I Was a Teenage Existentialist #1

Growing Up Unhappy with the White Patriarchy in the 60s and 70s

Preface: A Tale of Chemicals and Depression

This is not current events, but by plumbing personal history in the context of contemporary history, maybe can shed some light on how we got here.

So. Onward. Avanti.

Now as I look back, I think I’m a round peg, and I never fit in the square hole of the patriarchy. Yeah, I say obvious things, but they weren’t always so obvious to me. I thought I fit in. I was born in 1955, a pivotal year (my first memories are from 1958). The square hole I was expected to fit into, rather nicely, was the landscape I grew up in, the white male patriarchy: baseball, Russian missiles aimed at us, 4 brothers, the all-white landscape of suburban Minneapolis, the all-white landscape of television, except for Amos and Andy and the black kids on. The Little Rascals; the all-white freezing cold winters, that’s what was there. But the older I got, the less comfortable I was, and I wasn’t sure why. By age 18, one is given the implied power of life and death, with your draft card and your teenage hormones, or at least the power over one’s own self of living, or self-slaughter. And I almost didn’t make it a couple times.

At a certain point, you have to get a handle on your memories, and your memory, or it will drive unsolicited spikes in your head of pointless regret. So I found myself jotting down what is coming back to me (I got 200 pages), to sort it out backwards, as Kierkegaard warned us, because going forward from here is full of Fear and Trembling. And Loathing. Trump is back, and the Ball of Chaos he unleashes every day is made to keep us off-balance. I’m trying to settle a couple things so I can take the next steps with some stoic perspective.

Why I Don’t Bungee Jump: Keeping a Chemical Imbalance

If you have had several brushes with death, you don’t go looking for it. When I was about 26, I was working a ditch job in a cool record store, The Wax Museum on Lake St. (Prince used to buy records there sometimes; I sold him a copy of Culture Clubs LP Do You Really Wanna Hurt Me?). The used LP department was in the basement, which meant it cost no extra rent, and the only expense was the guy behind the counter (me) on minimum wage, and the records we bought, and resold with a 100% mark-up. 1979? This was back when there was a decent trade in used vinyl, pre-cassette, pre-CD, pre-digital. A guy I kinda knew from my college dorm came down the stairs and said “Dean Seal! Man, I thought you’d be Dead by now!”

He wasn’t alone. He might have been remembering the second time I almost got killed, and he had seen about 200 yards of barbed wire hanging off the back end of my blue Chevy Impala, the one with a busted passenger window filled with plastic and a Marine Corps sticker on the driver’s side that I had swiped off a recruiter’s table. My bumper had pulled the wire out of the ground when I was driving the 45 minutes from Minneapolis to Northfield drunk as a skunk, trying to keep my eyes open as I sped along at about 3 o’ the clock in the morning. I had left a friend’s house in a fury, because he had said something about how it is okay to break some laws if you can get away with it, and I got on my high horse and said it was always wrong to do the wrong thing. Then I got in my car, hammered because I was not originally planning on leaving, I was going to stay over; but I was too drunk to drive, and too angry to stay over, so I drove. I went right through a stop sign about a block away, within sight of my friend who told me about it later.

It’s 45 minutes from Minneapolis to Northfield, almost all freeway, easy, I thought. I was trying to keep my eyes open and stay on the road and between the lines, and not speed or drive too slow, and not get pulled over, that was Not Easy, and I guess when I saw the lights of St. Olaf, the college on the hill, off in the distance, I was relieved, and I relaxed and dropped my guard and conked out and drove off the road, down a slope of the ditch and into a cornfield. I woke up immediately, jammed on the accelerator, punched it hard, and pulled the car back up the embankment and got back on the road; and somehow finished the drive. I heard the sound of metal dragging, but I thought I had just dislodged the muffler again, it was wired into place with a coat hanger and an orange juice can, so I thought I would just look at it when I got up the next day. I pulled into the driveway behind the dorm, where no one checked to see if you had a permit, because I didn’t.

I crashed in bed, and did not wake up until after noon, when another friend, Steve-o, cajoled me into coming out to look at something interesting. “Oh Deeeeeeeeen, oh Deeeeeeeeen, did you have some fun last night? C’mere. I want you to see something.” My parking spot behind the dorm was in a circular driveway that was the main path between the library and the cafeteria, which means that most people went by there at some point on most days. People knew the car. Everybody saw it. That kinda counts as the second time I almost died. I had other 3 car crashes but only one more was that serious. It was more serious.

How did I come to drink so abusively?

#30#