1996 Changed Everything: Pt. 5 - We'll Meet Again Old Friend

This is part of a series of articles about 1996, as it holds significance for me since it was the year I graduated high school. This fifth article is all about the friends we make, the friends we lose, and the friends we keep.

Thirty years ago I walked across a stage, strutting like pro wrestling icon Ric Flair, grabbed my diploma, and began the slow walk from childhood to manhood. My sister Kate recorded much of that graduation ceremony on my old Sears camcorder. I cherish every second of it.

Even today, as the young faces pass by the camera on that tape, I remember so many of them like they are frozen in time. I feel as though those people who held the greatest importance in my life back then still do today.

The classic 1986 film Stand By Me has an iconic quote at the end that sticks with me to this day. Richard Dreyfuss as Gordie types: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?"

I wasn’t twelve when I graduated high school, but that line perfectly encapsulates how I feel about the friends I had back then. I’ve never had any like them since.

We were all learning and experiencing life for the first time together. We were succeeding, failing, laughing, loving, achieving, hurting, rebelling, being overwhelmed, and clinging on to each other as we rose and fell with the waves of teenage life. Those friends I made were not just friends; they were lifelong brothers and sisters.

When looking back at the people I called my friends as I graduated high school, I don’t look at a strict timeline. Many of those I’d have taken a bullet for I had already known for years by the time of caps and gowns. It was as if I already knew I’d found my tribe.

Doing some work in photography class.

Making friends is hard at any point in life. As an adult, it can feel like you’re applying for a job. As a kid, you’re putting yourself out there hoping that a stranger finds you worth getting to know better.

Being as shy and introverted as I was during my childhood, it’s a wonder I made any friends at all. Without luck, I’d have had to wait for a kickball to roll my way and use that as the opening to befriend whoever retrieved it.

My two oldest friends, Barry and Matt, came into my life through luck. Matt grew up across the street from me, and Barry happened to live a few doors down from my aunt. I’d go and visit her and invariably end up with Barry. I met both of them around the age of seven. Barry ended up being one of the most important and influential people in my life.

It’s interesting, as I sit here mining for memories going back 40 years, how I can’t remember those first meetings with people who went on to become chosen family. Oh sure, I can give you the Cliff’s Notes version of when someone crossed paths with me. I can share some early memories. However, the first meeting is a blur in virtually all of these cases. I guess you don’t realize that someone has become an integral part of your life until a certain amount of time has passed.

Hasan lived a few streets over from me. I know we bumped into each other during the summer before 6th grade. We built a bond like steel. He came from the city to Cape Cod and taught me about late 80’s/early 90s Hip-Hop. We played basketball. Rarely was it one-on-one because he’d crush me every time. So we’d do these two-against-zero games against opponents we called the ‘invisible ghosts.’

Tim lived further away, but our origin story is similar, revolving around a shared love of basketball. I remember sleepovers at his house often being punctuated by freshly made donuts the next morning by his parents. It was the Jerky Boys, walks through the woods to get to a nearby strip mall, and countless hours of me trying to figure out how to defend his patented ‘Fishy Swim’ fallaway jumper.

John I had seen around in middle school, but only when we sat next to each other in Freshman English did we connect. It was our just slightly wacky sense of humor that made us friends. I wish I still had my English notebook where we’d one-up each other with foolish lines and drawings, rarely paying attention to what the teacher said. To be honest, I would have had an easier time hearing an ant speak than that teacher, though.

Rob, much like Matt, happened to live close by. Our families were heavily intertwined, but it was only when I entered high school and bought a camcorder that we truly connected. He and I were the typical feral Gen Xers. Out all day on our bikes, going places we’d probably have needed permission to go, junk food, caffeine, crazy ideas, and laughs that brought tears.

Liam was another stroke of luck. We happened to work at the same job at the same time. Standing side by side with him, preparing food while music blasted loudly off the walls, ended up becoming some of my fondest memories of high school. Some funny lines we said back then we still bring up to this day.

There was a massive influx of new friends when I got to high school. My high school saw two neighboring towns’ middle schools combine into one blended family. It was an interesting transition. I played for the basketball team in middle school. A few of the new faces in the halls of the high school were once rivals on the other middle school team. It took a minute to realize we were all on the same team now.

New faces like Steve, Greg, Mike, Kevin, Pete, and others quickly went from strangers to major parts of my crew. Our interactions varied depending on the person. Greg, Mike, and Kevin became frequent subjects of photos during senior year.

An attempt at an artsy photo of those three.

I was taking a photography class and had to practice using a film camera. Those three would pose, or something like that, in the middle of classes. It was my job to hit up the darkroom and develop the foolishness that we created. To this day, Mike insists he wasn’t in any of those photos. The joke is on him, though. He has aged very well, so he looks almost the same today.

During high school, I was at the mercy of my bike, walking, or occasional rides to hang out with friends. I didn’t get my driver’s license until senior year, and even then I had infrequent access to a vehicle, what with me being one of five kids and having a mother working full-time and going to nursing school full-time.

It was a different era in the 1990s. You didn’t sit inside on a phone, playing video games, or watching television. Well, sure, we did all of those things to a degree, but for the most part life consisted of calling friends, quickly getting off the phone, and getting out of the house to have some sort of an adventure.

You quickly learn who your ‘ride or die’ friends are based on the level of stupidity they were willing to join you on. Wandering through the woods? Sneaking into a construction site to explore half-built houses? Hanging out of the back of a station wagon riding a skateboard? Drinking Jolt and creating caffeine-soaked skits with a bulky camcorder? These were only a few examples of what I’m talking about.

Yes, we drove something like this while someone rode a skateboard out of the back.

A classic ride-or-die story happened freshman year. Hasan and I went to a party at another friend’s house. It was in the next town over; we must have been dropped off there. It was populated by probably 8-10 more kids, but it was over thirty years ago, so my memory is hazy. What’s not hazy is how the party ended.

I am sure we were loud. I think there was at least some alcohol there, but I don’t think Hasan and I had more than a few sips at most. It was when the red and blue lights started flashing that we knew the jig was up. The police were there.

All of us 15/16 year old kids scattered. People were going in all different directions. Hasan and I though stuck together. One wouldn’t leave the other. We ran through yards, behind houses, tearing through trees and bushes until we were safely behind a nearby strip mall. It was part terrifying and part exhilarating.

At the strip mall, I called my mother to come and pick us up. We stood in front of a darkened store and waited, letting our heart rates come down. The fact that we hadn’t drunk worked in our favor. When my mother showed up, we didn’t reek of alcohol, so when we told her the story of what had happened, it was believable.

I feel like growing up in the 90s, I had a lot of near misses when it came to danger. I don’t think I’d have gotten in much trouble if the police had snagged me, but who knows? Being a minor, I knew I could do nearly anything I wanted with little repercussions.

That doesn’t mean that I went out defacing people’s property, or starting fights, or stealing. It just meant that the voice in my head telling me something was dangerous kept quiet a lot of the time. Maybe it wanted to see how I’d react to adversity?

I find it interesting that I didn’t go out drinking, or smoking, or partying until all hours of the night, and yet I feel my high school years were filled with adventure. That comes down to who my friend group was.

What the ‘cool kids’ would have thought of as adventures I saw as dangers not worth the time or risk. Now I can’t say for sure that if I was asked to go out drinking and partying and randomly hooking up that I would have said no. I can say that, looking back at the classmates who got DUI’s before they were of legal age and those who held their own children before holding a diploma, I am happy with my choices in friends and adventures.

I chose wisely when it came to friends. I also didn’t restrict myself to any certain subset of people. Only in the last few years have I noticed just how all-encompassing my friend groups were. Yes, I said ‘groups.’

I can rattle off a handful of different groups of friends. These had very little, if any, cross-pollination with other groups. I tried to be friends with anybody who wanted to be friends. It’s the way I was raised by my mother. I tried to fit in with anyone while also staying true to who I was.

