I forgot something funny from after the graduation all-nighter. When my
friend Cole and I were driving home really tired and such. I kept
stopping at stop signs and waiting for them to change all the while
thinking this stop sign is taking a really long time. We were sitting
there for at least a minute when my friend asked what I was doing.
That startled me into action and I was fine until the next sign.
After doing that twice and laughing about how stupid I was I stopped
at a red light and then after I checked both ways, I ran it. We
laughed about that and got on the freeway and got home, alive
somehow. Sure was a good idea to just let us stay up all night and
then drive home sleep deprived rather than drunk.
An Accumulation of Days
Some Stuff Happened and Then Some Other Stuff Happened.
Jewel Songs
A few days after graduation my girlfriend and I were driving home one
day and when we came to the stop sign off the freeway exit a song
came on the radio and my girlfriend stopped and turned it up. She
looked over at me and told me this song explained exactly how she
felt about me. It was 'Near You Always' by Jewel she watched my face
during the whole three minutes and a bit of the song to see if I felt it like she felt it. It is a sweet song
and it was really a good description of how young love feels but it
was just awkward at the moment. There were people waiting behind us
and I was uncomfortably aware of them waiting for us to go and I was
trying to make my eyes and face let my girlfriend that I did really
like her very much but I wanted to do that and keep the car rolling.
I must have looked impatient because she huffed a little and then
turned right and drove down main street obviously frustrated with me.
In retrospect I should have been more interested in her sincere
expression of love for me and drank it in, inconvenienced motorists
be damned. There are so few time in our lives when life is good and
everything is right and I didn't appreciate it until it was gone. Too bad, I guess there's never next time.
As a side note to
this story Jewel actually shares my birthday and my birth hospital.
She was born exactly four years before I was in the Payson Utah
hospital. Cool beans right?
All Night Jelousy
The idea of the all night senior party was to keep us contained and not
drinking booze and then driving or doing ill advised sex to each
other. The idea was to mix and reminisce for one last time sign some
yearbooks and tell everyone we would always love them and never
forget them. My problem was that for the second time in my life I was
genuinely in love with a girl and it was driving me crazy with
jealousy. Every time she would go and hug another guy and laugh with
him it was like cold acid was being poured into my brain and I wanted
nothing more than to keep her close to me and out of the company of
possible kissing accident inducing guys. I had a miserable night
purely ruined by my semi-rational fears that my girlfriend would
cheat on me or spark an interest and leave me. I walked around and
talked to some people but I was mostly trying to keep my girlfriend
in sight. I never used to care so much because I could just go find a
more or less interchangeable replacement but this was the first time
since my first girlfriend that I wanted this one and no one else.
Well, in fairness I wanted her to be all mine but I was still looking
to keep my options open. That might not make sense if you are not a
libidinous teenage boy with little empathy and life experience. We
passed the night without incident or much entertainment and I went
home with my friend Cole and my girlfriend went home with her best
friend.
Graduation
I don't know what freedom and fun that high school students think lives
just outside the confines of home life, free room and board, little
to no responsibility and a place where all of your friends gather for
a several hours a day but it is a lie. By May all of the seniors were
ready to move on to what we thought would be more freedom, more money
and more fun - because we were stupid. Whatever the motivation or
compulsion to escape - freedom or exile was almost ours, ready or
not. We were out of school a week or two before graduation and that
is when it sunk in that I would not be achieving my goal of speaking
at graduation. The graduation was held at the local college and it
was the basic talking and blah blah and then we got to walk where you
get your diploma and then walk over for a picture. I had toyed with
the idea of doing something funny and memorable but I chickened out
and did nothing. After the ceremony I got pictures with my family and
went to say goodbye to all of the underclass friends of mine that
were in attendance. We hugged and made the un-keepable promises we
feel we must make on parting and I went home to get rested up for the
senior all night party. It was supposed to the momentous marking of
the greatest accomplishment of my life but it was one of the more
anticlimactic afternoons of my life.
Last Show and Imagined Glory
I
was banned from all school activities based on my sub-stellar.
sub-lunar even, attendance and grades. That was going to include the
senior 'sob' assembly where they play a montage of pictures of
popular kids and friends of the producers while they play songs about
how this was the best days of our lives. I was not above debasing
myself and begging to, and I quote, 'Please, please, please let me
do this one last thing.' All whiny and blubbery though. They cracked
and let me if I promised to not make any naughty jokes or make fun of
any teachers or administrators. I agreed and they allowed me to
participate in the writing and producing of the final assembly of my
high school career. I helped write a knock off of Don McLean's
'American Pie' where we cleverly replaced the lyrics about rock and
roll with words about the Payson High school experience so that the
chorus went, 'Now we're singing bye bye Payson High. . .' and lines about what we had done in high school. It all felt very significant and momentous because, at the time beset as we were with the myopia of youth, everything felt very big and very important and uniquely real. Probably like what was happening at the thousands of high schools across the nation more or less simultaneously. They played
memorial tributes and the photo montage and some kids said what they
would miss and all the girls cried and all of the boys tried to
comfort those girls in the most inconspicuously yet deliberately
physical way possible. A good time was had by most and I convinced
myself I had done an all time good job, but I doubt anyone but the
people who worked on the show and I would even remember anything
about it.
A Very Unfortunate Game of Tag
On one of our lazy senior-itis afternoons in school leadership class we
decided to give productivity a miss and go out into the gorgeous
afternoon and play some kissing tag. Kissing tag pits the boys
against the girls with the boys on one side and the girls on the
other. One person who is 'it' sits in the middle and a boy and girl
are chosen randomly. If the person who is 'it' is a girl then the
picked boy tried to kiss her before the picked girl can kiss him.
Whoever does their job wins and the other person is 'it'. This is a
perfect game if you are playing with all cute and fun people because,
kissing. It is not fun if the ratio of uglies gets too high and you
are trying to decide which kiss would be worse on the fly. This day
the ratio was pretty good but about fifteen minutes into the game a
girl suffered a womanly leak and didn't notice most of the rest of us
did but I, at least, had no idea if it would be less embarrassing for
me to tell her in front of everyone or for her to realize it later.
The correct answer was both are equally horrifying. A girl tried to
get her attention and quietly let her know about her accidental
discharge but the girl was too into the game and didn't understand
what she was being told discreetly and yelled at the sacrificial
Samaritan asking her what she said because she couldn't hear her. The
person trying to head off the problem just pointed a finger at her
own crotch and nodded her head towards the leak now spreading around
her crotch. The girl, still smiling and laughing a little looked down
and understood screamed and grabbed her hoodie sweatshirts wrapping
around her waist as she ran off crying. We all felt horrible fro her
and discontinued the game and wandered over to sit in the shade and
talk about anything other than what had just happened. To my
knowledge none of us ever told someone else the story and definitely
not with the girl's name attached, some things are just too shameful
even joke about. It is one of those things I would love to ask her
about after all these years and see how she felt at the time but I
couldn't for fear that she would still be ashamed and had hoped it
was gone and forgotten.
Girls are Not as Strong as Boys
I have mentioned lots of times how very much my girlfriend was into
feminism. She was convinced that women had made and done everything
of any note in the history of the world and that women were equal, if
not superior, to men in every measurable way. One day when I was over at her house she started saying that she wouldn't
worry about any guy assaulting her because all she would do is kick
him in the nuts. I explained to her that since the very beginning of
a boy's self-awareness when guys know they have nuts and that they
are extremely tender they are the first thing we defend in any
situation not just during the assault of a woman. She told me that if
someone ever tried to grab her she would just fight loose using her
anger and rage. I told her I didn't think that would be possible
against a guy of any size or any strength. She insisted she could get
away easily. So I challenged her to try and escape a basic wrestling
hold I would put her in and she could try to escape using any weapon
in her kicking, punching, biting, arsenal. She agreed a little
over-confidently. You have to understand that at this time I was not
much bigger than she was, maybe 10 pounds or so, and we were both in
pretty good shape, having been rock climbing every day. I closed the
distance between us in two steps and grabbed her arms to keep her
from punching me I spun her around with her arms crisscrossed across
her chest holding both of her wrists under her armpits. She started
trying to kick me and so I settled her onto the couch and tangled her
legs up in the leg scissor. Her brother who was taking the 'you
couldn't get away' stance with me started telling her to trying get
away and to fight harder. She was trying her best to kick and to bite
but she was hopelessly overpowered and getting really quite angry. I
wasn't saying much but her brother was laying it on and she was
getting seriously furious. When I finally let her go after about 5
minutes she was exhausted but not so exhausted as to not slap me,
call me in a-hole and tell me to leave. I tried to remind her that
she had agreed to the challenge but she was hearing none of it. She
stormed up to her room kind of rage crying. I followed up after and
told her I thought we're just playing around but she didn't see it
that way. I apologized and went home while her brother kept making
fun of her something I wished he would've stopped. She called me a
couple hours later when she'd calmed down and apologized for getting
so angry. I never again mentioned this physical challenge reality
check and she never asked for a rematch.
I Rig the Vote
Every year for the yearbook the student body was supposed to vote on a whole bunch of different people who would be the most or the most likely too. . . or the best something or whatnot. Generally, this was done by anonymous poll and the winners would then be announced and have their photos taken to be put in the yearbook. In my bid for just a smidgen of high school immortality I decided to go ahead and rig the vote. I gathered a couple hundred of the ballots and took them around to different classrooms, as I was supposed to do, but not like I was supposed to do I instructed everybody to fill in my name in every field. There were several hundred people who did follow the instructions I gave them making me far and away the winner in every single category. The teacher who was the coordinator of the yearbook was not amused as they tallied up the ballots and called me in for a little chit chat. She was under the impression, and quite rightly so, that I may have altered the natural flow of democracy. Yes madam, I am guilty of doing my job and I'm not sorry. She told me that I could choose one picture to be in and the second place person in each field would be in those pictures. Despite my longstanding policy of resisting authority, I agreed to these tyrannical terms and chose to be in the picture with my girlfriend as 'Most Outspoken'. In retrospect I should have picked most likely to succeed. That would've been nice, you know? Success. Outspoken is just code for opinionated and annoying.
