![]() It wasn't enough that I had to deal with the girls ignoring me in school, now I had to gaze at all these sexy divas dancing and writhing non-stop on my TV. That endless parade of music videos had a downside, however: the plethora of hot rock 'n roll babes! And they made me feel even more like a loser. For months, it seemed like every morning at school we were discussing a new, cool clip. But with MTV, we were exposed to a dizzying number of new bands and songs, things we would have never heard on Casey Kasem's weekly top 40 countdown. As I mentioned before, we had a very limited selection of radio stations in my area. Suddenly an unknown universe of music was piped directly into our homes. For you Millennials out there, MTV was the "killer app" of cable TV. It sounds like a cliche, but MTV changed everything. But it didn't really become a must-have until MTV launched in August of 1981. How could things in my little world possibly get harder?Ĭable TV arrived in my rural corner of the country sometime in late 1980, and by the next year, most everyone I knew had it installed. I was a raging, boiling cauldron of conflicting thoughts and hormones. I wanted to hold her hand, to walk side-by-side along the shoreline, to look longingly into her eyes, to confess my deepest emotions. With every girl I found even halfway cute, I was all sexual Jekyll and Hyde. There was a constant tug-of-war going on in my body, an unending battle between my simpering, fawning heart, and my pulsating, newly-hirsute loins. (Pardon the pun.)īut that soul-crushing embarrassment did nothing to temper my inner horndog. X'?" And the friend I gave the letter to said, "It's Don Stroud!" She completely threw me under the bus. When she finished it, she asked, "Who is 'Mr. I found out later that my crush read the letter out loud on her bus, accompanied by the raucous laughter of her friends. ![]() The world rack-focused around me like Roy Scheider hearing "Shark!" for the first time. The next morning, as I was walking through the hall to my locker, a senior that I barely knew finger-gunned me and barked, "How's it goin', MISTER X!" All the blood in my body evaporated. (I'll give you a moment to let that patheticness sink in.) Now, despite my desire to win her heart, I was so terrified of what I was doing, I couldn't bear to let her know who cobbled together this tome. To that end, I wrote her a loooong love letter (by hand!), and asked her good friend to deliver it to her. I was so nuts for her, I felt like I'd burst wide open if I didn't do something to let her know how I felt. Somewhere in the middle of ninth grade, I fell head over heels in deep smit with a girl in my class, someone I considered the hottest girl in school. All that internal conflict leads you to do some stupid stuff, let me tell you. Let me tell you, high school is pure torture for a horny teenage boy who's been infected with Hallmark's "romantic love" nonsense. No, there were two other things that made my situation incredibly difficult: I had the sex drive of a 70s porn star, and I was a hopeless romantic. I'm pretty self-sufficient and armored-up when it comes to that stuff. I had friends and comics and TV and music and video games and all that. (I rocked that same pre-Super Soldier build, too.)īut agonizingly enough, that wasn't the worst of it. You know that scene in the first Captain America movie, where he's in the car with Peggy Carter, and he keeps tripping over his words as he tries to empathize with her not being taken seriously, and everything he says is awkward and painful? That was me. And that sense of being "less than" manifested as an inability to converse with any girl I found even remotely attractive. (ahem, let me slip into my Large Marge voice.) I. I was painfully unsure of myself when I got outside my tiny comfort zone. My family didn't have a lot of money, so I never had the cool clothes all the rich kids had. ![]() No, my problem was that I, as The Kids say, had no game. And the only inhabitant of that space was me. In the Venn diagram of every possible type of social group in my high school, there was one tiny little minuscule space where they all overlapped. Had there been any gay kids who were out back then, I would have been pals with them too. The honors class kids and the remedial kids. I was friends with the jocks and the nerds. I have this weird, wonderful ability to make friends with people no matter what strata of society they represent. My lack of a love life didn't stem from being a nobody. ![]()
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