Yearbooks and "Best" Friends

Nostalgia is a funny thing. As far as I can tell, the human brain does not store the memory of negative emotions very well. Sure, the really traumatic stuff gets indelibly etched up there, making us terrified of clowns forever (Why can't they stop smiling!?!), but the day to day stuff gets leeched of all the low grade stuff. The anxieties, the doubts, the minor shames and humiliations all fade with time, leaving memories that are all Good Times. Oh, and how we yearn for the days of yesteryear, not getting hassled, not getting hustled, keeping our heads above water, making a wave when we can...

Wait a minute, I think that is the theme song to Good Times. What we talking about again?

Ah yes -- Memory. All times are good times as long as they were long enough ago. Even if they were horrible times, we look back on the tidbits that were not so bad with a strong sense of nostalgia. It is exactly this sort of selective memory that drives bad couples back together again and again. They want to recapture that nostalgic memory high, like some poor junkie.

Yes, nostalgia is a dangerous drug, don't be fooled. You can't go home again, you can't go back to college, and you can't experience what it was like to experience everything for the first time again. Trying to recapture stuff like that just leaves you feeling frustrated and uncomfortably out of place. Now before you say, "Jesus, Seamus, you are all doom and gloom with this we are all gonna die someday crap", there is a pretty damn nice alternative to looking back. There is no way any of us can exhaust more than a tiny percentage of the possible experiences this world and life have to offer us. You just can't be afraid to move on to the next thing. Raising kids is completely different than getting so drunk you wander the UCSD campus on your own self-devised scavenger hunt (one mildly damaged EXIT sign, check), but it is awesome and amazing in its own, different way.

Not to say strolls down memory lane aren't fun. Researching my previous post, I cracked open all my old yearbooks, really for the first substantial read through since I graduated. A normal person would have done this before their 20th reunion, but I did it after. Go figure. Anyway, it was a blast taking a return peek into the weird world of pre-adult absurdity. In particular, I was amused by messages scrawled there by barely literate apes and those of my supposed "best friend", Brian Deacon. I thought it might be fun to give you folk a sample by reprinting all of his yearbook signings, year by year.

Please note these comments are not appropriate for children, those with delicate sensibilities, pregnant women, the Dutch, or anyone who believes in the pure and indomitable spirit of man.

1985: This was my seventh grade year and first one at Prep. It was my first yearbook ever and I believe I caught on slowly to the idea of having people sign it. Altogether I got 13 signatures, plus one that looks suspiciously like it might be me writing to myself. I didn't notice any obvious Seamus-meme or common gross reduction of my character and/or personality down to one or two common pieces of knowledge. This changes in later yearbooks. There are a couple of references to jokes and dumb comments in class, so a wise ass I have always been. As I was known to say, “Have sex, will travel” – Huh?

Dear Homosexual Bleep*

Drop Dead
The Deak

*Asshole Mother fucking dick sucking two balled bitch

1986: Eighth grade and I seem more dumbfounded by this yearbook signing process than before. I mean, seriously, is anyone gonna ever read these? I reach through time and slap the 13-year old me. There are 5 signatures, plus at least one person (Nicole) pretending to be another one (Joanie) writing that they are in love with me. Really not enough signatures to try and piece together a meme.

Seamus “The Gaylord Moron Idiot” Colbert,
You are an asshole. You are a mother fucker.
You are unbelievably short. You are ugly.
Deacon

1987: Freshman year and the class size doubled, but I still have only 11 signatures plus a double giant two page scrawl claiming “Seamus Sucks Dicks A lot”. Very classy.

There are several references to something about me being Greg Ahn’s bodyguard. I have the dimmest recollection of threatening people to stay away from Greg Ahn as a gag, maybe related to him becoming a Fine Young Cannibal? Cursed brain cells! I think I accidentally stored Seinfeld quotes on top of this information. Here there is an early mentioning of my T-shirts. For everyone who knows me there is probably a certain amount of nodding. There are also several references to how strong I was. I missed my calling as a pocket strongman, apparently.

