There are so many things I wish I was instead of average. I wish there was one distinguishing feature about me. Something that would make people stop and stare or strike up a conversation. Nothing grotesque or debilitating mind you. No Phantom of the Opera-esque facial deformities or cleft palettes for this guy. But maybe some ambiguous facial scarring to give the impression I have a dark mysterious past wrought with violence and danger. Or even just a more prominent chin so my face doesn’t give the impression of freshly risen dough. I hear chicks dig those kinds of things. Some vaguely pseudo-scientific study has confirmed the fact, I’m sure. I read somewhere facial hair is a decent substitute for those of us lacking action hero jaw lines but no one has gotten laid with a mustache since the seventies and the best I can do below the mouth is exaggerated neck hair. Few know what it’s like to walk around with an Amish neck-beard that looks at home above a butter churn or in the front of a horse drawn carriage with a “slow vehicle” sign in the back.
Right-handed, five-foot-ten, and just over five and a half inches below the belt. Oh, and white. Whiter than Elton John running through the snow. If mayonnaise and tartar sauce had some sort of depraved self-aware condiment baby it would cringe at the mere idea of my paleness.
While I’ve always been average, there were times of distinction to note before I settled into true mediocrity. When they were picking teams for dodge ball in high school I was always middle of the road. Not last with the tragically overweight and socially inept, but most definitely not first with the already steroid enhanced future gym teachers and minor league athletes. My voice had dropped to an unsettlingly low octave for a fifteen year old, but I still maintained the hairless, scrawny stature of your average prepubescent male. Soon I realized if I yelled “pick-me” in the most commanding tone I could muster I could avoid the humiliation of being picked last. Eventually my stature evened out and everyone else’s vocal cords caught up, leaving me unremarkable once again.
Part of the my high school experience and the most important thing I learned in those four years was how to fit in. How to walk like a normal member of society (confidently, and with a purpose). How to talk like someone with a degree of social acumen (don’t confuse anyone, they react with anger and mean names). How to dress like you didn’t jump into your dryer and come out with whatever stuck to you (find the guy who gets laid the most and wear what he’s wearing). These are things I found myself doing to avoid getting chewed up and spit out by high school society. The things I did just to go from chronically picked on to face in the crowd. They worked.
Picture a grocery store check-out clerk. Now, put him in a sensible white shirt, black slacks with a few nondescript stains from dropping a bag of flour here and there, and a black tie he keeps pre-tied in a ragged excuse for a double Windsor knot so he can get a few extra minutes of sleep on early days. Picture him driving a white Toyota Corolla to work everyday with crank windows and a blown-out speaker system he plays the same radio station on the ten minute drive. He maintains a constant state of mediocrity. Not quite clean-shaven but definitely not looking like he should be cutting down trees and rolling logs instead of checking out groceries. His shirt is missing the last button, but he haphazardly tucks it in so you can’t tell. The top button is left undone for comfort’s sake and he only buttons it for the fifteen minutes his boss isn’t in his back room office masturbating. His hair is disheveled, but not in the elegant indie-rock front man kind of way, but the sticking up at odd angles Charles Manson mug shot type of way. You see him mechanically pushing shopping carts around a half empty parking lot for hours on end. Occasionally he takes one too many carts and ends up having to heave them in the proper direction or let go of the back and run forward to stop them from hitting an old lady in an electric scooter with a basket full of cat food for her twenty cats she thinks are her children. She probably eats the damn cat food herself. He smiled at the thought of her broken body in the middle of the asphalt. It is not the first time he has fantasized about enacting some sick form of revenge on a relatively innocent bystander.
“I don’t know what happened officer. One minute he was calling for a price check on my box of Fiber One and the next second he had ripped his shirt off and was climbing the display cases.”
“He had already thrown an entire case of prune juice at an old lady in a walker and hit an old man in the back of the knees with his own cane when three cops jumped on his back.”
“Right before those officers pepper sprayed him he was stalking through the aisles wielding a Swiffer WetJet like a halberd.”
I was “that guy” for two years and I’d like to kindly request of you the next time you go to your local grocery store you do your best to not set one of “those guys” off.
