Now
It’s like, 5:40-ish in the evening, but it looks like it’s about midnight. I pop into the living room and tell my mom I’m gonna go to the corner store and “pick up a tallboy so I don’t lose my mind.” On the way out, she asks me to run a couple errands for her, so I grab her debit card. I’m 27 fucking years old, but it feels like I’m 19 again. I don’t have much to show for myself monetarily, so she’s helping cover the brunt of my cost of living right now. I feel pathetic, a waste of space, but it’s fine; life has a way of forcing you to wind back up where you start, sometimes.
My doctor tells me that smoking fucks with the hormones I have to take to not want to kill myself, but I’m blowing fat fucking stacks off a gas station vape (5% nicotine! They really want me dead!) as I write this, because it’s about the only way to really interface with my own personal history without experiencing an Enter The Void-level crisis of ego. I’ve been off the drugs for a while, and I’m pretty sure I’m on a couple watchlists by now, so it’s this or abusing OTC medication again, and I’m a bit too old for that now.
I’d been doing well, so I thought. Well enough to have an audience, to have a voice, to have friends and be involved in communities. It all came crashing down a while back: a couple months spent listless in the job hunt, addicted to the dopamine response to talking to all of you, years behind on things I owe people, barely enough money to feed myself, let alone not wind up on the streets. Somehow, trying to do things “right”, do them “correctly”, had stolen from me my most valuable qualities; the thing that make one unique. Things came to a head around Christmas last year - I went home for what seemed to be a short holiday visit, then was faced with the unthinkable; my mom catching a cancer diagnosis.
It was a minor one, just a quick surgery to remove it and things were all good, no chemo. But it freaked me the fuck out, so I stayed back, to help. Then my grandfather, my wonderful, crazy grandfather, wound up in the hospital. He was a real anomaly of a man. At once a literal card-carrying Trump voter, devout Fox News watcher, convinced he was under attack by antifa agents when his shoddy internet would drop out, and at the same time, the kind of man who, at 60 years old, figured out I was trans on his own time, and switched up the pronouns he used for me without even asking anyone in my family to confirm his suspicions. The last time I remember talking to him while he was fully lucid, he gave me a copy of the Time Magazine issue about Elon Musk. “You should read this,” he said, excitement in his voice, “This guy’s got some really cool ideas.” I opened it up to a random page when I got in the car, and the first and only word I saw was “asperger’s.” I laughed and threw it over my shoulder, into the trunk, where it still sits now.
It’s been a hard year. Honestly, one that’s almost killed me. I haven’t really been myself since 2021, but I’ve been especially not myself this entire year. Losing touch with friends, family, and any in between at a faster rate than ever. Lost in a daze, unsure of identity, in a phase of rapid change, reflection upon reflection amassing into a breaking of self-image from which I still recover. When we get lost in the world, we tend to look back on our own personal lore, to try and decipher it all…
So, I dug up the first piece of published writing I ever did under my own name today. It’s not very good, but it holds a special place in my heart. You’ll find it included in the latter half of this article, unedited, for posterity, considering I could only find it after extensively searching my 12+ email addresses and trawling through the Internet Archive. But before we get to that, I wanna meditate, just a bit, on why exactly it’s so important to me, and why looking at it right now feels as harrowing as it does nostalgic.
Then
It was Thanksgiving, 2012. We were in the thick of the Golden Age of Weird Twitter, and somehow, despite being a then relatively niche personality, and literally 17 years old, I found myself surrounded online by journalists, bloggers, musicians, and celebrities who all loved what I had to say. It was a time in which, unbeknownst to me, I was finding out who I was. A friend from Twitter, who ran a comedy-focused Buzzfeed-esque website, had been talking to me via email for some time about having me write something for his project. I think he’d scouted me because I’d been contributing to @vrunt’s project “FeedBuzz”, where a bunch of us Weird Twitter shitheads came together to write ironic buzzfeed articles.
Again, I was only 17. Though comedy had been then, and is still now, my lifeblood, I had no idea what I wanted out of life. I was never one of those people who knew in the here and now what exactly I wanted to do; Everything was a joke. I put my old Favstar on my college applications, and I’m pretty sure that’s a huge part of the reason they rejected me from Northwestern. When councilors and teachers alike asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I couldn’t very well say “a girl” like every bone in my body had wanted to scream, so I just shrugged and said “Someone important.” I’d never taken it seriously. A shot I had to write for David Letterman in that senior year of high school had fallen through, so I thought to myself the only way to make it was to forge my own path. Enter, twitter. Enter, writing. Enter, comedy in the digital era.