By the way, the photo above is me playing Malachi Stack in Thorton Wilder's The Matchmaker. I actually played this part in my Junior year, but there is a real dearth of yearbook pictures previous to 1988. It was a great part. I had a soliloquy and then got consistently drunker throughout the rest of the play.

Seamus,
Fuck You!!
Have a summer. I really don’t care how it is.
Deacon

1988: Sophmore year and I am holding steady at 11 signatures. These includes a recap of my first three acting lines ever. -- Aldonza, I brought something for you. She won’t deliver. Why so hot about it? -- There are also multiple references to DEATH in capital letters, something from English class I assume. There are more references to my awesome shirts.

Here we start the Where's Waldo segment of yearbook pictures, starting with Ms. Cerri's Spanish Club. Quick side note: There was a television show that was popular at roughly this time called American Gladiators, where average people would have to engage in mortal combat with professional gladiators. That is, if by "mortal combat" you mean slapping each other with wet foam on a stick and if by "professional" you mean people on lots and lots of steroids. The Gladiators all had comic book hero names, like Zap or Lance or Thunder. My younger brother really liked the show and announced to the entire family that one day he would be a gladiator and his name would be Thor. After some mild guffawing, I was asked what my name would be. My brother answered for me, saying "Waldo". After people stopped crying and peeing themselves, I had a nickname that was tough to shake. So anyway, I suppose it really is a Where's Waldo puzzle.

Jim Billy IV,
Life is a terminal
Disease, there is no
Cure. So don’t enjoy
it too much. I have
decided to take
up too much
room while
writing.

HOW’S THIS?
I AM CLAIMING THIS
ENTIRE
PAGE. ENJOY
YOUR SUMMER IF
YOU WANT TO. I’M
GOING TO WRITE IN THE
UPPER RIGHT CORNER NOW.

Here I have included the actual Upper-Right Corner as Brian clearly labeled it. This scrawled masterpiece also included a cartoon of a rolling eye Dr. Cowett that you will find at the bottom of this post.

Catnip 4-Ever refers to an incident where a "friend" gave us a "joint" at a "party". Ok, I think it was actually a party. Anyway, the so-called illegal substance was really just catnip. Fortunately for Brian and myself, John Sprafka (the "friend") could not contain himself and started having paroxysms of laughter before we had done more than take a tiny puff each. So we were spared getting really high on nothing more than the idea of taking an illicit substance and thereby looking like complete fools. The story was still entertaining, however, and became widely known in certain circles, increasingly embellished with each telling.

The Marquis thing comes from a family myth that we are directly descended from the Marquis Jean Baptiste Colbert, one of the most important advisers to Louis XIV, the Sun King. I am the oldest son of the oldest son going back as far as we have records, clearly making me the heir to the Colbert fortune, whatever that might be at this late date. Pure fantasy (we are Irish, not French) but that is where this Marquis reference and the one scrawled over my Sophomore year picture at the top of the page came from.

1989: Junior year and I now have 43 signatures (Booyah!) and a piece of masking tape marked “Seamus Is My Babe” which I vaguely recall came from Kirsten Cochran, who was often alphabetically close to me. There was more talk about the T-shirts. Clearly it was my thing. Check out the AFS Club photo below (I went to Colombia one summer) and you will see the classic "Beer?" shirt that shows a bear with deer antlers. Hoo Ha. Classic shirt.

To my chagrin this book is also filled with Mr 1420 SAT references. Yes, I did well on my SATs. I guess when a single standardized test carries so much weight people obsess about them, but it drove me crazy that everyone locked on to it. I think it slightly surprised people I was so smart, despite taking every honors class, etc. I had a poor high school work ethic, what can you do? Next year when I retook the test to fix my Math score I became Mr. 1530 and wanted to crawl under a rock.