There is a terrifying moment in the life of every cashier, carriage boy and waiter where they are struck with the stark realization of how replaceable they are. They need only look around them and see a million walking mannequins modeled after themselves. Here and there a different wig or colored contact but all with a similar look in their eye and willingness to step in for you. My life was undeniably mundane. Get up. Go to school. Go to work. Go home. Go out with friends. Smoke weed in a fast food parking lot and then play video games. Go home again. Do homework. Sleep. This process played itself out daily, with minimal variation for longer than I cared to admit. This is the modern American suburban opera and I was playing the role of Suburban Teen #9,999,999. It wasn’t a speaking part.
It’s not that I didn’t realize this depressing truth, I just was content to ignore it for as long as possible. Perhaps because I was aware of what an uphill struggle getting out of average-ness is. A stark realization we live in an era where everything you’ve ever thought, said or done has already been thought, said or done by someone else fifty years ago, and they did a better job of it. Throwing house parties when my parents left was done better in countless teen comedies my friends and I worshiped and related to as if they represented our actual lives in any way. My parents getting divorced was par for the course. I’d always wondered what took them so long and whether or not they’d held out for seventeen years to cling to some vestiges of individuality themselves, to not be like all the other parents. Hemingway and Cobain killed themselves better than I could or anyone else ever will, and I didn’t even own a shotgun. It’s all been done.
So now, you’re of course telling me to go do something different. Make a change. Get in a car, drive to New York, and rent a studio apartment and become some sort of freelancer, as if this hasn’t been done a million times before by a million angst ridden self-proclaimed artists. “What’s stopping you?” you’d ask of me. Stop complaining about how average you are and go do something to change it, you say. My response is, if it’s such a great idea, why haven’t you done it. I can tell you. You’re afraid to fail. God forbid you make it all the way to the city and find out you suck at whatever it is you do. You’re better off thinking you’re better than you are. Whatever it is you do, there’s a 99% chance there’s someone already there doing it better than you. The crippling fear of rejection and failure coupled with the unbearable desire to do something keeps you complacent. Keeps you “What-iffing” until you look down at your beer belly, feel the beginnings of male-pattern baldness and hear the walls of your cubicle closing in.
I’ve gotten to the point now where I’m begging for something terrible to happen to break the monotony. Something so awful I’m excused from small talk forever. I want to never talk about the weather, how my parents are doing or how my day has been ever again. I want to never have to use the word “fine” to describe a situation. “Fine” isn’t an emotion or a state of being, it’s nothing. It is “I don’t care and neither do you, so why are you asking me a boring question” in four letters. I’m hoping for bipolar disorder so I can never be “fine” again. Every manic depressive I meet is just much more interesting than I am. The last one I knew let her boyfriend beat up on her but wrote a hell of a short story. I periodically consider making a conscious and fully lucid choice to develop alcoholism just so I can have something to struggle against other that choosing which type of soda to drink for lunch. It worked for Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce. Green Peace and the military both seem like fantastic options at this point as well, maybe I’ll do both. Grabbing a gun or a case of bottled water and heading off to foreign lands to kill/feed people seems like a viable solution to this problem, until I get back and become one of those assholes who thinks he’s better than everyone else because he’s seen a third world country. I’ll probably even tell people how much it “changed my life” and such.
“Changing your life” isn’t enough anymore, everyone’s had their life “changed” by something. No, now you need more than a life changing experience. You need to be famous. Lucky for you, it’s only a mouse click. In the age of the viral video, it seems all you have to do is tape yourself getting kicked in the balls in the most elaborate manner possible and you become an instant celebrity, whatever that means, I imagine a whole new set of problems. Is some idiot who knows how to string together a few dick jokes and use Windows Movie Maker a celebrity if a couple million people saw him on the internet? Is it better to be known as the guy who fell off his roof because his son managed to fire a golf ball into his man bits from forty yards away than not known at all?
It makes me think maybe I was better off as the mop-headed, glasses wearing nerd who spent all his free time playing video games or buried in a book. Although, I do get laid way more often now (Note: Any number is higher than zero).
Much of my time is devoted to reconciling my average-ness by somehow fitting my B pluses, cliché summer jobs, and equally white brunette girlfriend into this ideal of uniqueness I’ve been made to feel is my American right. I find myself clinging to whatever detail about me I can rationalize as unique, whether or not it actually is. My girlfriend wears a hearing aid and nineteen years of artery clogging fried food haven’t caught up to me yet. Everyone’s trying to be a unique and beautiful snowflake. There is no such thing. We are at best a drop in a downpour. Either way you disappear when you hit the ground.
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