Entry date: 5-3-2022 - Graduation - Letters to My Friends

Dear Friends,

I came to the realization in the past few days that I need to spend some time with this blog and catalog what I have written. I’m getting to the point where I start to tell a story and then spend about five minutes wondering if I’ve already written this. I also know I have developed a habit of telling you all that I will get back to a story or tell the full version later and that is more confusing to my memory than I thought it would be.

I have so many more stories to tell. It is probably time to get good and organized. Now back to the end of my senior year.

As I thought about what I wrote yesterday and compared it to a conversation Rhondi and I had over the weekend, I realized that one of the reasons that poor Cheryl and I were also doomed from the start is that she was nice, relatively normal, and drama free. As Rhondi and I talked this weekend about things life has shared with us, I realized that I did not have much luck when it came to drama free ladies (and that is not a dig…I have plenty of drama to offer anyone). So, Cheryl never stood a chance.

When the time finally came to end the month of having to go to school every day, I was more than ready to graduate. I should probably back track a bit and say that habitual ditching was tough for me to stop. I loved the aspect of high school that made attendance a flexible sort of commitment and had learned to embrace ditching early on in freshman year. With my dad working down by the fairgrounds and our house being at 47th avenue just shy of Union Hills, the odds of him popping into the house for lunch were low.

Anyhow, I survived and got the go ahead to receive my diploma. My grandparents came down from Colorado Springs for the big event and it was going to be a big to do. There was a party at Easy Street, and I think even some Reardon’s came for the graduation, too. My memory is a bit hazy of the ceremony itself. My friends and I decided to expand our minds that day and timed it so that when I walked across the stage and shook hands with the dean, I was flying pretty high.

I do remember giggling a lot while I was sitting through all the speeches and such from people I barely knew. My friend group in the latter half of high school was tight knit and many of my friends were either a year ahead or a year behind once I got to Camelback. My two best friends from my graduating class decided that high school was not for them, so I was out there on my own, even with them also tripping balls in the stands.

My ex-girlfriend, who was deemed “The Breathmint” by a couple of my other comrades, came to the graduation with her mom and sister. I was kind of touched by this and even though we had broken up much earlier in the year and would never truly get back together, we had kept a friendship. It was also a complete and total boon to my ego and something of a piece of karma for her when my friend, Barbara, came up and gave me a very huge and not so ‘friendly’ kiss right in front of my ex.

Barbara is now the wife of an ex-NFL quarterback who is in the hall of fame, so not too shabby on my part. The ex just looked at me like, “Wow” and it could have been the LSD, but I swear I saw her mom and sister smirk. They knew that karma was at work, I’m sure, as she wasn’t always the nicest to them, either.

My uncle Mike had gotten us a limousine so we could celebrate in a safe and stylish fashion and we (which was Michael, Brian, Ben, my fellow graduate Tony, and myself) went around to a few parties. We had stopped by Scott and James’ place the day before and James had hooked me up with a bag of, for 1987, some great weed. Between that, the LSD, and a cooler full of beer, we were all set and had a fun night of frolic.

The end of the evening was spent riding around in the limo laughing our asses off and then becoming very, very quiet. I think all of us were lost in our own heads. For Tony and I, the realization of our accomplishment and the weight of such a huge era coming to an end was significant. I remember talking with him about it the next day and wondering if we would even remember the night in years to come.

I remember looking for Barbara at all the parties (no luck) but there being some other revelations from different girls about how much they liked me, blah blah blah. I probably should have been remembering that I was dating a nice girl.

A day or so later, Ben and I were in my grandfather’s car heading to Colorado Springs to hang out with Granny and Papa for a week. Considering the fat sack that James had provided as a graduation gift, Ben and I were set.

We stopped in Albuquerque the first night and Ben and I had our own hotel room. We partook of the bud and watched the awesome Terry Gilliam film, Brazil, on HBO. It was perfect. I can’t remember if I had seen it before then or not. I think I had, but still, something about being a teenager, stoned to the gourd, watching a movie on cable in Albuquerque was magical.

I remember wondering if the smell was something my grandparents were aware of and I’m sure they had to be. We didn’t care, though. We were just doing our thing and I was going into the army in a few short months. That got me a pass for a lot of bad behavior.

See you tomorrow.

stolen from the internet....what a great movie.