Being seen as a poser is a kiss of death in any generation. If you lose your authenticity, you lose credibility. At least that’s how it was in high school. The way I navigated those waters was by amplifying traits around certain groups. I never hid who I fully was; I just shined a brighter light on the things I had in common with the people I was with at the time. Does that make sense?

I must have done a good job in my choices of friends because, as I said earlier, I still consider many of those same people my friends to this day. There are also no friends, not acquaintances but friends, that I regret knowing or having in my life. I think it’s rare to look at your friend group and not find someone who turned out to be a bad apple. I mean, unless we all were bad apples and none of us noticed the difference?

Friendships in high school changed and evolved along with all of us. You start with needing rides to someone's house to using your bike or your own car. Adventures go from walking to the corner store on a summer afternoon to driving to Boston for a killer, loud, AC/DC concert. Relationships could come and go, but friendships tended to stay.

A replica of my concert T since I have no clue where it is.

In my life today, I have more than a handful of friends of over thirty years. Now we don’t get to see each other all of the time due to work, family commitments, and location. That being said, if a friend reaches out to get together, I try my best to move whatever I need to see them.

I still remember inside jokes. I still remember certain foods certain friends liked. I still remember who was in what class. Mainly, I still remember how these people made me feel and why they became my friends in the first place. I think that is the most important thing.

Over time, specific memories might fade. That’s just the price of doing business in life. Feelings remain, though. If I hear any of a few dozen names from high school, whether they are still fixtures in my life or not, I get a smile and a blast of warm positive feelings.

We were all teenagers. We all went through the experience of finding ourselves in the world. If we are lucky, we have a solid crew of friends to navigate the choppy waters with. Very few grow up on one straight, clear path. It’s typically filled with twists, turns, dead ends, heartbreak, confusion, anger, and possibly, if a Gen Xer, indifference.

To wrap things up, I found one song that stuck out to me as far as my high school friendships went. Not surprisingly, it is a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. They were a band that made you cool if you listened to them, along with the Beastie Boys. At least it was in my circles.

The song is My Friends off of their less-than-stellar One Hot Minute album from 1995. The entire song weighs heavily on my memories of high school. The hook, I guess, is the lyrics I gravitated toward.

I love all of you
Hurt by the cold
So hard and lonely, too
When you don't know yourself




It’s a perfectly fitting sentiment. We were growing up, trying to find ourselves, but also knew that even as alone as you might have felt at times, if you were lucky, you had some friends to stand by you through those formative years.

In my next post, I will take a look at my family dynamic during senior year and a look at the role of family in the life of any high schooler. All families are created differently, as was mine.

Alternate Life Timelines. #2 - Moving To New Orleans

This is the second in a series of articles looking back at moments from my nearly 50 years of life. These are moments where I zigged. But what if I had zagged instead?

In some ways, life becomes like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. The decisions you make have ripple effects throughout your life. If you do this, then that happens. What about the decisions or events that could have happened but didn’t? That is going to be the purpose of this series of articles.

The first article saw me reflecting on my decision to not go away to college and, in fact, take a semester off before continuing my education at all. It had a huge effect on my future.

In this second article, I am looking at another moment that had a major rippling effect on my future. This one, when changed, could have resulted in this never being written at all.

These articles won’t be so much about rehashing regrets. They are more of an interesting look at how many times in life you are faced with the potential of a big change. What do you do when the opportunity arises? Let’s try a different path.

In the spring of 2004, I was a mess. The three years since I had returned to Cape Cod after living in Las Vegas had not been kind. Yes, I had graduated from college with a 2-year degree in communications. However, the stink of failure, in my mind at least, was hard to wash away.

I was meant to succeed in Vegas. I was supposed to have gone there, finished college, gotten a good job, and moved Cape Cod into the ‘completed’ chapter section of my life. That did not happen. It will also be a future ‘alternate timeline’ article, so you will get the full story then.

All you need to know for this piece is that I did not succeed in Las Vegas. I came home with my tail between my legs. I went back to cooking, then left for landscaping, then returned to cooking. My most taxing job was battling the overwhelming depression that hovered over me for years.

I was working as a cook in the spring of 2004 when one of the most important moments of my life occurred. I saw her. Through the rectangular-shaped window of the swinging door to the kitchen, I saw the most heart-stoppingly beautiful girl. My world was never the same.

The view from 2004

I officially met her a few days later. She almost immediately cured my depression with the confidence of someone scaring off a bear with a stick. I was in love.

We spent much of the summer together. I felt this unusual feeling of wanting to be my authentic self around her. I always had a tendency to keep at least a little bit of my guard up around people, but she was different. It was like every rom-com rolled into one and gently placed into my hand like a butterfly.


Now, of course, we all know that if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. My summer romance in 2004 was no different. It had nothing to do with her. It had to do with her situation. She didn’t live full-time on Cape Cod. She was a live-in nanny for a family, and they spent winters in New Orleans, Louisiana.

It was a hurdle for sure. At first, it was not insurmountable, though. She would leave with the family back to New Orleans in October, but then return to Cape Cod the following April. The confidence I had in our relationship told me to just relax; good things would be waiting on the other side of a harsh New England winter. Silly me.

In one of those ‘of course’ moments, the husband and wife she nannied for split up shortly after they returned to New Orleans. This meant there was no return trip to Cape Cod on the horizon, because why would there be? Sure, maybe she would have come up for a week to vacation, but our relationship had hit a crossroads.

I had never felt love like I did for her, before or since. I had given her a placeholder ring during one of her last weeks on Cape Cod. Along with it was a promise of a real ring and a potential real engagement when she returned the next year. I don’t think she believed me, but I was deadly serious. She had changed my life so deeply that my focus turned to building on that life with her.

There was a big problem in the way. New Orleans is more than 1,500 miles from Cape Cod. It is not exactly somewhere that you can drive to easily. What was I to do?

In reality, I kept in regular contact with her, typically daily. I slowly felt the distance winning. To try to combat this, I booked a flight to New Orleans in January 2005 and stayed for four days. She and I got to spend a lot of time together seeing the sights, meeting her family, and enjoying each other’s company. It all felt right again.

A collage of memories from that New Orleans trip

I had to act. During a drive around New Orleans, I came clean. I was seriously thinking of moving down there permanently. To my surprise, she seemed shocked by this news. I told her how I felt and how I wanted to at least give our relationship the full chance it deserved.

She didn’t outright reject my plan, but it wasn’t the overwhelming success I'd hoped for. The rest of my time visiting went well. I flew back home fully intending to follow through on my idea. I even began voicing it to my family and friends as if I were trying to make sure I was held accountable.

Weeks passed, and little was said of the potential move. I don’t know if she was hoping I’d forget about it or wanted to see if I was serious or just all talk. When her birthday drew near in April, I again broached the subject. She was not into it.

Unbeknownst to her, I had begun scoping out apartments and jobs in New Orleans in anticipation of relocation. I had begun contacting an art gallery that was looking for a host.

My family saw how serious I was and supported me. Everyone supported me, except for the person I was going to move for. She backed away. She felt things were going too far too fast. Looking back now, her being 23 and staring at a man she had known for a year, planning to move 1,500 miles to be with her, must have been a lot. It was a lot. I know that now, but in 2005, I was as crazy in love as Beyoncé and wanted to finish my story.


What happened in reality?

In reality, I dropped my plans. She and I took a break. I don’t know if you’d consider it the official breakup, but we went from being frequently in touch to being more intermittent. I was hurt and confused. I am sure she was as well. The best of intentions cannot overcome some things.

A few months passed. Then a major event threw us back together. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast of the United States. All of my hurt over not getting the storybook romance I wanted went out the window. It was replaced with fear over her safety.

I reached out and got the update. She and her family were safe. They ended up being evacuated and relocated to Houston, Texas. To this day, she still lives in a suburb of Houston.