JD Almost Dies
The
was a girl in my grade who was the fairly pretty ponderous,
introverted, poetry-sharing type who asked me several times for me to
take her climbing or repelling. In the spring of our senior year
there was the definite sense that the window was closing on when we
could go. I had lost some interest because I had a girlfriend and the
both of them knew about each other. To that end we
organized a strictly platonic trip with her little brother along to
make sure that it was going to stay that way. There was a gate across
the road so we had to hike up about 3 miles carrying the gear and
making small talk for about an hour. Her brother had told me how much
he knew about rock climbing and rappelling and how he was pretty much
an expert in all aspects of the outdoors. When we had hiked up to the
top of the cliff we were rappelling off of I could tell right away he
may have overstated his qualification because he was having trouble
organizing the exact direction in which to put on his harness. We
were on top of the cliff that was about 60 feet tall and he was not
giving it the proper respect, walking back and forth towards the edge
all willy-nilly in a way that gives the guide of any trip with any
sort of danger a real sick feeling in the pit other stomach. I had
asked him to please stop walking up to the edge until he put on his
harness and his rappelling device. He told me he would be fine. To
prove his point he walked one more time to the edge and this time
actually did grab the rope that was already over the edge and leaned
forward and until his chest and torso were literally over the void.
Just like in every cheap thriller ever made, he slipped. His legs
flew out from underneath him and luckily with the double rope in his
hand he was able to stop himself from the plummet with just his legs
falling over the edge. I've never been so terrified in my life. I
don't think I particularly cared if he died, I really didn't know him
at all, I just didn't want them to die on my watch and in my view. I
yelled at him and instead of being sufficiently chastened and humbled
by his near brush with death he was defiant, saying it was fine
because he didn't fall off. We only rappelled one time each and then
I took down the rope and I walked back down in a much more surly
mood. For the next couple of weeks I would wake up in the middle of
the night in a cold sweat gripped in night terrors convinced I was
seeing this kid slide off the edge to his death. I don't think I've
ever taken anyone, but my own children rappelling again. Especially
not somebody who knew everything about everything and didn't need
their safety equipment attached.
AP Testing and Gloating
I told you before the first class and only I have ever gotten an 'F'
in was AP English. The teacher and I spent a lot of time, when I
would go to class, arguing over whether or not different
interpretations of the works were valid. Now that I've been through
college and met with a lot of other literary criticism I know I was
right. No one, even the author sometimes, knows why they wrote some
of the stuff and if you want to chase down the final authoritative
interpretation of any work you are on a fools errand. There are
hundreds of schools of thought and personal interpretations of every
great novel, play or poem and with no chance at objectivity all that
have justification in the text can be equally viable. She was more of
the opinion that whatever she thought was right was actually right
and if your essays didn't reflect that they were wrong. The good news
was that I had an AP test that would be judged by outsiders without
her input. She told me over and over that if I used my style and my
ideas I wouldn't do well on the test and that I need to do it her
way. I disrespectfully disagreed. When I was reading the test and
taking the test I was excited, this wasn't going to be hard at all.
My confidence was justified when the couple of weeks later we got the
test results back and I had scored better than anyone else in the
class. I couldn't wait for the next class. Now, in my opinion,
smartassery is an art and when I came in that day with my paper I was
intent on painting my masterpiece. I asked quite loudly around what
everybody else and scored most of had scored enough to pass but then
I told him that I'd scored higher than all of them by not listening
to the teacher. I told her that now objectively we could see which
method worked better and if she felt like apologizing I would accept
her apology then and frankly forgive her. She did not feel like
apologizing, I forgave her anyway because that's what the bigger man
does. I never went back to her class and I think that made us both
happier.
I Am Inexplicably A Douche
There
is no denying that I was generally a pretty selfish and self-serving
kind of person or in the parlance of the day a (air quote), douche,
(close air quote). Generally, though I was doing it for some sort of
reward like a girl, or a grade, a trophy, or to take a shortcut to
having a good time. There was one time after school though when I was
going past the chemistry teacher's classroom and a kid I knew from
Santaquin had just finished taking a makeup test and put it on the
teacher's desk. He was a bit of a goofball but basically an okay kid
so I don't know why I did what I did next. I went into the classroom
took his recently completed test off of the teacher's desk and took
it with me. My friend asked me why I took it and I told him something
which wasn't the truth because whatever it was did not explain why I
was being such a jerk for no reason. On the way home I took the test
and tore it up into little pieces and threw them out of the window.
Later that afternoon when the acid haze of douchebaggery had passed
from my mind I tried to figure out why I had done that, but there was
literally no reason. To this very moment I'm not sure why I took that
kid's test, I mean I don't even think it was to be funny or anything, it was just a random act of un-kindness.
I felt a couple times like I should tell them what happened or at
least make up some legitimate sounding excuse as to why I had thrown away his test but I never
worked up the courage. Once again, total class act on my part.
Coffee Forgiveness
Another funny thing about that chemistry teacher was that for his favorites
he was not a huge stickler for attendance. If you missed a day
because you just didn't want to come to class all you had to do was
tell him you were off doing something more fun and he would excuse
you. Or because we had him the first class after lunch if we are
running late my friend Cole would buy him some coffee and then when
we came in 20 or 30 minutes late he'd start to yell at us and Cole
would tell him he got him a cup of coffee then hand it over and go
sit down and it would be like nothing ever happened. I'm not sure if
they teach that in college when teachers are learning to teach but is
not a really good method for maintaining a sense of law and order. it
would be pretty funny in a sitcom, but as I understand it those
classrooms in high school situational comedies are more made up than
real.
If Murder is Committed I Am on Point
My
chemistry teacher used to joke about all kinds of things that aren't very
funny to joke about but one day he took a line that was really scary.
This particular day he was exceptionally mad at bird over something
or another and threatened to go out to his car, get his gun, come
back and shoot him. The two reasons I didn't think this is funny was
first; he did have a gun and second; he didn't just say 'I will kill
you' he told us the specific practical steps his plan would need to come to fruition. Everybody got really quiet and the teacher told my friend and I
that he liked us pretty well so if he did end up shooting Bird in the
head and then locked himself in his office and had his gun in his
mouth threatening to kill himself that we were supposed to come talk him down. We looked at each
other and then back to him and told him he had a deal. This is simply good manners, because if the
psychopath who is threatening to shoot a student in the head asks you
to talk him down from suicide you say yes. Common, flipping, courtesy, not to mention the oldest rule in the book.
He never did end up shooting Bird, and its kind of a shame too, I
would've been pretty heroic talking the madman out of whatever he was
planning to do next.
An Old Girlfriend and the New One Don't Get Along
If
you member back a little ways I told you about a girl in Florida that
I dated, and that I led her on a little bit, what I hadn't really
made clear, I think, is that I'd never stopped leading. So when she
came out for a visit the next spring I was sort of committed to my
new girlfriend but she was under the impression the we were still
keeping our thing on a low simmer and were going to reignite it soon.
The old girlfriend called me and set up a time we could get together
to go rock climbing and I still chickened out of letting her know
that I had another girl in my life. That would've been the ideal time
to tell her, you know, Before they met? Anyway, I set up to meet her
one afternoon that spring of my senior year in a parking lot in a
town a few miles north so we could go climbing in the canyon that was
close to there. The thing is somehow it worked out that my girlfriend
found out about it and she invited herself along. When I pulled up in
my truck to meet my Florida girlfriend I had my current girlfriend in
the cab and there was no way that was going to end well but I pushed
forward anyway. What added to the awkwardness of the situation is
that they both thought they were my girlfriend and I hadn't really
cleared that up. Also, somewhat ironically they were both dressed
almost identically wearing khaki shorts, a white tank-top and boots
with socks. When I first pulled up beside old girlfriend she looked
pretty happy to be seeing me after a year. That happy look kind of
melted away into confusion when she noticed there was a girl in the
truck with me. I got out and said 'hi' and introduce my girlfriend
not as my girlfriend but by her first name and did so conversely with
my other old girlfriend. They were both looking each other sizing
things up and realizing what the situation exactly was. They were
pretty polite at first but then they started in with some passive
aggressive jibes and both of them being quite high toned didn't help
to de-escalate the situation. In fairness to them, this whole thing
was entirely my fault. We drove up to the canyon across town, got
geared up scaled a couple climbs and the whole time the tension is
mounting and each girl is trying to stake her claim by making sure
that she was as close as possible to me and touching me whenever she
could to establish dominance. The problem being is that they were
both way too intense to be cowed and things just got more and more
uncomfortable. After about an hour climbing I feared violence was
about to break out and I suggested we called it a day. When I asked
what the Florida girlfriend was doing that night and before she could
respond my girlfriend who was most adamantly against PDA reminded me
that we already had plans and kissed me square on the mouth. That was
the coup de grace in the Florida girlfriend, who I still thought was
really cool decided she'd seen enough and said she was busy anyway
and left. I never talked to her again. I just hope all of the other
men she met in her life weren't such selfish jerks. I thought with
all the public kissing my girlfriend was going to be more into me and
reward me with some making out. But somewhere in her love addled mind
she also felt that being brought along on a date with an old
unbroken-up with girlfriend was not the coolest way to spend an
afternoon either and she was cool to cold for a day or ten.
