N9YCV

When I was younger, Junior High age to be exact, I had 2 buddies, Jon and Mike. The 3 of us were thick as thieves. Roaming around the shit ass 'burbs finding all kinds of trouble to get in. After 10 fucking years guess who drops a comment on the old blog, no one but Mike himself.
2 months ago I renewed my ham license online and got to thinking about them both. A lot changes in 10 years from 15 ish to 25 ish, so I thought I would bring everyone up to speed.
After Junior High I hung around all summer mentally preparing for High School, you know smoking cigarettes behind the Quikee-Mart and popping zits. Late summer rolled around and my old man decided he didn't want me to go to HS. I'm not sure exactly what his problem was, but what I have been able to cobble together from mixed [first and secondhand] accounts of that whole scene is that he had had the oppurtunity to skip HS and was always pissed his old man didn't let him. Or alternately, he was worried Rolling Meadows was the source of all the drugs in the Cook County Schools Districts. Heck, it had been where he got all his during his 5 and 1/2 years of HS.
All I knew was that I wanted to go to HS. At the time I wanted to play soccer and hit on girls my own age. Newt Gingrich was promising state sponsored dating and I wanted my fair share.
Alas, it was not to be. I spent a year being home schooled, which meant I hung out in the backyard reading books on programming(which I hate) and mathematics (which came easily to me). The summer when I was 15 I started attending the local community college. I had never really learned how to apply myself to my studies, so my results were fair to middling. I had good semesters and poor ones, but since my heart wasn't really in it I spent most of my time in the lounge shooting the breeze with Nazia B. Haque, the artsy girl who sure could make a dress look good.
The fall when I was 16 I went away to college. I transfered to IIT, where I joined a fraternity, got a girlfriend, and payed nearly 16,000 to get a total of 3 credits (a D in german) over the course of 2 semesters. Again, I wasn't very motivated, didn't know why I was there, or how to succeed. I never got into the groove, and filled my time with diversions. Drinking, making out with Christine and internet games were much more fun than studying. As a side note, these forerunners to EverQuest ruined my sex drive, and when I forsook my boyfriend duties for the 'EverCrack' my old lady dumped me like a bad habit. She was right to do so, Wally and Kimi need learn from my folly and go cold turkey, before it's too late.
In my 17th summer I was in a sucky place. I was living off of Top Ramen and cigarrette butts. I had blown it at IIT and was homeless, so I headed back out to the suburbs, back to my folks house. That night Pops stayed up all night working himself in to a frenzy, pissed off about how his son had turned out, and woke me up before sunrise to let me know. He spent the morning violently screaming about how I was a failure, then sent me out to the garage to clean. No Shit. You're worthless, now go clean my garage. I spent alot of my early life listening to him scream, mostly about Ma or their parents. I had spent 17 years listening to his crap. I guess I was at a point where I was sick of his bullshit, so I stuffed my clothes into a rucksack, hopped the fence and started walking.
I had two pairs of threadbare pants, second hand boots, and 12 dolllars in my pocket. Nowhere to live , no job and the nuclear family unit had detonated. As I walked down the road to catch the subway downtown I remembered feeling scared.
I'll finish the story tomorrow, I need some sleep. I just put in my time card, I worked 93 hours last week(which is what happens when you don't apply yourself in college).