"Can you do that?"

A while ago I was reminded of "the good stuff". It is mildly upsetting to me that apparently this is also a line from a wildly popular country music song. I will continue as if I never had heard of that song. "The good stuff" for me refers to a period of three or four years while in Auburn where everything was fun and uncomplicated. The future was to be dealt with and thought of in a time and place far from then and far from there. Vague generalities sufficed for who we collectively were to become. Those thoughts were for different people, older people. They were for the poor alumni who failed miserably at discarding serious faces upon returning to the plains of their youth. They were curious with their hair cuts and pressed pants, pressed smiles. They wore school colors for association, bleeding us of our identity. "I was here, really, I was," was the corporate cry of their button down uniforms. We didn't wear school colors. If we did, it was entirely by accident. But you couldn't change your clothes, no sir. By doing so you would have to acknowledge the worst. Deep down you didn't want to leave the good stuff behind. Throwing water balloons at Taco Bell. Walking around in flip-flops.
But you knew you had to. Eventually, you would leave that era, there was no choice. So, to be repulsed by looking like "them", even if by accident, would be to hate what you had no choice in becoming. You certainly didn't want to embrace it but you couldn't rightly hate it either. So you didn't change your clothes. But you also didn't comb your hair.
I was reminded of the good stuff when someone asked, "Can you do that?"
- While at Auburn, we made a movie. We bought coveralls and fake guns. Filmed it in the graveyard by our apartment. Parts of it were of course filmed on location in Florida. One particularly funny line from that film was "Can you do that?" It involved a special-order at a drive-thru window with a deep south Alabama accent. It makes me smile.
When I heard it said not too long ago, I was coolly happy but within moments became sad. The future had crept up on me, had overtaken me. Direction beckoned. I no longer have a drawer filled with balloons. I know people who do and I want to be them and not. It is perplexing and it makes you sad.