I Graduated High School 20 Years Ago Today
By: John Gorman
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Retrospectives, Culture, John Gorman

II. I Wasted 90% of My 20s

My life, specifically, was really mediocre for a long time. No, really. I mean, shit, read anything I wrote on this platform from before late-2017.

So, on June 24, 2000, I took that high honors diploma and over the next decade-plus tarnished it through a bat-shit three-major, four-college tour of destruction, where I started out as a broadcast journalist, did acid-trip versions of the weather, worked and went to school full time, skipped half my classes and still graduated in four years, was on the Dean’s List three times and Academic Probation twice, bartended, did some blow.

My first job after graduating from my fourth college was as a survey taker for $9/hr, only because I thought I wasn’t cutting it as a banquet server. I got promoted six times at that place in 16 months because I’m a mediocre white man and people just give me shit. Even at my apex, I was still only making $24K per year. I was 24.

Then I tried to move to North Carolina (for the third time) with my ex, I decided I didn’t want her to come, then I just didn’t go, and so then I had this weird telecommuting job where I basically just read Deadspin on the clock and pretended I could write if I wanted to. [I wanted to. I could not.]

Then, I’d eat shells and cheese, nap, then watch football in a dive bar when I wasn’t playing three atrocious songs at a local open mic at an even divey-er bar in downtown Buffalo, an area where I had moved to for the third time — and spent 20 of my first 28 years there.

But life got a little better, I met my three best friends toward the tail end of the 2000s, and we spent 2008, 2009 and 2010 driving around in my Black 1985 BMW 745i — and, later, Frank Sonata, my crooning 2009 Hyundai, who I still have — trying to see what bar we could get kicked out of for smashing the bubble hockey machine or kicking down a bathroom door. (Fact-checker’s Note: Both those events happened on the same night, within 30 minutes of each other.)

Those summers were dope and magical and we grew to be great friends with other people besides our mildly degenerate but far-too-smart-for-the-commoners asses.

Then, I stunned the world — errr … county? some of it, anyway? — by saying I was moving to Austin, Texas, and everyone thought that was kinda weird, but after having wandered around and lusted over wandering around for as long as I had, I realized the moment you stop moving you start dying.

I literally told my friends when they’d ask me why I wanted to leave, I’d say, “I do not want to die in Buffalo.” Just like I didn’t want to die in Utica. I guess we all gotta die somewhere. Maybe off the top of a skyscraper in New York. Too soon? Nah, it’s been 19 years. Almost 20. And everything was different then, as everything feels different now. It feels heavier, lighter, darker, dimmer.

Lest you think I rode off into the great southwestern sun of Austin and found fame and fortune, well, motherfucker, you weren’t out here in these streets for the Great Ruin of 2011–2012, when I legit lost so much money from such a pitch-perfect combo of bad luck, bad deals, bad people and bad work ethic that I ended up sleeping in a WalMart parking lot for several weeks when I was too broke to afford the $30/night Red Roof Inn that offered me free hookers and crack so long as I wasn’t the fuzz.

You haven’t lived until you’ve panhandled for food on your lunch break at a corporate HQ for a $100B multinational tech conglomerate, before resigning yourself to stealing un-SKU’d produce from H-E-B. Bananas, green apples and bell peppers. Breakfast and lunch. Christ that sucked, but I lost weight. I also made like $12K that year. I was 30.