I Get Cheated On
Alright,
now back to the girlfriend already in progress. By the spring of our
senior year we've been dating for a couple of months we were pretty
much understood to be exclusive. That is to say I understood that we
were exclusive, she may have been fuzzy on that fact. A kid that I
had to kick off the friend team in junior high because he was
dishonest and a bit of a turd had come back from Idaho for a visit
and was staying in a house right next to my girlfriend sisters house.
I had known that they were hanging out a little bit but one day when
I came over to her house to chill I overheard her on the phone
talking with her girlfriend about how she didn't mean to but they had
just kissed. She talked to her girlfriend about how bad she felt and
how she did not know how to tell me. After I heard her, I made some
noise like I was coming in for the first time and played it cool like
I didn't know was going on. I was hurt a little but not so much as I
found an opportunity for some real top-level manipulation. I came in
over-nice and over-cheerful telling her how much I missed her and how
much she meant to me. That said put her into some deep guilt and I
decided to keep my foot on the gas pedal of shame. I asked what she
been up to, she said not much so I asked if she'd been hanging out
with my old friend. When she told me that she had, I acted excited
and asked how he was doing. She was getting more and more sad and was
looking wracked with guilt. I started asking her what was wrong because she looked sad, she said she didn't want to tell me, I sat
down by her gave her a big hug and told her if anything was wrong I
was there for her. Then I pushed her over the edge by telling her the
only thing I cared about was that she was happy. She broke down
crying and said she was sorry, I asked what she was sorry for. She
said she didn't want to tell me, so I said that was fine and laid
back on the bed. She was still sitting up and she turned and told me
it had to do of my ex-friend. This is when I really turned it on, I
asked if he was okay, pretending that I was hoping he wasn't sick or
something. She said that he was okay but that they had done
something. I was still playing it cool, pretending I didn't know
already and asked her what she had done. She finally worked up the
courage and got out that they had been wrestling around and when they
went to the floor he'd kissed her and she kissed him back but that
then she felt immediately guilty and came right home. I whipped up
the saddest face I could have and said a line that I had heard from a
movie somewhere, "I guess I just love you more than you love
me." Bam! She tried to give me a hug and stood up and told her I
needed to go think about this she asked me couple times not to leave
but I felt my leverage was increased by my absence. I went and got in
my car and drove up the canyon and sometime during that drive it
actually sunk in that my girlfriend had kissed my douche-bag
ex-friend and my fake indignation and manipulative ways give way to
actual rage and puppy dog hurt.
I Somehow Forgot a Whole Love Interest
Somehow
in all the excitement to tell you about everything that was happening
I forgot an entire love interest. The whole girl and her friends
actually. One of the perks of being a senior was that they had a new
batch of young and untainted women coming up who viewed us as older
wiser and possessing of cars, driver's licenses and money. Most of
the girls our age had already been picked over pretty well and
everybody knew who had dated whom and all the various details of
their love lives and other such gossip. With this new batch of girls
there was a group of friends who had quite a few cuties so my friend
Cole and I preformed a little joint maneuver to get two of them
separated from the pack. I was under the impression that these young
ladies would have a lot less self-esteem and therefore be much more
susceptible to suggestion. I asked the one of them I had singled out
to a dance, the cheapest of the year. It was called 'Recession'
reflect its inexpensive nature and the idea was to do everything on
the cheap. For our date we went up the canyon and climbed to the top
of very tall pine trees and tried to swing them far enough back and
forth to jump from tree to tree. I never worked up the courage but my
friend James pulled it off several times. I think mostly we just
watched him. We went dating, dinnering, dancing, good-timing and at
the end of the night I thought a little kissing would be a forgone
conclusion. That was because I was older and cute and had shown her
good time and she would do what I wanted I thought. I made my move
and she politely declined and said that she liked me as a friend but
she was not very interested in me romantically. What new devilry was
this? She was acting like a full-blown regular person with their own
tastes and interests, who knew? Cole was having a little more luck
with the girl he was perusing and I think they turned the corner into
kissing, borderline going out, when things came to an abrupt stop in
one of the funniest breakup stories I've ever heard. I don't want to
mess it up, so if you're reading this and you feel like it Cole, you
might want to tell your version in the comments.
I Bet You He Dies
That
chemistry teacher was never really a stickler for that newfangled
political correctness and whatnot. He was always telling us massively
inappropriate stories about blood, gore and dismemberment which you
might find very appealing if you are a fan of the 'Saw' movies or the
Holocaust. He would start out telling us that he had a funny story
about something in the tone halfway between fond reminiscence and
giggly recounting, he would then tell us about a time a lady's head
got blown off or some other charming tale. She'd been using a
pressure cooker and didn't know that she needed to release the
pressure before he took the lid off and when the lid came off, in his
words, it took the top of her head clean off and blew her brains all
over the room. That is sure enough funny stuff. He told lots of other
stories of warring paramedics, or maybe it was war, paramedic
service. Either way if you had the sense of humor of Ted Bundy or
Jeffrey Dahmer you would be rolling your seat. There was a man
scheduled for execution that January that I was in his class and he
offered an open wager to the class that some bleeding heart liberal
would get him an appeal or a pardon before they shot him and that was
eating a hole in his soul. He offered coffee and donuts as stakes if
someone would take the 'he gets shot' side of the wager. I decided to
take him up on that and the deal was struck. Just his normal
teacher-student stuff. That night the man was indeed shot with three
executioners bullets through the heart; Hooray for me! The next day,
true to his word he did have a donut for me when I got the class and
he said it was a small price to pay for that scumbag to be shot. His
only lament was that he didn't get to see it personally. Yeah…
That's what we were all thinking.
The Wheels Come Off. . . Literally
The
dance we were going to was The Sadie Hawkins Day dance where the
girls asked boys and therefore far fewer people went. After the cute,
quiet girl asked me she brought by my shirt which was the Sadie
Hawkins Day dance tradition so that we could all be matching
matchers. It was actually a really nice green corduroy shirt, much
nicer than any I had so I kept and used it for a long time after the
dance, like for ten years or so. The kids we were going with, mostly
athletes and their girlfriends, jet setters as we called then. They
were almost all football players except for two kids it been on the
wrestling team with me. We weren't exactly friends on the wrestling
team but we knew each other. Even though I didn't know any of the
kids we hit it off really well and by the end of our date and dinner
were all laughing about inside jokes. The funniest thing was after
dinner we all went to the bathroom before we left to go to the dance
and three of us were in the bathroom together and we overheard an old
man doing mighty battle with his bowels, swearing out and cursing
God. This struck us as exceptionally funny and we repeated things we
heard him say for the rest the time I knew those guys. Thank-you
random stranger with gastric-intestinal struggles, you sir were
comedy gold. After the basically uneventful dance the kid who was
driving us in his family's van noticed a little rattle, a thump and
some vibration. True to my hamartia of always knowing something about
everything, whether I do or don't, I suggested maybe the van was
simply out of alignment and that sometimes driving faster was the key
to smoothing that out. For the record, driving faster is virtually
never the solution to a car problem. Fortunately for us he only tried
my solution for a couple of seconds until he decided to stop the van
and see what might be the problem. The problem was four of the five
lug nuts on the front passenger tire had broken completely off and we
were down to a single lug nut holding tire on, and precariously at
that. Even I didn't have a solution for that so we had to stop on the
side of the road and wait for rescue. A lot of people claim the
wheels fell off of their date this is the only time, to my knowledge,
it literally happened. We finally rounded up enough rides and we all
got home and as I had promised to I called my girlfriend to tell her
about what we've done and play up the comedy of the night and down
play any close dancing and cuddling then may or may not have gone on.
After I'd gone away to college I did actually go on one or two more
dates with that Sadie Hawkins girl but nothing ever really came of
it.
I Go Out on a Date With Another Girl
Even
though I had a really steady girlfriend I was still prone to little
flirtation especially with the cute underclass girls that were in my
chemistry class. There was one there that was really cute and had a
boyfriend who was also in class. I used to make a point of
insinuating myself between them, turning my back to him and asking
her how she was doing. She was a cute and shy type of girl who
blushed when I flirted with her which was nice. She was much more
Martha Stewart and less girl power than my girlfriend. Which is the
kind of woman I have a little trouble getting interested in usually
because a lot of times they're really eager to please and I prefer a
little abuse from my females. Anyway after a couple of weeks of
flirting and sitting by her and whatnot I had heard that she broken
up with her boyfriend, who was actually a pretty cool kid, so I bet I
felt a little bad for him, but more excited about my prospects. There
was a girls choice dance coming up and I playfully begged her to ask
me even though I had a girlfriend and I knew my girlfriend wasn't
going to take me. So it was a half joke, have hope sort of situation.
And lo and behold she did ask me out and I asked my girlfriend if she
thought I was okay and my girlfriend laughed and said, 'Sure,
whatever, I am not taking you'. So I did whenever, which is generally
not a good idea if a girl suggests to do whatever.
I Discover and Consume the Hitchhikers Guide
For
the record, I didn't learn any chemistry in chemistry class. The
teacher was not very focused, not very knowledgeable, and not very
interested in us. What he was prone to was long meandering stories
almost always with an inappropriate-for-the-age-group payoff, and
spasms of rage which I have discussed previously. In fact we were so
busy not learning diddly that we ran out of time and didn't even get
started on squat. All this not learning left plenty of time in class
for goofing off, messing around, messing off and, God willing, even
goofing around. We would talk, joke, flirt with underclass girls,
you know? The basic required stuff in the core curriculum for
chemistry I would assume. Most of it wasn't very productive but one
day one of my brothers friends who sat in front of me had a book
called the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I was drawn to it because
it had the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters
on the cover. If any of you are fans of the book will recognize that
I stole that last line from the book, if you're not a fan of the
book, I made up that last line all by myself and it's pretty funny.