The relief over her safety morphed into wonder about my own timeline. As is the title of these articles, I was already thinking of what could have been had I gone through with my move to New Orleans.

So let’s take a look at it over 20 years later.

My original plan was to move to New Orleans, likely sometime in early June 2005. In this timeline, I follow through with getting the job working in an art gallery and also get one of the apartments I had been looking at. I would have driven my Saturn sedan the 1,500 miles from Cape Cod to New Orleans. Fine, so I am there.

The Saturn model I planned to drive to New Orleans

Perhaps the fact that I actually went through with it and uprooted my life in the name of being with the girl I loved would have changed her mind. The odds of that are probably 50-50. New Orleans is a big area, with the metropolitan area being home to nearly one million people. I believe that the apartments I was looking at were between 10 and 15 minutes from where she lived with her family. I’d be there, close, but not right on top of her.

In all honesty, I’d have been trying to court her from the time I got there. After all, she was why I moved. When we were together, we had a chemistry that was undeniable. That was when we were physically together. Apart it was different, like she needed to see me to remember she had feelings. How much would I encroach on her life to be seen?

Not to have rose colored glasses, but I do think we’d end up together, at least to start. Dating is one thing. Being in a serious committed relationship in close proximity is another. How much would she bend to fit me into her life? The bigger question is how much I would bend?

She was, and to this day is, extremely religious. In fact, she and her husband (spoiler) run a church together. Would I have moved things around in my life to accommodate a hefty dose of religion? I honestly don’t think so. Having date nights always consist of church would start to wear on me. I’m not anti-religion, but I am wary of those who make their religion the overwhelming defining characteristic of their lives. It’s the same way I feel about people who do that with politics.

So, we’d probably have had some sort of relationship. To what degree, I don’t know. Looking back on it, I feel like it would have been an uphill climb to get back what we had when she was on Cape Cod. I would have tried, though.


We then get to the bigger issue: Hurricane Katrina. I highly doubt that I would have given up on us by late August. I would have probably stuck it out through 2005 in the hopes of my birthday in November, or Christmas, tightening our bond. This means I’d have been living in New Orleans when the storm hit.

That statement in and of itself is chilling. Knowing how serious that hurricane was, the fact that I would have likely been in its path is crazy. The first question is, what happens to me? I’m grateful I don’t have to find out, but 1,833 people died in that storm.

Even if I were in a relationship, that wouldn’t have meant she and her family were obligated to take me with them. I’d like to think the offer would be made, but who knows? Would I have been fine in my apartment? Would I have been relocated to the Superdome? Would I have ended up in Houston? Or somewhere else?

My honest opinion? I’d have hoped to go with her family to Houston. If that wasn’t an option, I’d have gone back to Cape Cod if possible. To pick a path, I’d say I'd go to Houston, too. Here’s where it gets interesting as far as the future goes.

If I went to Houston, that would mean I was indebted to her family. I’d have been more likely to bend my life around theirs. I could see myself, out of respect, becoming way more involved in religion than I normally would. I’d have sacrificed my interests to stay close to her.

I can’t say if we end up together and I am then the husband she runs a church with. Maybe so. Or do I become resentful and end up leaving her and moving back to Cape Cod, or somewhere else? I was never great at openly discussing serious issues, so I’d have probably simmered until I boiled over.

At some point, we would have ended our relationship, and I would have probably come back to Cape Cod. In reality, once the plans to New Orleans blew up, I still had the itch to move and ended up doing so.

I moved to Florida in September 2005. It was very brief, lasting all of two months before I went home. Ironically, it was because Hurricane Wilma tore through and washed out all of my job interviews. Once out of money and patience, I went back to Cape Cod.

The reality, when I moved to Florida in 2005.

In reality and in an alternate timeline, I don’t think my relationship dream works out. It’s sad but an honest reality check. I end up back on Cape Cod before my 30th birthday, and we go from there.


One thing that I haven’t mentioned yet that I need to mull over. My writing career, beyond this blog or anything amateur, got its start due to my relationship ending. I processed my pain through writing. It led to my blogs, which led to my first book, and eventually ten published books. Everything I have done creatively since the end of 2005 is because of her and our relationship ending.

What if that relationship came to a natural end instead of feeling like the distance was the killer? Do I have the same sadness to overcome? Do I write a fictionalized version of our relationship that becomes my first ebook? I don’t know.

Maybe the extra time we have together opens my eyes to some other career path I end up enjoying. Maybe I could build a successful career running art galleries? That’s the intriguing thing about these articles: it’s all just informed speculation based on what I know of the situation at the time and of myself.

I do believe that everything worked out as it should. It’s funny how each of the first two alternate timelines ends with me believing that I ended up on the right path. Maybe it’s just my way of coping with unknowns and unfinished business.

In reality, once my girl moved with her family to Houston after Hurricane Katrina, we slowly lost touch until one day it was the last time. She was beginning to move on and mentioned meeting someone. That was a bridge too far. I didn’t want to be a pen pal hearing about her new flame.


My biggest regret of this entire story is letting go. Once we lost touch, and I lost her phone number, that was it. She was never on social media, and thus I had no way of reconnecting. If we had stayed in touch, maybe a day would come when she wanted to give it another try? I’ll never know.

As I said earlier, today she is married, has no kids, and runs a church with her husband. How do I know this if we lost touch? I am a master internet detective. I found a shared social media profile she has with her husband. There, I got my closure. I had no need to reach out. I saw her. I saw her life. I saw her happy. That was enough.

Do I wish we’d ended up together back in 2005? Yes. Nobody has made me feel what she made me feel. But she did make me feel it. That means there’s always a chance I could feel that way again about someone else. Or, if someday her profile isn’t shared anymore, all bets are off.

She and I were good together. She and I are good apart. She changed my life more than she will ever know. She continues to do so as all of my creative endeavors trace their origin back to her. So in a weird roundabout way, she is still in my life.



“There was nothing in the world that I ever wanted more
Than to feel you deep in my heart
There was nothing in the world that I ever wanted more
Than to never feel the breaking apart
My pictures of you.”

Pictures of You – The Cure

See you in the next alternate timeline

1996 Changed Everything: Pt. 4 - Love, High School Style

This is part of a series of articles about 1996, as it holds significance for me since it was the year I graduated high school. In this fourth article, I look at how a significant relationship influenced decisions whose ramifications I am still feeling to this day.

Love is a wonderful thing. Michael Bolton said so in his 1991 hit song. Hey, it ended up in the Top 5, so he must have been on to something. Before you truly know what love is and what love feels like, love can take many different forms.

It can take the form of innocent crushes on girls in your class, like I had several of during elementary school. It can take the form of infatuation and pining like I did for a girl who used to visit my neighborhood during the summers of my formative years. When you are chasing the type of secure love that your life has not given you much of, you start to settle. You start to think that maybe you should say yes to whoever comes knocking.

Looking back thirty years, I can say in all honesty that during the nearly three years I dated my high school girlfriend, I thought I loved her at some point. Using my wisdom and experience from those years that have passed, I can say that, no, I never truly loved her. At least not in the purest form. Not in the way that I would want to be loved.

We came together mostly out of convenience. She literally lived next door to me and was friends with my sister Kate. I hardly had to do any work in terms of courting her before we were together. In fact, it was Kate who bluntly stated that we both knew we liked each other and that we should just get together.

I remember on that cold winter evening in February 1996 thinking to myself: Wait, I like her? I think my reservations were overruled by the thought of actually having a girlfriend, which was something I’d been wanting for years. A girlfriend in 5th grade, or a brief connection over a summer or two, was not the real relationship I was looking for.

I decided, why not? Soon we were hanging out and getting to know each other. The time together grew, which meant that my time with my group of friends shrank. In my mind, I thought if they were really my friends, they’d be happy that I had a girlfriend. Maybe that kind of justification to myself should have been a warning sign.

