around him, how we just picked on people for virtually nothing. He knew I was better than that, but didn't know how to help the situation, either. He finally let it go and went West. Nothing makes him happier (happier for me, at least) than the fact that BT isn't around anymore and that I am a good guy (these are his words, more or less).

I knew I had become a better person, but in the process I had to shed not only BT but most of my other college friends, too--none of them were the cat's pajamas, really. Nobody was around to corroborate my story, though, as it were, but now I have proof. I am not a racist, homophobic, generally unpleasant asshole any longer and it feels good. It feels good to be a nice guy and feels good to have people tell me so often that I am a genuinely fun person to be around. I never used to hear that before and it never gets old. Ten years ago nobody ever said those things to or about me. But, then again, ten years ago I should have been on The Bum List, too.