Well, I've had about 6 rum and cokes, and I'm think I'm just getting started. I figured out why I don't get as drunk at home as at at bars and restaraunts. No straws! But I'm still doing pretty good. Just started my 7th. Haha...and I'm still typing okay.

Oh, I said in my last entry I'd talk about my high school. May as well get it over with.

First of all, it was small, about 400 kids, 100 or so per class. And we'd all been through elementary school together, none of that consolidation shit, so we all knew each other for way too long. And no one new moves to my home town...everyone just moves out, so there was never any new blood to invigorate us. So, for that reason, your social status was pretty much determined in kindergarten and never changed.

Second of all, there were two major classes of people. Rednecks and Preps. There were a few skaters and a few nerds, but that's about it. I was always a marginal man, able to talk to people from every group, but member of none.

Third of all, my class didn't really give a shit about each other. The classes ahead and behind of us did, but not ours. For example, we had a teacher that taught us and the class ahead of ours in 8th grade, then moved up to teach high school. The members of class before ours who mattered, which were all pretty close to each other, ended up breaking down a couple days before classes ended, and had a big ol' cryfest in her class, remembering all the good times they'd had growing up together and thinking about how they'd never all be together again, yadda yadda, yadda. Anyway, that teacher expected the same from us the following year. She said about a month before graduation how, when we only had a few days left, it would happen to us too. It didn't. No one gave a shit, including and especially me. She got so pissed at us, screaming about how we'd never see each other again, and these were our last days together, and we didn't know what we were missing not crying over having to say goodbye to each other forever, etc. But we just didn't care. And, to this day, I know I haven't regretted it, and I'm sure everyone else in my class feels the same. That's just how we were. We never won any sort of spirit award during pep assemblies, we only had two girls that cared enough to be cheerleaders, our sporting teams that year completely sucked. You get the idea.

Anyway, I think that's why I never got over my teen years. Because I never had any. It certainly wasn't like Porky's or American Pie. These days, I'm wishing I could just relive my high school years, just at a different high school. If you had a high school career where you couldn't even dredge up one really good memory, you might feel the same way. I've been cheated! Bamboozeled! I didn't land on high school! High school landed on me!

Plus there's the whole time factor. I went to high school in a really boring time. '91 to '95. Absolutely nothing remarkable about those years except maybe Nirvana, and we didn't even have any radio stations that played them, so I really didn't discover them til In Utero.

Lately, I've been reading diaries by teenagers (which has inspired me to start on this one), just to see what I missed out on. Apparently, a damn lot! I think I've noticed what seperates today's teens from those in my day. The Internet. The Internet didn't really hit big until '96 and '97, a year and two after I garduated. And, beyond that, even then it wasn't what it is today.

Kids these days are so much more worldly and cool than they were in my day, or at least in my school. Perhaps there were teens like there are today running around back in my day in bigger cities and such, but today the Internet has reached its tenticals even into the hills, hollers, and redneck villes like the one I grew up in. So all the ideas and perversions and general fun stuff in the world that we'd never heard or thought of in my day are available anywhere today.

When I was in school, all we had to work with were single line phones. Now kids have multiple lines, websites, chat programs, fucking webcams. Any number of ways to stay in touch, spread gossip, all the fun stuff, and it can all happen 24 hours a day. No more sitting at home at night and waiting til the next day to break up or hook up with your gf or bf. It all happens at any given time, day or night, on buddy lists and through e-mail. Everything moves faster, the good and the bad.

File share programs make it easier to get into different types of music, even in those little burgs like mine where all radio has to offer is country, pop, and classic rock. Porn is everywhere (thank god). Alternative ideas flow freely. Anyone can get them, and it seems like many kids take advantage of it.

And I feel gyped out of all of it. Do you know how much I would have killed to stumble across some website in high school and find out one of the girls in my school had been flashing their tits on a webcam? That would've been fucking great! Or if I'd stumbled across one of their diaries? Heaven!

But no, I was an isolated guy, from an isolated community, with isolated ideas. Jesus, this is what my generation is going to bitch to their grandkids about. "Back in my day, we didn't have streaming chat with all our friends, we had to pick up a cordless phone and call people one at a time!"

Anyway, enough drunken raving. No one's reading this shit anyway, but it's nice to get it all ut there. The more I type, the more likely someone out there in googleland will enter some random phrase, stumble across my diary, and relate with what I have to say.

Til then, more rum and Coke and diary reading!

Wooderson

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