In other Junior year news, apparently Pre-Calc was hard for a lot of people. Armenia (the girl I knew from high school, not the country) writes that she would write crookedly just to piss me off, and you know what, 20 years later… it does a little bit. I find a very tiny, tiny bit of satisfaction that she was the victim of some Deacon graffiti a year earlier (see top of post): she had a slight English accent, so when she said banana it was funny.

Finally, someone had realized Shamus meant private detective… and told others. Sigh.

SHAYMASTER,
What can I say? I could baffle you
With my eloquence, but no, you’re not
Worthy. I hope your trip to Colombia
Fixes your problem. If you already know
What your problem is, then that’s a
Good first step. Look both ways when
You cross the street and don’t come
Back with more than 2 brain cells.
The Big ‘D’

1990: Senior year. There is nothing. Blank. I think I forgot to bring it on the Senior outing everyone else did signing on. I also was probably in a "F- all these people, I am out of here" mood. There are some nice photos of my triumphant performance as Elwood P. Dowd from Harvey. I really like the shot of me sitting on the edge of the stage like I own the place. Senior year. Nothing but Good Times.

Still, it is disappointing to have no signatures at all. Maybe I can still get Brian to write go fuck yourself in it.

All Apologies to Ken, Wherever You May Be

Most people like to think of themselves as basically good people. We all have flaws and moments of weakness and loss of self control, but over all every person thinks that come the day when the jackal-headed Anubis rips their heart from their chest and places it on the scales opposite the feather of truth, that Thoth will write down in his ledger that their heart did rise. [I suppose traditionalists would probably have preferred a St. Peter and the heavenly gates metaphor here, but you can not beat the Egyptian Book of the Dead for evocative imagery. If you fail the test you will get eaten by a monstrous crocodile-hippo-lion beast called Ammit, meaning "she who gobbles down". So eat your veggies kids.]



And while I do genuinely believe in the basic good intentions of mankind -- I attribute most evil to ignorance and fear -- clearly this world has more bad people in it than people who think they are bad people. That is, we all lie to ourselves. It makes sense. When it comes to oneself, it is a little hard to maintain an unbiased opinion. If you have two pieces of information that contradict each other and one says that you are good person and another says you are bad person, which one are you likely to go with? And who hasn't taken the side of a close friend in a dispute, reassuring them even though you knew them to be in the wrong. Being a good friend wins out over cold honesty most times, but it is this sort of thing that tends to skew a person's perspective.

It not my intention to come to a final evaluation of myself as a human being today (Interim Evaluation: Lazy Awesome), but instead to discuss a particularly dessicated bag of bones that is rattling around in my mental closet. We have all done things that we regret, things where we hurt people. Sometimes unintentionally and other times, well... When I look back on my life one major incident keeps ricocheting around in my skull.

This will probably come as a shock to most people, but as young lad I was just a wee bit nerdy.

No it's true.

I liked to read science fiction and fantasy books. I had big thick glasses. After reading came a love of computers and computer games. And then there was Dungeons and Dragons. I think you see where I am going with this. Like many young men, I entered my junior high years not exactly looking my best. I went from a diminutive, but adorable leprechaun of my elementary years, to a still not particularly tall but all stretched out and gangly teenager. Never the most outgoing of kids -- shy would be one way of putting it -- my realization that girls might be more interesting than I had previously thought did me little good. I switched from a public school to a tiny private school, so the pool of fish became very tiny indeed. And I was not one of the sharks, I knew that much.

It was here that I met one of my best friends junior high through most of high school: Ken. Ken loved all the same geeky stuff I did and we shared a similarly perverse sense of humor. He was ridiculously thin and of normal height, but walked with a bit of a permanent slouch. Along with my big buddy from elementary school, Brian, we made quite the funny looking threesome, I am sure. Geeks small, thin, and large. Pick your favorite nerd to pick on. Although actually, I don't recall dealing with anything particularly venomous that would even register on the grand scale of teenage cruelty. Helps to be a nerd at a prep school. Probably helps more to have a giant best friend (Brian).


