Memories of a Bad Kid (#1)

"Time, memory, and the long consequences of living."

I do not speak with an English accent because I am pretentious or a pretentious Anglophile. I speak this way because I smoked too much weed when I was a kid.

Let me explain.

In my memoir The Bad Kids, I tell stories about the misadventures of my friends and me—misadventures fueled by copious amounts of marijuana.

By the time I graduated eighth grade, I had stopped smoking. Before starting high school, I reinvented myself as a clean-cut kid with short hair and polo shirts (that story will be told in the third memoir).

Clean break from the past, huh?

Nope.

The summer after eighth grade, I began experiencing a speech impediment. Best described as a lisp or a slur. Here I was, weeks from starting a new school, and I couldn’t talk right.

Cue fourteen-year-old me panicking.

I found a way to overcome it by accident. I’ve always done voices and accents, always quoting Monty Python as a kid.

Monty Python, for the sadly uninitiated, was an English comedy troupe.

I discovered that when I did an English accent, the speech impediment disappeared.

Problem solved, right?

Sometimes the solution to a problem creates other problems.

Like starting school speaking with an English accent.

Kids notice things like that.

“Why are you talking that way?”

So I created an elaborate backstory: my parents were American missionaries in Manchester. I made them American so I’d still be a U.S. citizen. I also did it so they wouldn’t have to fake Manc accents on back-to-school night.

And so began a ruse I carried through all of high school.

When I was nineteen, the speech impediment cured itself.

The problem was, the fake accent had become my natural one.

What should be my real accent—Central California USA—now feels fake. I have to concentrate to speak it.

When I talk to myself in my apartment, it’s a mix of Mancunian and Liverpudlian. When I’m tired or emotional, same thing.

To avoid confusing my family and coworkers, I put on a Central California accent.

Because I switch back and forth, my voice drifts—Northern England to Scotland to Ireland, sometimes traveling 11,000 miles to Australia for no apparent reason.

All because I smoked way too much weed in my early teens.

The name of my memoir is The Bad Kids.

Thank you for being here, IDD.