Alright, so, ‘Straight Guys 69’. Sounds like a laugh, right? Well, let me tell ya, it was anything but when we actually tried to make a thing out of it. It became this whole saga, a real learning experience, if you can call crashing and burning ‘learning’.
Me and my buddy Dave, see, we thought we were gonna be the next big internet sensation. This was back in, like, 2018. We had this brilliant (or so we thought at the time, fueled by cheap pizza and too much caffeine) idea for a YouTube channel. The ‘Straight Guys 69’ name was Dave’s genius moment during a late-night brainstorming session. He thought it was edgy, provocative, and guaranteed to get clicks. I had my doubts from day one, thought it sounded a bit much, but hey, I was younger and definitely dumber, and he was persuasive.
So, we decided to dive in. Our first ‘practice’ session was just trying to figure out what ‘Straight Guys 69’ would even be about. Dave was all gung-ho for ‘insane pranks’ and ‘epic challenges’ – you know, the kind of stuff that was already flooding the internet. I leaned more towards maybe some game playthroughs with funny commentary, or perhaps some poorly-acted sketches. So, right from the get-go, we were pulling in completely different directions. It felt like we were two guys trying to row a boat with one oar each, facing opposite ways. The ’69’ in the name started to feel less like a clever title and more like a description of our working relationship: stuck, facing away from each other, and getting nowhere.
The Great Chili Challenge Fiasco That Wasn’t
Our first attempt at actually creating something was a legendary failure, a true monument to bad planning. We decided our debut video would be us eating a bunch of super hot peppers. Groundbreaking, I know. Dave went out and bought these Carolina Reapers – man, those things looked like they could melt steel. We set up my ancient, crappy webcam in my mom’s cluttered basement. The ‘master plan’ was simple: eat peppers, overreact dramatically, rake in the views. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, or so we thought.
- Dave took one tiny bite and immediately started chugging milk like his life depended on it. His face went a color I ain’t never seen before.
- I, trying to be the tough guy, managed a slightly bigger piece and then spent the next ten minutes pretty much convinced I was going to throw up my entire skeleton, thankfully just off-camera.
- The footage? Oh, it was gold. Shaky, poorly lit, mostly just us coughing, wheezing, and making noises like dying animals. Absolutely unusable.
That was our glorious first ‘practice’ session. A total write-off. We didn’t give up immediately, though. Stubborn, or stupid, take your pick. We ‘practiced’ a few more times. There was the ‘blindfold makeup challenge’ where I ended up looking like a Picasso painting gone wrong. Then we tried a ‘reading mean comments’ video, except we didn’t have any actual comments yet, so we just made up mean things to say about each other. In hindsight, that was pretty much the underlying theme of the whole damn endeavor – unintentionally being mean to our own project.
The thing is, that ’69’ part of the name really started to feel painfully accurate, and not in the clickbaity way Dave had hoped. We were stuck. We’d pooled like fifty bucks for a slightly-less-crappy microphone, and we’d hyped it up to a few friends. Pride, y’know? It’s a powerful, dumb motivator. So we kept slogging at it. But every single recording session just threw a big ol’ spotlight on how fundamentally we weren’t on the same page. He wanted quick, loud, potentially viral nonsense. I was aiming for something, I dunno, a tiny bit less cringeworthy, maybe something with a sliver of substance. We were like two dudes trying to build a complicated piece of IKEA furniture, but one guy had instructions for a bookshelf and the other for a TV stand, and both sets of instructions were in a language neither of us understood.
Finally, after about two grueling months of this ‘practice’, which felt more like ‘painful, slow-motion self-sabotage’, we had the inevitable blow-up. It was over something incredibly stupid, I think it was about who was supposed to edit the grand total of three minutes of semi-usable footage we’d managed to scrape together. Dave blew up, said I was too slow and too picky. I fired back that his ideas were derivative trash. Classic creative differences, I suppose, if you could even call what we were attempting ‘creative’.
So, ‘Straight Guys 69’, the YouTube channel, died a quiet, unlamented death before it even managed to upload a single video. We just… stopped. Deleted the few terrible raw files. We didn’t really talk for a few weeks after that. It was super awkward. We’d been pretty good buddies before all this, and this monumentally stupid channel idea nearly torpedoed the whole friendship. That entire experience hammered home a valuable lesson: some ‘edgy’ or ‘provocative’ ideas are best left as jokes tossed around in a group chat, not pursued as actual projects.
Why am I even dredging up this ancient history? Well, every now and then, when Dave and I are grabbing a beer, one of us will inevitably bring it up. ‘Hey, remember Straight Guys 69?’ we’ll say, and then we both just groan and burst out laughing at our own past idiocy. It’s firmly in the ‘cringey but funny memories’ category now. Dave’s actually doing pretty well for himself these days; he started a small but successful landscaping business. Me? Well, I’m here, sharing stories about our spectacular flameouts. At least it makes for a decent anecdote, right? Just goes to show you, not every ‘practice’ session leads to perfection or success. Sometimes, it just leads to a good old-fashioned, facepalm-inducing memory and a story to tell.