I was a senior while my new girlfriend was a freshman. It was not ideal. It actually made me feel a little less-than. Sure, a freshman who dates a senior would be seen as stepping up. A senior dating a freshman? It was more of a ‘what you couldn’t find anyone in your grade?’

Her reaction to us being together was to sweetly say, ‘I can’t believe I’m with you.’ It appealed to my ego. Yeah, I am a catch, I knew it. But it was also a lot of pressure to live up to. Also, in the back of my mind, I should have read it as it was: I had settled for less than I should.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not a knock on her. She was sweet, funny, kind, and supportive. I’m looking at it from my perspective. If I felt the same way as she did, then I wouldn’t have opted against going to my Senior Prom. I couldn’t let my friends and classmates see I was dating a freshman. That’s on me, not on her. My insecurities and low self-esteem kept me from going to one of the milestone events of high school life. Maybe a few people would have cared. Looking back, I think that my group of friends, many of whom I am still in touch with today, would have been happy I was there.

I’m sure the next logical question is, why did you date her in the first place, then? Convenience, the desire to have a girlfriend, and an inability to say no. I should have said I didn’t have those same feelings. I didn’t want to be seen as the bad guy. Plus, the fact that she was so damn into me was intoxicating to a teenage boy who had not felt much love or appreciation at home for much of my childhood. I needed that validation.

Celebrating moments after my high school graduation in 1996.

The way that I viewed love and relationships as a teenager is far different from the way I view them today, as it should be. In my immature mind, it was about the fooling around every bit as much as it was the emotional connection. It was about availability over compatibility.

I know it was a me thing. Growing up, I was not taught how to give affection or express emotions. Vulnerability was weakness, at least in the presence of my first stepfather. I lost my ability to trust new people, always figuring they had an ulterior motive or were waiting for the right time to hurt me. I had done two bouts of therapy as a younger kid and probably could have used more.

For my girlfriend, I was the prize she couldn’t believe she’d won. She only wanted to be with me. I can’t speak for her, but I know that to any fully functioning adult, this would have spelled a perfect relationship. Unfortunately, I was the awful combination of an immature teenage boy and an abused child with emotional issues. I was broken, and she couldn’t fix me. She shouldn’t have had to.

An unexpected revelation about myself from this relationship was finding out just how broken I was. When senior year was still ongoing, I had structure. I couldn't spend unending amounts of time with my girlfriend, so I think things were masked. Once school was over, we spent more time together, but it was all pretty smooth. It wasn’t until my friends went off to college while I took a semester off that things started to go off the rails.

It wasn’t long until I felt I had made a mistake. Not so much in dating her, but making choices in my life based on our relationship. I had decided to take a semester off before going to college. Not only take a semester off, but also not go to, or even apply to, colleges that would have been off of Cape Cod. I still believe this to be one of the worst decisions of my life.

Despite it being more about convenience than actual feelings, my girlfriend made me feel important. We had some fun times. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy being with her, but our interest levels were far apart. I wanted to give it a chance, though. If I had left for college, then that would have been it. We’d have been a quick fling to end my high school days. Perhaps it should have been.

Dating in high school is a trip. Maybe you have a car. Maybe your parents have to be your driver. Maybe you have money for dinner or some sort of activity. Maybe you can only afford to go for a walk. Maybe you hold hands and talk on the phone. Maybe you go all the way. As a teenager, the possibilities were seemingly the entire spectrum of what life could throw at you.


That semester off to end 1996 was sobering. I went from a high school senior with possibly limitless potential to a lowly dishwasher/prep cook living at home. I can remember my life becoming a routine. Work, hanging with my girlfriend, rinse repeat.

I would drive us around in my mom’s station wagon, or later, my first car, a Pontiac Grand Prix. We’d find secluded places to, well, you know. We’d hit up Taco Bell and Burger King. It was being a teenager, but doing so while my future was slowly fading off into the horizon. It’s like I was blissfully ignorant.

A 1982 Pontiac Grand Pirx, my first car.

When my girlfriend was all that was left in my social circle, I started to cling tight. Familiarity was something I desperately needed as the rest of my life was descending into chaos. My mother wasn’t happy that I was spending all my time hanging out with my girlfriend and eating fast food, going so far as to point out the weight I had gained since summer ended.

Now I needed my girlfriend to become my anchor. What started as convenience morphed into toxic desperation. I felt less-than in life. I felt weak and powerless from years of abuse and neglect at the hands of my father and first stepfather. Having a girlfriend who idolized me made me feel strong and important. I began to lean more into that.

When you start to believe your own hype, it can prove to be your downfall. I have been a mix of different issues for so long. I have an avoidant attachment style. It’s a fear of intimacy and vulnerability stemming from my childhood. I also crave the closeness and safety of a real, loving relationship. It is two opposing forces colliding.

Now, in my late 40’s, I can see this and express it. When I was 18, 19, it was all there but also wrapped up in immaturity and teenage angst. I wanted my girlfriend to be there. I’d sing songs to her, and we’d go on late-night walks through our neighborhood. Then, if I felt I was lowering the mask too much, I’d flip on a dime and become cold and callous. It had to have been incredibly frustrating and confusing for her.

I look back 30 years, and on one hand, I am embarrassed at how I ended up becoming a bad boyfriend. Instead of saying no to the initial meetup, I became drunk on the attention this girl gave me. If my life were out of control, I wouldn’t just talk to her or someone else about it. I would lash out or be cold and distant as a way to express my inner turmoil. I probably trashed her mental health and self-esteem as she wondered what she was doing wrong. In reality, I needed therapy badly. I do wonder if it would have been the same result even if I were dating my biggest crush I had back then. Maybe nobody would have been able to make it work.

Then again, I look back to 1996 and step back to see a broader view of me, my life, and my mental state. I was 18. I knew nothing of real intimate relationships. It was all new to me. I didn’t go into that relationship seeking to hurt anyone. That’s not me making excuses; it’s me going a little easier on myself because of where I was in life at the time. When you don’t have a reference point for how to cultivate a relationship, or even how to properly express yourself, you are destined for trouble.


A lot of this particular post about 1996 is me admitting my faults and trying to atone for my actions. Today I am my own harshest critic. I was not the greatest high school boyfriend. Yes, she and I lasted a little over 2 ½ years, but honestly, the relationship should have ended a year before it did. We even had a brief split, but I went back to rekindle it. I guess I was desperate for any sense of normalcy. It ended up being a big mistake. In fact, that final year of our relationship might be why I look back on its entirety with such a bitter taste.

We were never meant to be a long-term thing. Statistics show that less than 2% of high school sweethearts end up getting married. So it was a near-certainty that I’d be writing about our relationship in the past tense as of now. I don’t know what the best-case scenario was, but I do know that in a different timeline, we’d have been joined together forever. There was a brief moment, a week at most, when I was 19, where we had to wait with bated breath for her to get her period. I have no idea how my life would have looked if that scenario had happened.

When she had finally taken as much of my bipolar attitude as she could, she ended things. Ironically, I was caught off guard and desperately clung to her to not leave me. Imagine that? I had spent nearly all of our relationship wondering if I’d made a mistake, and when she finally confirms my belief, I couldn’t accept it.

Today, I am single and have been for years. I would love to have the relationship of my dreams, but something holds me back. I feel today much like I did in those final months of 1996. I want the relationship, but also want my independence. That type of thought process is fine when you’re a teen. It’s not as good when you’re nearing 50. So I look at dating sites but stay in the background. Perhaps I am worried that version of me I’ve spent this blog talking about is still in there?


To tie a bow on this subject, let me flash back to 2012. This girlfriend and I had broken up in the summer of 1998. We had not spoken or even seen each other since. I was in the middle of training for my first marathon. I was out on a long run. Once I had put in enough miles running, I stopped, shut off my running app, and prepared to walk the remaining mile or so home. Then I spotted her.

