On Saturday night, I went to meet some friends at The Only, which is a bar at Donlands and Danforth. Don’t ask me why I was out there, because you don’t really care. The cool thing about The Only is that it is exactly the kind of bar I would have liked to hang out in when I was 14. There are classic rock posters on the wall and a colourful mural out front, and when I got there they were blaring Jimi Hendrix.

 My friends and I at 14 wore military jackets and oversized band T-shirts, and coveted op-art posters and beaded curtains. We would smoke pot in the alley behind the Green Room, and pool our allowance money for french fries. After they kicked us out, we would ride the moving walkway at Spadina Station. Eventually we would go back to our friend “Raphael’s” apartment to watch The Doors movie. We watched The Doors movie almost every week. When we weren’t watching The Doors movie, we were listening to The Wall.

 There is a good chance that you were exactly the same way at 14. That’s because this one subculture of 14-year-olds has changed very little since it was born. When I first watched the show Freaks and Geeks, I was stunned by how much it resembled my early high school experience, except none of us had driver’s licenses, and our version of Jason Segel was this gawky dude who tried to make out with me while we watched a Ron Jeremy porno called Sins of the Wealthy.

I don’t know what you’d call that subculture, exactly. Only one of us could really be considered a hippie. We called her “Hippie ‘Nancy’” and she played in a band called Tricksterwoman with one of the older regulars at the Green Room. The rest of us were just stoners who wanted to be different but didn’t have the gumption to go nuts with our differences. Our group melded seamlessly with those of the grunge holdovers and the metalheads at our school. We all met at the Green Room and smoked pot together in the alley.

Grade 9 was a neat supernova of weirdo possibilities. Sooner or later we all either got balls-out “different” or embraced our sameness. Some people in our group started doing acid and got really into Aleister Crowley, then left school to start pseudo-cults. I saw a picture of one of these guys recently, crouching shirtless near a campfire with a fox head on his head and what appears to be an apple in his mouth. Hippie Nancy moved to BC and had her ears shaved into elf ears. On the other hand, one of us became the school president, another got married, and another has a kid and owns a restaurant. On the whole we are way more normal than weird.

That’s why it was so nice to go to The Only. It reminded me of a time when I still had the potential to turn out totally weird, and live what seemed like a more exciting life than the one I currently live. Because no matter how weird I feel sometimes, I’m still not weird at all. I know right from wrong. I live in society. Even the Aleister Crowley guy probably realizes in his heart of hearts that he’s not that weird. He doesn’t come from the woods. He comes from a really nice house near Lawrence Park. Weird, in practice, is not all it’s cracked up to be anyway. Most of the legitimately weird people we knew back then were drug dealers and old men who shouldn’t have been hanging out with kids our age. At least a few of them are probably dead.

With the exception of a few local weirdoes, the drinkers at The Only seem pretty normal. When we went, an alt country band was playing in the adjoining cafe, and the whole night ended with a singalong to “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” led by a guy in a blue button-down shirt. After that, some girls harmonized to “Dreams” by the Cranberries. The alternative rock linked us to a great tradition of people who want to be weird but either don’t know how to go about it or can’t be bothered or who value their quality of life too much. In my mind, it was a great celebration of the idea of being weird. Afterward I went and slept in a bed, then got up and had brunch at my parents’ house.

____

Alexandra Molotkow writes about life and stuff for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter at @alexmolotkow.

For more, follow us on Twitter @TorontoStandard and subscribe to our newsletter.