So, I decided to write a blog while slightly buzzed on beer. Tried something tonight called Red Stripe, imported from Jamaica or something like that. It’s actually pretty damn good, doesn’t have that pissy immediate aftertaste that American beer has…
This entry is damned long, but I’m sorry, I need to get this out of my system.
I joined up with friendster.com and found more than I bargained for today. It was unduly depressing to see so many people from my past so successful today.
I take no pride in the fact that I’m a two-time college dropout who can’t seem to get his shit together. I’m stubborn and selfish and indecisive. I don’t know how my wife puts up with me sometimes.
No, I’m not done with this pity party. My new job IS going well, but it’s a means to an end. College. But so late in life, I wasted so many godamned years…screwing off.
What made me suddenly realize this? Let me ask you, the reader, a question for yourself…what school years do you remember the most fondly?
I will tell you mine. The Jr. High years. Yep, 7th and 8th grade. There’s something absolutely magical about the years that unfold into puberty. You remember the girls you started to notice. I had three. The first one was just a measure of my self-worth and trying to test out my ‘looks’ or whatever charm I thought I might have had.
I was dissed. Badly. She put me in my place. Thanks, Josie. You weren’t worth it after all. Seeing you working in a 7-11 almost 15 years later almost made up for it.
I was in the band, you see. Yes, a ‘band fag’, as we were called at the time. But I loved music, as you can tell by my photo. I picked up a guitar not long after I hung up my cornet for good at the end of my Junior High years.
There were so many interesting people in that band, and people connected to those people. I think it’s the pictures I kept that helped me remember them all, taken with my Dad’s now old Vivitar 110. I was academically a very good musician, but as with all things, kids are stupid, so few of them appreciated my raw talent at the time (especially my parents).
In 7th grade I was 2nd chair in the cornet/trumpet section of advanced band. I should have been 1st chair, but I was too nervous during the tryouts and screwed up a scale. I could have challenged the 1st chair player and won, but I didn’t. Why not? Peer pressure. I would have made a lot of this girl’s friends mad if I had, and they were big and mean friends. But I was already starting to pick up popular music, translate band songs to the piano, and began picking out things on the guitar.
By 8th grade, the former 1st chair had moved on to high school, and there I was, King of my particular hill, 1st chair of the cornet section. But peer pressure still jolted me into never bragging about it, nor openly feeling proud about it. I impressed a lot of people privately with both my piano playing and my guitar playing, and the ease of which I could translate a lot of our band songs to other instruments. Looking back, I realize I had nothing to be ashamed of, and if I had held to my convictions, people might have remembered me better when I grew up. MIGHT.
My band instructor sure as hell did. My mom had a co-worker whose daughter was going to my Jr. High School many years later, and in the band. This was damn near 10 years later. My name was dropped to the instructor, and he responded like Obi-Wan Kenobi or some shit: “Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time….”
But would these other people remember me? I guess it just depends on the people. My band instructor remembers me as a good student, obviously. I’d hate to admit to him that I never once practiced at home, my chops were always kept sharp enough by just playing in band during band period.
Anyway…along with the band was a group from a rich grove nearby I like to fondly and affectionately recall as the “Kessler Brats”. The ‘Brats were a tight-knit group of people, all of whom knew the other, and a very large group at that. And if they weren’t in band, they knew someone who was. I tried desperately to fit in with this group, though my approaches were awkward. But there were many of us who were not from that neighborhood who tried and accepted into their circle to some degree. I had several friends from that bunch.
The second girl is the one I will never forget. She set the standards by which I judged all girls for the rest of my life, and truly I can say that it wasn’t a bad thing, because she was, for the most part, a very pretty and very nice girl.
Back in my day, to express that you liked someone of the opposing gender, you asked the girl if she’d ‘go with you’ (shortened form of ‘go steady with me’ from earlier generations, obviously). I never did this with her. Instead, some girls told her for me…and like an idiot I came back the next day acting foolish in class, and although she and I were still friends after that, she wasn’t as flirty afterwards. I never did stop liking her, though.
