Apparently I’ve gotten old. I didn’t even realize when the transition occurred, but I’m confident it’s happened. When you’re young, you look at your parents and think “there’s no way they were ever cool.” Then as you get older, you hear them tell radical stories of their youth and ask yourself “Well, when did you decide to give up on having fun?” I understand now. It’s not as if you break down and tell yourself that you have to hang up your hat. It’s a slow fade that goes mostly unnoticed. If you’re like me, you have a moment in time that you have a self evaluation and come to the conclusion: well…apparently I’ve gotten old. There was no greater example of this realization than this past weekend.
I have a core group of guy friends that try to get together as often as possible to hang out. Some of the guys I’ve been friends with since elementary school. The group grew in numbers in both junior high and high school. Four of us all went to college together and were roommates and housemates. We picked up a few extra guys in college to complete the man-group. There are about 8 of us total. Like most college guys, we did STUPID things constantly. I can truly say if not for the protection of God, we would all mostly likely be dead.
Examples:
-There were times where we were driving down the interstate and one of us would hang out the window and try to open up the door to the car next to us. Aw, dude, you almost had it, try again! Look at the expressions on their faces… priceless.
-Going down the interstate and need a CD, but the guys in the car next to you have the CD… not a problem. Edge your cars close enough to each other and pass it across. Slow down you ask? No.. Make it happen at 75mph.
-We built a potato gun that was incredible, but we didn’t want to fire it outside cause we lived in a neighborhood. SO, we got a pizza pan and taped it to the bathroom door. The plan was that we would use a ball of wet paper towels as our first bullet. The THEORY was that we would fire the ball of wet paper towels at the bathroom door and have the pizza pan catch it. What we didn’t realize was the FORCE the wet paper towels would have when shot out of a potato gun. When it hit the pizza pan, it bent the pan into a bowl and shot the pan through the bathroom door, hitting the cabinets in the bathroom and breaking them into shards. In-credible! Let’s do it again. You’d think that we would have taken the hint, but nope. We shot it through the bathroom door about 20 more times. There was a giant 3 foot hole in the door by the time we got done. No worries. We just hung a towel up over the hole. Hey, we were five guys in a one bathroom house. Privacy? Overrated.
-We lived on a VERY steep hill, I would say probably 40-45 degree decline. One day we decided that we needed to see if you could make it down the hill in an office chair. The thing is, you could make it MOST of the way down the hill, but at some point you would be traveling too quickly for the tiny office chair wheels to keep up, so you’d go tumbling over in a crash suitable for nascar. The goal was to make it farther down the hill before you crash than the other guys did. Stupid, but FUUUUN.
Anyway, during college and slightly post-college we would get together for “Man trips” or “Man weekends.” The goal was to find new and more ridiculous things to do. This came easy with the amount of alcohol that was consumed during these trips. One time we went to a local bar and by the time we left our bar tab was 1400 dollars. To this day we can’t understand how some of us didn’t die. By the end of the night the shots were just straight Wild Turkey and Vodka. (And that was without my addition to the tab, as I had stopped drinking alcohol after college). Guys would take a shot, SLAM the shot glass down on the table, make a “Tim the tool-man” kinda yell and demand to know what’s next. One guy always ended up without a shirt somehow, one guy would unnecessarily curse all the time, one guy would throw up no matter what.
But NOW. Now our man-trips are completely different. We’re all married and most of us have AT LEAST one kid. Now instead of going to concerts and possibly getting in a fight, we go tubing down a lazy river. In place of the conversations about the hot chicks we met, it’s about our kids or our 401K. “Yeah, she just learned to crawl. It’s the cutest thing ever.” “Your son looks just like you, man.” “Oh, we’re thinking of having kids within the year or so.” “Well my company will match my 401K contribution up to 6… “Really man, ours only matches up to 4.. You got it good.”
Most of us don’t have the quintessential cigar because our wives don’t like us to stink when we come home. Before it would be around 11 o’clock before we even left to go out. NOW by the time its 11 o’clock, some of us start fading and yawning. No one is willing to go to bed first for fear of being made fun of, but pretty much everyone is thinking about it. When we go to the token bar, everyone just has a couple beers rather than 15 beers a piece. In place of straight vodka, the shots are mainly fruity and have really feminine names. “We’ll have seven apple plinkies, please.” No one throws back the shot and yells out anymore. It’s more like a slow sip and then gently setting the shot glass down, hoping and begging no one orders another.
We all want to seem like we haven’t changed, but the reality is that we have. Before it was more important to DO something crazy, but now it’s fun just to hang out with those guys. The old cliché is true, it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you like the people you’re doing it with. It’s kinda funny to think that one day my son is going to grow up and think that his dad is SUCH a BORING guy… Son, I’m not boring, I just decided to give my guardian angel a much needed break.
