The Things We Didn’t Know
Taken some spring day in 2010
A friend of mine recently sent me a picture of myself. In the photo, an artifact from another life, I’m eleven years old, wearing a baggy green soccer sweatshirt, my hair is sticking up in great tufts all over my head, and I’m giving a speech. I’m standing behind a podium that’s almost as tall as me and speaking into a microphone I’m holding far too close to my mouth. When my friend sent me the picture, here in this often worrying, sometimes sickening year of 2020, my reaction was, really, inevitable: Poor bastard, I thought, looking at myself from a decade ago. He has no idea what’s coming.
—
What speech was I giving? My “Why Drugs Are Bad” essay I had written for Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE, obviously). I was speaking to a crowd of two hundred fifth graders, their bored teachers, and the corona-proof year of 2010. No one in the room that day knew what was coming a decade later. No one had ever heard of COVID-19, or murder hornets, or a song called “Gangnam Style.” Also in the photo is a cop, our DARE instructor, Deputy Nicole. In 2010 not even Deputy Nicole, in her infinite wisdom, knew what TikTok was, or had heard of SpaceX, or had endured the raw cultural moment known as the movie Cats.
No one, in 2010, knew what was coming in 2020. Or that Cats would have a budget of 100 million dollars.
Of course, that probably was for the best. Imagine telling your eleven-year-old self that someday, before they knew it, he/she would be spending hours every week on a “social media platform” known as “Twitter” where everyone collectively agrees to forget that the things they post are called “tweets.” You know, like, the sound birds make. Right. No, eleven-year-old me, I’m not making that up. Tweet tweet, buddy boy: you think fifth grade is the peak of existence, but things are gonna change, and they’re gonna change quick.
(A short conversation between my current self and myself ten years ago):
21-year-old me: Ever seen Kung Fu Panda 2?
11-year-old me: There’s a second one?
21: Oh, right. It doesn’t come out until 2011.
11: What’s 2011?
21: A very strange year. There’ll be this thing called “Occupy Wall Street” and Blackberry smartphones will go completely out of style forever.
11: There’s no way Blackberrys go out of style. Every adult I know has one.
21: Trust me. Invest in Apple. I don’t care how much you have in your piggy bank. Just do it.
11: ...Okay. Sure. Why are you sweating so much?
21: Don’t worry about it. Just see Kung Fu Panda 2 in theaters. You’ll love it.
11: Really?
21: Yes. And you’ll spend most of the next 10 years trying to convince people it’s the greatest animated film of all time.
11: …
21: Please—
11: If that’s my future, I’m in no hurry to get there.
—
Ah, the carefree days of 2010. When we thought DARE meant they were daring us to avoid drugs because drugs were BAD and could KILL you and you were going straight to HELL if you ever tried them. I hate to break your heart, Deputy Nicole, but I know so many kids who were in the crowd that day who now smoke weed with remarkable frequency. To illustrate how in 2010 no one knew what was coming, I’ll list the things Deputy Nicole was unaware of a decade ago: 1) COVID-19, and 2) how many of the impressionable young kids she guided through DARE would ten years later say “lmk slide up, $30 a g” on their snap stories. The fifth-graders in the audience who grew up to become young adults that are married, or have kids, or go to college, or work, or have moved, or have experienced loss and love and life—none of them knew what was coming either. Or that someday something called “Snapchat” would be used to deal drugs. As in, I DARE you to buy drugs over snapchat.
Anyway, regardless of how smug my 11-year-old self may be, he’s in the dark about nearly all of the things I now spend my mental energy thinking about. The version of myself contained in that photograph has never heard the word coronavirus. He doesn’t know what middle school is like, what minimum wage is, where to find Iraq on a globe, how it feels to be taller than five feet. He doesn’t know what lockdown is like, has never tried the Chicken Chalupa Crunchwrap Supreme from Taco Bell, has never broken a bone or been stung by a bee, and has barely begun riding in the front passenger seat, let alone driven a car. The kid in the green soccer sweatshirt with bedhead reading his anti-drug essay has never checked his bank account, is still in fucking Boy Scouts, doesn’t know what a meme is, is still two years from getting braces, and has never tweeted. (How is “tweeted” a real word? Can we change this? Wake up, people.)
Half my life has passed since that photo. The things that kid knows, and the things I know now, are not mutually exclusive, but both of us could learn something from each other.
If I could tell that kid only three things, I would tell him this:
1. Ten years, which is the entirety of your lifespan, will double to twenty faster than you can imagine. (And other such statements that are both meaningful and meaningless, such as “life gets richer as you age.” Right.)
2. When you go to Adventureland in 7th grade as a member of the Gretna Middle School Jazz Band, do not ride that last ride. It’s called like the Spinning Wheel of Death or some shit. If you get on it you will feel violently ill the entire bus ride back until twenty minutes from home you will be forced to ask for a trash can and subsequently vomit right there on the bus. Just don’t do it. You can’t handle it. Trust me.
3. When the Cleveland Cavaliers lose Game 4 of the 2016 NBA Finals, going down 3-1 in the series, go to whatever sports betting site will accept the most money and put every fucking cent you have on the Cavs to come back and win in 7 games.
In 2010, we all didn’t know what we didn’t know. What would you tell the version of yourself who lived ten years ago? What can they teach you?
—
If I examined my eleven-year-old brain, I’d probably find mostly empty space, with a few monkeys banging cymbals together at odd intervals. Keep in mind that when I finished elementary school the greatest achievement of my life was earning all four Turbo Math ribbons before anyone else. This, in fifth grade terms, meant I was hot shit. So, at least, my younger self could teach me something: the best way to beat Turbo Math on a desktop iMac from 2009 (one of those big white computers that looked like a cloud. I remember one time one of the weird kids held a magnet near it and turned half the screen purple for like six months. My fifth grade teacher absolutely lost her mind. It was awesome.)
And eleven-year-old me, for all his lack of coherence, structure, or collegiate education, probably had something in his monkey-cymbal brain that many of us, including me, have lost to some degree in the intervening years: the ability to wonder. Curiosity is the nature of childhood—why is there air? What makes the stars float in the sky late at night? How do fish breathe? How did the dinosaurs die? What’s the Big Bang? As a 21-year-old, I know the answers. But eleven-year-old me had the questions. That sense of wonder at the world, at the universe, at the big things that at age 11 you are only ever-so-dimly aware of—that sense, in 2010, was at its peak.
I now know what coronavirus is, and what “Gangnam Style” is, and I’ve seen Kung Fu Panda 2 dozens of times. The kid in the photograph from 2010 can barely wait to learn what those things are. Maybe someday he'll even "tweet" about it. Whatever that means.
—Thanks to Reggie Wortman (@___reggie) for the picture of me <3
