Goddamn it man, that was my line!!!
Maybe it's cuz I fucking loved monsters as a kid and a huge part of me still loves shit that's macabre, twisted, dark, bigger than life... ahem. This post is about a particularly special Halloween.
This was the year of the lazy Halloween costume. I think. I can't actually remember if I was planning on going as Lazy Ghost Rider that year, if that was the year I bought that silly grinning Calavera mask and tossed on my leather jacket, or if I had that all on hand since last year. In any case, a couple friends showed up at my doorstep on Halloween afternoon. I didn't really have a costume ready, nor was I really in doing-stuff mode when they showed up. My friends were playing for a Halloween block party later that night, but other than that I didn't have the slightest idea what I was going to do until they showed up.
But show up they did. Friend 1 (who I am no longer friends with) creeps on Friend 2 (who I was madly in love with) as we go get Friend 3 (who I'm giving a descriptor for the hell of it) in Friend 1's car. We go get Stupid College-Age Idiot (a friend of Friend 1) from his college so he can buy alcohol. They get beer and some Smirnoff Ices. They hotbox. At this point, I desperately want to go home, but I'm now some several miles from home, so that's not really an option. They drop off College Idiot, go back to the woods, and drink.
Whoever the fuck said that shit about high school being the best years of our lives deserves a Falcon Punch to the goddamn crotch. Not sure what this picture has to do with that, but it seemed appropriate.
At this point, I haven't really acquired a taste for alcohol. I had ample opportunities to try (come on, it was high school), but my friends never really did it, I didn't go to parties, I drove pretty often (...that excuse sounds a lot weirder out loud), I was in athletics and whatnot, so ultimately I figured "I can do without this". But here, we had a few Smirnoff Ices. I'd tried almost exclusively beer up to this point, and hated the taste. Nevertheless, I tried one of the Ices. And fuck y'all, girly drinks are the shit.
JD knows what's up.
So I polished one off, and mercifully not-much-later, we had to bring Friend 2 back to her house because she was perpetually semi-grounded (for good reason, honestly, but that's a horse of an entirely different color). Friends 1 and 3 planned on... I don't know, doing more stuff about as invigorating as drinking in a car in the woods during the day, so I took what may have been my last chance to bail and did just that.
Somewhere along the line, I met up with another stoner friend of mine who was fond of me giving him rides.
Funny, what's that picture doing here?
Naturally, I was giving him a ride somewhere. This time, it was at least to a place I was also going - my friends' show. He brought his broke-ass guitar along (cracked neck, missing the third string) for some reason, tossing it in the back of my mom's minivan. Which I was driving. Fuck a duck, I was 17.
Uh... On second thought, maybe don't.
Back there, among the tennis bags, grocery bags, dog hair, and David Cook CDs (was he a thing back then? well, the 2009 equivalent anyway), it was promptly forgotten.
We get there, show goes awesome, the band (bands? was there more than one?) play/s well, block party's fun, bla bla bla happy. At some point, I had to run stoner friend back to his house on the other side of Earth. Okay, it was the far end of the next town over, but seeing as our world consisted of those two towns, this was more or less true. I didn't realize until hours later, when I'd pulled back into my garage, that holy shit: he'd left his guitar.
I'd been considering picking up the guitar off and on for a while now. At the time, I played bass, but for whatever reason, it just wasn't enough.
Okay fuck that; enough foo-foo talk about hopes and aspirations. Basically... I had this guitar now... and I still haven't ever given it back. Even now when I have an acoustic guitar that isn't broke as fuck, I still have that beat-up piece of crap that I learned on sitting in my bedroom back at my parents' house. Same guitar where I sat, shirtless, at one in the morning or so, at the computer downstairs, learning Brain Stew, The Beautiful People, and Mein Herz Brennt.
Mostly because of the Hellboy 2 trailer.
My sappy theory: I can't toss it or give it away (yet) because to me, it represents the stuff that didn't suck about my last year of high school. It reminds me of adventures, friends gone by, sitting in my attic learning guitar when I should've been doing what little homework I had my senior year. It reminds me of finding something new, of finding a nugget of gold in a mire of shit. I still play that guitar. Whenever I go home, I tune it by ear and pluck and strum, and I remember being something that I never quite was: a happy teenager.
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