When I was seventeen

 

When I was seventeen
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for tearoom sex at Four Seasons Mall
Hands under the stall
Sometimes faces unseen
When I was seventeen

When I was twenty-one
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for new wave boys with big trendy hair
We’d make a lovely pair
Till the weekend was done
When I was twenty-one

When I was thirty-five
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for backroom sex on Folsom Street
There was often a treat
Though the bar was a dive
When I was thirty-five

In observance of the day, I’ll be skipping the final verse about how old I am, thank you.

Sincere apologies to the Kingston Trio, Frank Sinatra, and Homer Simpson

 

 

R.I.P.

I found out about two weeks ago that one of my oldest friends (and my backyard neighbor as a child) was killed in a car wreck recently. We were pretty good friends through high school, which was a bonus for me because I didn’t have many. We worked together at McDonald’s (hold your tongue) and I had both my first beer and my first cigarette with him. We had not stayed close over the years but I would run into him once in a while since his mother still lived across the yard from my parents. He had sort of a rough childhood, with an abusive, alcoholic father and a very sweet mother who always seemed a little “off.”

As it happens, I also introduced him to his first wife. She was a high school friend and they married probably right as he graduated from college. They were among the first few people I ever came out to. I was in their wedding. I also sort of new it was not going to last, and I was right. I liked both of them, but they were not a match made in heaven. I think they split up after a few years; I was living somewhere else at the time and we’d sort of lost touch. He remarried twice after that and had three daughters.

Anyway, I was looking online to see if there would be a memorial service and I was also wondering if anyone had told his first wife. When I looked her up, I found that she had also died about four years ago (cancer, I think).

So that made for kind of a depressing day. A lot of my good friends have died young, and most of them not from the causes you might expect.

Sigh…

Friday morning

When the alarm went off this morning, I actually stayed in bed for a few minutes pondering whether I should call in sick (and knowing that I really wouldn’t).

After a few minutes, I got up, headed to the kitchen, took my pills, snorted my Flonase, and started the coffee. I noticed it seemed darker than usual outside. I figured a storm was coming.

I looked at the clock on the microwave. It said 6:15. I looked at the clock on the oven. It also said 6:15.

I get up at 7:15.

Apparently I had dreamed the whole “alarm going off” thing, And I was now awake an hour earlier than I needed to be with no chance of going back to sleep.

Sigh…

 

 

The state of the stream

Social

I swore off Facebook almost three years ago. I’m pulling back a lot on Twitter nowadays too, using it for what it does best: providing me with a reading list of material on other sites. I do still use Twitter to push the other site, but that’s mainly reposted photos from flickr and pushes from the RSS feed. I use Mastodon for that too, but let’s be real. No one seems to care that much about Mastodon. That said, no one seems to care that much about Twitter anymore either except as argument fodder. Response to my stuff is way down over the past six months since the Muskrat came into power.

I don’t really use social media to forge relationships or (Great Pumpkin forbid) get into arguments. I use it to stay updated on topics of interest and to find other things to read.

I probably won’t be posting much on Twitter going forward, but I will probably keep using it as a reading list as long as it serves that purpose well.

Personal

All in all, things are good. I had my annual physical recently and my fat, sedentary butt remains far more healthy than it has any reason to be.

I’m having, um, a milestone birthday next year and I’m thinking of taking a really huge road trip in celebration thereof. Maybe cross-country even. Or something that would knock out those last three states I’ve never visited (Idaho, Montana, and Alaska). Then again, there’s a reason I’ve never visited them.

Work is good too, though budget cuts, declining university enrollment, and the current political climate in my home state are a little terrifying. I think tenure will protect me for the six or seven more years I need it to. We’ll see on that.

Almost three years in, I’ve managed to keep on maintaining my daily (private) audio journal. My life will be well documented when I die, though I’m not sure anyone would (or should) care that much. But the archivist in me feels like it’s required.

I continue to hate spring.

Writing

I want to write about things, really, but it just ain’t happening.

Last but not least

Does anyone want to buy a slightly used house?