Anyway, he was a pretty mellow kid named Jeremy and asked if I could
borrow the book because he said he had finished reading it. I got one
page into it and I was hooked. The book I had my hand was actually
five separate books that had been bound together into one big omnibus
edition and from the time I started reading in the alleged chemistry
class straight through until about four o'clock in the morning I was
consuming some top-notch sci-fi parody comedy as fast as I could. I
finished all five books in about two days and then had that
missing-a-step in the dark feeling I get when there is no more story
and I am still unsatisfied. I have recommended it to anybody who
asks me ever since. In all honesty though, the first two or three
books a pretty good but the last two are not quite as clever and
wearing a little thin. Yet and still, one of my all-time favorite
books, so chemistry class was not a complete waste of time. Well, I
thought so at the time until I went to college and had to take
chemistry 101 and realized that I had not learned one shiny sliver
of a damn thing at all about chemistry or following advice from the
cover of books, and I panicked.
The Chemistry Teacher Hates Bird
I
had missed one other required class for graduation and that was
chemistry. It was a class that was generally taken by sophomores but
I had been in AP physics which somehow does not fulfill the physical
science requirement that chemistry did. Either way at least my friend
had missed it too and I ended up in a class with almost all
sophomores including my brother and his friends. The teacher was
ex-military and current psychopath who was right on the tipping point
of rage and outburst all day, every day. It would seem that someone
like that would be a bad fit for someone with my predisposition for
smartassery but we hit it off from the first day and every day
subsequent to that. There was another kid in the class with the same
disruption disease and he was not so fortunate as to fall in the good
graces and anytime someone was going to get yelled at for anything it
seemed to be him. I actually liked the kid a lot and we had always
had good rapport but for every joke I got off that gave the teacher a
chuckle this poor guy was getting yelled at for basically the same
antic. His last name was Bird and that is all that he would call him
and sometimes just yell or say 'Bird' in a tone that indicated
warning and great displeasure. The teacher also used him as the butt
of his often crude scientific metaphors. When he was teaching us
about measurement and significant units he mentioned that kilometers
would measure the distance from the earth to Uranus making units like
a centimeter or millimeter irreverent in a measurement of that size,
while meters would measure the distance from his foot to your anus,
Bird, and in that case the difference of a few centimeters might mean
the difference between correction and child abuse. At this point he
would show how a toe forward kick to the anus would most likely
constitute abuse while a side footed kick would be simply
disciplinary. A distinction that I am not sure holds up in the most
strictly legal sense and was most likely not found codified in the
schools official policies regarding pedal-anal contact in terms of depth and toe orientation. A tragic oversight and a dang shame if there were no
line-drawing illustrations with the incorrect foot orientation
crossed out with a red barred circle and the correct foot position
accompanied by a green check mark. No doubt some liberal kumbaya-pothead-hippie had made it so that there
was supposedly no appropriate manner in which to kick a student in
the butthole, disciplinarily or otherwise, never, ever, with no consideration for foot positioning. Tragic.
WNBA is a Thing
>My
proto-feminist girlfriend was into everything girl power. At the end
of our senior year of high school the evil minds over at the NBA
thought that their product was too dynamic, too fast paced and they
wanted to offer something that sucked a little more and was less
interesting to watch. They were at the time mired in the
unrelentingly dominate Chicago Bulls lead by Michael Jordan and they
thought that was the perfect backdrop to introduce the WNBA. The 'W'
there stands for “Women’s” and if you were a fan of some
rather slow back-to-the-basket ultra fundamentally sound dribbling
leading to a layup or a set shot then you were in luck because they
had delivered on that promise. The games were excruciatingly slow and
there was a lot more 'dribbling it off of your foot out of bounds'
than you would see in the more interesting men's version. I remember
watching several games in which both teams scored less than 50
points. You are probably asking, 'If it was so bad why did you keep
watching?' That's easy, I was whupped. The oldest disease of the
smitten and like any addiction where the dealer controls the supply
the addict must at times forgo the luxuries of freedom and dignity to
ensure the supply. I would push back mildly with a couple of smart-A
cracks but there was a limit before my girl would give one of those
non-verbal or verbal signals that we had enough joking about the
gawdaffle sport we were watching if I wanted any chance at getting my
fix. I would settle in and hopefully find the sweet release of sleep
while women beset by glandular disorders tried and mostly failed, to
put the smaller than average basketball into the hoop. I watched
about 10 games that year and at one point I even bought tickets for
and traveled to and consumed that product in person. They had done a
pretty good job on the television of keeping the angles low to hide
the fact that the stadium was all but empty. We were there at the
game we watched with about four or five hundred diehards and a lot of
echos. It was even more painful to watch in person because I couldn't
go to sleep and there was no advertizing to break up the two-hour
ordeal. When it was over even my girlfriend had to admit that a
32-46 game was a little boring to watch and that cooled her jets a
little. I have not seen asingle WNBA game since that night and I am
always shocked when during the NBA finals every year they run promo's
for the league terribly juxtaposed with the highfaluting images of
the best in the world doing what they do. It always fills me with
rage and I try and call my congressmen or someone to get it off the
air because I find it offensive.
I Run Lots of Miles
I
mentioned in an earlier post that I had neglected my physical
education in favor of math, science, and advanced placement English.
Well, the state has rather strict rules about that kind of thing and
they will not let you graduate without knowing you were physically
fit. I had to make up for three years of skipping out on PE in four
weeks to be qualified to graduate with my class. The way you made up
a PE credit was to take a fitness pre- and post test which included a
few metrics like push-ups, sit-ups and the big mother of the all, the
mile-and-a-half run. The push ups and situps were no big deal it was
only as many as you could do in a minute. The key with all of this is
that to pass you had to improve pre- to post test and each pre-test
had to improve one to the next, so I had to work a little math. I am
not a good runner so I was trying not to die when I made up for
slacking. I can't remember the exact rule of thumb for how long after
a workout you should taste blood but I think I was over that ideal
time what ever that time is. The mile-and-a-half had a max time of
15 minutes for the pretest so I ran one a day for three days at
14:50, 14:30, and 13:00. The next week I ran the post tests at 14:00,
a 13:50 and a 12:50 for three qualified times proving to the coach
and the state that I was the type of guy who was fit enough to be
called a Utah high school graduate in a manner not at all a mockery
of the principles our great forefathers held forth for the education
of our bodies.
50/20 Again, This Time With Beratement
I
told you before about walking the 50 miles in 20 hours race, I
actually ended up doing it three more times. The middle two are not
terribly interesting just a lot of walking and a lot of pain. The
fourth time I did it though there was some drama. The drama came
almost entirely because this time through I brought my girlfriend. I
told her it was a good experience and that she would do fine and it
would be fun to do, because I am a liar. My dishonest methods for
convincing her to come along aside she did really seem interested in
trying a test of her endurance. We started out two blocks from my
house early in the afternoon figuring to get a jump on it and it was
pretty smooth sailing for about the first 10 miles. I find that in a
pinch even those without much athleticism or training can do about 10
miles before they collapse. 10 to 25 miles starts to weed out all the
people who were not really that interested or dedicated. On the route
we were taking miles 10 to 25 went through a canyon across a highway
and into the night and that is when we started to slow our pace and
settle into the grind. By the time we got to the halfway mark all of
our friends given up and gone home so it was just her and I in the
dark cooling night. From the halfway mark of the 35 mile mark she
started to get increasingly cranky about the physical pain. I'm the
type of person who actually likes to hear someone else complain so
that I can in turn be stoic and its kind of a power trip. It started
to make her even more angry that I was acting like I felt nothing and
I wouldn't complain. From 35 miles to 45 miles, which took us about
three hours, she stopped and yelled at me a couple of times and even
punched me a time or two to try to get me to complain which made it a
lot funnier for me and the distraction was more than welcome. I think
the race can be divided into three equal parts, the first 30 miles,
the next 15 and the last 5. That last 5 miles when the sun is coming
up and you have walked through the whole night and every part of your
body is in immense pain and the only thing that can keep you going is
the humor you find in your girlfriend's unadulterated rage. That last
5 miles took us about two hours and for virtually the whole time she
was yelling at me, cursing at me telling me, telling me how much she
hated me how stupid an idea this race was and I would just tell her
that if it was too hard for her she could just quit. It was
especially delicious because she was always going on about how much
more pain and suffering women could endure than men. I was making
very calm and understated observations about the intense pain that
was racking my body and how the key for me was to let my body be
subject to my will. When we turned the last corner and were only a
half of a mile away from the finish line she broke down and was
crying and leaning on me and telling me she was glad that we did this
thing together. I was in no condition physically or mentally to be
leaned upon in any sense but she wanted to walk in together hand in
hand and I was too far down the rabbit hole to resist. Arm in arm we
stumbled to the finish cried, hugged and got in the car to drive
home. I was so tired that I drove off the road and into a field when
the road unexpectedly teed. I backed out and got us home okay. I
dropped my girlfriend off and then went to bed and didn't wake up for
18 hours.