It wasn't long before I began spending more and more time at Ken's place. It was where I was truly introduced to the dark arts of the comic book, a medium for which I still have a passion to this day. Ken lent me every single book he had, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the Dark Knight Returns. Many a Friday and Saturday night had me crashing on his bed or his floor. I became friends with his friends, like the always fascinating but difficult to pin down Ray (was he an American Indian? Did he have an inheritance coming at age 25?). And, of course, Ken turned 16 nearly a year before Brian and I did, making him the designated driver for all sorts of shenanigans that I probably still can't discuss, as I am not certain the statute of limitations have all expired. For instance, we shot bottle rockets off his car rooftop, while standing on his back bumper going 50 mph. We are so lucky to still be alive.

There was drinking and there was vomiting. We were stupid kids. I chipped a tooth when Ken jammed a gallon wine jug into my mouth as I was trying to take a swallow. Didn't hurt much at the time. Hurt a lot more later. We discovered Guns 'n Roses and KROQ. We set up electronic bulletin boards, which were like internet chat boards back in the dim and hard to recall pre-internet days. There was some petty piracy using 5.25" floppies. My tag at the time was Mad Dog. I think I made my signature blink and reverse to say God Dam. I am sure I felt that was very clever. Even earlier I remember trolling and flaming on the Compuserve chat boards. Such behavior didn't even have a name back then.

In general we had a damn good time, wished we had girlfriends, got good at computers, and managed to barely stay out of both jail and the morgue. Standard, if slightly nerdish, teenage fare.

Then something happened. I am going to say it took place during the summer between junior and senior year, but it could have been slightly earlier. There began to be a significant schism in our threesome, with Brian and myself on one side and Ken on the other. There were some other friends involved, but that was the main break. For whatever reason, Ken was getting to be less and less fun to hang out with.

Now I want to take a quick time-out here to warn that there has been over twenty years and a lot of water under the bridge since these events, so while I may now have a much better perspective, the details are certainly fuzzy.

At the time, the common refrain was that Ken was growing annoying because he seemed to be stuck at a level of immaturity that we were growing past. That seems like some unadulterated bullshit now. I do think he was increasingly bitter, sarcastic, unpleasant and abrasive. His mood was often down or dour, and his jokes seemed increasingly leaning toward the infantile or cruel or thoughtless. Worse, he began radiating a strong sense of self-loathing. He also became very clingy, showing up at our houses unannounced, wanting to hang out longer and not picking up on signals that we didn't want to do everything with him any more. That is what sticks out in my memory, anway. Talking recently with Brian, I was reminded that there was also a strong sense that Ken was becoming unhinged and maybe a bit dangerous. Brian recalled one incident:

The big memory for me, I think you gotta remember this one too, was the weird blowup he had [with a friend of ours named] Damien. I think Ken got overenthusiastic with some rough housing, Damien got annoyed and pushed him away or something (maybe hit him or cussed at him or something) and then Ken lost his shit and used some phrase like "I know you all just fucking hate me."... I think it sticks in my head because I remember my reaction being not just that it was a nutty thing to say even if there were tension, but that there wasn't even any tension to overblow into us "fucking hating" him. So I sort of took two mental steps back and thought to myself, 'Wow, that's something a crazy person says.'"

Our relationship to Ken didn't change out of thin air. Ken had some serious stuff going on in his life. I want to tread carefully here, because I am not Ken. I don't know all the stuff that happened and how it really effected him. And I don't want to tell too many tales out of school. But around this time period his home was falling apart, his parents separating. His father clearly had issues of his own which certainly leaked out into his relationship with his son. I will describe one incident that must have taken place our Junior year:

We had all gotten up at dawn to go paintballing and we borrowed Ken's dad's car. The paintballfest took place somewhere out in Corona, which was far enough away that I had no idea where exactly that was. On the way there we exited the freeway and hit a sandy patch on the off ramp. We were probably going a little too fast, but basically we slid into the railing. We piled out, but saw no major damage, and continued onwards. After a full day and hundreds of dollars in fees, gun rentals, and paintballs, we were tired, filthy, and several of us had significant injuries (cuts, bruises, turned ankles). Great sport Painball: putting 16-year olds up against Vietnam vets, I kid you not.