But even in those moments, forging those paths, it never felt like I was doing anything. The internet can be so fickle when it comes to careers, to success.
So there I was, iPhone 3G in hand, talking to the owner of one Slacktory.com, completely ignoring my family during our holiday celebration. Even then, I couldn’t think of what to write. I’d always been prone to the failure of thinking my natural abilities weren’t good enough, and that to succeed, I would have to transmute my current form into something more “professional.” When it came to that world, the professional one, there wasn’t much I knew, and even less I could do. So I pitched him the only thing I had in my metaphorical belt at the time — A longwinded bitching about how much I hated the Wheatus song “Teenage Dirtbag” that I had written for my Tumblr blog at the time in place of giving a shit about college admissions essays.
I was so fucking proud of that article. It’d gotten posted with absolutely zero editing, and it was 100%, unfiltered, unadulterated Morgan. It didn’t even break 1,000 pageviews. Sites like that pay-per-view, so I didn’t see a cent from it. But for a 17 year old, whose entire life had been defined by being in the right place at the right time, and somehow always finding a way to screw things up in a way that moved them upward in the world, so much as seeing my name on a website was good enough.
But that was then, and this is now. At 27, seeing my name on a website means almost nothing. I’m numb to it. Ironically, despite the infamy, the accolades, it feels like I never really progressed past that point of just being some weird guy that knows people, and happens to draw a crowd when they start doing things trying to remember what it feels like to feel something. Like I’m just, some, digital street performer, irking passersby with inane ramblings on their way to the subway, as they pass a city corner, as they wait at the bus stop.
So I look at this article, and I think, and I remember. I remember the anticipation, waiting with forced patience every day for this article to get posted. I remember the joy, of being able to tell everyone “hey! look what I did!” And I think to myself “Did I waste that potential that they saw in me? Have I gone anywhere? Done anything?”
I never really intended to be this. Or really to be anything. But here we are. I am, and so too do I Be. For better or worse: I’m Weedhitler. I’m dicksoak. I’m a freaky little ghost person who haunts you across the internet. And with the internet changing so much, so rapidly, and culture moving at twice that speed, I can’t really help but feel like maybe the time for those parts of self is over. I can’t help but feel like now is the time for Morgan. But it’s so hard to let go of the old identities, because truthfully they were security blankets. I fear for my future, and truly hope to god this wasn’t all for naught. Because god fucking dammit, I still have stories to tell, places to go, and people to see.
So we look back, to find ourselves again, embracing the past instead of running from it. Hoping that one day we might make the child still living in the back of our minds proud.
Onward and upward, failing now just as we did then. With foolish faith that our direction remains ever higher.
Where It Began
Why Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag” is the worst song ever made
by Morgan Imago
Originally published on the now-defunct “Slacktory.com” on November 28th, 2012, at 4:41 pm
My first exposure to Wheatus was in 2007, on the old community-run website flashflashrevolution, a Dance Dance Revolution ripoff that involved tapping the keyboard instead of dancing on a pad.
When the site was still being run as a for-profit venture, it partnered with bands and gave them little widgets to put on their MySpace pages so people could play DDR files (or “stepfiles”) for said band’s song. We had some slightly big names — 5 Finger Death Punch, Disturbed, Reel Big Fish. I would play these widgets for quick fun. One day, I came across a widget for a band that seemed familiar. It was Wheatus.
Now I, being 12 years old at the time, had pretty much no sense of what good music was, so what I listened to at the time included, but was not limited to:
64kbps speedcore songs
whatever came on the top 40 rock radio station in town
metal remixes of video game music
the Diggnation podcast
a podcast dedicated to They Might Be Giants
more speedcore
Given my luck, the first song I picked on this widget was Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag”. No lie — I played DDR with my fingers on a keyboard to Teenage Dirtbag and liked it. Now, to excise my past demons, I’m going to give you a play-by-play reason as to why “Teenage Dirtbag” is the worst song ever made.
The best way I can describe Wheatus’ target market for this song is that the first time I heard “Teenage Dirtbag”, it was in a fan-made anime music video using clips from both Bleach and Naruto. The song starts off with the typical late 90s college indie rock bullshit; vague record scratches and a hiphop beat to lure the listener into thinking that this song might actually have some artistic merit. The same kind of thing Limp Bizkit pulled for a decade and a half.
Then the acoustic guitar comes in playing the most fucking contrived melody you could ever image in a song. Imagine if you could take the most generic indie rock melody ever, make it even more generic, out of tune, and coming from a dollar store guitar. It might as well be a ukulele. In fact, Teenage Dirtbag sounds like it took about as much talent to play as most “ukulele cover” videos on YouTube.
