Love in the Time of Cthulhu

Going through more photos today, I came across some even older polaroids than the ones in the last post, mainly from when I was in high school in wonderful, scenic Willows, CA. As I mentioned, I used to take pictures of everything, which I guess seems kind of cliche these days, post-Edward Furlong in Pecker et al, but at the time I thought I was pretty damn swell (and, more importantly, members of the fairer sex occasionally did as well). Back then I titled all my pictures, like they were documenting some epic pantheon of small town mythology. Hey, I thought it was pretty fucking awesome back then.

The first photo is of this dude named Charlie, who is probably about as famous as anyone in Willows could ever get. Charlie was at every softball game, basketball game, football game, whatever kind of ball game you could think of; high school, little league, you name it, Charlie was there kicking it super hard. You would think, being someone who was pretty significantly disabled, Charlie would be the fodder for unending ridicule and mockery by the denizens of backwater rural farmtown USA. But no one I know ever fucked with Charlie. He was a cool motherfucker. He would get pumped and do a dance, and everyone would laugh, but not really at him, just to him, with him. He’d get an empty bleach bottle, or tree branch, or anything else and wave it in front of his face like it was the only thing that mattered in the whole world, and to him, it probably was, at least for the time being. You could drive by his house, and see him in the yard sometimes, creeping around. He seemed at home in the world, strangely enough. Aloof and carefree. Sometimes I would think about it, and almost be jealous that Charlie didn’t have to worry about the shit I had to worry about. Charlie was old, even when I was a kid, but he never seemed to get any older as we all did. He’s probably getting to be an old timer now. Anyway, I always liked this picture of him. It’s honest, whatever that means.

This is me and my friend Willie out in the park behind my house, which was literally “The Park” because we hung out there basically all the time. We ate lunch there. We met up there at night. We walked through it to get to my house. We snuck back there to smoke and look at the moon all night and meet up with girls. It was technically called the 20-30 Park, for some dumb reason. I think it had to do with the Rotary or whoever the fuck built it. We renamed it the “20-30-40 Park” because we used to drink 40s in it. This picture is probably 1997 or so, judging from my shitty “look I can grow facial hair” goatee and sweet hemp choker. My friend Willie lived right across the park from me, so we met up there basically all the time just to sit around and be angsty and do angsty teen shit. We would get drunk and take turns getting on the merry go round and getting it going really fast and trying to jump off without getting hurt too bad. It’s actually pretty surprising we never got killed or arrested in that park. Back then though, the cops didn’t really take the time to fuck with us too much. As long as we weren’t trying to beat anybody up or bust anything down, which we usually weren’t they were fine with letting us have our little park to mess around and be idiots in. Thanks guys.

Speaking of doing stupid shit, this photo was taken a year or so later, in Santa Barbara when I was smart enough to jump off my friend’s roof onto his balcony. They had a couch set up which was supposedly goin to to break my fall. Which it did, sort of. Only I rolled off of it and busted my damn head on a glass table. I was bleeding everywhere, which looked even more awesome thanks to my totally despicable bleached hair. This photo is pretty badass though, because it looks like I’m doing something way more daring than what it really was; the roof was probably only about 8 feet off the ground. This photo looks like I’m jumping into the void, like at the end of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. If someone would have been taking video of that shit they probably would have won a million dollars on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Instead, all we got was this bodacious polaroid and a lifetime of mediocrity.

Just on the off chance that, after reading this or perhaps knowing me IRL, you’re not 100% sure that I was a complete douche in high school, this picture should bring it all home. Last day of school, senior year, my friends and I took all the trash cans in the school and dumped them out in the hallway. The picture doesn’t really do it justice, because most of the trash was piled up at the end of the hallway out of range of the piece of shit polaroid, and they had already came and picked up most of it and straightened out the trash cans by the time I ran to get my camera to document our idiocy, I’m sure the janitors were super pumped on us. We thought we were fucking hot shit, of course. And we were, at least in our own minds. I don’t know why the fuck I spelled fuck FUK though. Too much nu-metal.

Music: Surrogate “Shift the Blame” .