I left home after high school and continued with the Composition books for maybe a year after high school and then switched to using a Day Runner-type organizer and writing daily things into the calendar spaces. I ended up writing about a lot of illegal activities in the Composition books so I kept those hidden in a space under the back seat of my car. When my car died and I left it in a parking lot in Texas, I forgot to bring the journals with me. So I stuck to the Day Runner thing for the next year. After I started getting into all kinds of legal problems in Highland, IL and kept getting visited by the police I decided to burn my Day Runner logs because of all the illegal activities it contained. I didn’t want to have the police confiscating it, you know?
SO THEN…I think my next move was going without a journal for about a year. Then I started inputting everything into a Casio organizer that I got from Radio Shack. A silly idea since there would be no way to print things or convert them into any other format. I probably lost that journal when the batteries died. After getting a laptop computer, I started doing journal entries in the Windows 3.11 Calendar program. I might still have backups of those somewhere because I’m sure I backed those up. From there I quit using a journal for awhile because I was writing everything I did into the PLA issues. I just started doing the journal thing again a little over a year ago into an ASCII editor. Every few months the journal gets backed up onto a CD. And then I started posting the journal on this page just so I could feel like I’m a cool person that has a Live Journal. Plus my journal will probably get backed up onto archive.org so I guess there’s no chance of me losing it now. But it sure sucked that I’ve managed to lose pretty much all of my journal writing for the past 20 years or so. I’ll try to do better from now on.
This is a picture of me and an old friend of mine named Sara, taken at some point during the 1980’s. We lived next door to each other our whole lives but never said a whole lot to each other. I think this was because I was 2 years younger than her and was known as, for the most part, the annoying little brother in the group of kids that hung out on our block. Then one day, somehow, she suddenly turned into my best friend. I think it was around 4th or 5th grade for me. She was more like my evening best friend, though, since my after school best friend was John Sever.
Mostly in the evenings, we spent every minute together. When it got dark outside, we would embark on all kinds of evil missions. The missions included, but weren’t limited to, toilet papering trees, stealing porch light bulbs (or just loosening them to make them appear burnt out), peering in windows, setting things on fire, knocking and running (we called it nigger knocking, honestly not knowing that was a racist term) and avoiding police cars at all costs even if we hadn’t done anything wrong, which usually meant being chased by them because they thought we were up to no good.
We used to rearrange people’s lawn furniture, we’d hang strings across the roads to confuse motorists, once on trash night we stole everybody’s trash and put it in one person’s back yard. In the trash area, not the yard. But it was about 5 blocks worth of trash in one single yard (the Parker house). I bet the trash men were a little confused about that one. Another time we attempted to make a wall of trash bags along the backside of Whitney Page’s yard, but ran out of trash before it got very high. It was still amusing to see it there for the next day or so.
We started a club at some point, called the BASLC. The Brad and Sara Lab Club. Because my garage was the lab. We had monthly dues, but I don’t think we ever actually spent the money on anything. In fact, I never got my share of the money back after we went our separate ways. I was ripped off! I think we were hoping to save up for a set of intercoms to put in our rooms so we could talk to each other. Our windows faced each other, but were on different floors. So we had to contact each other by shining flashlights, throwing rocks, or doing half-rings on the telephone which annoyed our parents. I don’t think our “club” ever actually did anything besides collect dues.
She played guitar, and we recorded quite a few tapes of us singing and talking together. I think she ended up with most of those, because I only have one of them now. We wrote a few songs together, mostly weird parodies. I think I still have lyric sheets to them somewhere around here. I know we did a lot of hits of the time too, but the only one I can remember is Islands in the Stream. We were into the duets.
I spent weeks during the days drawing a colored, detailed, scale (more or less) map of our block to help us on our missions. This map was on a small piece of posterboard and included every rock, tree stump, garden, car, clothesline, etc. in everyone’s yard. I suppose the map didn’t really help, it was more just to make it all more fun for us. I even bought those pin flags, to mark important things on the maps.
My garage was command central, we carried walkie-talkies, we had code names, we had our own secret handwriting that we could read and write fluently. I still can, in fact. Anyway, we did these things for about 2 or 3 years straight. She finally grew up and became interested in a boyfriend so we stopped hanging out so much and I found new friends. We hung out a few times during jr. high and high school, but I guess we’d outgrown our nightly missions by that point.
Last I heard, she married, had a couple of kids and moved to Montana or something. But I’d say our nightly adventures had a pretty severe impact on my life. Someday, years from now, Sara will happen across my homepage and read my rant about her. HI SARA!
Someone tell me why this is cool:
That’s a neighbor of mine mowing his lawn. I’m sitting here at the computer, minding my own business and he decided to start mowing his lawn wearing that. So of course I grabbed my camera and snapped a picture. I guess I’m just too old to understand the new show your underwear and/or butt crack fad. What keeps his pants from falling all the way down once they reach that low?? Does he velcro them to bottom part of his underwear? Why don’t people just buy clothes that fit?? I can understand loose-fitting clothes, but it seems like somehting like that would just be an inconvenience. I guess this guy was just determined to look cool while he mowed his lawn.
Anyway, my weekend wasn’t too bad. I played with the kids a lot, went to a wedding with Tricia, roasted marshmellows, went to a park, mowed my lawn in jeans that fit me and bought a suit. I think it’s probably been about 17 or 18 years since I’ve owned a suit.
I get the idea that you enjoy computers. Don’t you relaize that
with all the information you have provided you are giving someone out
there family names, photos, addresses and the like. C’mon I see you
don’t like your father-in-law too but you should be putting your family’s
safety first. Think about it…..whatever your name is.
I keep re-reading it, trying to figure out what he’s talking about. I think it was just designed to confuse me or something. At first I thought he was trying to say that I’m not really me, I’m just someone making a pretend web site which is designed to give out a bunch of information on some guy that I’m pretending to be but I don’t really like. But then there’s the confusing father-in-law statement which I’m not getting at all. Or maybe he’s just saying that I shouldn’t make a website for myself because stalkers might use the information on the site to stalk me and my kids. But again, there’s the father-in-law statement. I don’t hate my father-in-law. Or EX father-in-law I guess I should say. And even if I did I don’t think I’ve said anything negative about him on my site. Unless I did it in a drunken stupor. But I haven’t been drunk in 12 years or so, so that doesn’t work. And whose address am I giving out? Where is this?? This has really started my Monday out on a confusing note. I need to email this guy and ask him to clarify things so I don’t lose sleep over this.
Keep in mind, the closet door you see was actually outside of my room when I started this on Tuesday. There was a whole other wall to my room there which I removed without taking pictures first. So the size of my room is considerably bigger now. Now when I get out of bed in the morning, I’m “coming out of the closet.” HAHAHA, I KILL ME!
