Dismal Affairs

"I did not like teenage parties. I do not remember them nostalgically. They were dismal affairs. The lights were kept low. That kept self-consciousness to a minimum. The over loud music made conversation and possible. There was little to talk about in any case. There were always a couple of the town psychopaths attending. Everybody drank and smoked too much. A dreary and oppressive sense of aimlessness hungover such occasions, and nothing ever happened (unless you count the time my two quiet classmate drunkenly began to brandish his fully loaded 12 gauge shotgun. Or the time the girl I later married contemptuously insulted someone while he threatened her with a knife, or the time another friend climed a large tree, swung out on a branch, and crashed flat on his back, half dead right beside the campfire we had started at its base, follow precisely one minute later by his half-wit sidekick).

No one knew what the hell they were doing at those parties. Hoping for a cheerleader? Waiting for Godot? (Although the former would have been immediately preferable although cheerleading squads were scarce in our town), the latter was closer to the truth. It would be more romantic, I suppose, to suggest that we would have all jumped at the chance for something more productive, bored out of our skulls as we were. But it's not true. We were all too prematurely cynical and world-weary and leery of responsibility to stick to the debating clubs and air Cadets and school sports that the adults around us try to organize.......

I wanted to be elsewhere. I wasn't the only one. Everyone who eventually left the Fairview I grew up in knew they were leaving by the age of 12. I knew. My wife, who grew up with me on the street our families shared, knew."

- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules for Life