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I’ll share a couple bits about this one in various places, but I’m putting this note here first because I would bet this is a common thread of experience in forum people. Come on @Tanya or @rechraum or @Cactus_Ed or @charliep33 or @Desperate_Yuppie or @jpclegg63 or… what’s your version of this?
Every pre-cell phone era northern Jersey kid (and southern CT kid, and Eastern PA kid, and…) has this story:
The one about the time, in high school, when they told their parents they were going one place, but in actuality, they were sneaking into the city.
Scrap that. Every kid has this story:
The one about the time, growing up, when they broke/bent/blew off the rule book and went on an adventure.
And, critically, part of that adventure is whatever went wrong.
Eric Markowitz didn’t know (I didn’t even know) I’d be asking him this question when we sat down for our Intentional Investor interview, but it unfolded with me saying,
“As a Jersey kid, it is part of your birthright, to sneak out of Jersey and sneak into Manhattan, usually when you’re not old enough to do so yet—do you have any good stories or fun nights in the big city?”
Of course he did.
He and his friends prepped their alibis. There was a band playing they wanted to see. They took the train or the bus in, and a bunch of kids saw a killer (indie rock darlings) Built to Spill set.
Funny enough, just before our recording, he saw the band again, 20ish years offset. Weird how that works, right?
But that night, all those years ago, that group of friends experienced the city as only teenagers can. They experienced the magic of taking a risk, of taking a ton of risks plural, and as they walked out ready to catch the bus home, undetected by parents, full of bragging rights for school, they found out… there were no more trains, busses, or accessible/available options to get them back to Jersey at that hour.
F***.
This is the critical part of the story. When the adventure takes the wrong turn.
When you realize might not get away with it.
It’s critical because you have a choice.
A very adult choice.
How will you handle it? How will you get home? Are you about to take more risk, take your lumps, what, why, and how are you stepping forward?
These aren’t stories we usually share. We usually aren’t trying to encourage kids to take risks like this. But, I think it’s important we tell them. The stories. Maybe not the kids (or, be careful which ones you tell your own kids at least. Leave the bad ones to the uncles and aunts, then return the favor accordingly).
Eric and his friends attempted to cross the George Washington Bridge on foot.
What they didn’t know, was that there was a gate in the middle blocking their passage. The police lights and sirens found them there before they could decide on what risk to take yet.
It was the era, but the cops shepherded them to the other side of the bridge and told them to get home safely.
It’s a happy ending, in that way.
But it’s also a happy lesson.
Learn to take risks. Learn to be wrong. Learn to be OK. Experience being right.
Know what role luck is playing.
In a few years, Eric would become an investigative journalist, and later, a hedge fund research analyst. I’m not attributing all of that to sneaking into the city, but I am attributing some of it to the gall it takes. Life is scary. No, life is REALLY scary.
You have to try to cross the bridges, even when the police need to escort you off from time to time.
They’re rites of passage for a reason.
And, maybe, Built to Spill said it best (my emphasis)
Sometimes life surprises
'Cause you’d never expect it to be that
Dangerous disguises
That you never expect to see
Some things never change
Nothing’s gonna change that
Some things you can’t explain
Like why, we’re all embracing conventional wisdom in a world that’s just so unconventional
Made you turn around
But you never expected to see that
That’s what makes that sound
That you never expect to hear
Some things never change
Some things wanna change that
Some things you can’t explain
Like why, we’re all embracing conventional wisdom in a world that’s just so unconventional
They don’t know they’re wrong
But you know that they never can see that
That’s what makes them strong
That they know that we’ll never see
-“Conventional Wisdom” by Built to Spill
Tell the stories.
Thanks for the prompt, @MZeigler3, I actually listened to the episode on the way to work this morning. Let me give it a think and report back!
Ok, I opened the vault, and quite a few memories fell out! I didn’t move to NYC until my early 20s (grew up in suburban/rural Connecticut) so sadly I don’t have a “sneaking into the city” story, but here are a few things that might qualify.
I suppose I got started pretty early – I was a kid in the 70s, and I walked to and from kindergarten by myself. One day, I took it upon myself to go home with a friend from school. Her Dad was there, but he was blind so it was apparently a bit of an ordeal to figure out who this other kid was, and get my phone number so he could call my Mom. She was NOT happy, lol!
As a teen I really wasn’t that wild, but I do remember camping out overnight for tickets (remember Ticketron? Cross Country Concerts?) with my two best girlfriends.
This was my crowd at high school, basically my Breakfast Club. Unfortunately the photo is black and white, otherwise you’d see that the car was robin’s-egg blue!
We got up to all manner of foolishness, from having a party at one dude’s house during the day and then getting busted when his Mom saw us sneaking out the back door when she got home from work, to going to Denny’s late at night after my boyfriend at the time Dan’s gig with the band he was in (the bassist, natch!), to all going to school in Dan’s van and turning a stop sign that was loose upside down every day on the way, and having another friend light fireworks in the van and throw his favorite lighter out of the skylight instead of the fireworks! One of them landed on his jean jacket and burned a hole in it, lol. Somehow my household was one of the first to get a CD player, and everyone came over my house after school while my parents were at work to listen to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” on CD.
