Being an Asshole in High School was Rad
A lot of people miss high school because it was the social high point of their lives. Others miss it because it was the last time in their lives when dating junior-high girls just made them just a creepy loser instead of an arrestable miscreant. Most of you, being "internet people," probably don't miss it at all, since you witnessed your teenage years through garbage cans and locker vents, and even to this day you can still feel the cold toilet water dripping through your swirlie-matted hair.
High school is a captive, hostile environment. You're forced by The Man to be in an unpleasant place for seven hours with a bunch of random characters who just happen to be the same age as you. You're taught mind-numbing trivia at a glacial pace by underpaid sadsacks who have to tailor their curriculum to the whims of the State Board of Making Sure Morons Graduate and Get Jobs at Pulp Mills. Everyone's there because they have to be; you owe them nothing, and you've got a license-- even a moral duty-- to fuck with people. As long as you're not killing anyone, you can act with almost total impunity.
That's why I miss high school. It was the only time in my life when I was free to be an utterly reprehensible prick. You can't get away with being a flamboyant jerk in college or the corporate world-- not artfully, at least. Though it's tough to accept, being in college or working a job is a privilege, and being a jerk just doesn't carry the same sense of moral victory.
It's coming up on ten years since I graduated from a puke-beige edifice called Eureka High School, and I sometimes take a moment to reflect upon how fucking great it was, my friends and I getting to be tremendous assholes all the time without consequences-- not the kind of assholes who come from abusive homes and bring knives to school or whatever, just jerks.
We weren't Parker Lewis, but we mostly got along with people and nobody really gave us any shit (which is weird, due to the amount of shit we gave other people). That's really the best part about high school: we never, ever got our comeuppance, and we probably never will. A few people have asked me to write down a few tales of minor-league jerkery, so what the hell. I asked my friend Thomas, the hero of many of these tales, to help me fill in some details.
At lunchtime, my friends and I sat on benches along a well-trafficked corridor and watched people go by. We'd see the same people day after day, so over time we developed our line of abusive patter for all the regulars. There was this one kid I took to calling "I'm Depressed," because he always sulked down the hallway with a look on his face like God just shit in his milkshake. Every time he walked by-- every day, I'm sure-- we'd work the phrase "I'm depressed" into our conversation, usually in an Eeyore-style voice. "Gosh, fellas, life sure is gettin' me down in the dumps. My house blew down and nobody loves me. I'm depressed."
Throughout the months, I'm Depressed never betrayed any indication that he noticed, until one day someone took it a little too far: a guy who wasn't a central member of the group and didn't fully understand the joke took things a bit too literally and blew our cover by describing exactly what the kid was wearing.
"Aww, boo hoo, I've got a new red hat but I'm still so depressed." It was kind of a tearjerker moment: I'm Depressed turned to us, and for a minute he had a look of terrifying realization on his face like Bruce Willis during the plot-twist- flashback montage at the end of The Sixth Sense, then his poor depressed face just collapsed into this look of hyperdepression the likes of which I've never seen since.
Don't worry, he didn't kill himself. I saw him walking down the street years later, still just as depressed as ever.
Then there was RJ. He was kind of an obnoxious tough-guy type who'd get really combative if we made fun of him. He was angry, bowl-cutted and high-strung, which made him a real treat to screw around with. Whenever he walked by, I'd say "Hey, RJ! How's it going?" he'd say "hi" back, we'd prod him a little until he got surly, then he'd move on. Eventually, I started openly calling him "Rimjob" to his face. "Yo, Rimjob! Rimjooooobbber! How's it going today?" He never seemed to get what it meant, so we were in the clear.
One day, after we'd been calling him this for something like four months, he was walking by with a slice of pizza. Justin-- a funny guy, but prone to occasional bizarre outbursts-- yelled at him: "Hey, you! Eating pizza! Yeah, you're always eating pizza, you lesbian."
Now, objectively, this was not a particularly witty thing to say, but I've gotta hand it to Justin, because this was the shit that finally pushed RJ over the edge. "Fuck you! I'm not a lesbian! What the fuck!" It looked like we were about to have a bona-fide fight on our hands, so we started trying to calm him down: "What? You're not a lesbian? You don't like girls? Just means you like girls, dude. What's wrong with that?" In his flustered, pre-fight state, he couldn't figure out a way to dispute the logic of this, but he was still mad as hell.
"So let me get this straight," Thomas says. "We've been calling you Rimjob for months-- we got half the school calling you Rimjob at this point-- and you're gonna get mad at being called a lesbian? This is what gets you?" He still wasn't quite getting it, so we had to lay down a little sex-ed lesson to explain exactly what we'd been calling him for the past few months.
A fight was somehow averted, but the real coup-de-grace came a few weeks later when a friend and I were walking down the hall in the afternoon, having somehow snuck out of class, and we saw a teacher lecturing RJ outside a classroom. "Listen, you can't just fly off the handle whenever someone says something you don't like. You've got to learn to get your anger under control."
So, of course, as we walked past: "What's up, Rimjob?" (No reaction from the teacher--either the teacher didn't know what it meant, or, more likely, he knew that this dude was just a goddamn rimjob).
Something Awful has been mocking itself and the internet since 1999, bringing you reviews of the worst movies, video games, and websites to ever exist. If it's something and it's awful, it's probably on Something Awful, where the internet makes you stupid.
