My Last 5 Diary Entries

The Three People That Actually Read This

ROCKNXS

Last night I was watching the Olympics. The US women�s swim team won a gold medal for the 4 by 200 relay or something like that. It was quite exciting�I always get revved up about crap like that. Anyway they also broke the world record for that event. The record was set in 1987. This was apparently a big deal because the record was so long standing. Cool. But at some point, there was something else the announcer said that shocked me to my core. 1987 was 17 years ago.

What the hell? Now I can add and subtract and that is not the point. I was just surprised�I mean I remember 1987. I was 13 then. I remember my favorite song. I remember the boy I had a crush on. His name was Jamie and he had black hair and blue eyes (lethal combo) and he kissed me behind the locker room after football/cheering practice. It was also the first I�d ever heard of Guns-N-Roses. My best friend at the time was named Tammy. She was a sneaky conniving little bitch who got mad when I made captain of cheering. Needless to say, by the time I was 14 Tammy and I weren�t friends anymore.

My new best friend when I was 14 was Anne. Oh Anne. Anne was not Tammy. She was not a cheerleader. She was not � how can I put this �pure--in more ways than one. Anne taught me a lot of things about life. And a lot of things I would use in later life. To put it simply, Anne was a crazy ass bitch. And we met at ROCKNXS.

ROCKNXS was a nightclub for kids 21 and under. It sounds dumb now but when you are 14 the chance to be at the same club as 20 year old guys is an aphrodisiac. It was in this crappy little strip mall that had a Lucky Convenience store on the other end of it. That store was constantly sold out of cigarettes, gum, and rolling papers.

The club as I remember it was painted really dark and had different levels. You couldn�t really tell about the d�cor because of all the black lights and smoke. Christ, the smoke. You couldn�t have cut that smoke with a chainsaw. But what are a bunch of kids who can�t openly drink to do? They also sold Jolt cola which I think has like ten times the caffeine of Coke. The place to me�was heaven. They played music like The Cure and The Clash. We all thought we were very dark and in turmoil and you wouldn�t be caught DEAD in a turtleneck or Sebago�s. I sometimes saw Brian there with his dark little group of friends. They wore trench coats and Led Zepplin T-shirts and tried to maintain their �deepness�. Ahhh you didn�t know I knew Brian then did you? We weren�t close then and that is a COMPLETELY different story.

We were talking about Anne. She had a string of boyfriends because she was quite a slut and didn�t make apologies for it. This meant I usually spent the second half of the night trying to fight off the guy�s best friend. Or friends�thank Anne. She taught me how to smoke pot, she taught me how to sneak out of the house or arrange to �spend the night� at her house. She taught me how to wrap a guy around my little finger. She tried to teach me how to shoplift but I was scared as crap and threw the lipstick across the store when I thought I saw a security guard.

One of my fondest memories, is the night we went to a party out in a field in the middle of nowhere. We were in the back of some guy�s pickup, drunk in the darkness and staring at the stars. I knew I was screwed with my parents at this point because this was before cell phones and I was late and hadn�t called. But I was having fun and at some point I stopped worrying and just enjoyed myself. And that was the most important thing I learned from her�how to let go. She was the friend that is like the guy in the movie �Risky Business� with Tom Cruise whose famous line is �sometimes you just have to say what the fuck�. There are times in your life when you can�t control a situation but you know there is a chance to have fun in there somewhere. These are the times when you just have to say �what the fuck� and go with it.

Sometimes it is a lovely thing to be carried out by the tide.

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