The Rise and Fall of The Fad Man
AFF Newsletter on Substack #49
Welcome to the AFF Newsletter on Substack.
Fads! Oh man, I’ve been through so many of them that it feels like I’ve lived multiple lives! I know now that it was all part of the searching process. The pursuit of who I was/am. I was experimenting to see what stuck but I was also escaping - with alcohol at the centre of every fad and every exploration of self.
Fad - an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived; a craze.
Like many people nowadays, I was hoping that I would find an identity in the things I’d attached meaning to. The problem was that, in the grand scheme of things, they were meaningless to me. Temporarily, much like alcohol, the fads I’d transformed my life around gave me some joy. But, unlike with alcohol, I grew bored and moved on to the next thing.
I’m going to speak to one fad at length later in the post because, although it wasn’t the longest one I had, it was a dangerous one and ended up causing me a whole load of pain. However, before I get to that, I will take a few minutes - and with a real sense of embarrassment - to let you in on some of the phases I went through during my drinking days.
Rap star wannabe to mosh-pit rocker
When I first heard Eminem, I was blown away by the rawness of his sound and delivery. The polished Dr Dre beats couldn’t hide his pain and anger from my impressionable ears. I connected with his music instantly. Not all of his lyrics resonated but his raw energy did for some reason.
I wasn’t an angry kid. I’m not an angry adult. But I could feel his pain. I wasn’t aware that I had much pain inside of me until I heard his music, but it resonated. Looking back now, I was angry at the world because my mum was sick. I was also angry at Eminem because of the way he spoke about his mother - although that never stopped me from listening to his music!
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After discovering Eminem, I went into full hip-hop mode. I adopted a bandana and baggy trousers, and I absorbed as much music from the genre as I could. From Westside Connection to the Beastie Boys, Kurupt to Xzibit. I listened to as much as possible. I bought G-Unit merch and wore Jay-Z sneakers. I played hip-hop/rap while I got drunk on beers.
My obsession with hip-hop and rap morphed into a deep love for rock and metal music. I switched my hip-hop merch to black band t-shirts. I went from G-Unit and D-12 to Hed PE and Slipknot. Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg were gone and replaced by Korn and Disturbed. But the biggest change was my love for live music.
I loved going to gigs. I loved singing my favourite songs back at the bands. I loved buying t-shirts at the merch stands. I loved being in the mosh-pits.
I wore black nail polish and black eyeliner. I wore black clothes from head to toe. I wore those cheap spiked bracelets, bought albums the day they were released and went to as many gigs as I could - big ones and small. Mainstream bands to unsigned ones. I couldn’t get enough. During that time though, my drinking got heavier.
I partied hard during my rocker days. We were young and having fun. I formed some great friendships, some of whom remain friends to this day. But I also adopted some terrible habits that took me years to shed and which often reared their ugly head before I finally achieved sobriety.
Cocaine to wrestling
Before my rock/metal stage and more fitting of the “gangsta” image I’d adopted while listening to the heavily drug-orientated lyrics of my favourite rappers at the time, I found myself introduced to cocaine.
That became a destructive fad for a while. I say fad because I would watch every cocaine film I could get my hands on. I stylised myself on Al Pacino’s Scarface. I wanted to become a coke dealer and live a lavish lifestyle. I wanted to be a mob boss and have all the beautiful women.
But those dreams never became a reality because that was never me. I was a mere guest in that world. A spectator. A voyeur. I didn’t have it in me to sell drugs, I wasn’t built like that. But I was a sheep following the crowd. The wrong crowd. I got swept up in the drug culture. But I was never Scarface. I was never “the bad guy.”
“Make way for the bad guy. There's a bad guy comin' through! Better get outta his way!”
- Tony Montana
While my cocaine phase was destructive it didn’t last long. As I’ve written about previously, I was always an alcohol guy. I never liked spending money on drugs when I could spend it on booze. During this time though, my friends and I had also become fanatical wrestling junkies.
