Generation Why Bother

Tegan and I skedaddled out of that apartment and stayed out. We really weren’t of any assistance to them outside of the bare-bones situation of being guardians, and I was fairly certain that there was about to be a huge hurricane with Andy and Anthony being the centerpieces. It was better to wait until it blew over. Besides, we always had Facenook. Either of us could be contacted at any point through that.

True to his word, Mick messaged us through the band’s page that night, the three of us in the same chat room. However, the only thing he said at first was, “hold on a sec, I’m gonna add you 2 from my personal page!”

Sure enough, in the top corner of our pages, a notification popped up. I clicked on mine to see that a person named “Mick Magellan” had sent me a friend request, and of course, the profile picture depicted Mick smiling like a goofball with a thumbs-up. Must’ve been taken during practice or a show, too, because he was behind his drum kit.

Tegan messaged me, “omg now I can stalk mick. Join me.”

Before I could ignore her suggestion, Mick himself had created another group chat with his personal page and messaged us, “hey guysss, if anyone asks, I’m fake and you just wanted to make it look like you were friends with me irl.”

“IM GOING TO GO THROUGH ALL YOUR PICTURES MICK,” Tegan stated, laying on the caps lock.

“ok that’s fine, at least now it feels more personal :D,” I typed on a different route. Didn’t want to make this any harder for Mick, adding two teenage fans on a social networking site.

“tegan, ur a creep~,” he added. “but ok. So back on topic. anyways andy and anthony haven’t said a single word to each other since they got back. they just went straight to their laptops and started stalking the two dudes. found their facenooks, but they couldn’t find out anything else. apparently though, chuck has a mumblr blog or whatever it’s called. andy found that out when chuck accidentally blogged something and it showed up on his facenook page because he linked the accounts for like a day – so now we have that and we’re turning it upside down except there are some things u can’t see unless ur a member.”

Like I knew she would, Tegan messaged, “omg what’s his url?? I can stalk him for you guys.”

“oh god tegan just don’t follow him, that’d overdo it,” I warned. You could just as easily stalk someone if you didn’t follow them. Something told me she had a tab open on her computer, completely ready to look him up.

“well his username is skatterbrain3d, idk what that has to do with his url but there it is,” Mick told us.

Out of curiosity, I looked him up on Mumblr, and just from the first page of his blog, all he posted were high-quality pictures of sweaty dudes playing trombones and dancing onstage. I probably should’ve guessed from his username that he was a ska kid. (Man, I didn’t even think those folks still existed – I thought they were just mythical creatures said to walk the coastlines in the late 1990s…)

Almost immediately, Tegan messaged us, “oh my god dude do you really need to reblog the same picture 20 times omfg.”

“so what does that mean? are the pictures significant?” Mick sent. Poor guy was 26 and probably too out-of-touch with the blogging technology of the day.

“nah, he just likes pictures of ska bands and posts a ton of them,” I messaged. “like seriously all of this is just from today…must’ve had his laptop with him in the hospital or something.”

Suddenly, though, Tegan sent us a wonderfully caps-locked memo. “OH GOD HE JUST POSTED SOMETHING NEW OSHIE LOOK AT IT OMFG IT’S BEAUTIFUL IT’S SO RELEVENT.”

I clicked on the homepage of his blog, and sure enough, a new blog post was sitting pretty at the very top. All text, it read, “Well, this has been a weird few days. Got struck by lightning at a show last night with Riley and we were stuck in the hospital last night and most of today. Earlier this afternoon, these two guys came into our hospital room and told us we were gonna have to defend the earth ‘cause the world’s gonna end or something. They said they were in this band called Put’emup, Put’emup. I googled them and it would definitely seem like it was real; two of those dudes were talking to us – one had long hair and the other one literally had a pompadour. By the way, if that sounds like complete nonsense, that’s because it is. They gave us too many pain meds, probably. It’s been a weird freakin’ day.”

Tegan typed, “ohgod I should reblog that and completely grill him.”

“no, tegan, that’s rude,” I replied.

“SOMEONE COPY AND PASTE THIS BLOG POST THAT’S SO IMPORTANT, GOOD LORD,” Mick sent.

I did, and that was pretty much the end of that as far as the night went. Mick signed off and told us goodnight, suggesting we get some sleep because it was well past midnight, saying to keep them posted if they find anything else. Tegan and I stayed online and kept messaging each other about the various things we found while surfing deeper and deeper into Chuck’s blog. Once we got past all the seemingly repetitive pictures and various tunes – ska and punk, of course – there was some meaty stuff.

Boy, back in 2009, he shared a lot more with the Internet than he had in more recent times…from what we knew about these two, they were our age. So at the time of the big blocks of texts that documented his personal life, October-ish, he was a sophomore just like me and Tegan were at the time. Even I didn’t talk much about myself on my own blog. I just posted pictures of cats and good music.

Tegan gave me a link to the very first page of his blog, because it’d make more sense to go from less recent to more, and I started the adventure.

October 10th, 2009 held his first personal post. According to it, that was the day he had to move from New Jersey to Gainesville, Florida, and judging by the gratuitous frowny faces he used, he did not like it one bit. He had to switch schools, his parents were divorcing, he wasn’t much of a people person…I felt sorry for the kid. I didn’t join in with Tegan, who was expressing her laughter through our Facenook conversation.

