2.8: You know what it is if it has a name

I'm in my own head lately. Not in a bad way, either, I'm doing a bit of cleaning up there, know what I mean?

I guess I've just been in a good mood since the whole HMV thing came down. There's been a lot of good lately, and while there is certainly still a little bad (nothing that involves me directly or that I care to mention at this time,) I'm really starting to feel it - and it's reflected out there in the world, I think.

My brother Eric recently graduated high school. I'm really happy for him, because there was a time when it didn't look like it was ever going to happen and it was a little awkward when people would ask about him. He counts four years where he got not a single high school credit, and for much of that he was lying idly aorund the house. In 2002, it was really at a low point because he used to argue with mom a lot about what he was going to do and what direction he was going in. In 2003 it may have been even worse actually because Kris was living with us and going to school, and they were constantly in conflict. It's not easy to verbalize exactly what Kris hated about Eric's situation but it's not hard to imagine. Kris was working his ass off at school, and Eric was abusing his mind and body with prescription drugs and excessive idleness.

In February of this year, Eric enrolled in adult learning centre and started to get his life back on track, after spending the previous year bounding back and forth from career planning groups and other useless BS. He started meeting new friends about his age, he got int a regular schedule, and basically turned himself around. Last week he got the last necessary credit to officially be an OSSD graduate. I'm proud of him, but silently so because if I said so, he's probably think I was just being polite in saying it. Or worse, somehow condescending because I (three years his junior) graduated over a year ahead of him. So, I just hope he assumes I am. He's now doing co-op work with a theatre group around town, doing a prodction of Dark Victory. So that's some of the other good that's been going on.

When I was a kid, my grandma used to babysit neighbourhood kids (and kids that didn't really live so close to us.) That was how I got and kept a lot of my friends before kindergarten. My best friend at the time, Tim, for instance. Then there were kids I played with but didn't really like being friends with, like Travis... no offense to Travis, but to me, he was like a poor man's Tim. But you play with them anyway, because hey, you're four years old. You'll be friends with anybody in your age bracket.

The only girl grandma ever babysat was named Jessie. I only have the vaguest recollections of her, but she was probably over a lot more than I remember. When I was young, my dad built a deck in the backyard and even before this, because my brothers and I asked for it, a clubhouse. it wasn't that big -- in fact, in my later years I came to enjoy jumping off it -- but when you're a preschooler you don't notice these things. Basically, it was a wooden shack in our backyard, and when Jessie would come over, we'd play house, and she'd make "dinner" of "spaghetti..." and blades of grass would stand in for noodles. I didn't have a dog back then, and that was probably a good thing, because as I recall I actually did eat the grass.

One day, she stopped coming over. Maybe she moved, maybe her parents put her into a school different from mine. Who the hell knows. That's not much of an ending to that story, but as Matt Caracappa said in a recent X-E article about halloween... "it wasn't much of a story." I was just reminded of those days because of a poem we went over in (poetry) class today.

That's another thing... I'm starting to get a little more inspiration, and I'm way out of my "blahh I suck at everything" attitude from earlier. I'll probably do some real writing when I get a chance.

So you can all just keep on rockin'
Scott Williams,
Prince of Funk