We watched everything we could get our hands on - from WWF (now WWE) to IWA Kawasaki Dream. Old events and new. When we weren’t going to gigs, we were watching wrestling. And we talked about it nonstop. When my mum’s health began to suffer again, I used wrestling as a crutch alongside alcohol - my trusted friend.
We would stay up late and watch all of the Pay-Per-View events. We would drink a load of booze and order takeaways. It was innocent fun but, as my friends admitted years later, this was where alcohol began taking centre stage in my life. Despite this, I would not change these years. Yes, it was a geeky fad but I loved this period of my life. It wasn’t the wrestling that I loved or even the booze, it was the friendships I made.
Football and fitness to raver
By the time the cocaine period of my life ended so did the life of my mother. She lost her brave battle and another angel left us. This was when the spiral began. But at one point during it, I managed to get in the best shape of my life - despite drinking more than I ever had.
I began playing football (soccer) regularly. It was great. Again, much like the wrestling fad, I made some amazing friends who I still see to this day. Alongside partying and fitness, came women and casual sex. A dangerous mix for a young man who was broken.
So, despite immersing myself in fitness and football, I became more lost and sad. I was navigating the world without my mum and I didn’t get the proper help I needed to deal with that loss. While I tried hard to stick with these positive habits, ultimately, this was where the devil tightened its grip on me.
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Like many alcoholics, a change of scenery seemed like a good idea just when my life became unmanageable. So I moved away from my dad and sister and ended up living with some uni students in a party city. It was chaos. Pure and utter chaos.
My drinking escalated and so did my drug use. I started getting tattooed and living out multiple fads. I became a graffiti art fan, a dubstepper, a wannabe PUA and a raver. I did drugs. Partied. Had multiple random hookups. And drank loads.
I dressed in rave gear to clubs and took MDMA. I transformed my life to fit in with party culture. While I held down a job and gained promotion after promotion, I continued to dive deeper into this debaucherous world - one that, at my core, didn’t suit me. I was not the guy I was pretending to be. But the more time I spent living like that, the harder it became to differentiate the real me from the fad-obsessed me. (I will talk more about the personification of The Fad Man in a later article, so please look out for that!)
As promised, here is another fad I went through that caused me a whole load of pain! If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read so far, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. This is a reader-supported publication and any donations are very much appreciated.
Jackass
Yes, you guessed it. I went through a Jackass phase! I’m pretty sure most people my age did. If they didn’t, they were sensible because alcohol and stupid stunts don’t go well together.
I’m glad that even though I was a total drunk I had some sense of danger to do the show’s less crazy stunts because had I dared do the more reckless ones, I’d hate to think what would have happened to me!
That being said, there was one stunt that made a lasting, painful impression on me. I can’t remember what it was called on the show but I imagine it was Bush Diving or something similar (no, not that kind! Dirty mind!).
The stunt consisted of me and my friends throwing ourselves randomly into hedges and bushes on our way home from the pub or club. Through the shrubbery and straight onto concrete! The next morning, after the booze wore off, the bumps and bruises, and the aches and pains, surfaced. So did the shame, embarrassment and promises of never doing it again - until next time.
I suffered multiple injuries from this ridiculous fad. I bust my shoulder, my knee and my back. I suffered cuts all over my body. And I gave myself a concussion, which I think I’m still suffering from today. A driveway doesn’t provide a cushioned landing, believe it or not!
Needless to say, after years of searching for my identity in multiple fads and losing myself at the bottom of a bottle, as well as causing physical injuries from ‘bush diving’, I found myself in so much pain before I got sober.
I paid a heavy price physically, mentally and emotionally, and I’m still paying them now. Thankfully, I’m doing so without alcohol and with a much better understanding of who I am. Freedom over fads!
Thank you for reading “The Rise and Fall of The Fad Man”. If anything in this newsletter resonated with you, then I’d love to hear from you:
Check out the last free post “The Promise Of Freedom Isn't Always Kept”.
Take care of yourself and your family,
Roscoe | @AFFathers
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