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11/21/96 ".....slug....." i'm suppossed to be out of the house right now, i told my friend danny that i would meet him and his girlfriend claudia in front of crunch at 7:50. 8:38.... 8:39.... 8:40......... the way i figure it, i'm 50 minutes late, but they aren't in front of crunch anymore anyway. among my small circle of friends, my not showing up isn't considered as rude or something to be taken personally. i think that they have come to accept my weirdness, even to the point of telling me where they will be during different points of the evening in case i decide to join in later. we were going to go to cbgb's gallery (the vh1 section of cb's) to see a friend play acoustic guitar and sing. sounds pleasureable enough, but here i sit.... i work really long hours, often-times all night long. so i've adopted the thomas edison system of "cat naps". usually one around 4:00 in the morning and one around 6:00 at night. they generally don't last very long but it takes me a while to come out of them. by the time i came out of my evening nap it was 7:40. ten minutes to get to crunch, oh well.... i remember when i was growing up in suburban nj, i had some friends who lived on the other side of the town, a good 5 mile walk. my desire to hang out among my peers was so great that i would fight with my parents, (just a little strict, 10:00 curfew), and storm out of the house vowing to never return. this was generally countered by threats of what would happen to me if i ever did dare return. with anger, rage, and teenage angst pulsing in my 15 year old body, that 5 mile walk would seem like nothing. these were what i like to call the "joni mitchell years". punk was just beginning to happen but i wouldn't discover it until a year later, 1976. my main focus in high school was art and music, and all of my friends were, well, i guess you would call us hippies. but it wasn't like it is on tv. we would sit up all night, drink herbal tea, smoke a little cheap mexican pot, and talk.... i don't know if i have ever felt closer to a group of people in my life. nothing has ever quite felt so warm. this was my first group of friends ever in my life. i met them through the art program in school. most of them were seniors when i was just a freshman. after being a solitary person all of my life i finally had friends, real friends. i didn't realized how devastating it would be when it finally hit me that these friends would be leaving for college while i was stuck at summit high. i had thought that through having friends, my life had changed, to be stuck with me again was disappointing to say the least. do you remember your first true love? the one where you promised each other that no matter what happened to you over the years, you would always save a place in your heart for them? did you feel a little part of you die when that love ended? perhaps that was the piece of your heart that you promised to that person.... the losses in our lives are cumulative, we rarely notice them adding up as we go about our daily activities, we call this growing up, becoming mature. but every once in a while we have that rare moment where we realize that we just don't look at the world with the same sense of wonder anymore.
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