Coming back home, we could hear something rubbing in that wheel well. We must have bent something. Sigh. When we got home to Ken's place his dad was watching tv and we told him -- we TOLD him -- that we had had a small accident and something was rubbing the tire. I am sure we downplayed it as not a big thing, but there was no subterfuge. At dawn the next day he kicked in the door, leaped on the bed, literally sat on top of his son, and screamed into his face, "What have you done to my car?!" I was lying five feet from him on the floor. I am fairly sure there was cursing. That was how he behaved when other people were there.


So no two ways about it, Ken was probably going through a tough time. Just being 16-17 years old can be tough enough and he had more going on. He desperately wanted friends to lean on. To support him. So Ken probably tried to grab onto his friends tighter. Of course, we were looking for more space from him, so his actions had the opposite intent. He made us uncomfortable. His behavior was disturbing. His odd actions became the topic of conversation when he wasn't there. By grabbing so hard he pushed us away.

The details of the end of this friendship are a bit loathsome to me. Instead of dealing with the issue staring us in the face -- our friendship with Ken was no longer working -- we started ditching him. Hoping he would get the hint. What kind of crap is that? Tight friends for 4+ years and we wanted him to take the hint to leave us alone? It was not at all surprising that the hint was never taken.

My poor VW Scirocco took some of the biggest hits of this stupid policy. I believe it was an early ditch attempt that led to me shooting down a mountainous street way too fast and realizing way too late that the road was ~100 yards shorter than I recalled it being. Forty feet of skid mark later and the control arm holding one of the wheels had snapped clean through. It was definitely a ditching attempt when I tried to roll my Scirocco backwards down the driveway without starting the motor, so Ken wouldn't know I was sneaking away. You had to get out of the car to get the rolling started and, of course, I lost control and grabbed that open door with all my might, bending it almost entirely backwards on itself. From that day until the day it was given away to charity the door made a horrific CREAK every time it was opened and it had to be slammed shut. Because I tried to sneak away silently. I think there may be some cosmic justice there.

I don't recall how long this pathetic dance continued. I think it started off good-naturedly and infrequent and ramped up to angry and deadly serious. I do recall who it was that finally gathered up enough balls to go out and tell Ken that he was not invited. Me. Talk about mixed feelings. I am glad I finally put an end to this immature and truly mean ditching with some honest talk. But I also was the one who hurt him. Face to face, I used words to hurt him. To tell him to go away. That he wasn't wanted here any more. I spoke for the group and Ken knew it. He said fine, if that is what you want, and drove away. I can't even begin to process what that must have been like. No one has ever been that cruel to me. I can only hope he had, in fact, seen the writing on the wall. That it wasn't a bolt from the blue. His friends -- his friends for all of high school up that point -- telling him they no longer wanted him any more.

I do know that Ken never made a single overture to me after that day. I think we spoke a few times, but only in the most perfunctory, excuse me you are standing in front of the water fountain sort of way.

Look, clearly there are a lot of problems with trying to judge decisions made as a teenager from the perspective of an adult. If Adult-Me had an old friend going through some stuff so serious that it effected his behavior towards me, I would either try and help the guy through it, or at a minimum, just put some space between us until that guy had gotten his shit back together. But Kid-Me was simply not capable of that. Kid-Me had no clue what was going on, except that Ken was becoming more angry, more troubling, and generally less fun. Kid-Me addressed the problem by at first running away from it, before finally snapping under the constant pressure of running and telling Ken to fuck off.

For this I am sorry. You deserved better, Ken. I was just a kid and maybe I did not have the capacity for more a nuanced or braver approach, but that just explains why it happened, it doesn't excuse it. I strongly suspect there was no way of avoiding the trainwreck our friendship became. But handling it kinder would have been better.