She was standing outside her car in a parking lot. We both looked at each other. She seemed hesitant. I was exhausted, basking a bit in the runner’s high. I approached her, and we began creating some small talk. As we spoke, something was weighing on me. Knowing I might not get the chance to have her in front of me again, I finally gave her the vulnerability that she was owed from me.

I told her I needed to apologize to her. She said it wasn’t necessary and seemed like she didn’t want to go there. I needed it badly, though. I told her that my life was a mess then, and I took out my anger at that on her, and she didn’t deserve that. She deserved better, and I was sorry that I treated her that way. I was literally shaking from the nervousness of truly exposing myself.

She could have told me off, but she didn’t. She accepted my apology, which made me feel better. We left things off cordially and parted ways. I remember being in tears for the rest of my walk. It was a huge weight that was lifted off my heart. Yes, I had been a bad boyfriend, but I had grown from it, recognized my mistakes, and apologized from the heart. In life, that’s all you really can do.

1996 began with me at 18, single, in my senior year of high school, counting down the days until school was out. The year ended with me at 19, in a relationship that I wanted but also didn’t want. It was at the same time fun, exciting, a bit sexy, and a lot of confusing. It was all a part of the experience of growing up.

In the next post, I will go into detail about the other important type of relationship I had in 1996: my friendships. These were the people who shaped who I was, what I liked, and some of the fun memories that still hold a special place in my heart.

Home in 1996

Alternate Life Timelines. #1 - Going Away To College

Getting older means a lot of things. You see and do a lot. You meet people. You lose people. You experience the exciting, the mundane, the exhilarating, and the ordinary. Your body changes. Your mind changes. Where you live? What you do? It’s all a free-flowing sea of days washing over each other.

As I approach 50, I have a unique perspective on my life and life in general. The older you get, the more chances you have had to travel down different paths. These might not be physical paths. You might not even have traveled far from where you grew up. Time does lend itself to creating different chapters of your life.

In some ways, life becomes like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. The decisions you make have ripple effects throughout your life. If you do this, then that happens. What about the decisions or events that could have happened but didn’t? Those are going to be the purpose of this series of articles.

I will be looking back at the nearly 50 years of my life and finding the seminal moments that either did, or could have, changed the course of my existence. I will expand on them using my best intuition as to what the probable outcome would have been.

You can easily do this as well and likely already do. Everyone thinks back to moments that could have changed their lives. If you didn’t meet someone. If that car in the other lane hadn’t swerved in time. If you had chosen to take that job. These articles won’t be so much about rehashing regrets. They are more of an interesting look at how many times in life you are faced with the potential of a big change. What do you do when the opportunity arises?



In order for something to have the greatest ripple effect through your life you need to choose moments from long in the past. The first one that pops into my mind is my choice to not go away to college. This has had an enormous amount of impact on my life.

It was 1996. I was a senior in high school and was, in all honesty, getting burned out on school. I had been an honors, sometimes high honors, student. I had taken my SATs when I was thirteen. I had been invited to genius camp by the prestigious Johns Hopkins University. I worked hard on my education throughout my formative years.

I still had time for friends, but I was also driven to be successful in school. This was likely tied to my own self-worth due to not getting much emotional support in my home life aside from my mother, who was doing the best she could to be both parents. Good grades proved I had value.

When senior year came, most of my friends were looking toward the future, specifically college. I had my eyes on some places. They were lofty expectations, like the University of North Carolina or the University of Nevada – Las Vegas. These were tied to athletics, something that I was not excelling in, and therefore my odds of going to schools like those were slim to none.

Closer schools, like the University of Massachusetts, should have been on my radar since I had family who had gone there. You cannot predict the future, and an event happened during the final few months of high school that threw a wrench into my plans; I got a girlfriend.

This changed my outlook. I hadn’t had a real, serious girlfriend before. My judgment became clouded. She was still going to be in high school after I graduated. I couldn’t leave her, right? I enjoyed the feeling of being in a relationship. Having someone who was so deeply into me was intoxicating. So intoxicating that I couldn’t see, or didn’t want to see, the obvious issue. There was a very, very small chance that we would be the high school sweethearts that lasted into old age. The reality was we weren’t going to make it.

When you’re a teenager, dealing with your first real relationship, you don’t have any experience by which to judge your choices. I chose to back off on my application to colleges. In fact, I decided to not apply at all. I chose to take a semester off from school after graduation.

My mother was supportive, but I am sure she could sense that I was starting to drift in a different direction. My life was no longer going to be filled with education. It was about my relationship. I did end up going to college after taking a semester off, and that plan still happened. However, I didn’t go out of state. I barely traveled from my home. I signed up for classes at Cape Cod Community College for the spring semester in 1997.

It is a great school and a boon to the Cape, but compared to how my future had looked a year earlier, it had to be seen as a step down. I took classes in graphic design, journalism, and creative writing, among others. These were all things I wanted to become good at for a creative career. Looking back, though, I was all over the map. I had no definitive path for my education. This is why my major was communications.

To no one’s surprise, my relationship did not last. After 2 ½ years, we broke up. I was devastated, even though I had brought the breakup on myself. That left me heartbroken and wandering through college with no real drive. Not to mention that I had been taking fewer classes per semester than was necessary.

I did that to have time to work and also spend time with my girlfriend. What it meant was that when my two years at community college were finished, I did not have enough credits to get a 2-year degree. I was deflated. It took all of my willpower just to keep going in college to get to that magical two-year mark. After that, I could take a breath and see where I wanted to go. Maybe it wasn’t too late to go to UMass or somewhere else.

None of that happened. I sank into a deep depression and gave up on college temporarily. To escape my sadness and overall frustration at where my life was, I ended up moving to Las Vegas in 2000.

We look at the chain of events from my choice to not go away to college. I lost my drive for education. I settled for a low-risk, low-reward cooking job to pay the bills. I lost a lot of friends because they went away to college. I became resentful of my girlfriend and blamed her for my poor choices in life. Eventually, this led to a breakup, bouts of depression, and ultimately moving across the country to try to find myself before it was too late.

It doesn’t stop with a move to Las Vegas. You can keep the timeline moving forward to anything in the last 25 years that didn’t work out the way I wanted. It truly is the first major regret, major mistake, I made in my adult life.



Now let’s go back. It’s 1996. I am a senior in high school. How would things have changed?

I was already on the fence about going off to college before I met my girlfriend, so we’d have to go back to the beginning of senior year. I have made up my mind that I am going to go to the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. It is close enough that I could visit Cape Cod any chance I could get. It was also far enough away that I’d feel like I was on my own.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t have dated the same girl. I believe that if my plans were in motion to go off to college, I would be less apt to break them and stay. In reality, I didn’t have to cancel anything; I just had to not fill out the applications.

Maybe I date my girlfriend. Maybe I don’t. When August 1996 came though, I’d be packing up and getting ready to head off to college. I likely would have found a dorm roommate from high school classmates who were also going to UMass Dartmouth. I know a few who did.

I would have experienced everything that college life had to offer. Living away from home. Parties. New people. It would have taken a bit of adjusting, but being placed in a large, unfamiliar situation would have done wonders for my confidence.

As far as a major went, I’d be looking for a creative field like I did at Cape Cod Community College. Probably not communications, likely something along the lines of creative writing. I wrote for the college newspaper in reality, so I’d probably do it at UMass as well.

The college experience would have better prepared me for social situations in general as I got later into my 20s and 30s. The older I get, the more difficult it becomes to step out of my comfort zone. Succeeding or failing at doing things while in college would have shown me that I would be all right in an unfamiliar environment. Going away to college would have forced me out of my normal routine. The longer I stayed on Cape Cod, the more ingrained the routine became. It’s like stepping into wet cement. You can get out of it, but you have to do so quickly, otherwise you are stuck once it dries.

After four years of college, the sky would have been the limit. I would have graduated in 2000. In reality, by the summer of 2000, I had gone through that terrible breakup, dealt with severe depression, given up on college (temporarily), and decided to move to Las Vegas. In the alternate timeline, none of that would happen.

