Why We All Wanted To Be D.B. Cooper

Each suspect felt more convincing than the last.

As I watched the new HBO documentary on the mythical mystery of D.B. Cooper, I wondered why so many would claim to be the only sky pirate to ever elude the omnipotent FBI. Many of the many who confessed did so on their deathbed, instead of telling their children they loved them, or saying sorry to those they had scarred, they used their last words to cement a lie.

It made perfect sense that those who had wasted too many days in front of a TV would foment a bluff of epic proportion to mask their inefficiencies, but it puzzled me that just as many did so right before leaving existence.

Let’s face it, life in the 21st century can be pretty goddamn boring if you stay inside the lines. Mankind has never had more opportunities to become legendary, the problem being, more people than ever have a shot at being the one. With a cosmic mass of humans roaming the streets today, more than the collective of everyone that came before, the world is shrinking to the tune of losing purpose. As we speed toward the theater of the absurd at the pace of a bullet, the days seem shorter, a dollar stretches thinner, and chasing after our dreams seems like a meaningless maneuver.

From the moment we’re born, we come equipped with a void that we spend the rest of our lives trying to fill, actually filling, or covering it with complacency. The hollow hole that the philosophers coined as our being is stuffed with sports and religion, ideologies do the job for others, and some collect things just to say that they did. We all want to be someone or something we’re not. The damning reality is, that more often than not, what we want to do, what we can do, and what we need to do are never the same thing.

Even in the warped version of reality we have labored under like a moldy tab of LSD, I still believe that in this dimension there could be only one D.B. Cooper. Hundreds, if not thousands, have forfeited their own identity to parlay their achievements to lead us to believe it was them that did the impossible. With the case officially closed in 2016, whoever the man was that kept the blue windbreakers up at night for 45 years will dwell in history as somebody. In America, if you’re not somebody, you’re nobody, and being forgotten is worse than going…