A few words on why the original Irregulars were much cooler than the kids today.
The first question to answer is, “Who the hell are/were the Irregulars?” It was me who actually coined the term. I thought it would be neat to name our gaming group in the ‘80's and drew inspiration from Sherlock Homes’ Baker Street Irregulars, a bunch of street kids who occasionally did jobs for the World’s Greatest Detective. Originally, there were five of us, but we kept adding “members” throughout our teens and into our 20's. Membership was not voted upon, there were no initiations. If you thought what we did was cool, you were one of us. Anywho, what began as the Stewartstown Irregulars was quickly shortened to “The Irregulars.” The name stuck. More importantly, it fit. None of the guys in our troop were normal, mainstream or (to our sorrow) popular. There were about six of us, originally. We were all white, lower middle class, and honorable.
Why were we so cool? Well, we weren’t. That’s what made us so cool. Confused? Well, think about all the comedians, actors, writers, musicians, and successful artists out there. How many were popular? How many had plenty of friends and were captain of the football team? How many had girls calling and crying and making fools of themselves for them? Am I hinting that being an outcast builds character? No. I’m coming write out and fucking saying it. All the beautiful people grew up to own shit, run shit, and be shit, but I’m going to go so far as to say that they never really DID shit. These are the people who go to Ireland to SAY they’ve been to Ireland. These are the people who throw parties and invite the office. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I think there could be if you don’t have any actual FRIENDS to invite as well.
To this day, even the friends I hang with from other states (and in some cases from other countries) tell me the same story. They were last when picking teams, they were picked on for being smart, and they were never, ever, the homecoming king. Throughout my life, I’ve watched all of the “plastic” people continue to be plastic while I’ve consistently gravitated toward the people with character, the “irregulars” of our society.
So, why were we cool? It’s because we didn’t know how to be. We were just being ourselves, not knowing that we would one day look back and long for the days when we were poor and happy, ugly and cheerful, country and carefree. Because of this. We did stuff.
We built our own cars.
Before you go lumping us into the redneck grease-monkey click, well, we were. But, it wasn’t out of love of the automobile. Well, it was. But it wasn’t JUST that. We patched together cars, vans, and muscle machines out of necessity. We had minimum-wage jobs and had to save up for parts after which there was no money left over for labor. We swapped engines and transmissions, welded and bonded, busted knuckles and cursed like sailors. We could tell you stories of electrocutions, near-death experiences, and how it felt to spend and entire Saturday fixing a problem that was still there Sunday morning. We didn’t think it was “cool” at the time. Hell, it was a big pain in the ass. But, in a world that gave us no power over our own destiny, we took our dreams on the road. We launched cars over hills, played weird songs through the horn, and put more than a few cars in the ditch. We slept on the hood, got drunk out in the middle of a field, and made love in the backseat (not with each other).
Why that makes us cooler than today’s kids:
You can’t build a car like you used to. They’re much too hard to understand. Nowadays, kids think swapping the taillights and slapping on a chrome tip equals “customization.” Putting in a stereo and spending God-awful amount for rims makes your car “cool.” The engine and transmission are untouchable for the average kid, so it’s all talk about “chips” and shit. Going to a junk yard for parts is out of the question. So, other than the cosmetic crap, “fixing” a car means taking it to a guy and paying that labor we were trying so hard to avoid back-in-the-day. The kids still give it a good try, though. But, they’re just never going to have the experience of coming together to break two cars down to make one that runs over the course of an evening. Most importantly, for today’s youth, working on a car is done for acceptance, to “look good” in front of their peers (notice I didn’t say friends). For us, it was about having transportation to work or putting four wheels worth of freedom on the road.
We were products of our own imagination.
If I were to mention, say, the comic book Saga to you, would you know what I was talking about? Speedball? Jack of Hearts? Iron Fist? No? If so, then I’ll still count you among the elite who still actually read the comics instead of watch them on TV and the movies. Think of the average 14-year-old, today. If you add up all of the video games, movies, TV series, general tasty sci-fi stuff available, it’s almost as if one would have to specialize within his own specialty of geekdom. “Oh, I’m not into Star Trek, I’m a Doctor Who guy.” As a matter of fact, there is SO much sci-fi and fantasy out there, today, that being a “geek” has gone mainstream. Could you imagine getting kids to sit down to a game of D&D, when they could just as easily pop online for a WoW raid? Why think? Why do math?
There was a time when X-men and The Avengers were both one of those things only a select few knew about (For proof, I can name about 25 avengers, including the short-lived West Coast branch.) There was a time when we would pile into the car for a trip to the comic store and spend the rest of the afternoon, get this, READING. We knew we weren’t the only ones. We were wide-spread, and we were legion, but we weren’t organized and we damned-sure didn’t have clubs or cosplay. We were just a pocket of geeks. We played tabletop D&D, Car Wars, and Rifts. We talked about it non-stop. It wasn’t just a passtime, it was a hobby.
How much has it changed? THERE WERE NO GIRLS. The elusive “gamer chick” was like a unicorn. Once we ran into a girl who played D&D down at the beach. None of us knew how to act.
Computers were new, exciting, and practically useless.
Today, the iPhone has more processing power than the bank of computers NASA used to put a man on the moon. I was never into computers like some other pals of mine, but I remember respecting the brain power it took to write code, flow charts, and programs. One of my truly “geek” friends actually programed his calculator to roll random 20-sided numbers. Note, this was BEFORE math coprocessors. The games were intricate and slow. The home consoles gave us blisters on our thumbs. I remember putting about 60 hours into a game and was nowhere CLOSE to finishing it at a time when buying a game meant buying a stack of 6-inch floppies and staring at 8-bit stick figures.
How does this make us cooler than today’s kids? Because we were made fun of for it. Sitting around playing video games or learning programming was for the nerds and the virgins. Getting drunk, high, and committing vandalism was the cool way to go. We chose to do intellectual things (and, yes, the games WERE intellectual) and use our imagination while the “cool” kids wanted to stomp us for being different. Nowadays, knowing about computers MAKES you the cool kid. Again, just like with the cars, having the newest gadget is a way to show off. The kids with the flip phones are ridiculed. I guess not much has changed as far as D&D goes, though. So, kudos to those geeks, I guess.
We wore what we wanted to.
High school kids always have to be on top of the latest trends, spending way-to-much on clothes you are going to hate when showing your kids the photo album of the good-old-days. This has never changed. The Irregulars, however, never went in for fashion. Ok, I’ll admit there was a period of time when I jumped feet-first into acid-washed jeans and big heavy-metal hair. But, in my own defense, it was BECAUSE I had stopped hanging out with the Irregulars for a time. They made fun of me. It hurt. Anywho, when your parents are poor you either pay for stuff yourself or you wear what Grandma bought for you at Hills Department store. I still think I have a pair of Husky’s around here, somewhere. They were indestructible. It was lack of options that kept us out of the fashion trends, I have to admit. I just can’t see today’s kids NOT wearing their pants down past the crack of their asses. We used to abuse kids who did that. Ask me someday about “Butt-hole Bob” and the tater-tot incident.
I’m going to cut this short before I start splitting hairs. Suffice to say that, in a world where we didn’t have much, we had more than we could possibly need. We made our own fun, made our own rules, and made due with what we had. We didn’t know that MOST of what we did was going to become “cool” one day. That’s what made it so special, then.
Looking back, that’s what makes it so special now. And, if you knew me back then and WEREN’T one of us, well, I guess you just weren’t cool enough. I really hope that the outcasts of today will be able to find the same kind of pride tomorrow.
Here’s to the Irregulars. Then, now, and those yet to come.
