I woke up thinking about Jesse and Puck, which is not exactly the sentence you expect to form in your late forties before coffee, but the brain is a haunted Blockbuster and sometimes it just puts old tapes on by itself. Jesse Camp, the strange glam-raccoon who won MTV’s Wanna Be a VJ contest in the late 90s, and Puck from The Real World: San Francisco, the bike messenger chaos goblin who seemed less like a cast member and more like a public health warning with a nose ring. Two people I had not consciously thought about in a while, yet there they were, standing around in my morning mind like patron saints of badly managed authenticity.
So, naturally, I looked them up. Because nothing says spiritual reflection like googling the current whereabouts of people who helped shape your teenage personality through basic cable. What I found was about what one might expect. Neither became the clean, polished version of public success. There were odd career paths, disappearances from the mainstream, legal troubles, strange returns, social media fragments, and the general feeling that the machine loved them for a moment, chewed on them a little, then spit them back into the larger American wilderness. This was not surprising, but it hit me harder than I expected. Not because I thought they were going to become senators or host a tasteful NPR podcast about resilience, but because it reminded me that the people who give young weirdos permission to exist often pay for that permission with unstable lives.
When I was young, The Real World genuinely affected me. Not in the shallow “I watched a show” way, but in the “I did not know there were this many kinds of humans” way. People like Norman and others widened the frame. They showed different lives, different sexualities, different ways of talking, different ways of arranging a self. For a kid trying to figure out how much of himself was allowed into the room, that mattered. It was not a philosophy class, but it did something philosophy classes often fail to do. It made abstraction visible. It put otherness on the couch and let it eat cereal.
Jesse and Puck offered something else. They were not role models in the traditional sense, and God help us all if they were. I did not want Puck’s behavior. I did not want the cruelty, the mess, the performative abrasion, the parts that felt less like freedom and more like untreated ego driving a stolen vehicle through a farmers market. Jesse was easier to love, more comet than weapon, but even he seemed built out of glitter, cigarette ash, and a refusal to read the employee handbook. Their behaviors were not always admirable. Their stability was not enviable. But the thing underneath them, the loud, unapologetic here I am of it, lit something up in me.
That was the piece I loved. Not “be rude.” Not “be reckless.” Not “turn your personality disorder into a brand.” But this raw refusal to be pre-approved before entering the world. They seemed to walk into rooms without shrinking first. They did not sand down the weird edges before offering themselves to the public. At eighteen or nineteen, when adulthood is beginning to hand you its little gray uniforms, that kind of presence feels like a secret door. You mean I do not have to become normal before I am allowed to be real? You mean I can walk into the world with the hair wrong, the voice wrong, the timing wrong, the whole inner circus leaking out, and still exist?
That was enormous to me. I was one of the square pegs being shoved toward the round hole and told to appreciate the opportunity. I could already feel the mismatch. The world had rules I did not understand, expectations I could mimic but not naturally inhabit, and a social machinery that seemed to reward the people most willing to become beige on command. So when someone appeared on television fully strange, fully loud, fully unsanded, it felt like a flare from another possible life. Maybe not a safe life. Maybe not a wise life. Maybe not even a good life. But a life that said the self did not have to be murdered in order to be presented.
Now, from the far side of almost fifty, I can see the warning label that my teenage self missed. There is a difference between refusing to compromise your soul and refusing to learn how to live. There is a difference between keeping your edges and using them to cut everyone who gets close. There is a difference between freedom and combustion. When you are young, those differences are hard to see because fire looks like fire. A burning house and a bonfire both glow in the dark. It takes age, bills, parenthood, grief, marriage, therapy, failure, and probably a few badly timed naps to learn which kind of flame keeps people warm and which kind takes the neighborhood with it.
And maybe that is why they were in my head this morning. Not as simple nostalgia, but as a reminder. I was one of the crazy ones. Not in the fun inspirational poster way where a billionaire sells you a phone and calls it rebellion, but in the actual square-peg way. The kind of kid who admired the people who looked like they had escaped the factory before final inspection. The kind of person who could have confused intensity for destiny, refusal for wisdom, chaos for truth. I have loved the weird, followed the weird, cultivated the weird, and occasionally let the weird drive without a license. And somehow, impossibly, I made it into late middle age as a father, a husband, a daily writer, and something resembling a stable adult. Not stable like a banker. Stable like an old barn that leans dramatically but has not fallen over despite several storms and one raccoon family living in the wall.
That feels lucky. Truly lucky. Not because I became normal. I did not. That ship left the harbor, caught fire, and became a small religion among the fish. But I did survive myself. I survived the temptation to treat every impulse as sacred. I survived the fantasy that being misunderstood automatically made me correct. I survived enough of the wreckage to learn that the goal was never to become round. The goal was to remain a square peg without using the mismatch as an excuse to splinter.
I still admire the unapologetic here I am. I still believe the world needs more people willing to arrive as themselves, not as professionally softened little customer service versions of the human soul. I still feel grateful to the Jesses and Pucks of the world for showing teenage me that there were other ways to be alive. But now I admire them with a father’s caution and an adult’s tenderness. I can see the beauty and the cost. I can see the permission and the damage. I can see that some people become lighthouses by standing close to the rocks.
So perhaps the lesson is not to go full crazy. Most people who go full crazy do not make it back with souvenirs and a Substack. The lesson is to keep enough crazy to stay alive inside your own skin. Keep the strange hair of the soul. Keep the weird voice. Keep the refusal to disappear. But also learn how to come home, pay the water bill, apologize when necessary, love your child well, and put the dangerous parts of yourself down for a nap before they start rearranging furniture.
I woke up thinking about Jesse and Puck. I ended up feeling grateful to be here. Still strange. Still square. Still unsanded in all the ways that matter. But alive on the other side of the fire, holding a cup of coffee, watching the morning arrive, and realizing that survival itself may be the strangest act of rebellion I ever managed.