The Taurus is the Most Expensive Car of All Time
There
was a time as a young man that I suffered severely from migraine
headaches. One of those times in the spring of my senior year when I
driven up to the mall with my brother and good friend Cole to do some
shopping. Because I had a headache I turned the controls of the 1978
Ford Fairmont sporty two-door model to my friend so I could relax in
the passenger seat and wait for the neurological storm to pass. He
was at the stick for about 20 seconds when he lurched forward and
hit the most expensive car in the entire world, a Ford Taurus. We
were going about 2 miles an hour when the car struck but when the guy
jumped out of his car he acted like we'd assaulted him and his family
personally. His wife and baby were in the car, he didn't check on
them before he came out looked at the car. He said we ruined the
bumper, which would cost two grand to fix, because the plastic shell
had popped up in the center about 1 inch. My brother, ever the
pragmatist, walked over and pressed little bubble of plastic down
with his finger and it popped right back in place. You would think
that would mollify the guy or that his wife was telling it was no big
deal, or the fact that my friend and I were obviously terrified of
the ramifications of wrecking a car on the freedom and finances of a
17-year-old. You might be wondering why was referring to the Ford
Taurus the most expensive car possible, I mean it seems laughable,
but that is what the guy kept saying. He was going on and on about
how we really messed up and how we couldn't hit a more expensive car.
When he was otherwise occupied my brother mentioned that we could
have hit any number of more expensive cars by throwing a rock in
virtually any direction. His wife had just about talked him into
giving us a pass when a Dudley-Do-Right busybody from the local bike
shop came running out with her portable phone saying that she saw the
whole thing and she already called the cops. Okay thanks, idiot. Then
we had to wait there for the cop to arrive, he had to survey the
damage, get all of our insurance information, and hear both sides of
the story. It took forever. My friend was explaining that he had gone
from driving his truck which had differently shaped and sized peddles
and that he'd slipped off of the brake and slow rolled into the dude
that wouldn't let this thing go. After we got all sorted legal-wise,
we hit the road and spent the rest the afternoon and most of next
week making fun of the dude and his super-expensive car. I can't
remember exactly what happened with the insurance on that thing but I
want to remember I had to pay my dad back a deductible but it still
wasn't very much. Cole was kicked off the substitute driving team,
he'd had the car for less than a minute when he wrecked it with laser
like precision into the biggest douche bag around. Maybe that wasn't
his fault, but why risk it? I shudder to think if he would have hit a
Corolla.
Spring Break - Lots of Making of Outs
This
spring break trip came just recently after my potential girlfriend
became my actual girlfriend and just past the day she let herself
into the carnal cabal of the kisser-faces. The upshot there was that
she was possessed with the converts zeal and wanted to try out some
making out when ever there was time. There is nothing more
entertaining on the face of the earth for a large group of people on
a trip together then to have to constantly wait for the PDA couple to
be ready for group time. We were not making out in front of everybody
but we were definitely taking more than our share of private walks,
naps, and stolen moments. At first everyone was being pretty cool
about it but by the third day the rest of the group was getting a
little testy and they were starting to make comments that seemed to
me like they were getting a bit irritated. The problem was that in
the scales of fired up pubescent sexual frustration the opinions of a
couple-of-eight dudes and chicks was easily over-weighed by the sweet
kisses of a pretty girl. Eventually there was mutiny and the group
broke up with the three unattached boys heading into town to find
babes of their own. In theory that could have happened, but based on
how unhappy their were at the end of the second and third days out
woman hunting I had the strong intuition that they had not been as
successful as they had hoped. The other girls and one other couple
stuck it out with us and moved from Red Cliffs into the nearby town
where my girlfriend's best friend's sister lived to take some real
showers and to sleep on some couches and beds. We left her sister's
house in the morning and drove back home the back way through a town
called Virgin which compels all and sundry to stop at the city
welcome sign for a picture. The trip back was quiet and everyone in
my car but me fell asleep. If you cannot be at peace in a car full of
good friends and memories then you may never be.
Something I Forgot From Last Summer
I
ran into an old friend last night at Costco who reminded me about a
time that she and I and another friend blew up my dad's truck. Truth
be told they actually didn't have that much to do with it except for
being passengers. My friend Jordan, the girl I would meet much later
at a local Costco, and I had driven up to Salt Lake go clothes
shopping for school. That means this story would've taken place about
eight months before spring break so some sorrys are in order, and now
the story is too. Anyway, we had driven up there to the VF factory
outlets which purport to have various outlet stores but I've never
seen Lee jeans actually sold anywhere else. I think it's just a
front. We shopped a little and we hung out a little and we were
heading home in my dads newer truck when we were heading up the hill
at the point of the mountain I put the truck in cruise control at
about 70 mph (1.21 megajoules for the international audience). That
was a pretty good idea, until the engine exploded. I don't mean
exploded in the sense that a cooling hose came off and a bunch of
steam came into the cabin and that made us all scared but there was
no harm done. I mean exploded in the sense that a piston broke off
from the crankshaft and came out of the top of the engine and almost
out of the hood. The other half of the piston still attached to the
crankshaft had somehow got flipped around inside the engine and
jammed about 200 holes through the oil pan before it to came to a
halt. Was it exciting? More like terrifying. All I could think was
that I had to tell my dad that his truck exploded. Of course none of
us had a cell phone at the time so we had to pull off to the side of
the road and wait for some passersby to help. After a few
well-meaning but useless Samaritans stopped a police officer came by
and let us radio to dispatch who then called my dad and told him the
bad news. My friends Jordan and Jessica got in a call to her sister
and a little less than an hour later she come and picked them up and
they abandoned me to my fate. I had to sit and wait on the side of
the freeway for two or three hours while my dad organized a get the
truck home party. His brother is into truck repair and had access to
a towing thing to get it home. When he got there he said never seen
anything like the engine coming out of the hood and the oil pan. The
whole time we were loading up the truck to tow it home to see if
there was anything we could do about getting it fixed my dad was
running a constant nonstop stream of things he thought I did wrong to
make the engine explode until my uncle finally stepped in and said
that actually something like that was just bad luck and there was no
way I could have prevented it or caused it. That shut my dad up for
the afternoon but he forgot the next day, and week, and month and if
it is mentioned still to this day he remembers that I was , to quote
him, 'romping on that engine' to make it explode. The moral here of
course is if you romp on engine your friends will abandon you and
your dad will be mad at you for the rest of your life.
Spring Break - Some Gay Guys Get Really Sunburned and Play a Guitar
Our
next-door neighbors at our campsite where gay couple in their 50s
from California. To that point in my life I've never met a homosexual
couple and 'gay' was use only as a pejorative for something boring,
uninteresting, lame or effeminate. They were there hiking, painting
and camping in Red Cliffs pretty much like normal people as far as I
could tell. Besides having shorter shorts than most guys and not
wearing their shirts enough they seem like pretty okay dudes. One day
when we were heading out hiking we passed them on the trail as they
were setting up easels to paint a gnarled tree growing along the
path. One of the guys, being quite furry and quite sunburned, had
huge flakes of skin peeling off and sticking into his back hair in a
horrifying image that haunts me to this day. My girlfriend and her
friend stopped and talked with them for a little while and they
offered to come by later to our campsite and play some guitar and
sing some songs. My girlfriend enthusiastically took them up on that
offer but I was little wary. What if they came over and did gay
stuff? What would we do then? We would be left without recourse
because we had invited them into our campsite and I was not sure if
the same rules apply to homosexuals as do to vampires but I was
pretty sure if you invite them in that's bad. We hiked for a couple
of hours and came back by to see that they had done a pretty good job
of doing a watercolor painting of a gnarled tree sitting in the path,
the sort of thing that everyone knows is technically art but
generally ends up a thrift store when the person who loves it dies.
We got to camp, made a fire, made dinner and we talked and joked
sitting around the dying fire our new friends made good on their
offer and came by with a couple of guitars and an unrealistically
cheerful attitude for people completely sober, so I assumed that they
were not. I was right they pretty early on confess to having partaken
of illegal mind altering herbs and alcoholic beverages. I was really
nervous then. Gay, drunk and high? How could this possibly and well?
Why am I writing so me rhetorical questions? The last one wasn't
rhetorical, I was wondering if you had some insight. They asked what
kind of music we liked, and my girlfriend told them all the girl
singers she liked and we told them Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel,
Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Somehow these guys knew all about those
bands and how to play their songs. I guess people even way back in
the 60's and 70's knew about the Beatles. They played their guitars,
sang songs and invited us to sing along when we knew the words. I
didn't know if this was how homosexuals normally acted, but this
wasn't gay at all, it was actually pretty cool. We all got into it
and had a pretty fun night, when they were too tired and ready to
head off they played a two guitar, well harmonized version of 'The
Boxer' by Simon and Garfunkel. It was amazing in the cool, quite, new
moon night with the light of the fire makeing a warm circle around
our impromptu concert and I snuggled in tight with my girlfriend
while they sang. When they finished we applauded, they said goodbye
and I never saw them again. It was the first time in my life that I
can remember thinking that there might be more in heaven and earth
than was drempt of in my philosophy.
Spring Break – McDonald's Wake Up Gambit
I'm
really not much of a sleeper especially out camping. I'm one of those
people who is a night person and morning person. The kind of person
I am not is an afternoon person. Maybe that's my Hispanic heritage,
that I don't technically have, that compels me to an afternoon
siesta. No matter the cause, any time I was on campouts or sleepovers
I was always the last one to go to sleep and the first one to wake
up. Then I had to sit around and try to entertain myself for next
four or five hours while everybody else sleeps in. After the drug
stupor day the next morning I woke up at five o'clock knowing I had a
long way to go until actual morning. I stealthily found my keys, got
in my car and drove the 8 miles into town for breakfast at
McDonald's. While I was there I got enough for everyone else and
brought it back. This was partially altruistic and mostly excuse for
me to wake everyone else up so that we could get going. Somehow
though, after I woke them up I miscommunicated the fact that the food
was for everybody so I was sitting at a table at the campground
eating all by myself with three big bags of food and a whole bunch of
guys there looking at me. I thought maybe they didn't want any and
so we stood there in a McDonald's standoff until I asked they were
sure they didn't want any at once the miscommunication was resolved
and the food was devoured. The ruse had worked and I had everybody
up and going rock climbing and like I've always said a McMuffin is a
small price to pay for getting a jump on the day.
