Undoubtedly one of the biggest mistakes I ever made was selling my copy of Blink 182’s Dude Ranch for like four bucks in a fit of misplaced coolness. I was clearing out my CD collection for no reason at all, my senior year of high school—Dude Ranch had been out for awhile. I think I was 13 when it came out—and I threw it in a stack with alanis morissette’s Jagged Little Pill and probably some other stuff I can’t remember. Why did I feel this pressing need to get rid of these CDs? Where did I think I was going?
In the pile it went. Blink 182 couldn’t stay but Korn could? What is that logic? Life is Peachy is still under my bed somewhere. Attribute it to a frantic fit of sweaty insecurity. Bleary-eyed, thumbing through albums and tossing them on a whim—it’s a feeling of recklessness with my possessions that I haven’t felt since. It was its own small transformation.
One thing I do remember feeling weird about as a teenager was how Blink 182 were not teenagers, but they were making songs that pinpointed the teenage experience—or I guess the experience of being a white teenage boy in America in the 90s—so accurately that it made them hugely, hugely famous. As I approached those late teen years, the ones where you think you know everything, I decided that what they did was creepy, somehow managing to discount the 65 billion young adult novels written by grown men that I’d been reading.
I don’t really regret the choice to toss the CD. Thanks to the miracle of technology, I can listen to Dude Ranch whenever I want, which is not often, because I can no longer relate to it. What I do regret was this line of thinking: how could grown men write accurately about my teenage experience right down to the gross jokes that you laugh at but never actually think are funny?
Maybe they were teenagers trapped in adult bodies or maybe they just remembered what it felt like to be so unsure.
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