A Dissection of Cool

As I rounded the corner from the entrance hall of Travis Junior High School, hitching up my ill-fitting pants, shoving my hair out of my eyes as I realized I had forgotten to brush it because I was late for the bus, I stopped cold in my tracks. The corridor was crowded, and in the middle of it, unavoidably so, stood a clutch of the Popular Kids. Every ounce of my being vibrated with wanting to turn and run, as they stood there and assessed my ratty hair, my smudgy glasses and cracked lips that had a hard time covering my braces. I knew their smiles and laughter regarded my complete and utter lack of anything that resembled cool.

How do I get me some of that? I carried this quizzical in my pocket for the rest of my small town Texas public school incarceration, especially into high school where these cliques solidified into epoxy. I didn’t pay much attention to the kickers, the jocks or the stoners, though. I wanted to figure out how I could become one of THEM. The pretty ones, who carried their cool cards in laminated sleeves. I watched them walk past the window of the library, their relaxed and open postures, as if they carried sandwiches of ease in their lunch boxes. Everything came easily to them. Were they born like this? They must have been and who dealt these cards anyway?

It didn’t take long for me to settle, to find my way into the aggregation that was known as The Drama Fags, even though it incorporated most square pegs, the lost souls who sought solace in the arts. It turned out it wasn’t so bad, to be with people who were like me, where weird was a desired state. We sketched out the most exaggerated portraits of ourselves, created personas that were big, and hard to see through. I learned to wear my imperfections as armor, a cloak made of music and metal, of safety pins and apathy.

I dipped this cloak in a big vat of aloof and dragged it along through college and beyond. I redeveloped myself regularly, always searching for that elusive measure of cool. Whenever I returned to that small Texas town, people sometimes gawked or gave me a nervous smile, turning to whisper to their grandmother as I passed: did you see THAT?

I took this desired effect and wove it into my cloak with a grim smile, pulling it tight around my sharp edges as I pushed my way through my life, always feeling as if I were walking into the wind.

But somewhere along the way I just became me. Maybe it was after I moved to Austin and realized no one here gave a fuck if you were cool. Just go about your business, be nice and if you know who played guitar on that Lloyd Cole record from the nineties, all the better. I started leaving my cloak in the closet when I went to meet my new friends at the pub, my sharp edges softening.

The world churned and ground along on its axis, seeming as if it might end sometimes, but mostly it just kept going. And then the thing known as social media poked its head up on the internet one day and things changed, they really changed, irrevocably. It’s not like any of it was different, it was all the same things, the same mistakes and fears and incomparable joys we’ve always had, but now they were daubed on a slide and placed under a microscope.

So many things became clear, so many things I could never have conceived, so many I never even wanted to know. Connections occurred at breakneck speed and all of a sudden I had seven hundred friends, from all over the world, but also from that small Texas town. I started hearing a term bandied about in comments and posts, regarding me, one I had forgotten about, the one that was scrawled on the inside of a matchbook that was tucked into the pocket of my cloak, still hanging in my closet.

She’s one of the cool kids.

It annoyed me at first. Me? No. I’m sure you must be mistaken, or perhaps you find this amusing. And we’re in our fifties now, can’t we leave this in the dust, under our feet where it belongs?

But then I began to see it for the marvel that it was. It seems I was never alone in my quest for cool, of course I wasn’t. We all have cloaks and coats and sweaters we wear, trying to cover up the bruises, the gushing wounds that life issues without discrimination.

I’ve realized that those who are strapped down and laden with this label, this sobriquet that probably conveys nothing more than a Meyers-Briggs score that starts with an “I”, never believe it, they never see it for one second. Because it’s somebody else’s idea of what they think they want to be. Which is almost always wrong.

A Prince song from nineteen seventy-nine or a soft dog-eared copy of Bukowski poetry in your pocket. A filtered home screen picture of your first dog or a refusal to stop wearing your vintage Chuck Taylors even as you sign up for AARP. None of this matters and yet it is everything that you are.

So take off your cloak, your sweater and settle down for a while. We’ve got all the time in the world and we’ll take things apart until we get down to the bottom of your bucket of cool to find that in the end there’s nothing but warm underneath it all, the same blood and skin and heart beating as the pretty girl next to you. Leave it all. It will be there, if you need it.