We handled it with all the tact that 16 year olds at the bottom of the social food chain could muster, which is to say, very little. - Brian

Games

If anyone is reading this I have to assume they have this in their RSS feeds, because if you are regularly checking this blog at this point you are a champ, indeed. This blog more or less got really going as an outlet for all the stress and issues dealing with newborn twins and remodeling my home at the same time. Once I moved back home and the twins became potty trained, well, the NEED to get my thoughts out there became much more of a "need" to practice my writing chops. And with all things great and small distracting me, "needs" have a tough time making it to the top of the list these days.

I have decided to make another go of it. I am finishing my first "first author" paper since the girls were born (if you don't actually know me, I am a working astronomer) and that has played some role in the doldrums here at Kicker. I really shouldn't be writing a blog about whatever frothy thought flits into my brain when I need to be writing papers to keep my career on track. Long time readers will note how much time passed from this blog being dormant to the final (almost) publication of my next science paper. For new readers, here is the quick summary: A lot of time. There was really no connection between the two types of writing. I found plenty of other ways to procrastinate rather than write science that were much less fulfilling than this blog.

To get myself back in the swing of things, I will start with a light little bit on games. I am a bit of a board game guy. Nothing major. And I would have to say my playing time has dribbled to painfully small quantities with all this child rearing going on. Putting that aside for the moment, one of the classic board games in Monopoly. It has a lot of structural flaws: too random, too hard to reach end conditions (bankruptcy), and it requires significant trading cooperation among players to even remotely work and be fun. One Scrooge McDuck and this thing will grind on for hours. Still, there is probably no game board as well known besides that used for checkers and chess. And I loved it as a kid. My wife, to my mild chagrin, loves it still.




So here is one juicy tidbit I came across: How to win Monopoly in seven rolls of the dice. This comes from this web page. It prominently features a 21 second game consisting of nine moves. Later in the comments someone delivers the 7 roll variant that I believe is the shortest possible. All due credit belongs to them. They write it up further here. I am merely repeating their findings. Recall that all players start with $1500.

Player 1:

Rolls 5,5 -> Lands on Just visiting Jail
Rolls 6,6 -> Lands on Chance. Card is Adv to nearest utility. Buy it for 150. (P1 now has 1350)
Rolls 5,4 -> Buy Park Place for $350 (P1 now has 1000)

Player 2:

Rolls 3,1 -> Lands on Income Tax, paying 10% or $150 (P2 now has 1350)*

Player 1:

Rolls 1,1 -> Buys Boardwalk for $400 (P1 now has 600)
Rolls 2,1 -> Land on Community Chest. Card is Bank Error In Your Favor +$200 (P1 has 1000)

Player 1 buys 3 houses on Boardwalk, 2 houses on Park Place at $200 a pop (P1 has 0)

Player 2:

Rolls 2,1 -> Lands on Chance. Card is Advance to Boardwalk. Rent is $1400. He can't cover it.

GAME OVER

* It is my understanding that modern Monopoly simplified this rule, making Income Tax a flat $200. In which case, P2 is another $50 in the hole.

This example is great for two reasons. One it is demonstrates how much blind luck there is in Monopoly. In this admittedly freaky example, Player 2 got to roll the dice twice and then went home to weep. Imagine if this were a 3-4 player game. It would then last hours while Player 2 had time to catch up on his Spanish language soaps. "Oh mi amor. No soy Maria. Soy la hermana gemela de Maria, Chiquita! Y Roberto es tu hijo! No lo creo! Es verdad! [SLAP]" Most games in Monopoly are hours longer, but come down to the same problem. Player 1 got some good rolls early and that was that.

Second, I just find it amazing that I have that board emblazoned in my head like that. I was able to play along without even glancing at the board. And I bet many of you readers could as well. You might not know where Kyrgyzstan is on a map, but I bet you can find Free Parking and the Reading Railroad in your sleep. What an odd cultural touchstone.