Then the vocals kick in. There’s no word in the English language for how horrid the vocals are. There is honestly no way to describe the aural assault this whiny 20-year-old with a guitar puts into your ear-holes. Imagine if Beverly Hills-era Weezer got singing lessons from the Black Eyed Peas but will.i.am forgot to mention that they use Auto-Tune. That’s what it sounds like.
This song reminds me of what Weezer’s “In the Garage” would sound like if it were written by someone about 5 years younger. See:
In the garage, I feel safe. No one cares about my ways. In the garage where I belong. No one hears me sing this song. In the garage.
— chorus to “In the Garage”
Her name is Noel, I have a dream about her. She rings my bell, I got gym class in half an hour. Oh how she rocks, in Keds and tube socks.
— opening lines to Teenage Dirtbag.
They’re both the exact same concept; “Oh woe is me I’m a lowly nerd”. The difference being that “Teenage Dirtbag” shoots for the vibe of “I’M A LOWLY NERD AND I HAVE A CRUSH ON A GIRL BUT SHE DOESN’T LIKE ME IM NERDY HAHA!” angle, while “In The Garage” goes for the “Hey, I like weird things, and I get mocked for it, but I don’t really give a shit. I’m just gonna chill in the garage and play some DnD, fuck all y’all”.
Worse yet, there are times in the song where they play cheesy sound effects to accentuate the godawful lyrics. There are some bands that can pull this off (my thoughts go to That Handsome Devil’s “Charlie’s Inferno“, one of my all time favorite songs), but here it’s just too much:
Her name is Noel, I have a dream about her. She rings my bell.
$20 if you can guess the sound effect. Ding ding, that’s right! It’s a bell.
He lives on my block, and he drives an Iroc
No lie, they play screeching tires that sound like they came from a low-budget ripoff of The Last Action Hero.
After the first chorus, the lyrics devolve into what I can only call a word apocalypse. The second chorus is a veritable destruction of the human language and songwriting itself. Let’s break it down line by line:
Her boyfriend’s a dick
Alright, so we’ve established conflict. The girl the nerdy dude beats off to in gym class has a girlfriend and he’s “a dick”. Presumably he’s a dick to the narrator simply because he’s dating the girl of this shitbag’s wet dreams. No evidence is really provided of him being a “dick”.
And he brings a gun to school
Given when this was written, this would be rather out of the ordinary, especially since the guy who wrote this is from Long Island, but I think I’m missing out on the whole Having A Gun = Being A Dick correlation here? It really seems like he’s grasping for whatever he can.
And he’d simply kick my ass if he knew the truth
My biggest problem with this line is “simply kick”; is there a complex way this anonymous boyfriend would kick your ass? Would he set up a Rube Goldberg machine, with such accurate timing that it trips you while you ride home on your shitty bike, sending you tumbling down a giant hill into a broken glass factory, launched into the air, landing your ass square on this man’s foot? Is he going to verbally kick your ass with the teachings of the ancient philosophers?
He lives on my block and he drives an Iroc
The best part about this line is that, since the vocalist’s voice is so hard to understand, it sounds like he says “He drives and I rock” as if the narrator is forced to ride to school with this “dick” and spends the whole time presumably headbanging while the poor guy has to take this wimpy asshole to class.
But he doesn’t know who I am, and he doesn’t give a damn about me
At this point I think we can assume that this kid, who beats off to people in gym class and thinks no one cares about him, has some serious issues; paranoia, depression, probably is a stalker. There’s a list of shit this kid needs to get checked out for.
The song ends with, for some reason that no one fucking knows, the girl of this shithead’s dreams comes up as he’s all woe is me outside the school on prom night and, with literally no pretense, I don’t think she’s ever even talked to this dude, offers him *drumroll* Iron Maiden tickets. Yep! That’s right. The band that this song has been shamelessly namedropping the whole time is the fuckhead nerd’s dream girl’s favorite band. The whole time she reveals this, by the way, the lead singer somehow cranks up his voice another 5 octaves, making it sound like someone kicked his dick with helium-filled spiked boot.
Ultimately, Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag” is a clusterfuck of horrible writing, horrible music, every college rock stereotype you could ever imagine, with lyrics that really only help to either make college kids nostalgic or to make junior high kids feel understood and an overall message of “if you just sit around and rub your cock in the middle of class some hot girl’s going to leave her boyfriend and invite you to a metal concert, you sad sack of shit.”
I’m glad Wheatus never really got commercial success outside of having a song on the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack.