Over the summer between Freshman and Sophomore year, my British friend Alex came out to visit. Between 2002 and 2005, we had spent endless nights talking to each other on MSN Messenger and Myspace. He was destined to have a significant career in the music industry. He had been a roadie for bands like Zebrahead and travelled to Japan. In order to avoid potential lies, I won’t say others that have entered my mind. Something tells me he met Lemmy from Motorhead at some point, but I can’t be too sure. Something that had been brought up a few times throughout our conversations was my curiosity to see what a music studio was like. I didn’t actually want to record, just be a fly on the wall. He promised that he’d make it happen. 20 years later, and nothing’s resulted from it. I’m not mad.
He has allegedly seen Green Day well over 30 times. If you know where to look, he was actually in the front row with his ex-girlfriend during the Bullet in a Bible taping. He could play “Good Riddance” on guitar behind his head. He was an over-achiever. When we visited a grocery store, he had a heart attack from how big the aisles were. He was obsessed with going to fast food restaurants and getting free refills. The vision of America was clearly alive in this teenager’s eyes.
I want to say this was 2005. At some point he dated my friend Alex and spent part of the trip going around with her. On one occasion, her mother drove us around and I wasn’t allowed to sit in the backseat of the Volkswagen because it would be too much weight.
At some point we also went on a road trip to Sacramento. Because my father enjoyed camping, it was an excuse to show him the joys of nature. I can’t recall much of it, save for one night. In this instance, we were camped next to a three-piece family. They were friendly, but mom and I were convinced that something seemed off about them. My father, Alex, and my sister spent a portion of the evening sitting around their camp fire talking about who knows what.
At some point I hear Alex yell, “I’m not gay!” Much like everything else, this was a prodding from my father. Because he had a British accent and was above conventional attractiveness, I think he assumed he was gay. Given that this was the Mid-00s, there was something emasculating and my father found it funny. There was something about how Alex said, “I’m not gay!” in an offended (or maybe it was annoyed) tone that made him laugh the whole summer. If I had to predict, I think it’s something that’s been brought up on and off over the past two decades.
But yes, my father encouraged behavior that was closer to rough housing. In hindsight, I think a lot of it explains a certain insecurity I have around my body. While I won’t accuse them of greater accusations, I feel like the behavior would be classified as something else in this present age. Still, there was the conventional “purple nerple” behavior that became a summer long game where you were forced to be on guard the whole time or face embarrassment as you folded in on yourself from an overprotective response. They’d laugh and you had no choice but to take it. This translated to an equally baffling routine of pushing Gina’s son David into bushes whenever we were with him. The last time my father and David were in the same room, there was a major argument over my father’s history of bullying him that was uncomfortable but very much deserved.
Before I return to this neighboring couple, I want to touch on an event that was notorious and has traumatized me ever since. Because we were intent on playing pranks on each other, Alex provided a great release for my father. He was creative about it. He knew how to navigate a scene. For as much as I personally loathe it in memory, I insecurely tried to prank back with very little success. However, I remember at one point we were playing frisbee at another camping spot. As we did it, Alex came from behind and pantsed me. It was a classical maneuver of surprise. We had stopped including my sister in it when the other Alex had to tell my father that she had her period and didn’t feel comfortable being that kind of vulnerable.
What should’ve been a simple shorts to the floor routine ended up becoming a memory that Alex still brings up. He’s taken on a part-time career in stand-up and from what I recall, he does use me as subject matter from time to time. For as much as this time shames me, I’m not against him using it given that he has been mostly a caring friend outside of youthful antagonism.
Basically, I had a cyclical routine of wearing and not wearing underwear. This was a day where I went “commando” and you can guess what was seen. My father, across from us, watched the whole thing and laughed. He loved to talk about how I pulled up my shorts and chased after Alex while an innocent bystander at the nearby campsite fled. Among other details he’s brought up was the idea that it was “cold out.” Thankfully it’s a story that’s faded with time, but still the amount of embarrassment we were all privy to has caused a lot of mental problems as I’ve aged. As I struggle to be vulnerable in more emotional ways, I still feel that something like this will happen and people will laugh at my naivety.
But back to the family. Basically, we were going through the night and my mother came to one conclusion. The mother looked like she was on speed. She was talking to herself in her own corner of the site. This didn’t seem like much given that they weren’t harming anyone. However, as the night went on, a few things happened. For starters, the father made a campfire that was maybe a bit too bright and a bit too large. This caused staff to stop by and try to calm him down. This led to an argument and another conflict with the daughter. In one of the more heartbreaking scenes I’ve witnessed, the child tried to escape the central family tent and sleep away from them but found her parents overpowering. They dragged her back over.
The good news is that nothing significant from there happened. The fire was put out, but it did leave us with certain remorse for the child. As we drove back to Long Beach, we just kept thinking about that night. I can’t recall how many more stops we had along the way, but that one has stuck with me.
At other points, I remember driving around town with our heads out the window while playing “American Idiot.” It’s one of those experiences that you wish never ended. It’s meaningless, but it captures this freedom you didn’t know you wanted. Because Alex’s favorite band was Green Day, we listened to them a lot. As we were driving through North Long Beach (for alternate context, Vince Staples’ “Norf Norf” provides clues), Alex joked that we shouldn’t be playing “Minority” in that environment.
There’s probably more to the story, but I can’t recall what’s worth mentioning here. As it stands, there was so much going on at the time that makes it difficult to not be sidetracked by any of it. That was the summer where I met Joe Escalante of The Vandals because they opened for Flogging Molly. Given that I was a big fan of his Barely Legal radio show, it felt like a big deal that he signed my shirt.
But starting to shift to the next school year, I want to briefly mention some things that I forgot to mention about my Freshman year. The most noteworthy is that in January, I attended the presidential inauguration of George W. Bush’s second term for People to People. It’s one of two times I had been to Washington D.C. and a significant moment for me. I won’t say much more as it’s deserving of its own entry, but I remember being such a Southern California kid that I underdressed for the event and had to warm up in the portapotty at one point. Also, to provide clues for when this was, John Kerry entered the seating area on the jumbotron and was roundly booed.
Another thing that I think has aged poorly but reflects where I was in 2004 was a moment in English class where I got seated with this kid. I’ll call him Stephen. Something that I enjoyed about being in high school was taking the chance to create a new image that I used to essentially mess with kids. During this time, I jokingly told him that I was an atheist. In 2024, I don’t believe myself to have ever been atheistic. A more appropriate term is agnostic or lapsed Catholic. Still, I wanted to know what his response would be. There was something about his bafflement that I could use as my own amusement. It was one of my first times using the vulnerability of a stranger to amuse myself.
While he never hated me, Stephen wouldn’t stop telling people how there was something wrong with me. At one point he even suggested that I should listen to Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.” Given that 2004 was the year that “The College Dropout” came out, I think it made sense. If you are capable of removing yourself from later Nazi sympathizer comments, I actually think there’s something to what he meant by that. Still, I was doing what I could to see how others responded.
I can’t fully recall when it happened, but 2005 was the moment when my parents officially split up. I think they were waiting for my sister to complete middle school before going through with things. Without getting into their private affairs, they eventually decided separation instead of divorce. This was a situation that didn’t fully come to fruition until 2010, but the seeds were planted sometime around high school. I guess that’s a win in somebody’s book.
With all this said, I don’t know that I fully connect with people who feel “damaged” by divorce or separation. For as many conflicts as I recognize my parents to have as people, I never felt the need to keep everything together for some greater purpose. Instead, I felt that they would be happier apart. On some level, I do think it has made me side more with a toxic vision of what love is, that it can never last. That may have been a later development. Even then, I think it’s difficult to say the separation itself was the reason for a lot of complicated views on happy loving couples.
I bring this up here because this was the point where my father decided to finally move out on his own. I think it was around the time that he stopped working at Fun Services and started a notorious relationship with my grandpa (the one who ran the business). There’s allegations that differ on who was to blame for the rocky relationship. This was also around the time my dad began having surgeries for different arm problems that might’ve been exacerbated from that career. Because of that lifelong struggle and the sense that he’s barely gotten better overall, I do struggle to see the appeal of most surgeries outside of life-saving procedures. He also would get overly defensive of his medication, even slapping me if I made a snide comment about it. The irony is that while my uncle was in and out of jail as a drug addict in ways my father detested, I’ve come to see my father as damaging on my views of medication and how they don’t seem to solve problems.
I think we were encouraged to move in with him for a few reasons. The most noteworthy is that he was the “cool parent.” He was going to let you swear around the house and watch PG-13 and R movies. There was a perceived freedom you had when you were in his supervision. He was buying me FHM and Maxim Magazines, doing anything he could to sell me on the tropes of masculinity. By comparison, my mom seemed distant. There would be long periods of time where I never saw her. Because she wasn’t the most equipped to handle maintenance, her home looked to have shoddy upkeep. Part of that issue more stemmed from how helpless she was because while the new house was pristine, he kept the cars he bought impulsively in the other one’s driveway. Given his infatuation with having spares, he bought cars simply for replacement parts because he believed it was cheaper. It was cute in 2005, but having 90s Saturn cars taking up space is just gross now.
One of my bigger disappointments is that my father used a garage as a storage unit. He had all of his tools there. While they were organized quite effectively, there was no room to store a car. I’ve always been envious of those who are able to pull out a beeper and watch the door open before driving in. There’s something that felt safe and protective about it, and I hope one day to have that indulgence. My father believed that tools were important and they made him happy. I still can’t complain no matter how much I want to because it was a resourceful storage place.
While there’s a lot to talk about around Sophomore year, I do think that it’s probably the most underwhelming year of the four. It was more of a transition from the rudimentary debut and the ceremonious achievements that would come in Junior and Senior years. For now, it was a period of introductions and goodbyes to a variety of people.
Because my father bought a home close to Millikan, I was often encouraged to walk home afterwards. I’d put on a CD and navigate the streets. It was usually stuff like Lily Allen, The Specials, M.I.A., or Less Than Jake. I was an avid reader of Spin Magazine and used the reviews to pick out albums that interested me. It also helped that I learned around this time about online piracy, so I was exposed to a lot. I was indulgent at the time and enjoyed just burning discs. We also had DVD burning software that we copied many of the movies we rented from Redbox. Given that this was during the final days before they installed anti-piracy software onto discs, I had a significant collection in binders.
I suppose that I’ll start with gym. Unlike the previous year, this was one of the more pivotal classes that I ended up taking. I was friends with a lot of the people I met in 2004, but none of them were promoted to people that I regularly hung out with. In this instance, I met two guys that would become my entry point to a larger friend group. Eric and Nadir. One day we were stuck in a gym just watching everyone else play basketball. They encouraged me to come over and talk with them, and slowly we morphed into a friend group.
I can’t say that there was much to say about them at this point. Nadir wasn’t long for the friend group. After a few months he navigated to somewhere else. He liked me because I had CD-burning software and encouraged me to give him copies of the Bad Religion CD’s. He once tried to get me to burn a copy of a porno he had, but I rejected him. I won’t say that’s why there was a rift, but it was clear he was an antagonistic type.
This was never more evident than our first time hanging out together outside of gym. I ran into them walking around campus. They invited me to join as they asked random people for bus change. As far as I know, they didn’t actually need the money but made persuasive cases for collecting spare change. By the end of lunch, they acquired quite a few dollars. I tried to be cool around them and did things that were just as antagonistic, but it never felt right. Even watching Nadir laugh at my off-color remarks wasn’t enough to make it feel satisfying.
To be honest, I don’t know when the two people became a whole posse, but there was a point where suddenly I was in the middle of a larger group. If I were to hang out with anyone outside of school hours, this would be it. We’d go to the park by Tim’s house and run around for four hours just doing the most meaningless things imaginable. We’d go to the local theaters and plan how to sneak in half the party. I was never front and center for those plans, but I did often heard the more ambitious people talk about how they were collecting tickets so that they would have an alibi. I guess it worked because everybody was there. We packed the room and lived our own naïve lives while theater hopping.
Before I start introducing the extensive group, I thought that I’d touch on Eric. He was a romantic at heart. He wanted to join the military and in later high school years was heard muttering, “He’s talking with Davy, who’s still in the navy” from the Billy Joel song. Even then, he was responsible for some of the more jock-like humor that I was connected to. When we walked around campus, we’d come across a group of Mexican kids and he’d jokingly yell, “Border patrol!” Given that we were a year out from a school-wide walkout where Mexican students left to protest border issues, it was a prescient matter. Still, I can’t think that anyone was mad about it because we saw them a lot and they seemed like decent people. There was one kid who was very skinny that we called Tweaker less because of his drug habits and more because he physically looked tired – which may or may not have been a byproduct of having some disease that needed to be operated on.
To return to the main group, I will briefly touch on the people that I felt mattered. At the center was Tim, who loved to pick on me. His signature was opening mayonnaise packets and spilling it on my shoe. He also liked to “scoop” me, which basically meant that he would flip a hand underneath my chest. He was the goofy leader of the pack.
Next to him was Tony a.k.a. Red due to being a redhead. I have complicated feelings about him overall, but it all stems from developments that would happen in time. For now, he was the closest we had to the nerd audience. He played World of Warcraft and had an extensive knowledge about video games. He’d often break from our group to talk with the nerdier sector about things that I honestly didn’t care about.
There was Billy, who was in J.R.O.T.C. and overall a decent guy. Unlike Eric, he seemed more focused and career-oriented. He’d tell me things about the military and I learned that soldiers were required to salute back if you saluted them. Of everyone in later years, he’s the one who tried hardest to get me back into the group post-high school, but I just never cared.
There was Danny, a Mormon who was also on the obese side. As far as humor goes, I always thought he was a bit too simple-minded. He was the type to write “poop” in my yearbook. He didn’t provide any sentimentalism and that always bothered me. As the group expanded and we got less inspired varieties of people like Ian (who enjoyed yelling “I got shot!” whenever a loud clang was heard in the distance) or Jordan (a sentimentalist that I probably would’ve liked if I met him now), I felt like we were catering to the type of people Danny was. He wasn’t a bad person, but there was a love of very lowbrow comedies that never connected with me.
I think if there’s anything that bothered me about the group is that they were the ones that I spent the most time around. In some respect, they were the type who enjoyed causing pranks around campus. We hung out in a significant area where we often had play fights with the hackysackers across the way. At one point I got coaxed into a guy named Joe teabagging me because I misunderstood what he wanted from me laying on the pavement. Still, it got a good laugh.
In some respect, they were the stereotypical friend group you’d expect from the Mid-2000s. It was somewhat homophobic. I remember Danny suggesting that he was against gay marriage because he didn’t want to imagine them having sex. I wish I was more clever to respond, “In fairness, nobody wants to see you have sex either.” It was a hostile group to some extent, as another tangential friend had a fight with his girlfriend where he loudly called her a “cunt.” For as much as it was great to have this defensive shield, the reality was they were the ones I was least close to in the three years I knew them. It was odd then that I spent that much time around them.
Moving onto other classes, I want to touch on English class. If you were to randomly find a copy of our yearbook Aries, you’d actually be able to find a picture from the first time that I met Glose. It was the first day and I was sitting there listening to orientation. She looked over to me and you could see the back of my head.
I think it’s about here that I bring up something that’s conflicting. Millikan had some amazing English teachers and I like all of them for different reasons. Vann remains my favorite easily, though I feel a bit conflicted by Glose. It’s not because of anything she’s done but I do feel like I became shy around her the further away from high school we got. Because we lived relatively close to each other, we sometimes drove by to visit her and I regret that the last time I saw her was one where I refused to exit the car while everyone else did.
On a subconscious level, she is one of those people I had a crush on. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, I was the type of teenager who was attracted to teacher types. I needed to receive their validation. Something about it made me feel worthy of their attention. It filled me with this greater purpose to see the good grades or be considered smart in a classroom setting. Because I spent a lot of hours outside of class around her, I think there was some sense that we were “friends.” Of course, that would mostly be in the teacher-student sense, but you wanted to believe that you liked each other and enjoyed each other’s company.
I can’t recall much in the way of what actual lesson plans we had, but she soon became a favorite person for a variety of reasons. When there was a guitar club on campus, I brought my bass along and stored it in her classroom. She was a musician herself, playing in a band called Satan’s Cheerleaders downtown. I never actually heard their sound, but because she was into punk music and had tattoos, there was something about her that seemed ostensibly “cool.” The fact that she was enthusiastic that I had a sticker for the band Butt Trumpet only helped to make me more appreciated. She was kind and caring otherwise in the way that any ethical teacher was, but she had a candidness that made you believe she was far from the English teachers I knew. Even Vann seemed buttoned-up compared to her.
Like the other teachers I’ve discussed, she exists in this story over years, and it’s difficult to talk about everything here. With that said, I still consider her one of my favorites and liked that she became something of a family friend for a time. Not to the point where we ever hung out, but my dad would often stop by and have these casual conversations about how her life was going. If anyone was responsible for me wanting to join the yearbook, it was her. At the end of the school year, I helped her move classrooms from one side of the building to the other.
What’s interesting is that a picture of Brody Dalle on my folder caught the eye of someone in my Science class. At the time I was making collages out of magazine clippings, so it was an easy way for others to know who I was. She was a centerpiece of one, and this kid I’ll name Sergio enjoyed it. He said that he was actively rooting for her career. I don’t know much about where his life took him, but apparently he was friends of friends of people in the punk scene and allegedly once shaved the head of S.R. Rob of Transplants. He was so into punk that one time he tried to shape someone’s mohawk and botched it so they shaved his head. He was one of the most down to Earth people I’ve met, which makes it a shame that I didn’t know him for more than that year.
Moving onto journalism. This was the start of three years in the department and I’d argue the first year was practically a wash. Outside of learning the basic functions of a journalism room, I don’t think that I contributed a whole lot to the overall final products. I’d watch as people wrote on a whiteboard the different assignments. You were suggested to write your name on whatever looked interesting and do your best to make it work by the end of the month. We’d receive copies of Los Angeles Times and I read them diligently during every class. I wouldn’t say that I actually did much of note. I remember a kid in the class by the end of the semester writing in my yearbook that he didn’t really know me but I seemed nice.
I had met Cathcart the previous year on a rainy day. I was forced to have her sign an acceptance sheet that allowed me to take her class. Despite any grievance that I’ll have in my Junior year, I don’t think that I could ever actively dislike her. She was nice and encouraging. We became decent enough friends over that time. It’s an odd detail given that my main memory of first year journalism was sitting at my desk listening to Zebrahead’s “Broadcast to the World” while the world around me operated. I maybe edited a story, but it wasn’t exactly like I was making a difference to the larger production.
If there was one thing that I got complimented on, it was my editing skills. Cathcart believed that I had a way of being critical while also being nice. I wasn’t intimidating in how I looked at writing, and it’s something that I take pride in. While I think this is something that developed as the years have gone on, it was one of the things I did best as a journalism student. The irony is that my father believed that I was a much better writer and that editor jobs weren’t as fulfilling, so he was very disparaging about me following that path. Given that he wasn’t ever in the journalism field, it always baffles me why he thought he understood where things should go. Given that this was 2005-2006, there was the peripheral awareness that newspapers were a dying breed and something would replace it. The issue is that we wouldn’t know what exactly upon graduation. I would be part of the early stages to upload archives onto a website, though any further progress was made in the time since. Based on my awareness of the program now, Cathcart has retired and whoever has replaced her has done a phenomenal job of updating journalism to the modern era.
Now, I will jump over to Visions. My original introduction to the program came in 2004. As someone who really liked Vann at the time, I was curious to see what this program was and attended the first meeting. I was so intimidated that I never came back. Then, at the end of Freshman year, he invited me to join. For that and many other reasons, I felt eager to join, and I’m glad that I did. For as much as my first year was about establishing what the program was, it was a chance to realize that literary arts would be something that I felt deeply passionate about.
Part of the appeal of Visions was that we held monthly readings. We began at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf that was up the street from the school. The odd detail is that the business was still in operation, so it was often a crowded event. Still, it was a chance to enact an intimate experience as everyone got up to read something before an attentive crowd. I made my debut with a poem I couldn’t recall, but as the patrons snapped their fingers, it became clear that I was entering a part of my life that I was going to enjoy. More than anything, I liked trying to come up with a poem that would entertain audiences. Every now and then I would wait until the day of them to start writing, so the audience got something fresh and maybe underwhelming.
Because of the success, we would eventually move back to campus in the room known as the black box. In recent years, they have moved to the band room because the black box was flooded and never repaired. It’s tragic, because I had many wonderful nights there. While this is a development more for my Junior year, I include it to show how things progressed in such a short window. By Senior year, we were holding full on carnival-style concerts due to how popular things went. For as much as the Sophomore year of Visions felt insignificant in my greater picture, I still think it was a good starting point.
I showed up and did the work. I was there through submissions up until the final publication, and there was a satisfaction with holding that final issue. While I think Junior year had the most creative group I’ve been part of, Sophomore was not without its charm. Everyone was moody teenagers writing their own edgy poetry. I wrote something about “the death of suicide” which as a double negative meant happiness? I don’t fully know what I was going for and surprised they actually published it.
I think the most amusing part of everything is that it was the year where we held Visions Night in the cafeteria. Every other year would be held in a different location, but here it felt like some minor affair. We had a great time, but it felt like something smaller. I’ll touch on it all in a later entry.
My other experience with the cafeteria was a bit more interesting. Because of how school operated, you sometimes had an off period. If you were on campus and not in class, you had to report to the cafeteria where you’d sit and just wait out the time. Because of whatever reasoning, I was forced to show up to campus during this period for a time and I was sometimes forced to sit with an odd group of people.
While I don’t remember her name, I remember this girl noticed that my Sublime patch on my backpack was falling off. As she stole it, I reached over to grab it and I swore she stuck it between her legs. After the initial eagerness to get it back, I noticed the act that I was performing and pulled back. It wasn’t the first thing that was taken from me, but I felt like it created some weird life-long kink. For some reason, I imagined something I wouldn’t be able to retrieve stuck between legs, struggling forever to get it.
Other people at that table included a stereotypical-looking jock that I don’t have many memories of. The guy next to him had very dark eyes and a droopy haircut. I’ll call him Robalido because I remember one day the jock calling him “Rub a dildo” and him just unenthusiastically mocking him. Despite spending so many mornings around him, there was something ambiguous. I didn’t know anything about him other than he seemed like a manic depressive. My lasting story of him is that he once told me that he didn’t want anyone to save him if he fell down the stairs.
There were also these students that I got stuck next to that seemed intent on helping me hook up. They were actually cool guys who would be on the student council and I’d see going to different classes to do announcements. It’s safe to say that I had no game and thus it was often a disaster to watch me walk up to people in a cafeteria and have them awkwardly move away. It wasn’t a behavior that stuck and I did more to watch how others reacted.
