I'm getting used to adulthood. For several years now, there's been a slow trickle of friends from high school emailing me or otherwise contacting and making their presence known. I don't know how many years I spent trying very hard NOT to think about high school at all - probably 10 or so, until I decided to become too self absorbed with my own problems to notice that I was thinking quite often of the derelicts that I used to hang with.

Case in point, my buddy Ashcraft was an often homeless musician chum of mine. Kept running away from different foster homes in the town we lived in. Also was a pretty damn good guitarist and bassist - showed me how to play Stairway to Heaven + the Rush song "Limelight" when we were 15 or so. Later, we play Kiss and Judas Priest covers in an un-named band that I always called the Dogs but I think it may have been called Generation Landslide. We practiced regularly on Saturdays at 1 for the better part of 1985/86. Never had a singer though, and none of us could cut the vocal duties with our crappy puberty voices. Also in the band was guitarist L. Wallbanger and a kid drummer who - I kid you not- was a dead-ringer for the actor who played Spinal Tap's manager in the first Spinal Tap movie. (Everytime I see that movie I get the chills...) A formative time, to be sure. Guess you had to be there - probably were. I also guess that the point I was getting at is that I talked to Ashcraft on the phone after a 17-year hiatus in our friendship. You know what? People don't change. Still the same funny, cynical dude I remember from the 80's, only now programming the world for destruction by working at some multi-death corporate job in some secret state. Sounds like he's doing good, staying off the sauce and the eye-injected lsd but now addicted to the internet - you tell me which is worse.
Yawn... okay, off to my happy job - wheeeeeeeeee!!