Have you ever looked back at your younger days and thought “I was a right dick?”
I do. All the time.
I don’t mean a dick as if I was mean to somebody (although there are those), just that there are certain points in my life that when I remember them, I think that I am a right dick.
As I can remember pretty much everything that has happened to me, especially the stuff that causes me to think I’m a dick, this happens quite often. Be it little things like putting the emphasis on the wrong word in a sentence and making it sound far more threatening than was intended (“Oh yeah, I see what YOU mean.”), or big mortifying, life changing things, such as calling your Primary school teacher ‘Mummy.’ I remember them all.
What I’m wondering is, do other people do this with the same frequency as I do? It’s normally when I’m lying in bed, unable to sleep that these things run through my head. One in particular was bouncing around my brain last night. At uni, we went out to Kelly’s a lot, every week without fail. And, every week without fail, the DJ near the end of the night played the song All My Life by the Foo Fighters. I love this song, and throughout it I rocked out quite hard. However, there comes a quieter part in the song that builds and builds up until an unleashing of a lot of rocking rockiness. During this quiet part I would often pretend to play guitar, and then once the crescendo hits, I would leap into the air, landing as soon as the heavy guitars kick back in and continued playing air guitar and headbanging. A lot of the time the people I was with stood by and watched, mostly in admiration (bear in mind though, we were probably quite drunk). Except when I look back at it, I can’t help but think ‘Fucksake, JC. Quit acting like a dick.’
It’s as if I’m hovering over my past self, and watching in horror at what I’m doing. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, only this time I’m being shown my past to make sure I don’t return to my dickish ways, rather than….exactly, that’s exactly like Scrooge.
Another time I’ve often looked back and thought I was a dick was back in the first year of uni. I had recently come out of a relationship that had ended quite badly (well, badly for me), and had started kinda sorta seeing a girl that I had met/got off with at the union. At the time I sort of latched on to her and we were in a sort of pseudo relationship, mostly due to my insistence that it was one. That sounds really sinister; I didn’t tie her up and force her to play happy families or anything. Promise. But whenever she ended whatever it was that was going on, I sulked for ages and was a bit of a dick to her when really she didn’t deserve any of the anger I was projecting. It was more reflected anger that really should have been directed at the previous relationship ender. Fuck, this was meant to be a funny blog, not some sort of confessional.
Right, let’s get this back on track with a slightly embarrassing story. I remember being at a house party back in secondary school days and it was nearing the end and people were filtering out. It was back in the days of CD changers, and once the machine had switched from one CD to the next, a process which took an annoyingly long time as well as causing an unusual amount of crunching and whirring, Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) came on. Now, there’s a point in the video for this song where said White Guy does this dance in a dance-off that fails to impress any ladies, and for whatever reason (maybe I was trying to impress a lady myself) I decided that copying this dance would at least get a few laughs, completely ignoring the fact that the impressee would have to be familiar enough with the video for the song to even know that that’s what the impresser (me) was mimicking. However, even if she was familiar with the video that’s not what she would have seen me do. I had completely forgotten what the actual dance from the video was, so I ended up doing some weird kicking thing, and clapping my hands underneath my legs. I should’ve known that if it didn’t work in a fictional music video, it probably wouldn’t work in real life. Even if I had done the real dance. I did this bizarre almost Cancan-esque routine, like, 8 times before I finally decided that I should probably stop. All the while, future ghost me is hovering above and despairing.
I’m sure there are many more examples that I’ve thought of on manys a sleepless night. But I also got thinking about whether other people regret dickish things they’ve done and are glad that they’re no longer like that anymore. One person stuck in my mind when thinking about this. Back in school, there was this second year kid who got the same bus home to Bangor as I did (I was in third year). He was one of these alpha male type kids, who was essentially the leader of his little group, and as such was the loudest and most obnoxious. For the whole bus journey home, he was singing ‘Get your tits out for the lads.’ Anyone that spoke up to tell him to shut up had this sung back full volume in their faces. This guy had no shame about singing this at the top of his lungs for the half hour journey. Even when the bus driver told him to shut up by telling him ‘the only tits you’ve ever seen are your mum’s’ (which admittedly was pretty funny at the time) he just continued on, except this time turning his ire on the driver. I wonder does that kid ever look back and think ‘what a dick I was?’ I know I would.
What about school bullies? Are they ever kept awake at night, by replaying past horrors they visited upon kids at school and thinking that they were right dicks? Yes, Thomas. I’m talking about you, you little shit. Actually, to be fair he still hasn’t recovered from the time that, after he kicked me in the crotch and spat on me, I turned right around defiantly then went home, cried a bit and got my mum to tell the principal on him. Yeah, take that you dick. In fairness though, he was put in to the special class, so karma got that retard in the end. Retribution, bitch!
Anyway, that’s today’s thought. I’m off to try and not do things I’ll reflect on in the future. Just to get this goddamn future ghost off my ass.
Cheers.
