ADVICE FOR TODAY’S TEENS FROM A TEEN OF THE PAST

By Jimmy Joe Meeker

Originally published in The Wilson County Advocate, Vol. 3, No. 8, ©March 2, 1993 by Donald W. Gillette

Dear Friends: Do you have a teenager around the house? Are there any teenagers in your neighborhood or in your place of work? Then why not pass this helpful article someplace where they’ll see it—pinned to their pillow, maybe, or taped to the refrigerator door, or maybe pasted to an old lady so they can have something to read while they knock her down and steal her purse.

INFORMATION

¨You can do anything you want to with pimples and blackheads. You can pinch them, squeeze them, poke them with a fork, or dig at them with a golf tee and it won’t make any difference. It won’t make they any worse or any better or anything.

¨If you’re under sixteen, you’ll probably be released in the custody of your parents even if you kill somebody.

¨Your parents will eventually forgive you no matter what you did, and you can live at home for free forever.

¨Guys, if you’re over seventeen, you can probably beat the hell out of your Dad. Dads are notoriously out of shape because they make you do all the work around the house that they used to do, and your Dad’ll treat you with a lot more respect if he thinks you can whip him, so it’s worth a try. (Girls, this won’t work with your Mom, but screwing her boyfriend will.)

¨That lump/mole/wart you’re always fooling with isn’t cancer.

¨You don’t have a mysterious, fatal disease which nobody is telling you about even though they all know.

¨No, you’re not queer. But all your friends are, so watch out.

¨No, the earth is not an electron in an atom in a molecule in another universe or anything else that you thought when you were smoking dope.

¨The entire world is not a dream and you aren’t just imagining this, so get back outside and finish painting the house.

ADVICE

¨Never envy the real good-looking guys with lots of brains and athletic ability and a family with money because they always get leukemia and die before they’re twenty.

¨Also, the real pretty/handsome girl/boy that you’re hung up on will get real fat/ugly fast. So don’t worry about it.

¨Don’t worry about grades. Nobody in your future life will give a hoot in hell about what kind of grades you got in high school. The only thing grades are good for is getting into Vanderbilt, and if you go to Vanderbilt, everybody will always hate your guts and think you’re a queer.

¨Go out with all the older men and women who ask you or at least as many of them as you can take without puking, because they’ll take you places and give you lots of money and things and no one will every have to know about it because they aren’t going to tell, are they? And remember, you’ll never be this good-looking again, so make the best of it.

¨Lose weight. You kids today are really fat, especially the girls.

¨Go ahead and kill yourself if you really want to. It works. I mean it really will make your parents feel awful for a long time. I know a couple of people who did it.

¨Guys, if you want to have a lot of girl friends, go out and make a lot of money, because that’s the only thing women care about.

¨Girls, if you want to have a lot of guys spending money on you, get breast implants because that’s the only thing men care about. You could be bald with a face that can crack glass, but a good set of hooters will save you every time.

P.S. I would like to dedicate this article to two very special, if not necessarily very presentable, people. First, to a nameless nymphet at Barney’s after-hours club in Nashville who was discussing sexual performance with a man my age or worse and who, when informed that excessive intake of alcohol by an adult male can sometimes render the principal regenerative organ useless, muttered simply, “That’s old.” Second, to Mike B. for the remark, “I like young girls, their stories are shorter.”

I’d also like to thank Stephanie N., Angela T., Monique B., Latesha W., Debbi S., and T’Kayeh from Memphis for the help they gave me in researching this article. Don’t call me at home.