Life

May. 4th, 2006 at 6:17 PM
Thursday, May 04, 2006Life Current mood: awake Category: Life In a personal experiment of self-loathing and determination, I embark, for the time-being, on an effort to verbalize significant portions of my life. These efforts are geared toward memorializing the more interesting, mundane, heart wrenching, typical or excessively exciting situations I have experienced.We'll see where this takes me.......I'll start with the straight path of life, though I'm sure I'll seque back and forth into earlier life as time goes on. For now though, this rendition began at 13. The day I met Doug.This was during lunch in Brooskide Junior HIgh School. Located in a relatively moderate income town (Merrick) made up mostly of blue-collar trades-people and some white-collar executives climbing the slippery corporate ladder. The school itself was sandwiched between a grade school (Old Mill Road School), a state run highway services depot, and two highways, the Meadowbrook Parkway and the Southern State Parkway.A couple of friends of mine were eating lunch; Andy Cousmano (bless his soul), Stanley and Alan were sitting at a table having portions of the obligitory school served hot-meal of the day. Alan was nearing his moving day toward becoming a 'son of the commandment' (bar-mitzvah). In walks this new guy (not that I myself didn't handily fit that category either) with his bag lunch of home goodness and sits at our table. Alan was kind enough to make introductions and that was it. Hey, new kid to talk with (not that I was into talking ...at all..... due to my severely intraverted nature.) The meal went fine, and mostly without incident. (Being 6'1" tall, extremely timid, and due to adoloescence a voice which scattered across the globe during every attempt to communicate, left me in the unenviable position of being 'targeted' by the self-proclaimed 'cool' crowd, thought to everyone else they were the dirtbags.) Other than finishing up our meals and entertaining ourselves by looking to the ceiling for any new butter globbed plastic knives sticking on the ceiling (a morning ritual undertaken by those who ate breakfast at school rather than at home. School purchased buttered bagels were always loaded with the stuff. Sometimes the butter reached 1/2" think. The remedy was to grab a plastic knife and removed 7/16" of butter and leave it on your plate to be thrown out. If you got bored, or so the story went because we didn't partake in this ritual for fear of being caught by the proctor, you took your butter loaded knife and threw it at the ceiling in hopes that it would stick to the ceiling tiles.)Doug came from a large family. Son of a union Shop Steward turned heavy equipment operator instructor, he had three brothers two sisters and a mom that tried to keep the house together through the hazards of the late 60's early 70's.