It’s been a quarter century. Over half my lifetime ago. It’s the black hole, it’s the original mistake from which all others stem, it is the defining catastrophe of my life. And it’s starting to surface again in ways I honestly had not anticipated.
Part of that is down to college football – and the realization that as I think about possibly having gone to some other institution that didn’t play major college football, leaving me with the opportunity to take or leave Alabama…well, that’s exactly what I did in undergrad, didn’t I? There was nothing requiring me to take Vanderbilt; I could have held onto free agency if I wanted, just had no team at all, never made any other emotional investment. Heaven knows I was punched out on Bama for pretty much my entire life in DC, barring the obvious two games a year. (And they made it easy to punch out from 1997-2003, to be perfectly honest.)
But it isn’t just football that brought this back…it’s Silly Con Valley. Twenty-five years on, I look around me, and I have the exact same feeling that I had walking around a dark campus in the west end of Birmingham: this place is not meant for the likes of me. Sure, I live here and I work here and I do a good job and on paper I am part of the high-tech sector, just like I went to class and made good grades and was officially a student at BSC…but as there before, so here now: who I am and what I do isn’t a good “culture fit”. I’m not actually a part of this place, and I don’t stand much of a chance of becoming one – I could dress up like a Jersey cow and moo from dusk ’til dawn, but no matter what I try, I’m never going to be able to give milk.
In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that I latched onto Vanderbilt for degree laundering; Nashville felt like home on day one in a way no other place ever did before or since. And in a world where I’m caught between Stanford on one side and the University of California on the other, I needed a university affiliation of my own that could punch in the same weight class. But the brutal truth of the matter is that unless people here are very knowledgable baseball fans, are really into the origin of the Golden State Warriors, or happen to have had some other sort of connection, Vanderbilt isn’t any more of a household name out here than BSC would be, and in the areas of football and basketball, they aren’t doing anything to improve my mood or outlook on life – quite the reverse. If the rule for 2016 is to do the things I enjoy and stop doing the things I don’t, I’d pretty much have to shut down any connection to the Commodores between June and March.
The thing that really tipped it, though, was…Rocky Horror. I’ve seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show twice in my life, both in undergrad, the second time the night before Bama-Tennessee in 1992. The soundtrack got a regular and frequent airing throughout most of 1991 and 1992, and then disappeared from my life until a few nights ago, when I was looking for one song and realized that in all the years of digital music I’ve accumulated back to 1998, I never once got a song off that soundtrack. And I’ve been booming the whole thing ever since, and it’s become the waldo-arms with which I can start manipulating the radioactive material of my undergraduate experience.
So this is the beginning of revisiting that story. Four years off the rails, four years that I’ve been trying to recover from for two decades plus. Four years that arguably shaped me more than any other, if only because the rest of my life has been spent pushing back against them – and now that I see the same thing happening around me again, it’s time to remember the lesson and push back right this time.
Zip up your Starter jacket, tie your Nikes tight, turn your hat backward and let’s jump down the hole.