butthead aka 216

I am risking the removal of my sac by admitting this, but I have cried or come close to crying because of a girl before. To sound less like a pussy, I will start this shindig off by saying that I am anti-crying and probably haven't cried in 5 years with the exception of the time my dog got unexpected lung cancer and I had to put the ole boy down. But if you don't cry over putting a pet down, then you are likely an empty, soulless, cadaver of a human being. Back when butthead aka 216 was merely a young boy, he did not have the gargantuan coconuts dangling between his legs that he has today. No sir, he had small raisins which produced feels and emotional instability. These are all accounts of my teenage and early college years, when my testes actually fit comfortably in my briefs.


1) Archie Star - Let's Get Married



Back when I was 17ish, I ditched everything that my older friends told me, and turned a casual friends with benefits situation to a real relationship over a few months. My naive self wasn't content enough to be balls deep several times a week with no commitment or obligations, apparently. In the way that most storybook romances begin, I put it in her butt, then swigged MD 20/20 with her for a few hours before telling her I loved her and passing out in her basement. Thus, a relationship was born.

So, she had an athletic scholarship roughly half way across the country, which I knew going into the relationship. I figured I would just do what I had always done: Refuse to plan ahead and mentally block out the fact that she would someday be moving to the midwest and I wouldn't. I had always been the type to think about crossing bridges only when there was nowhere else to walk. Plan worked well until the day before she was set to board a plane to out-of-my-life-ville and then an avalanche of feels rained down on me with the force of a thousand monsoons. Myself and a handful of friends went to this festival where buffalo wing companies competed for top prize. On the way home, my friend Tara was driving with me in the passenger seat. We had a summer mixtape in the CD player and this song came on and I teared up like a wittle beebee... Tonight, I say let's just get outta this town, lets go to Seattle, watch rain fall to the ground... We had kinda jokingly discussed during pillowtalk about how cool it would be to someday just pack up and move to wherever together. But it's like getting older: When you're young, you have all these dreams and plans that you know will never happen, but the fact that there is still time left in the hourglass gives you some sort of weird false hope that you allow yourself to feel. But then the hourglass starts running out and you no longer have time on your side - the dreams are officially deceased.


I tried to do the tears-running-stone-face-wow-i-look-stoic-and-tough thing but the lip quivered and it was all over. I nearly drowned in my tears. Nobody in the car understood why I was crying so suddenly, but it was a combination of having a great night with my best friends and the realization that tomorrow I'd likely never see my girlfriend again, and we had never really talked about it. Planning wasn't my best feature.



2) Bush - Swallowed



So the next day, she leaves for wherever-the-fukc. I drive to her house one last time and it's a total wahhhhh-fest between myself, her family, her, etc. I start up the car to leave and this song comes on. Her favorite band was Bush so we listened to them a ton, and this particular CD happened to be in my stereo system... I'm with everyone and yet not... Gotta get away from here, gotta get away from here... I miss the one that I love a lot... Miss the one that I love a lot... There was a feeling of uncertainty and I had that feeling in my stomach where you kinda wanna barf but there's nothing there to vomit.

I took the back roads home and parked up the street from my parents house in this little indentation in the woods and just sat there sobbing for awhile. Partly because I didn't want my step-dad thinking I had a twat and partly because once I entered the house, I knew my weekend would be spend throwing a 1 person pity party in my room. I pretty much sobbed all weekend to the Razorblade Suitcase and Sixteen Stone albums.

3) Incubus - Stellar



If you are wondering why this is mainly involving the same girl, it's because following this relationship I learned how to deal with relationship issues like an adult: Heavy drinking with drunken shouting matches followed by apologetic yet bitter voicemails messages. So that girl ended up moving far, far away but she planned on transferring colleges once she found a match that was closer. In the meantime, I arranged to travel east to one of her away matches that was closest to home. We had a mutual friend at the college she was playing at, so I made the trip to see her. They lost the game.

I guess it was an important one or whatever, because after the game she was not nearly as happy to see me as I was to see her. My heart sunk like a battleship and I am pretty sure I lost the color in my face. When I regained color, it was probably a bright red, half due to pure anger and half due to embarrassment that I drove several hours alone for what amounted to a quick hello. Ok, it was a little more than that, but I remember her being really short with me and kind of in a hurry to get out of there. In hindsight, she was probably cheating on me with some guy named Jamal in St. Louis and felt shame in looking me in the eye, but anyways... I hopped into my car and drove 100 the whole way home. Again, the mixtape got to me when this song came on. By this time, my large sac had begun to grow so I no longer had the capability to cry like a bitch. I did the angry-teeth-grinding-cry on the drive home. As I approached my parents' driveway I felt my tear ducts glue themselves shut to preserve my penis. That was the last time I cried over a girl.