The one that was supposed to be something greater was Nali. For some reason, they decided that I should talk to her and try to make “something happen.” It felt like a relationship more pushed by them, and they stood with that goofy curiosity to see where things would go. I don’t know that Nali was all that comfortable. She was shy and simply trying to make it to the next period. In my mind, I didn’t think she was taking things seriously. That is why when it came to the conclusion that we were to have a date at the mall that weekend, I didn’t show up. I had her AIM which cleverly rhymed Gucci and coochie, but did nothing with it.
When Monday came around and the results were in, I remember running into the guys in the hallway and said that she was “breaking up with me.” We laughed about it. At the same time, I don’t know that Nali was ever serious enough to want to date me. It felt like I was cutting things off before they became complicated. At the same time, I feel like it was maybe a bad move to agree, even by third party, to have a date at the mall and not show up. I never knew if she arrived there and looked around in annoyance, but I like to think we both were on the same page.
What’s ironic is that while most of the people in this equation are people who long ago faded, Nali would be in the background for the next three years. She was friends with people in Visions. She was on the dance team. The last time I saw her was at the bank many years after and we briefly said hello.
While this isn’t a Sophomore memory, I still have a monumental regret around something I said to Nali that I never actively apologized for. At the time, I was into compliments that didn’t start like compliments in order to make them sound greater. It’s the old, “I didn’t like it, I loved it” type comment. She had read a poem at Visions and she came over to ask me what I thought of it and thought of a comment that started, “It wasn’t interesting.” I recognize even in the moment how disarming it was to say that, and I hate that I just didn’t say “It was good.” I rarely heard a poem that I disliked, so why did I have to use a clever response that night? It’s not like we spoke much before then, but it felt like I had let her down and would never receive a chance for mutual understanding. In theory it wasn’t the most offensive thing to say, but you still feel the weight of the wrong things more than the best things.
She’s one of those names that shows up in my Facebook friend recommendations, and I am always reminded of that moment. She seems happier now and I’m glad things are working out for her. I don’t know what she is doing, but I think it’s much better than a life dating me would’ve been.
The last friend that I’ll touch on is Laura. There’s been a handful of women that have called me a close friend despite not really having much to show for it. She is one of those who would occasionally reappear in my life and be like, “Remember when we were good friends?” I have nothing against her and think she is very nice. She had me write her a poem once and it was painfully earnest. Even then, I took whatever friendship I could find. She liked making fun of these sunglasses I found on the ground and made part of my regular look calling them “Foakleys.” She recently added me as a friend on Facebook, and I am reminded of the good times all over again.
The difficulty of really talking about this time is that there’s a lot of stuff that is extracurricular to the narrative. Given that I plan to cover a lot of my music interest for a Myspace entry, I am overlooking a lot of concerts that I went to. I’m ignoring that over the entrance to the 300 building were stickers for both The Matches and a local favorite called Blank Label Society. There was something optimistic about seeing those and feeling like some kid got a good jump on him and got it somewhere that nobody would ever be able to scrape off. And there it stayed for most of the years, reminding me of how there was a decent level of punk mentality in the students. For what it’s worth, I was in a class with the son of a member of T.S.O.L. and vaguely knew his mother, who taught one of the few English classes I never took.
Before I leave school altogether, I want to touch on Justin-Fest. On April 1, 2005, a student named Justin was killed by a car collision. He was riding his bicycle and things slowly spiraled from there. Despite my lack of familiarity with Justin, I apparently was a Myspace friend with him and we talked occasionally, albeit on the more trivial side of things. When he died, I was assigned to write a eulogy for the newspaper. I even went to the religious youth group he was part of to get quotes. Long story short, I didn’t have what it took to capture his essence and someone who was actually his friend was assigned to write something.
