MLWS: Against My Better Judggment

I stole a song that reminds me so strongly of my manchildhood (that period between age 22 and 26 or so) that I had to tell you guys about it. I don't know how long it will last, or what form it's going to take, precisely, but it's another part of my life that I haven't really talked about...

GG and Rebecca, you know some of these people. Keep it to yourself, although feel free to correct me via email if you feel I'm getting something wrong.

Sometime after the giant acid retailing days of the early nineties, and after the brief social remission I had as a result, I somehow hooked up with a couple of old friends from my second go-round with college. We had drifted apart after I left college the second time, mostly because they didn't approve of drugs and I didn't approve of gun running...which sounds kind of melodromatic, but it's the truth. Although I didn't really have any problem with gun-running morally, you understand, I just didn't feel comfortable storing crates of contraband in my rather limited closet space. I prefered wafers and doused papers to crates and gun oil, in other words. Inconvenient.

Anyway, they were my friends, and while I'm not sure how we jumped the gap between "friends" and "hanging out regularly again," I'm pretty sure it wasn't my fault.

There was a lot of deep background that I could expound upon, if I felt like giving you the best foundation in My History, but this isn't a history blog, it's a story blog, so I'll just pick it up...sheesh...what was the first memorable story?

Ah, jeez. The first memorable story...no, it's not memorable, at least not for you. For me, well, let's see:

Edless was a big guy, smart, but with a short temper and a broad waistline, which seemed at odds with his abundant energy and professed lifestyle...I wasn't really sure if I liked him or not, but he sort of came as a package (one of those annoying heat-sealed-plastic packages that takes a boxcutter to get into) with another friend of mine, Chuck. Keeping it simple, Chuck and I had met the previous semester because he was doing a paper on Satanism in Oklahoma....and...well, we became friends. Not due to Satanism, you understand (although lots of Evil Dead movies and whiskey were involved), but due...well, yes, perhaps it was whiskey. Anyway, by the end of 1995 I was a regular invitee to some of Chuck's parties.

It soon became apparent to me that Chuck had a lot of rather colorful friends. Now, I'd pretty well plumbed the depths of colorful people as far as punks, acidheads, hippies, hipsters, homos and hoodlums is concerned, but I found in Chuck's crew a gang of people who seemed...as energetic, as happy, and as dissolute as my own crew. The difference was their...creed, you might call it. Most of the specific group I want to talk about were skinheads of various sorts--I want to be clear that Chuck's friends were not predominately skinheads, but rather the group that I'm talking about was primarily skins.

Eh, I know this is rather disjointed, but I've been working my way up to telling these stories for quite some time. Personally, I'm not one for joining any group, much less one that requires a haircut and a uniform...

But tomorrow, or sometime soon, I'll tell you drunken stories.

Yes, feel free to jump the gun and start a comment thread about consorting with fascists and such. I'll be here, and I have a much bigger font than you. Sucka.