Do bad choices make great stories?

Phil Gurnee ♦ September 26, 2016 ♦ 3 Comments

While riding the metro home from the Rose Bowl on Saturday Night I was struck by a jacket I saw on a young woman between 20 – 22.  Her jacket proudly said on the back:

Bad

Choices

Make

Great

Stories

She could have been part of the group I’d hung out with at X concerts thirty-five years ago, but this was 2016 not 1981. She looked like someone who had made a few bad choices in her life but was happy with her current situation.

I’m a little too pragmatic a person, but I let my mind wonder about this little saying she was so proud to be wearing. I started running through bad choices people make and was having a hard time coming up with ones that would have a good story.

Is a DUI a good story? Not if it ends in jail or death for someone, or at a minimum the loss of your license. If you make it home without any consequences is it a good story? Doesn’t strike me as one but maybe that is a badge people wear.

Is a teenage pregnancy a good story? Sometimes, it worked out for my niece.

Is picking the loser who likes to hit a woman a good story?

Is picking the winner who likes to hit a woman a good story? In either case, it was a bad choice.

Is driving a motorcycle recklessly without a helmet a good story?

Is driving 120 on the way to Arizona a good story? Absolutely, until it isn’t .

Most of us make bad choices every day, and I don’t think there are many good stories to be found.  In my own experience,  I could only find one instant where I’d made a bad choice and it turned into a good story. At age 14 a girl and I played hookey from school and hitchhiked to the beach from Glendale. It was a wild and crazy trip that kept bordering on becoming a disaster, but eventually, we found our way home with one hell of a story.

The great stories are the great choices. Aren’t they? Otherwise, aren’t they  bad stories?

Maybe I need to expand my horizons. Sometimes we don’t know going in if we are making a bad choice, but I think the jacket was talking about going in knowing full well this was a bad choice and being ok with the consequences.

But I’m just a guy on a metro headed home to suburbia.  That wasn’t exactly a good choice, and I certainly don’t have any good stories to tell about suburbia.