Spring Break My Friends Fight the Drugs
The
next morning we went out hiking and two of the guys that were with us
were getting a little restless because there were no girls there for
them. On our way back from hiking up the river they were making plans
to go into town and see if they could encounter some of those low
self-esteem spring break girls of legend. The only problem there is a
they hadn't brought a car so they were asking if they could use mine.
I was super excited about that idea because they both had woken up
saying they had a headache and the only painkiller that was available
was some Tylenol PM, which if you're unfamiliar with that particular
OTC drug contains a bit of a sedative. They had been fine for the
hour or so we were hiking but when I started to come back they were
looking pretty droopy. They were almost falling asleep walking as
their heads would roll all the way down to their chests and then they
would snap back up and look around kind of confused. When we got back
down toward camp in the asked again if they could borrow my car and I
told him that would be a firm no. They said they were just fine and
they could fight through the effects of the nighttime Tylenol but I
honestly wasn't entirely convinced. Definitely not convinced enough
to loan the my car; my one possession on earth besides my clothes.
They were also not welcome to borrow my clothes. I told them they
should lay down and take a nap for a little while but they said it
was too hot and they wanted to go find some girls. So we compromised,
I agreed to drive them into town and drop them off while we went
grocery shopping and we would pick them up a couple hours later when
they found all the women they needed. We drove into town and dropped
them off as planned but when we came back four hours later after some
rock climbing and grocery shopping they were nowhere to be found.
These were those pre-cellphone times when you got lost it could be a
long-term to permanent thing. They didn't have a ride back to camp,
back home or anywhere. We sat and waited for about 45 min. for them
and it was starting to get late and I was starting to get pissed. I
was driving around in a bit of the cranky snarl when we saw them the
park leaned up against a tree, sleeping it off. I guess in the end
the sedative won and I had been absolutely validated in my assessment
about their driving abilities. We collected them up and put them in
the car and drove back to camp. We woke them up enough to get them
into their beds and they slept the rest the night as per their plan
for wild debauchery. Those were actually the only drugs any of us
took on spring break and it sucked. See kids? Drugs are bad.
Spring Break - A Nutless Car and Brushing Our Teeth
We
left on our trip late in the afternoon and my poor wussy car was so
very gutless that when we would come up to a big hill on the way down
it couldn't, even in its lowest gear, get up the hill with five
passengers and their gear. Two different times I would build up as
much speed as I could on the run up to the hill and then about half
way up all of my powers would be consumed and we would slow, sputter
and stop. Then the three dudes in the back would have to get out and
walk the two miles or so to the top of the hill where I could pick
then up again and we could ride down hill and along the flat bits
together. This transportation hiccup was making the
get-out-and-walk-ers a bit testy and I was getting anxious after the
second hill that I might have to ask them to walk again but
thankfully there were just the two insurmountable mountains on the
way down to our campsite. We got to our campsite at dusk and we just
had time to set up our tents and build a fire before dark. I had
never been on a big mixed gender camping trip before and I was not
sure who was supposed to do what because I had always had some
structure and direction in camping. What I did know was that I was
going to sleep in the same tent with my girlfriend, hooray, and two
other people, boo. When we had eaten and were ready for bed a bunch
of us went at the same time to the water spigot to brush our teeth.
When we got there and started brushing we all were brushing wondering
how long we needed to go to not seem like we were the kind of person
who would brush insufficiently. I was done in thirty seconds but I
kept brushing, determined to go at least as long as my girlfriend and
her best friend who was with us. It had turned into a dental hygiene cold war and we all had been brushing for something like 5 minutes
when a girl finally broke and spat and rinsed. We all followed suit
and she asked if we had all been waiting to see how long everyone
else was brushing to not look like the dentally retarded outcast. It
was one of those bizarre social situations one nearly never finds
themselves in and the conventions are not well delineated and so
things can get weird.
Spring Break – Ditching My Friend
For
spring break my girlfriend and her best friend had planned a camping
trip to southern Utah to a semi-secret little spot by the name of Red
Cliffs. By semi-secret I mean there is a forty place national park
camping ground with running water and toilets. Real undergroundstuff, like Cat Stevens. The problem was that there was room for 10
people in two cars and those spots were taken. The rub there was that
my friend Cole was left out. Cole had a bizarre existence for a high
schooler, he worked as a baker at a local shop and had to start work
at godforsaken-o'clock in the anti-meridian. The upside of this was
that he had to head home for bed at a very early time on nights
before work and he was going to have to work during spring break.
Meaning that he couldn't have come if he was invited which I was not
at liberty to do any way because it was not my trip and there was no
room. I choose not to discuss that fact with him and opted instead to
try to avoid him for the week running up to spring break even though
we had two classes together. I don't really know why I wanted to
avoid the subject coming up but then again I am a big fan of ignoring
things an hoping it goes away eventually. I could tell Cole was mad
and that his feel-bads were hurt that he was getting ditched but I
just passed him in the hall finding something else to look at or
someone to talk with to pretend I couldn't see him and have to deal
with it. Real stand up guy right?
All Alone At Wrestling Recognition Night
Even
though I've been disqualified from extracurricular activities,
including wrestling, I had been on the varsity team so they invited
me to senior recognition nigh. It was an event held in the gym where
we were all getting some made up award, even and especially if we
weren't very good. The fact of the matter was that most of us weren't
very good, we were terrible so there was no shortage of creativity in
finding some exotic thing to praise and put on a plaque. I told my
parents about this Wednesday night activity weeks in advance so they
can come support me in my moment of wrestling glory. When the night
came they had both forgotten, made other plans or something. Long
story short - I go to wrestling recognition night alone with my
girlfriend. After a speech from the coach about how great we were
they called everybody up on the mat to receive their awards. They
said the biggest contributor to a kid's success, the main thing, is
always the sacrifice their parents have made. Then the coach went on
to talk about the unsung glory of moms bringing kids to wrestling and
washing their clothes and making sure they were taken care of and how
that leads to their success. All the while I stood out there the only
kid out of the 12 seniors without a parent. It was humiliating and
embarrassing that I was the only guy that was stand out there alone
because my parents were too busy to support me. I was obviously
squirmy and self-conscious when we were to give the flowers that the
coaches had supplied for us to our mom as a tribute of gratitude for
all the hard work they put into our success. My friend Quin's mom was
there and alone and rescued me by coming to stand me with her son and
she got to roses out of it. They gave me an award for most improved
wrestler. Which is an old chestnut of the backhanded compliment
award. You did suck worse, but now you don't suck as much, hooray! I
collected my little plaque and collected my girlfriend and I went
home. I can't really remember what my parents were doing at night, I
think it had to do with my dad working and my mom was at a church
activity. Either way, we could definitely say that my success or
failure in wrestling could not be chalked up to the unending devotion
and dedication of my doting parents.
I Am a Funeral Hypocrite
If
you remember back, I told you about a kid who died the day of prom,
a kid that I had no emotional attachment to but that I pretended to
so that I didn't ruin the mood that I thought might get me kissing.
You know? because I'm a heartless jerk. Well brace yourself it gets
more jerk-like and more heartless if you continue to read, so if you
had an unreasonably high expectation of my strong moral fiber look
away now before it gets worse. I will let you know when you can look
back and thus leave your high opinion of me unblemished. The funeral
for this guy was the next Friday, the day after I got kissed
actually, and I wanted to go because everyone who was anyone was
going. They would cry and they would hug girls and they would get
sweet kisses from their girlfriends. My friend Cole who is burdened
with a sense of authenticity about his character was very skeptical
about a bunch of posers going to pretend they were sad for a kid they
didn't even like in real life. While I was talking to Cole I agreed
with him and said there's no way I'd go. I didn't know him and I
didn't care about him so why should I go it would be cheap, right?
But then when my girlfriend said she was going I forgot all about my
strong convictions and emotional authenticity and loaded up and went.
My friend Cole was pretty disappointed. When I was there and
listening to his family and friends talk about what a great guy he
was and how it was so sad and all those things I felt nothing. My
girlfriend was crying so I did the great old fake-out - looked sad
and then put my hands on my face and rubbed my eyes a little so to
look like I might've been crying. If this seems like an insanely
shallow thing to do that is because it was. After the service for the
kid that I didn't care about in any genuine sense, but saw as an
opportunity for my personal gain I did get some nice hugs and some
sad looks and that night, some more kisses. I have done lots of
crappy and shallow things in my life but for some reason this
disingenuous sorrow for the dead stuck in my mind is a particularly
turd-ish thing to have done. Cole let me know it was a particularly
turd-ish thing to do when I went back to school and saw him. That's
what friends, good friends, are for. They will not lie and tell you
everything is good when something is bad. If you have been looking
away you can look back again, I'm done saying all the crappy things
about my personality, until tomorrow.
