“Hey, hey, it’s the static age. Well, this is how the west was won…” 

I didn’t know who she was, but she told me her name was Michelle and she went to my high school. She was a friend of Teddy’s. He had given her my phone number because she was nervous about making friends at a new school. She said she liked Teddy and that maybe she’d like me. Starting ninth grade felt like the first season of a spin-off sitcom that I didn’t want to be on; contractual obligations met with poor managerial choices, is how I’d have envisioned myself explaining it in some career spanning interview years later– ninth grade felt like a real low point. I didn’t know anyone outside of friends from elementary school, cast members the invisible producers decided to keep around, and everyone else was Saved by the Bell: The New Class (1993). 

I knew there would be girls, and while this idea was tantalizing, it was like seeing a painfully inaccessible item on the first screen of a Legend of Zelda (1986) game. Even if it appeared to be obtainable, the methodology behind its retrieval was buried in an issue of Nintendo Power (1988) that I didn’t have; dull, aching frustration. Michelle’s phone call was that tantalizing item. I found her at her locker the next morning. We never spoke again.

Read More