But after that, I kept on trying to fit in. The final time I tried was with a girl a year younger than me in band but in 7th grade, a precocious flute player with a very sweet nature. I haven’t forgotten her due to the situation. She was a regulation ‘hottie’, and not touchable by anyone, much less a dork like me. Ah, so much we learn when we’re young and don’t know shit about shit. I got dissed seven different ways from Sunday. And due to her apparent ‘status’ in the school, my asking her to go with me apparently rocked the school. I was miserable for months, living in shame among the halls, and with my peers. She must’ve decided she’d had enough later on, because she felt sorry for me one day at lunch and gave me her sandwich to eat, just out of the blue. I learned a few years later from a sister of my oldest friend that she wound up pregnant and giving the child up for adoption while in high school.
It was about this time I had picked up a guitar, and began my musical journey. I finally had my first girlfriend for a little while after that, who dumped me after just a few months, but I’ll write about that in another blog.
Let’s see, other than some unforgettable friends and acquaintances that year…what else happened…oh yes, there was a house party thrown by one of my female friends, one that a LOT of people showed up to. It was fun, even though I didn’t know anyone. Two of the girls were messing with guys’ hair that night, and wanted to spike my hair. I didn’t let them. My loss. God, I was a prude.
The Kessler Brats finally split up at the end of that 8th grade year…some went to the local high school, some went to the school I went to, and most of the cooler ones went to the Arts Magnet, where I wanted to go.
The measure of my worth hit me pretty damned hard during those years. There were also additional rumors floating around anytime anyone might like a girl, I was no exception to those kinds of rumors, either. I feel that in the long run, I took it like a 14 year old could take it. The ups and the downs of my 8th grade year, though, I will never forget them. Nor the people. Following the end of those years, I began burying myself deep in my music, practicing night after night, honing my abilities. I did that for FOUR years of high school, much to the discontent of my parents. I once told a friend when I was 20 the story of how I never really had a girlfriend in high school, and I don’t know how I survived that long being such an outcast. His response to that was, “You had your music.”
Damned straight.
Oh yes, that’s what I was talking about at the beginning of my blog wasn’t it? Yeah, my best friend, also a band player during that time, sent me some links to some of the people over on friendster.com today. It was weird seeing so many of them for the first time in literally years. Seeing them ‘all grown up’. Very odd. Each person definitely looks like the person I ingrained into my memory, just the ‘adult edition’. Grown up, indeed. Some of them led exciting and purposeful lives, and are now the sums of experiences that are incredibly great in years. Almost 20 now. God, has it been that long? Too depressing to ponder.
But would they remember me? Maybe. Maybe not. I wrote one of them to test the waters.
Which at last brings me to what’s on my profile. I was stopped by my father. He said I would never make a dime at music, and it wasn’t worth trying, even if I ‘was the next Jimi Hendrix’. Leave it to my father to insult me and throw platitudes at me at the same time.
At any rate, I was barred from considering the Arts Magnet as an option, because, to quote my father: “I’m not sending you to a school full of godamn punks and pot smokers.”
/sigh/
That was the key turning point in my life. That was the reason I wound up hating high school. That was the reason I spent 10 years succeeding at jobs I hated anyway. That is why I didn’t go to college. My father shut me out. But that is also another story for another blog. Suffice it to say, that I found out at the beginning of my 9th grade year, my talent didn’t go unnoticed, as many people at the bus stop (all schools all had busses stop at the same home high school for all the ‘magnets’) on my first day of 9th either asked me why the hell I wasn’t at the Arts Magnet where I belonged, or asked me why I didn’t sign up for band at my current high school. All I could do was shrug my shoulders at them.
So…now, years later, here I am struggling to finish that music degree I should have gone for in the first effing place. Am I doing good at it, you may ask? My teachers display that old spark of interest in me that my band instructor did in 8th grade. I’d say so. If only I hadn’t had that injury last year, I might only be one year away from finishing now instead of three. I guess looking back, it’s tough to swallow that I wasted 14 years of my life. People were trying to tell me back then that I had the ability to do what I really wanted, but kids can’t do much when their parents say no.
To my wife, I love you baby, you were the one that made me believe I could do this.
To those of you that graduated from Booker T., Class of 1991 or 92, I’m right behind you. And I consider myself one of you, no matter that I didn’t go.
I guess, for what it’s worth, I’m gratified to know I had friends and good acquaintances who did become successful rather than losers, which proves I’m a decent judge of character. Always been one of my strengths.
All I know is I started something dear to me, and now I've GOT to finish it. Even if I never do anything with the degrees I have planned. I need this for ME.
“…and all the handiworks remain there…only a dream away.” -- George Harrison
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