I might have had breakups and dealt with depression, but I would have been able to look at what I was doing in college and hope that any suffering would pay off. I do believe I would have pulled through any adversity. In the alternate timeline, I might have been getting burned out on school, but I never took my foot off the gas. That is the biggest regret.

When you have momentum in anything, it’s easier to just keep going than it is to stop and try to start again later. In this timeline, I keep going. Even if I don’t become the absolute best I could be, I would not have the doubts and self-loathing that grew inside of me in my early 20s. It’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re a failure.



The view from 20,000 feet shows a massive change in my life and my identity as a person. No high school girlfriend means no messy breakup, which means I don’t feel a desperate need to find love anywhere. This had serious effects on my confidence. Going away to college means I don’t settle for the low-risk job that I ended up spending way too many years at. Comfort does not always equal happiness.

Graduating from college with whatever degree means I have a wide open playing field in which to ply my trade. Maybe I do end up in Las Vegas, but with a college degree. This would mean not grabbing the first low-paying job I could find just so I wouldn’t be broke while I went to college out there. Or maybe I end up somewhere totally different, with totally new people and experiences that take me further and further from Cape Cod.

Maybe I make connections elsewhere. Maybe I meet my soulmate in a town I don’t even know exists. Maybe I get married, have kids, own a house, all things I do not have in my reality. I am sure I would find time to visit home, but it would not be nearly the same as reality.

This brings me to the things I would have missed out on if my life had gone down this other path. First and foremost, I would have drifted away from my family. Not out of spite, but due to time, distance, and my own schedule. I would not have been there for the births of my two older nieces. I would not have had the close bond with them when they were growing up. That right there eliminates most of the regret I feel about not going off to college.

I would not have seen my Grampa as the role model and hero that he became. I grew to appreciate him more as I got into my later 20s and 30s. If I am not close by, I probably find my role models in celebrities or strangers. Who knows what that means for me as a person?

Then other things may or may not have still happened. Do I get a book published, or as it stands now, ten? Do I get deep into fitness and get into the best shape of my life in my mid 30s? Or do I end up overweight with various health issues that I don’t have to worry about in reality? It’s things like that which you take for granted.



So, to sum up this first alternate timeline, where do I think I’d be at this stage of my life if I had chosen to go away to college right after high school? Obviously, there’s a difference between what I’d want for a life and what I truly believe. For me, I think what I’d want and believe wouldn’t be that far apart.

At Age 48 in this alternate timeline, I could see myself living somewhere like Southern California. Not Los Angeles or San Diego, I don’t like cities. It would be a mid-sized town, probably slightly inland and somewhere halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I don’t think I’d be an author, but I’d be working in some creative field. Despite being a writer, podcaster, etc. I have learned many ancillary skills like editing, research, and story development. I could see myself finding steady, good-paying work, maybe not in my dream job, but a suburb of my dream job.

I believe that I have good genes. I would still likely be in halfway decent shape physically and probably better shape emotionally. The experiences, both good and bad, of college would have better prepared me for being an adult.

I would be married. Is it my first? Who knows. I know not all marriages make it. I also would know if I found love once I could find it again, so I wouldn’t close myself off like I tend to do in reality. Kids? I believe I’d have two. I’d hope for a boy and a girl, Michael and Jocelyn, but two of the same would be just as good.

In reality, I have been chasing my dreams as an author and creator for so long. The idea of letting them go to pursue a ‘normal’ life hasn’t sounded appealing. Having gone to college for a specific major would give me the purpose I have been chasing. I’d find a job and meet new people. Maybe I meet ‘the one,’ and we get married and have kids.

Or maybe I hit a bump in life that throws me off course, and I end up living in a shack in the woods with a beard I have to stuff into my pants, so I don’t trip over it. This is all a guessing game.

In the end, it is a fun and somewhat enlightening exercise to look at where I think I would be in life if I had gone away to college in 1996. What I always come back to is that there has to be a reason why I am where I am and who I am at this point in my life. I might briefly wonder what might have been, but I can’t live there.

“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.” – Kurt Cobain


See you in the next alternate timeline.

1996 Changed Everything: Pt. 3 - The Message of the Music

This is going to be a series of articles about 1996, as it holds significance for me since it was the year I graduated high school. In this second article, I look at the music of the day and how it impacted my life then and still does today.

1996 in many ways, was a tale of two halves. The first half was all about me trying to finish strong as my senior year of high school drew to a close. The second half was a recalibration. The seemingly endless grind of school had ended. Sure, there was college on the horizon, but for all intents and purposes, that was voluntary.

What I didn’t know then but know all too well now is that when you go hard for a long time, you get calloused. Your body and brain get used to the grind. Once you take your foot off the gas, it’s hard to get the motor running again, or the motivation to do so.

Looking back, it makes the second half of 1996, mostly the fall into winter, a bit of a blind spot in my life. Senior year and all of the events surrounding graduation are seared into my brain thirty years later. That final summer on Cape Cod with my closest friends before they left for college is one of my most cherished memories of my life. Until the actual days they left to start new chapters in their lives, the reality of the situation didn’t set in.

In my world, 1996 still revolved around Grunge music, although now it was a post-Grunge Alternative music world. Long gone was Nirvana as Kurt Cobain had symbolically ended Grunge with his death in April 1994. That didn’t mean that Nirvana’s music wasn’t still a huge part of me and my identity.

The teenage angst that Kurt wrote about in his lyrics only grew stronger in me as the prospect of entering a new phase of life grew closer. My interest in lyric writing, more along the lines of poetry, began early in 1996. However, it was not a Nirvana song that inspired me to jot down my innermost thoughts and feelings. No, it was a real-life event that happened at my school.

As you read in my last article, my English teacher, one of the favorites I ever had, was fired from his job for allegedly soliciting a student to appear in an adult film he was producing. When inspiration strikes, sometimes it comes from the weirdest places.

To process the events surrounding our teacher, affectionately nicknamed Bubba, I bought a steno pad and got to writing. I can clearly remember sitting in my bedroom adorned with posters of musicians and sports heroes alongside my closest friend, Barry, and working on lyrics to a song about what was still a fluid situation at the time.

Music had always made me feel. I can remember listening to Queen’s song These Are the Days of Our Lives in 1991 and getting overwhelmed by its message of looking back on life as you age. I was 14 then and had music making me think and feel beyond my years.

Writing lyrics, or poetry, to certain music made me feel more like an artist. In the first half of 1996, the inspiration came from my Grunge and Alternative roots. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, and others filled my brain.

It was an interesting contrast to try to write about teenage problems that were happening in the present while trying to sound like a weathered adult looking back. My initial year of writing poetry was a lot of simple, sometimes cringe-worthy, attempts at rhyming and explanations of life. College and the music I was exposed to would drastically improve my writing. Well, that and a surplus of new problems.

The music I tried to write to also served another purpose. It was a conduit for creative expression. A dream I had been trying to cultivate in the 1990s was that of being a filmmaker. I wanted to create worlds and share them. I spent around $800 of my savings in 1994 to purchase a bulky camcorder from Sears. That’s equal to just over $1,700 when adjusted for inflation to 2026.

That camcorder got used pretty much daily. By the time it kicked the bucket sometime in late 1997, I had recorded somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 hours of VHS tapes. There were skits, there were family holidays, and random, pointless moments that I captured that I cherish to this day.

The same model camcorder I owned in the 1990s

A major part of those VHS tapes is the music video. Simple, really, my friends and I set up my camcorder, played a song on a stereo, and performed it on camera. In today’s world, we’d call this low-hanging fruit for content. The videos all had a similar vibe. Teenage boys in the mid-1990s jamming out to songs they loved.

We did have our favorites. Nirvana ended up having nearly their entire catalog turned into music videos on my camcorder. It was a who’s who of Grunge, Alternative, and straight-up Rock music. Every now and then, we might switch it up and do something foolish to make ourselves laugh like Milli Vanilli, Color Me Badd, or the Brady Bunch theme. Of course, most of the videos are embarrassing to watch today, but we were kids, what do you want?

It’s a fascinating time capsule to look back at the week I graduated high school in early June 1996 and see what the music charts had to offer. Tha Crossroads by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony was #1. It was eerie as the song talks about losing a friend. Now, we were losing friends as we went our separate ways for college, not death, but still, it was fitting.

The rest of the Top 10 that week was populated by stalwarts like Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Toni Braxton, SWV, Metallica, and George Michael.

In general, music was trending away from the Grunge-Alt movement and into more polished pop, dance, boy bands, and that song they beat into the ground, ‘Macarena.’ That song debuted right around the time I graduated and dominated the airwaves for the next year or more. I even had to do that foolish dance when at my orientation on my first day of college.

After school ended, my main connection to music came on two fronts: my job and my girlfriend.

I worked as a prep cook at a local restaurant during high school. I was lucky to have a coworker who was a friend and more like a brother at times. We were the same age within a few days, and we had similar tastes in music. What I liked a lot about Liam was that we were just different enough that he might turn me on to a different band, and if he didn’t like something, he had good explanations and not just ‘it sucks.’

I made mixtapes (yes, tapes) called Prep Boys Rock that we would play while working. It was a lot of what I’ve already mentioned, except with maybe a little more REM. We played music loudly, sometimes to the detriment of our job, but again, we were teenagers, what would you expect? Here is a Spotify playlist of some of those classics from the mixtapes.


 

There was a time our music was so loud that we couldn’t hear someone calling to us to bring something to the kitchen. That didn’t go over well with the guy who was a crusty old 60-something who didn’t have time for us crazy GenX kids. He stormed into our prep room, literally tore the radio out of the wall, and took it. We acted worried, but as soon as he left, we made fun of him for the rest of the day, and honestly, still to this day.

It wasn’t all mixtapes. Sometimes we’d get tired of the same old, and we’d listen to the radio. Now we’ll get very specific to where I grew up on Cape Cod. We had some classic stations on the air in the mid-90s, like Rock 104.7 and Pixy 103 (both rock), 96.3 the Rose, and 106 WCOD (both Top 40). But Liam and I tended to choose the stations that felt like they were speaking to us, like Underground 93.5. It was the alternative we enjoyed with up-and-coming bands we might not have heard of yet.

The other connection to music in the back half of 1996 was my girlfriend at the time. I was trying to share my world with her, and the best way I could do that was by sharing the music that made me feel alive. I turned her on to some of the alternative that shaped me. I made her introduction to alternative music mixtapes. For a teenager who didn’t know how to express vulnerable emotions well, sharing music became a love language.

She was one of the select few in my life that I sang for. I always loved to sing, and think I inherited a pretty good voice from my Grampa, who was a jazz singer. So I would put on these concerts where I’d sing a song or two like I was some sort of celebrity. Again, it was a love language to share something so few saw, or in this case, heard.

I turned her on to Stone Temple Pilots, especially. She loved Scott Weiland. In fact, we ended up going to see them in concert later on November 30, 1996. This was only a handful of shows before Weiland got busted for drugs and was eventually thrown in jail, with the tour being canceled.

Concerts were the big new shiny thing for me in 1996. Getting to travel and see bands I loved perform live was something that blew my mind. The first concert I ever attended was AC/DC on March 19, 1996, at Boston’s FleetCenter. It changed my life.

I went with my friends Dan, Pete, and James (aka Butch). It was so liberating to be on our own despite still being in high school. There might have been a little smoke in the car, but for the most part, we were responsible.

My introduction to live music began with Beavis and Butthead on the big screen, segueing into Back In Black, shattering my eardrums. AC/DC was one of the loudest live bands, and I had the proof. For the next three days, it felt like I was wearing heavy earmuffs due to how that music had slapped my ears silly. To this day, I am surprised at how good my hearing still is. I hope I didn’t jinx myself.

I mentioned at the top of this blog that the second half of 1996 has become a bit of a blind spot in my life. I had been going nonstop with school, and as Senior Year wound down, I made a choice to not go away to college. I chose to stay behind and, after taking a semester off, begin my college journey at the local Cape Cod Community College. Why? Possibly burnout, stress, confusion, and the biggest reason, my girlfriend. I will get deeper into that part in the next blog, though.

It’s interesting for me to go back to that time. I know I lived those days, and yet nothing stands out. I believe part of the reason was that as soon as I stopped grinding at school, my mind collapsed in a heap. Not having to be in a constant state of readiness swung me in the opposite direction, and I became soft and lazy. Yes, I was working, but what else?

By the time September rolled around, the vast majority of my friends were gone to their next chapters of life, some never to return. I felt like I hit pause, and once I started up again, I had to try to run to catch up.

I graduated from high school and, within a year, was slam dunked into confusion and desperation about my place in the world. I wasn’t even 20 and was in the quarter-life crisis mode. To this day, I find one of my biggest regrets in life was not going away to college immediately. That stepping off the gas pedal made it easier for me to coast. I don’t think I quite realized that I had shot myself in the foot with my choice to pause my education to bask in the glow of couple’s life.

I look back at the songs that captured my state of mind as 1996 drew to a close. The confusing new releases from Pearl Jam (No Code), Weezer (Pinkerton), and REM (New Adventures In Hi-Fi) seemed to perfectly reflect my own state of mind. The party was ending, but I had only noticed the crowds leaving once my voice was the one left echoing across an empty room.

Music would ease my mind, and it would also influence my writing as I tried to put into words changes I didn’t fully understand. Life was changing faster than I was ready for. January 1996 saw me as a high school student getting ready for the real world. In December 1996, I was in the real world, standing at the starting line and watching it disappear onto the horizon, all while familiar bands played the soundtrack.

The seemingly infinite horizon can be liberating and terrifying all at once.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #102: Winter Storm Names, Stranger Things, New Year Intentions, etc.

1. I still don’t understand the point of naming winter storms. As of this writing, there is a Winter Storm Ezra coming toward New England. Like, who cares if it has a name? Did meteorologists feel sad that only hurricanes were getting names? Also, does anyone remember any winter storm in the last few years by its name? I sure don’t. What’s next, naming every day after someone? Oh man, look out, Partly Cloudy Pete is coming today. In 20 years, I’ll tell the younger generation ‘You should have been there for Foggy Drizzle Dan, it was so mildly inconvenient. Then again, every day is International (something pointless) Day, so I guess naming winter storms tracks.


2. Currently, I am on a holiday break from my day job. We do it each year from Christmas to New Year's, basically because the one year we didn’t, our schedule was maybe half-full, and my boss rightfully didn’t want to pay us full-time to be standing around half of the day. I’ve been using the free time to work a lot on content and also hit the gym more in advance of any New Year’s resolutions. That being said, I could tell my body was starting to wear down with how hard I was working out at the gym. It got to a point where my Fitbit had to basically order me to take it easy. Yes, Fitbit, whatever you say. I will gladly take a day to sit and relax. It didn’t hurt that the day it told me to chill, it was 25 degrees and windy out. Much easier to relax when the thought of going outside is too much.


3. This was a sure way to kill the mood of a day. I wanted to do some work on my script for my film that will shoot late this summer. Rather than sit at my desk as I always do, I decided to head to a local library. Typically, I get good creative vibes from writing at a spot different from home. Well, I should have just stayed home. I drove all the way to this library, and it was packed because it’s school vacation week. That was no big surprise. I went in and found a desk in the back corner and unpacked my laptop. I noticed they had new chairs. These were brightly colored and padded but also very low to the ground. As soon as I sat in the chair, I knew I’d never be able to work there. The desk was basically chest height. It was ridiculous. No more than 30 seconds after sitting, a big fat guy with headphones sits at the desk next to me. His being there was no big deal until I heard the music. This jerk had his music so loud in his headphones that I could clearly hear it, and it was distracting and obnoxious. I sat for maybe 2 minutes before being so aggravated that I packed up my stuff and left. It took me longer to drive to the library than the time I actually was inside. What an absolute waste of time. All it did was piss me off to the point that I no longer wanted to write.


