Season 2, Episode 6 - Drive

Original Airdate - October 27th, 2002

This episode is boring, let’s keep this brief.

Things are going great for Joey and Craig. Craig is helping out on the used car lot, and it’s clear Joey really trusts him. He even lets Craig drive a car around the lot, the peak experience for a 14-year-old. Joey is headed out of town for a weekend with his new hot girlfriend and trusts Craig enough to let him stay home alone. Three rules - no girls, no drinking, no parties.

Craig invites Spinner, Marco, Jimmy, and Sean to hang out, but Jimmy isn’t interested in spending time with Sean. The boys are excited for their weekend, but it quickly turns boring, with little to do but eat the snacks Joey left them. Spinner suggests chugging spray cheese straight from the can. Marco tricks Sean into prank calling Emma. It’s still dull.

Even with the dullness, Craig feels good that he’s in a situation where his parent figure actually likes and trusts him and shares that with the boys. As he’s talking about how much he likes his new friends, Sean makes a comment about Craig wanting to kiss them and Marco is like “hey shut up,” because he’s gay. When the guys hear Craig drove the car, they get a new idea of how to spice up the weekend. The decide to go to the dealership the next day and take a spin around the block.

They do, and Craig is being super careful. They hear about a contest on the radio to win concert tickets for an artist they all love. They need to be one of the first people to make it to a nearby park to win, and with the car they can do it. They win the tickets, but end up sitting next to a cop car at a red light. Luckily the cops drive off. WHAT a THRILLING weekend.

It all comes crashing down. Joey is waiting for them when they get back to the dealership. They triggered a silent alarm. He lays into Craig for violating his trust, grounds him, and takes the concert tickets. Guess Craig needed to learn that even if Joey is nicer than his dad, Craig can’t forget who is in charge.

In the B story, we get the first appearance of Ashley’s new look. Short hair, all black, and she wants to go see a moody horror movie called Strange Evil. Ellie can’t see the movie because she’s getting her cartilage pierced. Ashley sees Ellie’s belly button piercing and asks if she should get one. Ellie invites her along to her appointment to see if the piercer can fit her in.

The piercing shop is run by Ellie’s cousin, Atilla, and looks like a stereotypical piercing shop. Ashley is clearly uncomfortable, but acts like she’s interested in getting the piercing. When Atilla gives her a parental consent form, Ashley sees her out from this situation. But Kate surprises Ashley by signing the form.

The next day, Ashley is on the table when she chickens out. She can’t do it. She hates needles. Ellie asks her why she went through all of that pretending if she didn’t like needles, and Ashley admits she was trying to impress her new friend. Ellie says that Ashley doesn’t need to worry about that and that Ellie likes her just as she is. I’m glad Ashley has a buddy!

And now for something completely different.

Yesterday, at a Halloween house party, someone starting talking to me about reading this project. They were very sweet and complimentary. They had never seen Degrassi but said lots of nice things about their experience reading.

It felt so fucking weird. Don’t get me wrong. My Leo rising loves the attention, especially for my creative work. I have said it before, this project is not about attention for me. But it is nice to know that people are reading and responding. It’s especially nice to hear that people resonated with something personal that I shared.

But I suddenly felt very exposed. I’m well aware that I am saying personal things in these essays on a public forum. I am creating a situation where someone I have never directly told will know things about my parents, my relationships, my friends, even my politics. Still, when I’m writing these things on the internet, in the form of a curated essay, I am removing the interaction. I’m not really expecting a response.

I’m a fairly open book, and I evoke that openness in others. I have a tendency to find myself in very heavy conversations with people I’ve just met. I’m curious, I ask good questions, I maybe have one of those faces. Either way, I have no problem having quite vulnerable interactions with people, relative strangers and good friends.

Someone reading and responding to one of these essays feels very different. Some of it is that they’re often engaging with an emotional state I’m not currently in. The John that wrote the essay they’re referencing is not the person standing in front of them at a Halloween party. Some of it is that a complete essay is way more information at once than you give someone in a conversation. But I think most of it is that I don’t think that I’m the person they actually want to be talking to.

Earlier this year, my friends started a podcast. It’s great, you should watch or listen. When they first started, I wanted to be supportive. I watched every episode and talked to them about moments I enjoyed. But I quickly started to feel very strange. I saw them in podcast form more than I saw them in real life. And when our conversation was also focused on the podcast, I started to feel less like I was engaging with them and more like I was engaging with their work. I wasn’t acting as a friend, I was acting as a member of their audience.

The personas my friends put on in their podcasts are authentic versions of them, but it’s not them. It’s performed. It’s curated. It’s edited. It should be! This is also true of myself as an essayist. The things I say about my past in an essay, the way I say them, the conclusions I come to. All of these things are measured and intentional.

The awkwardness I feel at a party is because of of that tension. The person I’m in a conversation with thinks they’re talking to essay John, but they’re not. Essay John can’t have an in person conversation. It’s like a reverse secret identity. Someone talks to Clark Kent and doesn’t realize they’re talking to Superman. Someone talks to me at a party and doesn’t realize that my essaying self is a different person altogether.

In previous posts, I’ve alluded to the discomfort I feel asking friends to read this project. Your friends are often the easiest audience to mine for a new creative project, and I’d like to mine it. But because this project is often so personal, I feel hesitant asking directly. I’d love for them to read, but I’m terrified that they will talk to me about it.

There are a small handful of friends, mostly fellow writers, that I want to talk to me about the content here. It’s the few people who I know understand what of this is and isn’t me. Every post I’ve made on my social media about this project jokes that people can subscribe and never read it. I think that joke is my secret exposure of my ideal scenario.

If you’re my friend and you’re reading this, thank you. I appreciate your support of my art and my work. I will fight through any awkwardness to have any conversation you want to have about what I’ve written. I’ll steer the conversation as I need so that we’re talking as friends. Thank you for being in my audience, but please don’t keep yourself there. I’ll keep myself from feeling like you just want me to be on stage.