god i just remembered the funniest thing i did as a Teen which was went to see a midnight show of indiana jones at the cheap seats with a different friend than the one i usually went to midnight shows with. and i had my dad drop me off and i was like “yeah it’s fine she’ll drive me home” because i just assumed we’d go to denny’s and hang out and smoke afterward and then i’d go home after we’d been out until 4am being delinquents. EXCEPT she actually came with a whole bunch of other friends that i didn’t know and they were stoned out of their minds. so when the time came to pile in this strange stoned teenage boy’s pickup with like four more people than could safely fit i was like “hm. no thank you.”
so i call my dad but after three different times he still hasn’t picked up and i’m like. okay. clearly my dad is out like a fucking rock. and i told him that i would be fine and i wasn’t being irresponsible. and if i do finally wake him up there’s going to be a whole lecture about responsibility and also probably the fact that i still haven’t learned how to drive, and what would i do if he wasn’t around to save my ass. well, that’s stupid. i know exactly what i would do. i would walk. so i’ll just fucking walk.
for reference, here is my best approximation of the outfit i was wearing at that time
except also add a leather jacket that was way too big for me with pockets big enough to smuggle an extra-large can of monster into a movie theater. i made a lot of good choices.
i had a notoriously bad sense of direction and a flip phone (my dad offered to buy me an iphone when they came out but they couldn’t play flac so i wasn’t interested, like i said, good choices) but also one time a friend and i had ditched school to take the bus to the mall, so i had a vague understanding of where bus stops were. so like a genius, i went to the bus stop and looked at the map to try and figure out how to get home. except the map wasn’t really very good and i got turned around a lot and long story short after spending an hour going in circles in a suburb i decided to just go the way i recognized, which was the freeway. did i mention this was southern california? literally nothing is designed for walking in southern california because cars have air conditioning.
so like five miles in there’s this exit, and the thing is, my mom’s house is like. right there. it’s right off the exit. i can practically see it. so if i walk to mom’s house i’ll be done in no time. except!! if i do that!!! then it will be OBVIOUS that something has happened because i’ll have to knock until mom lets me in and she’ll be like “why are you here” and “where are your friends” and dad will be like “why did you go to your mom’s house when your computer is over here”. and at this point i’m still thinking: no one will ever know. i am going to fix this problem, all on my own, to prove a point about how i can handle my own shit.
which is why i walked another fourteen miles to get to my dad’s house.
you’d think at some point someone would have asked why the fuck i was on the freeway but no one actually offered me a ride until i was literally almost home, at which point it was like, yeah, no, i’m good. at one point i fell in a ditch and cracked the shit out of my phone’s screen. my feet got totally wrecked but i just kept thinking “in olden dayes people probably did shit like this all the time. it’s not even that far. i need to suck it up and stop being such a huge baby.”
by the time i got home the sun was up. and the worst part was that when i woke up at like noon i could barely walk so i had to explain to my dad what happened to be sure that no one would expect me to walk anywhere. he was horrified. there was literally no reason for me to do that. i could have kept calling. i could have just called a cab and gotten the money out of his wallet. there were so many options that did not involve just walking home. he had been so worried when he saw the missed calls and so relieved when he saw that i was in bed only to circle back around to wondering where it all went wrong.
EXCEPT i did not tell him i walked along the freeway. i was like “no, i went the other way”. later we drove around and he was like “was this the way you went” and i was like “yes definitely”. i don’t think i ever told him about the freeway thing. i’m 31 now and i still can’t drive.
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