Big plans (PC, not done yet…)

by ModernAncient

Posted to Stories on 2002-11-13 15:33:00

Big plans these days. Big ideas. Today me and a friend went walkin by the lake across the street from my house. For the first time in a month we sat down at the old broken down fireplace and smoked.

For weeks and weeks before this, it seemed all the same. For the first weekend since school ended I felt like I might have a future. Big dreams in my head on this damp November Wedensday. We walked in the woods talking about life as the last two months since school had started. Since the begining of this year, all my friends had lived vicariously, from weekend to weekend. Party to party to friday night to saturday night -visit the 24-hour joints around town -Dunkin donughts late night four AM visits to the 24-hour deli north of here -Evil fog drifting through the valleys of our all night adolescent excursions into money and opulence, wealth, drugs and vices the likes of which no one under twenty should see. My schedule for the months is as predictable as my day.

Just as the bells ring in school, every so often, and run by some master clock back in the wicked machinery of the place, my schedule was the same. Each monday I sit in class eye’s glazed and mind numb. If eyes are the window to the soul, my blank stare into the longing of sleep is obvious. The week flies by in some kind of wierd anticipation of the madness to come friday night. And so i find myself in the last class of the week. -Heart thumping, mind reeling, fingers and legs bouncing, eyes nervously darting from teacher-clock-teacher-clock…
And then the bell rings.
Salvation?
And so everyone darts out. The class is empty in seconds. It’s like i stood up and did somthing so incredibly ugly everyone had to leave, FAST. The weekend has begun. The nastiness of my life and the wierd evil haze of my friday to sunday is soon to come.

I’ve been living since September being half sober during the week, and living the weekends half dead and half alive. Sputtering around in some sleepy march. Battling my falling eyelids and just cramming shit into my body. More importantly, into my mind.

So with all this, a break on Wednesday was welcome. After we smoked we stood up and began walking. And this being a time in our lives of great plans and things to come, including but not exclusive to college, jobs, careers, the summer of our senior year and our lives as we would live them for a very long time.
The two of us got to talking. He needed a job because caddying would end with the coming of winter, snowflakes would keep him poor. -Quite simply, I was always poor. We were both so sick of the pattern, and him more than I. He didn’t even spend half the nights out, although I did. We were both numb and tired, and our heads so shot through from so many bullets of beer, whiskey and weed.
I decided to explore the possibilities.
Lets explore me.
Back in middle school, in my earlier teenhood I was a nobody. No one knew my name although I knew theirs. No one cared about my affairs although I knew which junior footballer was hooking up with which training bra-toting, gucci backpack wearing, lip-gloss smearing, mini-bimbo. usually part of the elite, back-stabbing group of manipulative 13 year-olds known as the “Lunch Bunch” Despised by everyone, including themselves. They hated name but somehow it suited them. At lunch they would run around wearing little neon outfits, gossiping and back stabbing, poking fun at Jhonny’s boxers of Lucy’s too-big boobs. They were a sick bunch, and I was as happy to stay away from them as they were that I stayed away. But even through all this, I stayed friends with my rich Pound Ridge members of that elite group.
In Middle school I was either hanging out with my two best friends from elementary school or I was climbing. From seventh grade to mid tenth grade I did four things. I ate, slept, climbed and read. No time for homework or sports. Only the weekly boy scout meeting and maybe a school book or two.
I spent four nights a week climbing at the climbing gym half an hour from hy house. Four nights a week, excluding sunday I spent about four hours each visit climbing. On the weekends I would go to the gym at nine in the morning and come back by 30 mile round trip on bycycle at 7:30 or 8:oo. When I couldn’t ride to the gym, or couldn’t get a ride I would usually read. But not regular books. No no… I read Bukowski, and Kerouac and Thomson taught me to be a man. So between my bleeding hands and tired word-weary eyes I had no time for anything else. On the rare occasions when I was not occupied by these two addicting activities I was with my friends of Old. One had moved fifteen miles in the opposite direction of the climbing gym, and the other was fankly too fat to climb. These two were friends in the Lunch Bunch and knew all the coolest people. If I hadn’t been almost completly seperated from them in school I probably would have existed to half of them from the ages 11 to 14.
After a year of climbing as much as 22 hours a week, I began to get very very good. I won competitions all along the north east and it never really even seemed that hard. I would climb right along next to, and even pass all the 30 year old veterans, slamming out all the hardest routes, and somtimes with only my arms.
It seemed I was built for it. A machine made solely for climbing. I was a wierd lean piston, cruising against gravity for minutes, feeling only the pull of that everpreasent but easily defveatable law of nature. I never fell. When I fell it was because of me. Falling was an unacceptable mistake in climbing as far as I was concernced. Slipping was allowed and encouraged, but all our falling was damn near dispicable. Climbin was pure and good. Climbing was meditative and religious. When I was climbing all the jelous and badness of the world was background noise, and if I was really wired, I didn’t hear anything at all. I was only aware of my straining arms and back, the only think I knew while climbing was where my hand would go imidiatly after my hand moved.
I often tore calouses off my fingers, and the gym guys yelled at me for bloodying up the holds.
Then, in tenth grade my finger blew. So much for all that. With a finger so far gone I’d never compete again, and no friends I found myself wandering my house on friday and saturday nights, with nothing to do. Sure sure I could read, but being a social person I needed to get out. My friends before this point had been 18 to 13 year olds working in the climbin gym. Modern-day hippies, hardcore with hands like mine and ripped 5% bodyfat torso’s. They were my young adult equivalents.
So I started taking to my two friends from elementary school, and all their nice girlfriends noticed the new, kinda wierd, obviously athletic friend. At pool parties my lean body, capable of 30 pullups and a back that looked like some kind of powerful winch would all be uncovered. It only took a few ultimate frizbee games in front of the school not wearing a shirt to be popular. It all happened so fast.
Since then I’ve served as the eccentric but charming, smart bookworm hippie type in the new sophisticated lunch bunch. Who poke and prod with their money and pomp, but never really got past being 12 and cruelly inhuman.