A Kiss at Last
After
my abortive attempt at making the kissing after prom I didn't know
exactly where I stood with my would-be girlfriend but when I talked
to her the next day she was as warm and friendly as ever maybe even
more so. It was confusing, and not in a good way. She had told me
that the reason she didn't want to kiss me a prom was that she had
never kissed someone on the lips before and she was too nervous. I
said that was okay, but I did not think it was okay. I was thinking
how bad could it be? She did get significantly more cuddly and we
spent a lot of nights from prom till the next Thursday cuddling and
hanging out. The Thursday after prom I was at her house after her
parents eight o'clock bedtime. We were downstairs watching TV of some
sort and when that ended she turned off the TV and turned out the
lights and sat next to me in the dark. She held my hand and then
leaned in really close until her warm sweet breath was on me in the
dark. Like the fortunate hiker who stumbles upon a deer in the
meadow, I held completely still, barely breathing and trying to not
spook her and ruin the magic. She started kissing my neck, then my
ear, and when she had worked up the courage she kissed me full on the
lips. I was torn on my opinion of our first kiss, it was not the most
technically sound kiss I had ever encountered, but it was passionate
and intense and she was beautiful and I was in love. We kissed a
little more in the dark basement not quite under her sleeping parents
but pretty close. I had kissed lots of girls before but I had never
felt such a sense of accomplishment and exhilaration as I did walking
the four blocks home that night. I mumbled elated congratulations to
myself while I made goofy celebratory fist pumps and 'heck-yeah'
faces as I bad-A strutted back to my house. It took a while to get
to the kiss, and it was a little sloppy and moist when I did, but it
was the best kiss I had ever earned. That night I was all redemption
and forgotten failures. I had trouble falling asleep and I laid on my
bed in my darkened and considered how great the world and everything
in it was.
Matt and I Debate and No One Cares
The
story of my would-be girlfriend and I cools off for a couple of
weeks, so to fill the time while we wait for more news on that front
I will tell you about some other stuff that happened. When I went
back to school after having been banned from everything I was still
in the debate class I just couldn't participate in extracurricular
activities. One day the debate coach from a neighboring school
dropped in to see how we were doing things, as he wanted to learn how
to win debate competitions like our coach had done. My coach offered
to send me and my little brother over to his class at a high school
in a town a few miles away to have a live Lincoln Douglas debate and
to illustrate for the children what one might see in the heat of fake
word fighting so they would not be scared. It was exciting because I
had in my mind the idea that somebody actually cared about Lincoln
Douglas debate. Here's a spoiler: high school children as a rule do
not care that much about formal debate - except for dorks, geeks, and
nerds, and who cares what those guys like, right? My coach told him
that I had won lots of tournaments but that my style was a bit
convoluted and esoteric. I was not really sure what esoteric meant
but it sounded like a compliment to my not insubstantial powers of
smart-being. My brother and I drove over to the neighboring high
school and we set up a 35 min. or so debate. I cannot over emphasize
how blindingly boring debate is anyone who is not a debater. A speech
class usually has mostly people who are not that interested the class
per se, they just heard it was an easy 'A' if you liked to
talk. This class was no exception. There were about 40 kids who were
there to listen to my brother and I debate the resolution that
individual liberty was more important than societal good. Oh, now
that's a juicy one. As I relate this story of how badly we bombed
this gig I got a little debate twinge and wanted to start writing a
quick couple of notes on the resolution, it is like nerd alcoholism
you are never cured just in remission. By the end of my first speech,
which was 7 min. long, we had lost the room. The teacher kept asking
people to quiet down and quit talking but that wasn't doing too much
to maintain order. My brother got up for cross-examination and
people were openly talking to each other, then he gave his speech and
I cross-examined him. I had to get up and give another speech and at
this point anyone who's ever lost a room in any sort of public
performance knows the agony of pressing through and finishing when
you are being actively ignored. We did push on through and then the
class was supposed to ask us questions, no one did. One girl said she
didn't know why we were there. You and I both sister, you and I both.
They voted on the winner and most likely because I had spoken last
they said I won. This was not the most horrible thing that ever
happened to me in my life but I had somehow gotten into some
inexplicable macho posturing about being a good debater and this did
put in perspective how exactly bad-A I was for being a debate super
Amadeus. Not bad-A at all that's about how bad-A I was.
Prom - I Go For Kissing
Now
there, I've been caught lying and repented now I will go back to the
story now. After we finished up at the courthouse, where the prom was
being held, all done crying over dead peers and dancing a little we
headed back to a friend's house; or more accurately a friend of a
friend's house. At that time he had the fanciest house I had ever
seen, by today's standards it's pretty average, anyway we were there
under the pretense of watching a movie. When we got there my date and
I changed back into more casual clothing and I sat close to her on
the couch hoping we would get into some hand holding or something
more. Other couples were engaging in various stages of cuddling and
kissing and heading off to more private venues. I was starting to get
pretty jealous when our host and his date, a very cute girl, headed
back to his bedroom for some mutual respect. . .probably. After a
couple of hours the movie wrapped up and we decided it was time to go
home so I drove my date the whole doing that junior high kind of
thing where I put my hand on the seat in between us hoping that she
would meet me half way and hold it. I had been pretty exclusive with
her, hanging out every night, doing stuff, and going on several
dates, for about two months which to my young still forming mind
seem like an eternity. I was more used to getting right down to
business on day one, or date two, or in extreme situations date
three. She had been a harder nut to crack. We pulled up in my little
white truck in front of her house and I turned off the engine. I
unbuckled my seat belt and turned towards her and asked if she wanted
me to walk her to the door she said 'no', pretty firmly. I talked to
her for bit about what we did and what other people did and if she
had a good time and what she thought about the dead kid. She had her
hand on the door handle and was looking towards her door which is a
universal symbol for dates being over so I told her that I had a
really good time put my arm close to where I could gather her in
around her waist and tried to close the distance for little smoochy
smooch. My vinyl seats made her next move preternaturally quick as
she spun on her butt and rotated her knee up and into my chest to
block me from the impending kiss. She said, 'No.' In the firm manner
one uses to address a dog that is about to poop where he mustn't. It
was absolutely humiliating and much beyond salvageable. She said that
she was sorry but that she didn't want to kiss me. She opened the
door and closed the distance to her house rather quickly. I stayed
there in the dark car for a moment, confused and facing a kiss-less
existential crisis. I decided that if I was going to have a pity
party I should do it on the way home. The problem was I only lived a
few blocks away and that didn't give much time for an angsty
self-pitying rage cry at my failure, at the idea that kids could die,
and at the confusion I felt about the girl who as far as I could tell
I was in love with. I tried pulling it together before I went in –
I cursed myself, and my abortive attempt at kissing, and the fates,
and the gods and the universe. I pounded the steering wheel, dried my
tears, and went in to tell my mom what a great night I had. When she
asked why I'd been crying I told her that a boy I knew from school
had died that night. I wasn't really crying about him but the idea of
youth snuffed out and love unrequited but it seemed like too much to
say and I was tired.
Prom - Cole Caught Me Lying
My
good friend and faithful blog follower Cole noticed that I was lying
about what I did at prom. He reminded me that my trip to the zoo was
at another date and at prom he went on the daytime date with me
before we went out to dinner where I started telling the truth again.
What we really did was more disastrous than not finding the zoo.
Along with Cole and our dates we went out with my little brother his
friend's and dates. What we decided to do was a classic of buying
ourselves a gift that we knew we would enjoy. We went to an indoor
paintball arena. This was a poor idea because we drastically
misjudged our dates pain tolerance and interest in simulating war.
Very early on most of the girls had enough and were sitting around
pissed off and fidgeting in the staging area while the remaining
hardcore chicks and the guys played on to use up our already paid for
paint balls. Most of us had welts and bruises from where we had been
hit but for the boys it made little difference because at the dance
that night we would be wearing wrist and ankle length clothing. The
girls would be much more exposed and they were really getting pretty
mad about what would show that night when they were dressed up as
fancy as they had in their whole lives. One girl, I want to remember
it was my little brothers date but I may need to be fact checked on
that as well, had been shot under the mask and she had a bloody
bruised vicious looking welt right up on her face. I had remembered
that my date was mad about something before dinner and this was what
it was not that not finding the zoo thing. Not finding the zoo did
happen exactly like I said but it was another night.
Prom – A Kid Dies and Ruins the Mood
>By
the time we got to the prom and went down for our little walk on the
promenade, got the pictures taken and started dancing my date had
calmed down from the slight of me wanting her to eat dinner. Nobody
was really doing because it is hard to do and still look amazing in
really nice clothes. Also you can dance only minimally in really nice
clothes especially because they are rentals and I at least was nearly
frightened senseless at the thought of losing my deposit. We did
dance a little and stood around talking people passing time when
somebody announced over the PA system that a kid our age had died. He
was not really a friend of anyone in the group but we did all know
him. He was a nice but effeminate guy that I had teased a bit about
being gay and I think most guys had joked about him being gay. Unless
he was running deep cover he actually wasn't gay and had been out
snowmobiling with his date before prom. While they were riding they
had gone off into a ravine or off a cliff or something and he broke
his neck and died instantly his date was in bad shape too but she was
from another town and no one knew her. I was not actually that torn
up about this dying business, I had not known the kid really well, I
had one class with him as a sophomore and I had been in on a large
group date with him in the party. I was sad in a general sense of
'that's too bad somebody my age died' but I honestly wasn't
personally affected. All the girls at the prom started crying though,
wailing and needing hugs. This would normally please me as it would
seem like a way to get some physical contact with girls but these
were decidedly unsexy hugs, slobbering and goobery from crying. I
was afraid, in my spectacularly self-centered way, that I was losing
my chance here for a little making out. That was the truth, a kid he
just died - snuffed out in the prime of youth and I only considered
whether that would affect my chances at getting a little kiss action.
Surprisingly that's not the least and disingenuous thing I ever did
concerning this kid actually; but that is a story I will have to get
to. The mood of the prom had come down quite a bit and we left early
to change back into regular clothes and hang out at a friend's house
and while my date would try to watch a movie and I would try and
score some sweet lovin'.