One last anecdote (even though it was when I was in my early 20s after I moved to NYC) – I once called in sick from London(!), not sure why I didn’t just take a vacation day – it might have been too short notice? And I think on that same trip was when the guy I was with and I snuck into the Eric Clapton show at the Royal Albert Hall through the stage door, only to leave early because it was so boring! For what it’s worth, I like a lot of Clapton’s work, but apparently his live shows were lacking at that time.
Matt, I really don’t have an adolescent equivalent to this, having grown up in Phoenix. Plus I was a Good Kid™ and would never have sneaked out.
Much later in life I found myself a guest of the military on a gift trip to New Orleans, courtesy of a program called Employer Support of Guard and Reserves. Skipping some of the many other cool details (got to lie in the operator’s position of a KC-135 tanker), one of the tour highlights was a trip to the Quarter. Rather than take the bus back after dinner, I stepped on and told the driver and our guide that I’d just get a cab back to the BOQ and continue the evening at whatever live music venue I could find. The driver was a little concerned, even more so when I asked him “Where’s Storyville?” thinking of the Robbie Robertson album popular at the time.
“No such place.” he huffed, in a tone that clearly communicated his belief that I was absolutely headed for trouble.
Somebody in a coffee shop suggested Snug Harbor might have a show, so I hoofed it down there. Didn’t recognize the headliner - a local jazz saxophonist - but as I was nursing my beer waiting for the show to start the waitress pointed out two other early arrivals up front.
“You know who that is? That’s Wynton Marsalis’ parents.”
Well of course it was, since as it turned out the leader’s band included the rest of the Marsalis kids with the exception of Wynton and Branford (who was on tour with Sting, I think).
Best night ever.
Wow, brilliant!! And I love the Robbie Robertson reference, I adore his first solo album.
Thanks for what you are doing Matt telling people’s stories. This was not at all your prompt
, but the question of engagement with bottom-up stories has come up on the last two OH. Ben mentioned similar thoughts in regards to @mpardieck two weeks ago, I believe he said something like “what you are doing is destined to fail, and that is why it is so important”. ‘Fail’ here would be seen as failing according to the top-down or macro world’s engagement-economy metrics. I think Paul Graham is who said ‘Do things that don’t scale’ and there is Melville/Zizek’s “I would prefer not to”. These powerful ideas come to mind for you guys that are brave enough to try to engage the world, but insist on doing it in a way that ‘fights the good fight’, which in the gyre will be an uphill battle the entire way. You both know this and yet you do it anyway. 
Ok the prompt…
Ok…so first of all I was a good kid too! But, as Tanya said, your prompt started opening the memory banks and plenty of relevant stories came out. But reminiscing on these in middle age I’m definitely struck by a sense of having been at least moderately lucky that no serious or long lasting consequences arose. I have to go a couple stories down the list to be willing to say aloud, avoiding a few of the most stupid things. But stupid or not, at least when you get lucky and things work out, risk-taking tends to be memorable and formative. A paradox of living.
And I’m definitely a believer that we’ve culturally overregulated our risk tolerance. Last year some kids in town got suspended from school for a week for ding-dong-ditching a teacher’s house. I could only hope there was more to the situation than harmless fun to justify such consequences. People in the neighborhood regularly complain on the FB group page about kids ‘trespassing’ by walking through their property. I nearly joined some kids this winter to intentionally sled down a small hill into a neighbor’s yard in spite of the “No trespassing” sign they put up after the kids did it the first time.
So, it may be mildly unsurprising, I prefer my own rule book to one that is culturally imposed. I consider myself highly moral and ethical but I have the rebel’s heart where I get significant enjoyment out of breaking rules that I consider arbitrary or without ethical value. When these are imposed my mind desires to break them. But as a parent how do you encourage risk-taking behavior when you recognize the role of luck, and you can’t trust the culture to not impose real consequences for harmless fun? A paradox of living!
Have I even told a damn story yet?!
I confess I was too much of a country bumpkin to be attracted to the idea of sneaking out to the big city. We snuck out to the country just to hang out on our own terms. We had a golf course that was fun to roam around at night and try to attract the attention of the security guard so we could run and hide from him. I remember driving side by side down a country road next to a friend going much too fast, a story definitely to keep from my teenagers. In college a group of us drove from Indy to Vancouver. We tried to go see Mt. Rushmore in the middle of the night and I’m sure some of us were high as kites when 3 or 4 Homeland Security (a months-old organization) vehicles came flying out of nowhere and surrounded us. They let us go on our way once they realized we were stupid kids, similar to Eric’s story on crossing the bridge. Life lesson there is that there is nothing to see of Mt. Rushmore in the dark. On the same trip, crossing into Canada the border police found an email that some idiot friend had printed out (do not ask my why) discussing how much weed we needed to bring for the long trip. I remember all my friends were shell shocked but I managed to say that we were just noobies and ‘didn’t even know what an oz was’, some other bullshit, which managed to get us across the border and not ruin the trip.
Do as I say and not as I do kids.
Wonderful comment, love this!
A. Denny’s, and moons over my-hammy, forever. B. That picture had better be framed in your house somewhere. And C. it’s always OK to tell rockstars some of their work is boring! Love this Tanya.
whaaaaa?!?! that’s incredible. Oh man, the stuff you wish you could take a time machine to to witness. So cool, what a story!
Didn’t Clapton get the nickname Slowhand from taking soooooo damn long to change a broken guitar string at a particular show back in the 60s? Talk about boring!