But anyway, it became the tragic story of my generation at Millikan. We’d name a portion of the quad after him. More than that, we were to hold a benefit concert at a nearby motel called Justin-Fest. They were all local bands that I never heard from again, but very much indicative of the moment. Some played acoustic while this band called Jonah Oh Jonah did something closer to metal. I think the only reason I knew he died on April 1 was because a singer did a song with the line, “I hope your death was just an April Fool’s joke.”
It was a somber night but also one with a decent amount of celebration. On Myspace, his parents had created a page to commemorate his passing that played James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” on a sidebar. Everyone wrote kindhearted messages paying tribute to a life lost too soon. Given that I barely knew him outside of realizing that he was friends with people I knew in middle school, it was an odd death. I’m sure he wasn’t the only tragedy in those four years, but his outshadows everyone else’s and still comes to mind, especially as 2025 marks 20 years since his passing.
An important thing to note in all of this is something that I think is obvious to those paying close enough attention. For as much as this has been about my Sophomore year of high school, there is one person missing from the equation. My father is there. Even if I haven’t mentioned her, Gina was there. My sister was only one year away from starting Freshman year at Millikan.
To some extent, even Alex was there. She was sticking with the Catholic school education for a while. She went to St. Joseph’s. Given that the St. Cornelius boys were predicted to go to St. John Bosco, it wasn’t the most controversial decision. Because we had gotten used to picking her up in middle school, we still were picking her up in high school. We’d often wait at the nearby Carl’s Jr. and wait for her to show up in her schoolgirl uniform. It’s how I met Jessica, who I thought was a great person but I think had such an impersonal relationship with me that it never amounted to more than amusement. She would eventually transfer to Millikan, but I forget when that was. From what I’ve gathered, she was a bit wayward in her 20s, so I can’t be sure how straight of a line her life ultimately was.
But no. Even as much as Alex and her mother were still in the picture, the one that seemed to be absent during such a pivotal time was my mother. I can’t speak for her relationship with my father, but it was evident that she wasn’t coming over every day to see me and ask how I was. While I don’t think that would’ve been opportune, it would still show a level of access to her child that might’ve been more fulfilling than what she got. She mostly saw us during holidays and under special planned events.
I think the reason she became known as “the theater mother” was because it was a way for us to connect with each other. I’m by no means a theater kid nor do I have a passion to perform. Outside of a developed ritual of going to Denny’s on Sundays to catch up with each other, we also formed an interest in going to events at South Coast Repertory. It’s the theater that remains in the shadows of Segerstrom Theater that’s less than a stone’s throw away. It’s where I saw productions of Doubt and The Importance of Being Earnest in high school. While I don’t think I fully appreciated them, they opened me up to a world of live theater that felt personal and expressive.
In all honesty, it’s difficult to fully describe how I felt about my mother during this time. I’m sure on some level I loved her, but I also felt like there was some subtext to how my dad talked about people that made her seem like a resenting figure. After all, Gina was Madrasta. She was cool and would be there seeing Sugarcult with us. It was the ideal person. My mother was never that type and found my interest in bands like Minor Threat to be confusing and off-putting. Alas, it was a phase that I needed to work through, but at some point I think I came back around. It became clear that my father was very much living a second childhood through us and it could only be appealing for so long.
I think that while these are things that started in Sophomore year, they developed into something grander in Junior year and I’ll talk more about the fraught tension between us in that entry. For now, I look back and realize that there’s something tragic about my mother not being around that much. Given that I’ve since been able to see the flaws of many people, there is something to processing it as impacting how I saw the world and human beings in general. What poor views of individuals did I have because of my father?
Whatever it was, this was the halfway point of high school, and it was interesting how formative it ultimately was. I was making connections to things and people that would come to formulate my remaining teenage years. Whatever was to come would be even bigger and more significant. It’s so much so that I’m sure there will be many tangents on top of the actual school studies. Please forgive me for going long. It’s also the year my sister started at Millikan, so it was no longer just “my” school. There’s a lot to get into, and you’ll just have to wait and see where things go from here.
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