So, I'm sitting here playing Warcraft, American Idiot blasting in the background, endulging my night owl nature while my sick wife succumbs to her Ambien and Nyquil cocktail. The last song of the album comes on, Whatsnername. You know the one
Great song, right?(stfu, of course it's a great song, it's a brilliant fucking album. If you don't have it, stop reading this, and go buy it. And then come back and finish reading this because I took the write it for you, damnit.) So, I'm listening to this song, humming along, and I have a real strong Mike moment.*
*I have a younger cousin named Mike. He's about 14, and I frequently have these moments where I'm like, "Holy shit, Mike will never know what a typewrites is, or a landline phone, or an etc... you get the drift, we're old."
Anyway, My Mike moment is that it occurs to me we might be the last generation that really has Whatshernames. I don't know about all of you, but, of "all the girls I've loved before", or even liked before, or just made it to third base with before, all but three of them are my friends on facebook. My first high school crush, who I haven't seen in close to 20 years? I looked at pictures of her kids last night. My girlfriend all through college? I'm friends with her boyfriend on foursquare. The girl I dated for 3 weeks senior year? I could pick her youngest child out of a line up, and I know what night of the week her book club is.
And I don't think any of this is bad. But, there's a certain romance to "Whatshername" that we're going to be the last ones to have. I think Shelli's kids are adorable, and she's clearly in a great marriage, but she's not fighting with the rebels to help the Tibetans gain their freedom, or leading guided tours across the African jungle to hunt the deadliest game of all, Man. She's in Orlando. There aren't any tibetan freedom fighters in Orlando.
I wonder how this will effect Mike, as he grows through high school, into college, past that into dating and marriage and adulthood. He'll have all these tools, keeping him wired into his various peer groups, the whole time. Dropping off the radar, falling out of touch, these will have to be extremely deliberate decisions and not just something that happens when you go your separate paths. I know, for me, seeing all these people after more then a decade apart made me radically shift how I thought of them, and allowed me to recall, as if the first time, so many great memories we'd had. I can't those things having as much impact if you never drop out of touch in the first place.
I love that I Know where these people are now, that I get a dirty little stalkers' glimpse into their lives, but I'll feel sad if my cousin Mike never gets to sit and have a beer with his buddies wondering whatever happened to that chick from high school. I personally have got my three Whatshernames left, and I cling to them tightly, at times deliberately creating exotic lives for them in Whatshernameland. (volcano helicopter tour guide, monkey assassin trainer, high priestess of a mongolian blood cult!)
I imagine with a fair bit of digging I could find them, but I don't really want to. At this point their relative anonymity puts them on a pedestal in my memories that, in some cases, far exceeded their impact on my real life. In one case, I've even forgotten her name. She's just Whats her name, the blond hair. I think she drove a Ford Taurus, had really thick, kissable lips, and a crooked nose that you thought was sort of ugly at first, but got cuter the more you knew her. I'm pretty sure that she's married to the Prince of Morocco now.
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