A few days later, another blog entry discussed his first day at his new school. I couldn’t even imagine the crap he’d have to face from being thrown in a brand-new environment on the other side of the country with no way to fend for himself. The worst of what went on that day was, however, the fact that he came right in the middle of a huge Spanish project going on that was a huge percentage of his grade – which, as I gathered, was something he was particularly careful about.

Of course, this project demanded him to work with a partner, and everybody had already chosen their partner the previous week.

“oh my god I swear this is like reading the worst teenybopper story in the history of forever,” Tegan sent to me as we read his chronicles.

So his teacher told him about this other kid who didn’t have a partner, but the other kid was flying solo because he jumped out of a truck that was going 45 down a neighborhood street, and that kid happened to screw up his leg. “Instead of landing comfortably, I guess he landed in the hospital. Soooo, he can’t be too bright,” the blog entry had read. Of course, as the next entry said, that other kid happened to be Riley, and as the next several stated, those two did not get along.

There was a stretch of time where Chuck just vented to the Internet about how much Riley was screwing up their project and how angry it made them both, but after a few weeks, those entries vanished, and it was back to normal blogging. Music, pictures of ska bands, funny animals. His Mumblr was looking more and more conventional.

“I guess they finally got along lol,” I messaged Tegan, finding myself smirking just a bit.

“its like reading a love story omg,” she said back, even throwing in a heart emoticon.

Sure enough, a few pages later, there was a seemingly friendly picture Chuck obviously took of himself and Riley. Granted, they weren’t smiling – they were sticking their tongues out – but it seemed like a far cry from the angsty Chuck who couldn’t stop venting about how hard Riley made his life. In fact, over the course of 2010 and 2011 up until right then, even more selfies were popping up of the two. Sometimes a sassy caption made its way underneath the photos. It was like tenth-grade Chuck didn’t exist and he just forgot about the drama documented a few clicks away.

Tegan and I copied and pasted the important things into the chat with Mick, even though he was no longer online. He’d see them whenever he’d get online next, and of course the next day he did. He laughed just like Tegan did but also thought it was kind of heartening to see them change like that, and he thanked us for being teenagers and getting that information from what they had compiled.

I almost forgot I was being a total creeper and intruding on someone’s personal life for the sake of our advancement. Whoops.

Well, in other news, school was nearing Tegan and I at a dangerous rate. We’d spent our summer in a pretty good way, but it was a little shocking to think that we only had about three more weeks left to live it up in the classic way movies and television hyped it up to be. It was our last summer as high school kids – the next year, we’d be preparing for college. When I thought about it, I felt nauseous. So I just doodled to let it out.

I found myself drawing even more than I had at any point before. In the back of my mind I kept it lodged in my head that I’d have to crank out 24 pieces of art that school year to keep up with the advanced art class I’d chosen, so maybe I was trying to get a head start. I don’t know. I think I was just nervous and fidgety, and drawing was what I did when I got like that.

I sketched words in my notebooks and random characters, people I pulled out of nowhere. I always wished I had the kind of talent to just put a few lines on paper and create brilliantly dynamic scenes like all the best artists could do, but I had to take my time to make it look even halfway decent.

Even then, sometimes I drew something that looked pretty cool – it just took time. I’d have to work on that. My art teacher once told me I worked at a slow pace and I’d need to pick it up if I wanted a job, and at that point I finally saw what she meant. It was whatever, though. My days the last few weeks of summer consisted of waking up at ten in the morning, jogging around the neighborhood with Tegan, going home to shower and eat, and every other day I’d go over to her house. The rest of the days, she’d come to mine.

We’d sit in each other’s room and I’d draw facial expressions, poses, snapshots of other worlds I’d only dreamed of, while she watched or sketched a few things of her own. Once, she even sewed herself a pair of shorts and I hadn’t noticed – I had my nose too deep in my drawing pad.

“You’re like the classic artist,” she had expressed one day. “Totally sunken into your little world. It’s so neat to see you like that.”

“What do you mean, ‘neat?’” I had retorted.

“I don’t know, it’s…heartwarming, I guess. Seeing you all passionate about something, and you’re really good too,” she smiled.

“I probably look just like you do when you’re drawing dresses or sewing,” I shrugged.

She just nodded and giggled quietly, turning back to her own drawing pad, where she was coloring vibrant patterns along a face she’d sketched out earlier.

Meanwhile, Put’emup, Put’emup was being a band. They had a full-blown northeast tour that had started in those next few weeks, taking them all over the area, and of course, that meant that we wouldn’t be seeing them for a while – at least two months, they said. Those were two months that we would be relying on the Internet and cell phones to communicate, two months where we wouldn’t see their true faces. It’s weird, hanging out with celebrities. When you’re reminded of the fact that they’ve got jobs, it’s a wake-up call when they go back to them after a break.

But how many people could say they’ve got Andy Allen, Mick Magellan, Anthony Alvarez, and Chance Chauncey in their phone’s contact list? I always knew it wasn’t because we were first and foremost friends, but it was just cool.

Every so often, though, a breeze would blow throughout our neighborhood and chill everything down. The shade of the trees that canopied my street kept the asphalt from sizzling. Sometimes, the sun would get blocked out by clouds and spare everybody the torture of heat.

Fall was approaching, and that dream summer was coming to a close. Every so often I had to pinch myself to make sure that my those perfect past few weeks weren’t just a dream and I wasn’t still holed up in a hospital bed. Sometimes I thought Tegan and I were dead and just went to Heaven.

It wouldn’t have mattered to me whether or not we were dead. I was happy, the happiest I’d been in a long time.