Rebelling Teenagers or just Ahead of the Curve?

As I previously stated in this blog, I have had many groups of friends in my days. It just seems that as life progresses, I gain and eventually leave groups of friends to go on and do my own thing somewhere else. That is not to say I am still not completely and totally loyal to my friends, I still hang out with people from nearly every group that I have ever been a part of. Some groups form from necessity, some I've joined and they have become closer than my family, and some I will probably never encounter again in my life. For whatever reason, this just seems to be part of my natural ebb and flow of my life. This entry is another attempt at explaining THIS group so that readers can have some insight into my bigger, more ridiculous stories down the road without having to explain a ton of backstory.

At age 13 my friends mainly consisted of Nash, Fred, and James (names changed to protect the guilty). These guys were just as ahead of the curve as I was and were already smoking pot and drinking in abundance when I began to hang out with them that year. Fred was the brains of the group and I had known him since we were both in diapers as our mothers were friends in high school. Nash was a huge source of inspiration to me as he got me into Nirvana during this time and we both got into guitars and making music at the same time. James was good people but came from a shit family, he was rough and tumbly, but as long as you were on his side, you eternally had a good friend in your corner.

At this time I was little more than someone who was wrongly looking at his father as a rolemodel. Up until this point I had modeled myself directly off of my father (for lack of any other male influence). A few years prior to this I wore cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, thick rimmed aviator 80's style eyeglasses and blue jeans. I wanted to be just like him in a big and bad way in these formitive years.... at least until I realized what a miserably repressed piece of shit he genuinely was....

The Alcohol Incident:
We four would crash at one anothers house and drink each others parents booze and just generally raise hell with one another all in the name of good, clean anti-establishment fun. The biggest of these nights began and ended at my mothers house. She worked at Miller and 3 weeks before the party I stole a 12 pack of Miller Genuine Draft and hid it for the get together. Now... by hid it, I mean I hid it from humans. I didn't hide it from just her, I hid it from the world. I thought it best to make it disapear from public eyes by taking it deep into my woods, and burying it 3 feet into the earth. Overkill? Yes. But my Mom was crazy overbearing... so, better than being busted.

There we were, fireside and drunk. Completely annihilated on three beers a piece. At least we thought we were annihilated, as far as we were concerned this is what drunk was, this was the beginning, middle and end of drunk. After a while we noticed by the lights in her room that my mother went to bed and Nash and James snuck in and amongst at least 10 bottles of alcohol... they stole the bottle of lime gin. We then proceeded to my room, where they drunkenly spilled 2/3rds of the bottle all over my bedroom, making my room stick like potent 7-Up. In a panic, I deluded some food coloring and Sprite in water, added some lime juice and stuck it back in the cabinet where it sat until the day she moved, unused and un-drank.

The First Pot Incident:
Our first group attempt at smoking weed was less than fruitful. We had a solid lead in Jake (of whom will HEAVILY be involved in one of the next stories). Of all of the shady people I knew, Jake was the only one of them seemed as if he wasn't a total piece of shit. He lived near Jason's house, on the "wrong side of the tracks". Jake had an older brother and we all knew that they smoked pot together, so we decided to pursue him to acquire some. Upon calling. Jake instructed us to wait quietly down the street until he gave us a signal to come and pick it up so as to not arouse his Fathers suspicions. So, not fully trusting the situation, we each grabbed a weapon, mine being nun-chucks, and headed down the street.

We sat there for the better part of a half hour, lurking in the shadows before we suspected somthing wrong. Not wanting to split up for fear of missing Jake, Nash and Jason went back to the house to recall Jake. Jake instructed that he had hid the stuff in the car and to come and collect it, which upon their return, they immediately got to. They were gone an entire 2 minutes when we saw a shadowy figure approach us. We assumed this to be Jake until we saw that the person was holding a baseball bat tightly gripped in his hands.
Fred and I both readied to pull out our weapons when we discovered it was Jake's father.

"What the fuck are you boys doing here?" he asked, bat pulled back as if he were readied to strike us. We concealingly held our weapons, me with my nunchucks and Fred with his knife as I answered "We were waiting on Jake, he said he wanted to come and hang out." His crazy, drunken eyes darted back and forth at us with his bat at the ready as he began screaming about how much trouble Jake was in and how we were the cause of it. Fred and I just sat back under the dim light of the one streetlamp in the neighborhood while Jake's fucked up dad went on about our being terrible human beings.

Eventually he walked off muttering to himself, leaving Fred and I to just sit in bewilderment. We discussed our options about whether to stay on the street, awaiting the other two of our crew, or to return home when Jason and Nash returned. We then all darted off back to Jason's house at top speed. When we got there, we sat and discussed the hilarity of the event over Coca-Cola and popcorn.... because there was no booze, weed, or alcohol to be had.

