Check Your Privilege (and your underwear)

Sometimes that's just the way it goes.

     I've been spending way too much time alone at coffee shops lately. I don't even buy coffee. It's almost like I'm living a perverted version of a social life; I don't have any friends to meet up with and I don't have any money to buy anything and justify my presence, and yet here I am! It beats sitting at the sober house all day, re-watching episodes of Louie, which really drives home the point that I have no friends.

     An author, I think it was Stephen King, said something along the lines of “The muse doesn't show up every day, but you won't know if she does unless you're waiting there every day.” I probably botched that quote, but I'm through running to Google every time I want to convey something. I have a history of showing up and waiting, and I don't mean metaphorically. I almost did it again this morning, and I feel like I might even be doing it right now. One of my friends, a girl I met in rehab, made plans to come hang out with me this morning after I got done with my probation appointment. Under the impression that this was still the plan, I called her (on my mobile, which is finally back on) and was told that she was meeting up with another friend from rehab. Long story short, I waited at that damn bus stop for a half hour, writing in a little journal and getting annoyed with the music on my ipod, until I said “fuck it, I may as well go get some writing done.”

       It's three hours later and I still haven't heard anything from either of them. And I'm going to sit outside this coffee shop and drink water and write until my computer runs out of batteries and I have to go back to the sober house, where I stayed up until three this morning, packing up the immense amount of dirty stuff my roommate decided to leave when he went to Boulder this weekend and didn't come back. Where a stolen truck plowed into the (thankfully) old, large, and well-rooted tree in the front yard two nights ago. That tree being where it was prevented the truck from smashing into the house, which would have put 49 guys out on the street. Tangents, always with the tangents. A woman who looked a lot like Jessica Walter just walked out of the pizza joint.

     When I was a teenager, there was a shopping center in the town I lived in. When nobody would answer their phones or want to go do anything, I would go and sit in front of the Starbucks and smoke cigarettes until some sort of potential amusement presented itself. As a boredom killer, it didn't work 100% of the time, but more often than not if I sat there for an hour or so something was going to come up. I actually ended up working at that Starbucks for a while.

Maybe that's just how things worked when I was a teenager; I went to junior high and high school in that town (which wasn't very big in any case) and I knew a lot of people. I can't remember ever having any great ideas about where to go or what to do. I mostly just flowed along when something would come up, and it seemed like whoever I was with was just as fluid as I was. Things got a little different when my friends and I started driving, but not much. At least until we discovered Golden Gardens in Ballard.

     Because I am fundamentally leery of new situations (see: crotchety), I didn't take to the beach quite as readily as most of my friends. There were constant invitations from friends of friends to come barbecue at the beach, and bring booze. The first time I went, I wasn't impressed with any of it; the sand was full of broken glass and rusted nails from people burning pallets and sticking their bottles in the fire, the company was a whole lot of people I didn't know who looked and acted like hipster royalty, and my best friend Dan, who got along with everyone, was off getting along with everyone instead of joining me in the shitty attitude section.

That's one aspect of my personality I really don't like. When I go somewhere or do something outside my experience or familiarity, I absolutely refuse to just roll with it until I'm convinced that whatever “it” is isn't going to bite me in the ass. It's a handy instinct; it's probably saved my life a hundred times, but it can also turn me into the king of the party poopers. It recedes gradually though, and the more I went to Golden Gardens, the more I liked it. At least until Jessie (another ex girlfriend. We were together for three years, I think) started taking me along to hang out with her friends.

     Jessie was spoiled.

     Okay, so this one might require some explanation on my part. If you don't mind, I'm going to write what you, the reader, may (or more likely, may not) be asking: “Hey, Ian! How, exactly, do you come to the conclusion that somebody is spoiled? I mean, you grew up with a single father and a brother, and you were POOR! By your standards, 75% of the country is spoiled, right?”

     Well, reader, I thank you for asking (or more likely, NOT) that question. While I will concede that your parents' Scrooge McDuck money vault makes it much easier to be spoiled, it is not a requirement. Spoiling your children is a very easy thing to do, and at its most basic level doesn't require any money at all. When the poor spoil their children, it's an accidental by-product of attempted social mobility (a crime they take very seriously in the suburbs). In my case, growing up poor around more affluent families (my stepmother and her daughter being a perpetual reminder) bred desire for better things and an easier life. I mean, I went to school with these kids, and aside from the ones who played sports better than me, what did they possess that allowed them to get a car on their sixteenth birthday?What did they do to deserve snowboards, gear and season lift tickets while I was getting rusty BB guns and water-damaged clock radios for Christmas?

     Life isn't fair. I know this now and I knew it then. It's one thing to grow up knowing that life isn't fair, but it's a whole other to have your face rubbed in it every day. And to have the same, “If you work hard and pay your dues, success is just around the corner!” speech crammed down your throat when you know, even at an early age, that your socioeconomic status contraindicates any real chance you might have at success, well, you start to get spoiled.

     You begin looking at everything you have as trash. Because compared to everything around you, it IS trash. You wonder why you're fifteen and a half and your dad yells at you to get a job every week while your buddy Mike still gets $100 a week allowance and just got a Subaru from his Opa. But you still ask him to drive you to work and shit.

     Basically, you're raised in an environment that is constantly showing you, through example after example, that the stuff you have is worthless, and that you deserve the same things everybody else has. You quit believing that hard work gets you anywhere, because you've seen your dad come home late and exhausted every day of your life, but your mom still died and you're still eating store brand macaroni and cheese with expired milk while all Mike's dad seems to do is drive his Mercedes to and from the links, and twenty to one when Mike eats mac and cheese it's Velveeta.

     So, in this example, we can't tell if Mike is spoiled or not. Mike might be a great guy, I mean, he gives you rides to and from your shitty job. He has you over for dinner three or four nights a week, and since his mom doesn't work she always cooks up a veritable feast for you two. Mike likes to go do things, like ice skating and bowling and go to the batting cages, and he always pays for you because he likes your company and it doesn't matter to him that you can't afford to pay for it yourself; in his mind, money is there to be spent on things he enjoys. Sometimes Mike will give you shit about being poor, but that's only because to him, money doesn't equal survival or comfort. Money is disposable for Mike.

Mike is lucky, naïve, and yes, a bit spoiled.

     You, however, think you have it figured out. You want to be able to go do things without Mike paying for you, because whenever he asks if you want to go do something, you reply “I don't have any money,” and you are so sick of saying that; it kills you a little inside every time. He just shrugs and says “Don't worry about it,” and you hang your head in shame. He drops you off at your house, you walk into your bedroom and look at all the thrift store clothes in the closet, the books you stole from the library, and the TV you found down the street; bunny ears wrapped in tinfoil and the power button replaced with a pencil. You hate it all. You don't appreciate any of it, and instead of working with what you have, you rail against the system that left you with the short straw.

     You are indeed spoiled.

     I was indeed spoiled.

     When I had nobody in the world left who would take me in, sleeping under a freeway overpass amidst used needles and rats the size of terriers. When I woke up because a 24 oz can of Monster smacked me in the head at 80 miles an hour. When I realized that nobody was coming for me and that I was fucked; that was when I realized how spoiled I was. What made me spoiled wasn't that before I had things like a place to live, food to eat or video games to play. I wasn't spoiled because I could afford to waste money occasionally. What made me spoiled was living like I couldn't do any worse for myself; like I'd hit bottom. The thing that never ceases to amaze me though, is

There's always more bottom.