Ahhh, high school. High school is miserable. For most of us high school is something to endure. It’s like waterboarding or winter or a Tyler Perry movie. You grit your teeth and do what you have to do to survive, like the Donner Party. What makes it bearable? Your buddies. That’s really about it. You hang out, you keep each other entertained, and you help each other along.
On some weekends during the schoolyear, my friends and I would get together at one of our houses and do incredibly productive things. In fact we finished a lot of things at these get togethers. Many pizzas, two liters, video game levels, and bad movies on USA’s Up All Night.
One Saturday night we ended up bringing a guy along who wasn’t a regular. Everything was going fine. The pizza was good and the cans of grocery store soda were adequate. We were taking turns in the WWF Royal Rumble on Sega Genesis. At ten o’clock we looked over and the new guy was asleep on the couch. This was simply unacceptable. We were willing to cut him a break. Maybe he wasn’t aware of the etiquette in situations like this. The proper thing to do is stay awake until you are falling asleep on your feet. You have to get all the fun out of the evening that you can. When you just can’t stay awake any longer, then you are free to sleep on whatever furniture or floor is available. Absolutely no one falls asleep at ten.
We needed to wake up the new guy and explain to him the error of his ways. To us, the most logical way to wake him up was to toss empty soda cans at him. I don’t remember how many cans were actually thrown, but let’s just say that it was not an insignificant number. Double digits for sure. One or two may not have been empty. Sorry about that. Ten minutes later he was asleep and surrounded by cans.
What to do next? The house we were at was fairly isolated. We decided that it would be fun to cut the lights and wake him up suddenly, claiming that we had seen someone outside one of the windows. One of us rounded up some baseball bats from the garage and then we shook him awake, shoved a bat in his hand and worriedly explained that there was a prowler. What followed can best be explained as ten hilarious minutes of checking windows and doors with one scared guy and three other guys who were trying really hard not to laugh. Ten minutes without laughing was pretty good. Somebody finally did laugh and for a second or two we wondered if giving the guy a baseball bat had been a good idea. Eventually we all returned to the Royal Rumble and the new guy stayed awake.
Moral of the story:
- High school buddies are good. In fact, you may never have better friends than you did in high school.
- Never ever ever be the first guy to fall asleep. EVER. Nothing good will come of it.
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