Excess in Abundance, San Diego Comic-Con 2013

This tale may or may not be true, and the names have most certainly been changed. So do not only take it with a grain of salt, please consume the shaker. Or perhaps, just as likely this is a toned down version of the exact events that took place, dumbed-down with the intention to protect myself and my not-so innocent compatriots. Guess you have no way to tell, but then again, who ever does with writing?

Wednesday:

Bike Cleaned For Con

We took off on a Wednesday afternoon and the idea was that I would follow my buddy and his wife down to the Con on my motorcycle. I assumed we would become separated and that I wouldn't be able to stomach the traffic and would begin splitting lanes to make up time, of which I was correct. The idea still being, that if anything were to happen to me along the way, they would be behind me at some point to pick up the pieces of either my bike or I.

About an hour and a half in to the two and a half hour ride I regretted this decision. I was safely (as safely as you can) splitting the car-pool lane at about 40 MPH as traffic was slowed down to around 15 MPH around me. Suddenly, a man crossed the quadruple yellow without signaling and came into the lane of which I was occupying and grazed my tire before even looking to see where he was merging. He almost immediately realized his mistake and hopped back into his lane but the momentum shift of my bike threw my front tire off of balance and began to skid around the road.

Now, the rest of this is my assessment of what happened because I had to piece the event back together due to it all taking place within about 5 very unclear seconds. Which upon retrospect felt like an eternity. I regained control of my front tire by wrestling it with my arms but had inadvertently locked up the back brakes and my ass-end began to slip and slide wildly. I instantly disengaged the brake but my bike was already all over the road. I plowed down my right foot to regain balance and upon doing so, threw the bike in the opposite direction to which I corrected with my left foot.

Eventually this process of ping-ponging back and forth resulted in my not going down, but it severely hurt my already weak (another story in itself) left ankle. The driver then waved apologetically at me to which I returned his gesture with a middle-finger and drove on to the next gas station where I sat for a half-hour and re-examined the all-too-late idea of riding to San Diego. Inevitably I got back up, dusted myself off, and went back on the road. I met up with the rest of my crew once I got there and immediately went to the most important task: Drinking. I checked my bags and headed off to the hotel bar to knock back a few before attempting the mile long walk to the con.

If you've never been there, the size of this convention can not be overstated, and it is rumored to double next year. The eye cannot help but dart back and forth between over-weight men who have never had a lay in their life, to amazing bodied cos-play girls showing less clothes than they do skin. The place somehow encapsulates both what it is to be a true basement-dwelling, masturbatory nerd, as well as the now embraced "geek culture" consisting of heavily CGI'd comic-book adaptations and video games. It is truly two sides of one weird coin, and somehow they both achieve some strange symbiotic existence.

Waking In Car

Wednesday night was child's play. We went out drinking, ran around town with our friends, ran into people we would rather avoid, made new friends, created a few enemies and generally pursued the most aggressive destruction of our livers possible. However, with our personal excess never being enough, the rest of our crew winded down early for an easy first night. The pussies. So my buddy and I took the whiskey and beer and headed to have our own private party in his car located in the parking garage. We laughed, we over-talked one another, got stupidly sentimental, and ultimately passed out for the night in the front seats. To many, this must sound like a weird, terrible thing to do.... to us, it seemed second nature.

Thursday:

Crazy Christians

I woke up that morning with a hangover... go figure. Upon sweating our asses off at 9AM, my friend and I separated and returned to our hotels rooms to shower and prepare for the next days offerings. He went to his hotel directly outside the parking garage, and I went off to my hotel a mile away. To say that I stunk was a colossal understatement, but that did not stop the crazy Christians outside from hounding me with "Get Out of Hell Free" cards. One of them must have smelled me because he turned to me on his megaphone and uttered "I'd never turn my back on one of those stinking homosexuals, you never know what they might do behind you". Way to represent your lord buddy. Bigoted asshole.

Eventually I got cleaned up and made my way back to the show floor where I had to wait outside for my credentials. Now, I look a bit aggressive with my tattoo'd arms and punk-vest with leopard print on it, but with that said, the many, many ways that this is interpreted to outsiders is often hilarious. For example, I was standing in line for my badge when I notice a couple looking at me and whispering. No biggie, happens all the time, however... they were in hardcore bondage gear. The male ventures over to me and asks, "Hey man, do you like Adult fun?". He fully had my attention, after-all, what a way to introduce yourself to a human being. "Sure, why not?" I replied. He then explained to me how he was the head of a club that sponsored "Discreet Adult Parties" and invited me to attend. I of course asked, "Wait... is this an orgy?". "Well", he replied, "We don't use that word, we just get together in a group, wear protection and see where the night takes us." I laughed and said "It IS an orgy!" of which he did not seem to find quite as funny as I did and he moved on.