“Life goes by so fast
You only wanna do what you think is right
Close your eyes and then it’s past
Story of my life”

Mike Ness wrote those words, and Social Distortion made that song. There’s a good chance you’ve heard it before. It’s been in lots of movies and TV shows, and it’s their most played song by a very wide margin on both YouTube Music and Spotify.

I used to listen to them a lot, mostly in my early twenties, which is when I listened to punk rock and hardcore way more than I listened to metal. To be fair, a lot of the metal bands I was into at the time either broke up or went back underground, and back then, it was much harder to keep track of the underground, and I think I’ve been pretty clear over the years with regard to my personal laziness. I got consistent access to the internet in 1995, but it was far less omniscient than it is now, so it wasn’t until I started working in a music store in October 2000, with an employee discount and access to an order catalog, that I began to find out what those old favorites had been up to, much to the detriment of my pocketbook and my credit rating. But I’m not here to talk about that today.

I’m here today
Because I had an idea.
My thoughts don’t always
Work in paragraphs
Why not
Just write
In poetry form
Instead
When the need arises
Or the urge strikes?

I can already see it  coming off pretentious and/or pompous  – an exercise in self-indulgence, if you will – but I reckon that’s not my problem. And besides, publishing a blog is nothing if not an exercise in self-indulgence.

Quick side story: one hundred thousand years ago, I was watching Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage with my homeboy Sal, and there’s a part where Neil Peart (RIP) is talking about people accusing Rush of being pretentious. He says something like “to be pretentious means you’re pretending, and we’ve never been pretending”, and I turned to Sal and said “I’ve been using the wrong word this whole time – Neil Peart isn’t pretentious, he’s pompous“. No offense to Mr. Peart. The man was obviously a phenomenal drummer, and he could write a hell of a song. If he hadn’t replaced original drummer John Rutsey, Rush almost certainly wouldn’t have become the Rush we know and love/hate today. But it’s also a fact that his lyrics, his drumming, and his persona were sometimes a bit much.

Anyhow
Why not
Write poetry
Whenever I
I feel like it
And prose
Whenever
I want?

I’ve been thinking about high school a lot lately. I know there’s nothing groundbreaking or special or even particularly notable about that, but it’s my blog, and that’s what I’m gonna talk about. If you don’t care to read it, that’s okay with me. You can watch this, instead.

This’ll be my thirtieth year out of high school, and that is causing me to have some feelings, friends! I remember my parents attending their 30th(s) when I was in the throes of high school. They had fun and spoke fondly of the event(s), but based on my count, they each had approximately 30 graduating classmates who all knew each other, and many of them were married to each other (including my parents).

Our fifth anniversary
Was advertised
In a tiny item
On Page 5
Of the local paper
And was later cancelled
Due to lack of interest

When my 10th came along, I was livin in Austin, Texas, some 1,000 miles from my high school. I genuinely wanted to attend, but I couldn’t afford to make the trip. I spent a lot of time writing a lot about high school in the days leading up to the reunion, and on the day of the event, I began working on what I have come to call “Unfinished High School Reminiscence Project”, which contains varying anecdotes of varying quality, and which has informed a significant chunk of my writing since. It’s also the source of “Speaking of Eric”, which my friend Chris turned into a silly comic, which led to further collaboration with Chris, which led, ultimately, to a self-published book containing three of my dumb stories/anecdotes from childhood, all made better and funnier with the help of Chris’s drawings. We still have some copies left, if you’re interested.

Fifteenth anniversary
An exercise in absurdity
Thirty-five dollars
To hang out with friends
I saw all the time
Surrounded by ghosts
And stereotypes
And caricatures

35 bucks
To eat
Picnic food
Off paper plates
And drink
Bud Light
And Miller Light
And chilled red
And Chilled white

Thirty-five
American smackers
To eat shit
And drink shit
And talk shit
With friends
Who I already saw
On a pretty damn
Consistent basis
While surrounded
By people
I hadn’t considered
In 15 years

Many of whom I never spoke to a single time in high school. I spoke to, at most, 20 people with any real regularity in my four years of high school, and probably 25% of those people had been classmates since elementary school. I’ll bet I had an actual conversation with no more than 50 individuals in those four years. Note that the population of my school was somewhere in the vicinity of 1,400 souls, 356 of which were in my graduating class alone.

And yet there I am in 2010, less than two months before my wedding, giving 70 bucks to some fund or another so my fiance and I could gain admission to a golf course country club in the middle of nowhere (the back entrance comes out less than 1/4 mile from my childhood home) and spend the evening with the attending members of my graduating class.

Part of it was morbid curiosity. I wanted to see who got fat (besides me), who went bald (besides me), and who floundered when set adrift in the real world (besides me). That’s not to say that I wasn’t happy at that point in my life; I absolutely was. But the fact is, I spent a significant amount of my early adulthood lost at sea. My time in Texas was very much informed by my choice of vessel during that journey. It’s hard to navigate in a rudderless boat. I’m using an awful lot of seafaring metaphors for a guy who is very uncomfortable with the idea of open water.

Anyway, my fifteenth anniversary was pretty dumb. My friend Chris (from the comic book) DJ’ed in exchange for admission, so the music was good at least. My buddy Jesse walked in the door, put on a name tag, and walked straight to my table, saying “you are the only person I care about talking to tonight”, which was obviously a very nice thing to hear. He was the sole exception that evening to my then-current circle. In fact, I’m pretty sure I only spoke to one person outside that circle the entire night, and that only happened because she walked up and inserted herself into a conversation in-progress with Jesse.

It was basically like an extended lunch period, circa 1995, but with worse food, and shit beer. Plus everyone was a little bit fatter and/or balder. The jocks and cheerleaders sat with each other, and the rest of us sat at random tables in small clusters. Whoever was responsible for “catering” the event bought deli platters and white bread and fried chicken and potato salad and coleslaw and potato chips and cookie trays from Wal-Mart.

At one point, Sheila went to the ladies room, where two of my former classmates approached her and asked, ever so tactfully, “who are you married to?” She responded that while we were not yet wed, she would be marrying me in a little over a month, and they both erupted in squeals and went on and on about what a great guy I was, and how they just loved me, and omigod they were so happy for her, and do you wanna wager a guess how many times either of them even acknowledged my presence that night?

My twentieth and twenty-fifth both fell on Sheila’s birthday weekend. Quite understandably, she had no interest in spending her birthday hanging out with a bunch of strangers. Only morbid curiosity made me sad to miss them.

The 30th though
That’s major
That’s big time
Morbid curiosity
Might get the best of me
But not if it falls
On my ol lady’s
Birthday

I have mountains more to say about high school and memories and time, and how they’re all pretty much nonsense, but for now, this exercise in self-indulgence is coming to an end. Thanks for reading, and keep on keepin on.