louisthunter

I've been listening to Brand New today. That's a pretty progressive album for the style of music. I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

I've been digging this telling random stories from my past theme I've got in these journals as of late. Another...

When I was 12 years old I moved to the suburbs of Chicago to live with my dad (the whole alcoholic parents trading the kids deal). I spent the summer getting fat because I had no friends in IL and split my time evenly between eating Dorito's and eating what ever else I could get my hands on. So the Fall comes around and it's time for me to start junior high school. Very quickly I realized that unlike California (where I grew up until then), skateboarding wasn't the popular thing - this was 1988. My skater shirts (and weight they poorly hid), lisp (still have that a little) and newness full on worked against me and by the end on 7th grade I had made exactly 1 friend (and he was a looser too). So that's the set up for this tale.

Around the same time, I started finding girls very appealing. One in particular was the jewel in my schools tiara, lets call her Danelle. So I had this enormous crush on her, every day in math I'd stare at her and have my little 13 year old fantasies (I was 4'11" and weighed about 135 at the time, the fantasies often involved me being taller and thinner). This went on about 4 months. So my only friend, John, decides it'll be funny to write her a love letter, sign it as me and leave it on her chair (he was in the same class). He does it and tells me after the fact. Now, at this time I was a small version of what I am today, and that type of behavior, while not totally cool, still sort of flowed off my back. In fact, there was a little (very, very little) part of me that thought, "what if she's not as stuck up and into looks as I expect...maybe she'd give me a chance". So a day passes, with me mostly avoiding eye contact with her and doing my normal looserish (who cares if that's a word) routine. I'm getting to the point, don't worry.

Danelle and I also had the same lunch hour. At the beginning of every lunch all the kids who were buying theirs would line up against the wall and wait their turn to pay for the eats. So I'm towards the back half of the line and I see that Danelle and all her friends (the popular kids) are sitting at a table that I'm going to have to go right past in this slooow moving line. I'm a little panicky but I stay put. The line moves and finally I'm right by her. She notices me (which is something, I guess) and smiles. Now I'm thinking. "okay, not that bad". Then she says something the kids at her table and they all start laughing. I'm still stuck in that line. She turns and, I shit you not, spits her gum at me. It hits me in the chest and bounces to the floor. I remeber it was fluorescent green. All the kids at the table and in line next to me laugh their asses off. I didn't even have the nuts to leave the line, I just put my head down, stuck it out, got my lunch and didn't eat a bite.

To this day, I vividly remember that gum, so small on the floor at my feet. And the funny thing is, that was about third on my list of worst experiences in junior high in Wheeling, IL. I'll talk about the others sometime too. These stories crack me up now, mainly because I kept score and when I became popular in high school, every motherfucker who wronged me got a piece. I was like the teenage Punisher. Lots of good stories from those days too.

Are my journal entries too long? I hope you're all doing well.