Prom – Tastes Fishy
For the dinner date portion of our evening we went to the nicest
restaurant that was available within 20 miles and was also in our
price range. It was a swank little steakhouse by the name of Carvers
it has since gone out of business in that location largely because of
their high prices and shady business practices which I will enumerate
straight away. I opened the menu and steadied myself as I started
noticing the prices and got a little panicked because I didn't know
that appetizers cost $10 and that dinners cost $30. I sat back and
nodded approvingly while trying to find the least expensive thing for
myself and endure the brunt of my dates order. I was hoping against
hoping that I had enough brought enough cash to cover the meal. she
started up by ordering a stuffed portobello mushroom appetizer of
which she took one bite of and decided it tasted like human fleash,
gagged a little, hurried for a cleansing sip of soda and pushed
aside. Well there was a quick $10 experiment that I'll never get
back. When we're going over the entrée menu she asked if the
swordfish was very fishy, because she hated fish and the waiter
assured her the swordfish was not a very fishy fish and she would
probably like it. I thought for $24 she better like it. Anyway, it
may come to little surprise to those of you who were able to guess
from the 'fish' half of the name swordfish that it, brace yourself,
tasted like fish. This also got a single nibble, a gag and a quick
trip to the sanctifying flavor of Pepsi cola. I was getting pretty
irritated about laying out $40 now for her meal which she done
nothing with but taste, gag and drink a soda. I ate mine all the way
down to the glazing, and then ate hers all the way down to the ground
including the human flesh flavored portobello appetizer. No wonder
they went out of business selling swordfish that, of all things,
tasted exactly like fish.We headed out to go to the dance and as we
left the restaurant which just cost me $90 for the two of us to not
eat dinner she informed me that she was starving to death needed to
stop at Wendy's to get kids meal. She got a chicken nugget kids meal
and some ketchup the put on the chicken nuggets and said that was the
best thing in the world. I pointed out there was a way we could have
gotten them and saved $90. Or, with a little bit of deduction,
realized that the swordfish would taste like fish. This made her very
defensive and she was in a huff for about an hour as we drove to the
site of the prom. I guess the important part was the experience and
what price can you put on the experience of turning your nose up and
fate gagging at dinner?
Prom - The Zoo is Hard to Find
My
plan for prom was to go out to someplace far away in the big city to
impress my date with my awesome knowledge of the landscape and my
world wise savoir-faire in providing exotic romantic experiences. To
that end I planed to go to visit the zoo. Hey, kids love the zoo and
in the eyes of the law we were still technically kids. The zoo
closest to where we lived was sort of like a prison for animals. If
you like seeing big cats pacing in a cell made of cement blocks, sad
and doing the cat equivalent of dragging a cup against the bars then
you were in for a treat - a real treat. I looked up the directions of
how to get there but in the dark ages of middle 90's the GPS was not
readily available, the cell phone was for yuppies in movies and the
internet was basically useless. I wrote down the directions which,
like all directions, assumed that I would stay on the path set out
and not make wrong turns rendering them useless. The morning of prom
I went and picked up my date, drove up to the big city, got off the
right exit, got off the second right exit and then proceeded to miss
the zoo completely. I then tried again and then I tried again and my
date was getting pretty evidently cranky with me for not knowing my
way and I was trying to pretend like I was almost there and this
little snafu would be shortly remedied. I stopped and asked
directions and the guy at the gas station gave me directions which I
tried following and still couldn't find it. I stopped another place
for directions and the guy didn't speak English and I got the wrong
directions as well either by misunderstanding or simply because that
guy hated teenagers looking for the zoo. By the time I had not found
the zoo this time we'd been driving for about 2 1/2 hours not gettign
there and the vibe was not the charming hand-holdy pre-kissing one I
had hoped to cultivate. I know it's pretty impressive to a date when
you get lost and this was no exception. I eventually conceded that we
didn't have much time left in order to make it back get changed and
meet our group for dinner, so we we stopped at a Subway restaurant,
ate lunch and drove home in a bit of a crank. Pretty slick.
Prom – I Make My Move Early
I
thought that the prom, with its literary and cinematographic
reputation for being the time of great sexual transition in a young
man's life would be a great time to get my first kiss from my
girlfriend. To that end I made some rather extensive plans to ask her
out, and thus stake my claim, well before the time generally
considered reasonable. Generally, 2 to 3 weeks before a dance was
sufficient time to ensure that you would have a date that wasn't
barrel scrapings. Not that everything you find when you are scraping
the barrel is necessarily barrel scrapings per se it is just
there is a good chance that is what you find when you wait till all
of the good dibs have been dibed. Even with two weeks maybe you
didn't get the particular date you wanted first go, but then you
still had some built-in buffer before you may be on the verge of
beginning to have to scrape barrel where you would find whomever of
God's precious daughters that were left over. The logic is sound. To
avoid any confusion about who was who's date I made my move about
eight weeks early. I got my little arts and crafts project together,
which was the modus operandi for inviting people to a dance
with you at my high school. I think it had something to do with
putting secret message in an Oreo and putting lots of decoy Oreos
into a jar, or that could of been the way that she answered me with a
similarly mandated arts and crafts project. Either way she said yes
and she told me a couple times running up to the big day that other
people had asked her if she had been asked already, boys and girls
included, and they were all very surprised that she been snatched up
so much in advance. I was not ashamed that I was the earliest of iron
striking birds and no-looky leapers, I got what I came for and I made
sure of that. I went to work making plans with other friends about
the required day-time activity and how we would not be meeting up
with them until dinner. I was planning a romantic date for two and
glommers on need not apply. This, combined with my woeful lack of
direction in big cities turned out to be a bit of a mistake by which
I mean it was a major cluster mess.
Test-Tacular
On
our drive up to the town where the test was being held our crazy
friend Ray sang that Denny's jingle that goes, '$1.99? are you out of
your mind?” theme song for the grand slam breakfast probably around
two or three hundred times. It was pretty awesome the first 10 times
and then started to pass over into a tedious mantra that hung heavy
on un-slept nerves. We got to Denny's with the rest the rejects and
social misfits that show up at four o'clock in the morning and
ordered ourselves a round of grand slam breakfasts which I believe I
paid for because I was the only one who had any money. When we
finished up our delicious, nutritious and fortifying brain food -
hotcakes, two eggs and two strips of bacon. We showed up at the
college where the test was being held to get signed in. At this point
I was running on adrenaline and a high amount of vibration was coming
from my ears, or maybe my brain or the little bit of gushy stuff
between the ears and the brain. Sorry to get you side tracked on a
bunch of medical mambo-jumbo but for those in the know that kind of
stuff is interesting. I got my test books and my room assignment and
waited to see what was on an ACT test it turned out it was a lost
knowledge party of things I had did knew.. . ago, except for a
concept called radians which I guess we had not had time to cover in
geometry class. I felt pretty strong going into the reading section
when the proctor wrote the wrong time on the board so when I looked
up from reading the first of five sections it appeared that I only
had 20 of the remaining 60 minutes. I was confused at how I took so
much time reading one section of two pages and answering the
questions. I panicked and I started reading at a reckless pace to get
the other four down in the next 20 min. If you had done as well on
the math part as me you know that is roughly 5 minutes apiece, carry
the radians by the square root of the derivative. I got all done and
everybody was looking around when the proctor glanced up to see why
everybody was restless when we had an hour left to go. He looked at
the board and realized he'd put the wrong finishing time apologized
and corrected it. I was in a tough spot because now I still didn't
have enough time to reread and do them right so I settled for an in
depth review. I felt like I had done pretty good for not sleeping all
night watching the stupid Dazed and Confused and eating
Denny's for breakfast and also being cheated out of a reasonable
pacing time on the reading section. I got a 32 out of up possible
36, well above the mean, or the median, or the radians and I am still
not sure what those words mean.
ACT Prep
The
ACT is a testing right of passage for all those graduating seniors
who want to go on to college and even for those who don't want to go
to college but who have parents who want them to go to college. I did
want to go to college and I needed an academic scholarship as well as
other scholarships so that I could go to school for free. In light of
that urgent need I did absolutely nothing to prepare myself to take
the test. The Friday night before the Saturday test I went out with a
couple of my friends, stayed up all night, met some girls, tried
score some weed and ate at Denny's. That had not been the plan at the
start of the night. There were four of us who had to take a test the
next day so we decided to all sleep over a one guy's house and then
next morning we get up and go to the test together and make sure
nobody missed their ride. What actually happened was that we loaded
up and went the next town over to “drag main”. That is a game
where a bunch of hillbillies go on Friday and Saturday nights who had
nothing to do basically drive up and down the street trying to find
girls. These mythical girls who for some reason want to be picked up
off Main Street and then go 'hook up' were hard to find. This plan
worked almost exactly never. It was on the night when it was a
terrible time to try that it did. After an hour or so of fruitless
driving and flirting we came alongside a group of girls who asked us
if we had cigarettes, we did not have cigarettes but they said we
looked cute so they asked us to follow them. Where they wanted us to
follow them was over to police officers house whose son sold
marijuana. There plan was for us to buy them some weed but we
declined the offer and just followed them back to their house and
Springville. It was a ratty little place and when we walked in one of
the girls mom's asked if we had any G-D weed. We had not so they
didn't even bother to ask our names and we were treated as
ambivalently as is humanly possible. We were naive and thought that
there was still maybe a chance to get some making out this evening
and so we stayed and watched that golden oldie of stoner
cinematography the godawful Dazed and Confused. For
the record, that is the stupidest movie in the history of stupid
movies and only potheads enjoy it. They could actually use quotes
from that and Fast Times at Ridgemont High as a quick screen
drug test. That and face tattoos. We finish up the movie at about two
o'clock in the morning and started to realize we were not going to
score any sweet kissing action this night. That is when we start
thinking that if we drove back home, and then get to bed it will be
three or four in the morning not leaving much time before we had to
wake up two hours later to be the testing site at seven o'clock. The
only practical option at this point was to stay up all night, eat
dinner/breakfast at Denny's and then go to the test. See? Completely
logical.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)