so on friday i walk into the drum section at my local guitar center

as you might imagine, it is full of drums, drumheads, drumsticks, drum hardware, percussion instruments, percussion implements, cymbals, and so on; and it's devoid of people, save for me and one teenager who is playing on one of the electronic drum kits in the middle of the floor

i grab a pair of vic firth 5A barrel tips off the drumstick rack and test them out on the test pad. i always test out my new pair of sticks; what for, i'm not sure. i guess to make sure that one of them isn't misshapen or dramatically heavier than the other. it's never happened to me before but you never know

satisfied with my choice, i continue to the stick bags. my friend jen mentioned that she needs a new stick bag and has asked me to see what kinds they have available. jenny, if you're reading this - let's be honest, since you're reading this - they have all kinds, including some really massive heavy-duty ones, and they all cost slightly more than one would like to pay for a bag that simply holds one's drumsticks, but considering your last stick bag of medium quality lasted you more than a decade, maybe it's reasonable to shell out for a nice one and see if you can get use out of it for the rest of your life

so i'm looking at the stick bags and i hear a voice over my shoulder say, abruptly and with no salutation, "how long you been playing?"

i turn to see the teenager, who is no longer playing the electronic kit and has just stood up but not even taken a step away from the drums. like the drum throne (which is what we call the little stool for some reason) is directly under him still

a quick aside about his playing: he had been playing a variation of a half-time, triplet-based funk groove that is sometimes called the Purdie shuffle, after renowned R&B, soul, and funk session drummer Bernard Purdie

here is an example of a Purdie shuffle played by Purdie himself

here is another example, with a different kick drum pattern, played by the equally great Jeff Porcaro

the teen's Purdie shuffle had been competent. if he were one of my students, i would tell him his time is great and he's playing a difficult groove very confidently, but that his dynamics could use some fine-tuning. he had been playing the Purdie shuffle like a rock drummer, voicing the ghost notes too loudly. but that's a real nitpick. it was pretty good

so he says "how long you been playing?" out of nowhere and i reply "uh, about 15 years. you?" and he says "oh, i don't really play. my dad taught me a couple of things. you know the band, um..." here he makes a big show of thinking of the name of the band, including a couple of false starts. he finds it: "...Breaking Benjamin?"

"yeah, sure"

"yeah, my dad played with them"

i wish in the moment i had said "sorry to hear that" but instead i simply clarified, "your dad was in Breaking Benjamin?"

"yeah, Chad Szeliga. drums are okay, i guess. anyway, see ya"

and with that he walked directly out of not just the drum section, but the entire guitar center without purchasing anything

Mr. Szeliga, if you're reading this - let's be honest, since you're reading this - it seems like your kid is proud of your accomplishments as Breaking Benjamin's second drummer, which is very cool. but you should know that he also seems to be going through a phase where he hangs around guitar center playing semi-difficult drum parts, strikes up conversations with strangers, and then tries to namedrop you in a nonchalant way while insisting that he "doesn't really play"

---

i remember being fourteen or fifteen and grasping that terrible catch-22 of insecurity:

the people we think are cool don't seem to care what anyone else thinks of them;

therefore, to become cool ourselves, we have to find a way not to care about what anyone else thinks;

this is impossible, especially at fourteen or fifteen, so we end up trying to /look/ like we don't care about what anyone else thinks, which is usually totally transparent;

and transparently trying to be cool is cringe

here, i think, the teenage experience diverges in the specific. sometimes, we do not detect the judgment of our peers, and we manage not to judge ourselves as cringe, and we maybe get a little closer to not really caring what other people think. more often, though, the cold wash of shame deepens our initial insecurity, putting the whole not-caring thing that much further out of reach. i hypothesize that as teenagers, most of us don't make a lot of progress in either direction, staying roughly the same amount of insecure from the moment we first develop social awareness until sometime in our twenties or later, when we hopefully realize that everyone else has their own shit going on

of course, that's the only way out of the cycle: the recognition of our shared vulnerability. everyone wants the guys at guitar center to whisper among themselves "that kid can really play!" in response to our Purdie shuffle. everyone has felt shame and embarrassment. everyone wants to be looked up to and not looked down upon. we all have judged and been judged. i have already told the story of this teen at guitar center for laughs among my friends, because his behavior was weird and annoying, but i recognized a version of myself in his misguided attempt at reaping the social capital his father's post-grunge band had sown

there, but for the unconditional love of our greatest friends, go each of us

Breaking Benjamin sucks btw