4. One thing I have been doing for my Patreon subscribers is remastering and sharing these livestreams I used to do for my podcast. About 4 years ago, I was going live on Instagram weekly and doing something called Without A Map. I’d review the most recent podcast episode and invariably go wildly off-topic into fun and wacky stories. I fix the audio, edit any dragging parts, and enhance the video to make it a better experience for my subscribers. I had been downloading the original videos from YouTube to edit. This week I went to grab the next in line and noticed it went from #10 to #12, no #11. I also noticed my Without A Map playlist only went up to #28 when I knew I did way more. I wasn’t sure what to do since, after the streams would end, I’d have to save them to my phone and then upload them to YouTube. What happened to the other streams? Luckily, a little research showed me that all of those ‘lost’ streams had been bundled in with my reels on IG. I was able to go into my archives and find #11 and download it. Oh, and I ended up doing 49 streams in total, so there’s plenty more content to come for my Patreon subscribers.


5. I headed out after dark one night this week to grab a few quick things at the store. I had barely taken a few steps and was reaching for my keys when I noticed something a few feet beyond my car. Then I noticed another, and another. 3 big shadows sneaking across the neighbor’s yard. It took me a moment to figure out that they were deer. Unfortunately, I wasn’t fast enough getting my phone out for a photo. Even if I did, it was dark, and it would have either been blurry or the flash would have lit up my car. It was shocking for sure to suddenly see 3 fully grown deer emerging from the shadows. They went across the street into a small conservation area. That conservation area is a haven for deer, coyotes, foxes, turkeys, and owls. I haven’t gone down in there to find out; it’s just that there are way too many of those animals lurking around the yard, especially in the warmer months. Now I’m going to have to be at the ready with my phone anytime I go out after dark in case the deer are hanging out again.


6. The finale of Stranger Things was an amazing and fitting ending. The show was 5 seasons of a trip back to my childhood. Granted, I would have been younger than the main cast when the events were happening in the 80s. In fact, for those who know the show, I was the same age as Holly and Derek and their crew. I won’t spoil things for those who will be watching, especially since it was literally New Year’s Eve when the finale premiered. It must have been watched by a lot of people since Netflix was glitched out for several minutes when the show went up at 8pm. Stranger Things had so many wonderful characters and actors playing them. We got to watch them literally grow up before our eyes. The thing is, for as beautiful as the ending of the show was, it was ever so slightly traumatic for my GenX mind. It was like reliving my childhood, yes, but then it was also like watching my childhood slip away all over again. I don’t think I was ready for that, and judging by social media, a lot of my GenX brethren weren’t ready for it either. So at least I am not alone. I will miss new episodes with the killer 80s music, product placement, and references that people of my generation understand. Rumor has it that there are at least a pair of spin-offs coming. One is an animated series based in 1985. That one’s confirmed. The other is top secret, but I have heard rumblings that it might be based around Nancy’s character. We’ll see. I posted it all over social media after the show aired, but once again, thank you to Stranger Things and the creators, The Duffer Brothers, for letting me, and so many other GenXers, relive our childhoods even for a little while. I even wrote a blog about how the show affected me. You can read it here: Stranger Things Have Happened: A GenX Fairytale

7. I have always had a wacky sense of humor. It comes out quite a bit in these blogs. When I was in high school, I spent my savings on a camcorder with dreams of being a film director. I loved using my creativity to make up the most random stuff to make skits. These were mainly to make my friends laugh. One thing I want to do more of in 2026 is crafting skits again, but this time for social media. They will probably be tougher to do now with all of my friends having jobs and families, or living far away. Still, I am looking for any and all creative outlets to explore since that’s the stuff that really makes me feel alive. Here is a little something I cooked up for New Year’s Day. I hope you like it.




8. In a strange but necessary twist, I actually turned down a couple of creative projects to kick off 2026. I’m not giving up my dreams of being a totally self-employed content creator. I am just being more selective with what I choose to spend my time on. This goes far beyond just content projects and goes into life in general. I have spent the last 5 years working nonstop on content. That means books, podcasts, YouTube videos, blogs, editing, producing, acting, and anything else that floated into my orbit. I don’t regret any of it. That being said, I have a goal in 2026 that involves having more free time for family, friends, and maybe even finding a relationship. In order to achieve that, I had to start finding places that I could cut back. The pair of projects I turned down would have been fun and would have added to my resume, but they also would have required who knows how many hours out of my life. I can’t say ‘I want more time with those I care about’ and then not do my part to make it happen. I think of it as going to a buffet. In the last few years, I would fill my plate with anything and everything, overflow it. In 2026, I am still going to have a full plate, just with fewer options. All steak and mac and cheese, no rolls or cole slaw.


9. It has already been a snowier and colder winter this year than last, and it’s only been 2 weeks. We got the storm this week that left us with 3-4” of heavy snow. That’s not a big deal except for the fact that the temperatures stayed below freezing for the next several days, meaning that the snow and slush stuck around and refroze. I only realized there was an issue when I was leaving the gym one morning this week. I saw the frozen slush/dirt combo stuck in my wheel wells and under my front doors. It was so bad that if I had gotten any more up in there, my tires wouldn’t have had any room to spin. I kicked a little away, but most of it was frozen solid. Not wanting any problems with my car, I looked for something to chisel the sludge away. I found the perfect utensil in the form of a tire iron from my trunk. So there I was, in my gym shorts, on a 30-degree morning in the gym parking lot, chipping frozen slush out of my wheel wells with a tire iron. Two thoughts were going through my mind. 1. How crazy do I look? 2. This is going in the blog (obviously).


10. It was 10 years ago this week that my buddy Steve and I went on one of our best photo adventures. We were up early and drove out to Provincetown. Next up was a 2-mile hike through the darkness and the woods, over the dunes to get to Race Point Lighthouse. It was in the low 20s with the wind chill at, or below, zero. We sat with our backs against a brick building known as the Whistle House. You can rent it in the summer. It was freezing, and we would get up to take photos of the ever-increasing sunrise, and then quickly huddle back down. It was one of my favorite photo adventures ever. How did we celebrate the 10th anniversary of it? By going on another cold photo shoot. Only this one was sunset, and Nauset Lighthouse is only a few hundred feet from the parking lot. I guess we are getting older.



11. Earlier, I mentioned my hope/desire to actually start a relationship. Intentions without actions are useless, so I signed up on a dating app. A problem that I have living on Cape Cod is that the dating pool can be small, especially as you get into your 40s. In previous years, when I was on dating sites, it was nearly impossible to find someone because I kept my search radius low, like 25 miles. That works fine if you live in a city, but not in a relatively rural area like the Cape. An old friend of mine used to have her search radius so wide that she’d end up finding and dating people in Boston. I wasn’t willing to go that far until now. Well, not Boston far, but expanding my radius to 50 miles. That gives me places within an hour of me. It’s like I’m showing the universe I’m serious. How serious will I be when I find someone 50 miles away, and we have to plan a date that might involve an hour of driving? We’ll see. But maybe showing I’m willing to get out of my comfort zone will bring someone amazing into my orbit.


12. While at the gym one day this week, I finished with the actual workout and went to sign up for a session on one of the hydromassage beds. They are definitely worth the little bit extra I pay per month, for now at least. While signing up, there was an employee explaining the gym to two potential new members. Ironically, he began raving about the hydro bed. I mentioned that was why I was standing there. Before going into the room, I looked at the two potential members and told them that it was my favorite part of the workout. I also said I wasn’t a paid spokesman for the gym. I will say that if they did sign up for the more expensive package, I should get at least a little thank you, like a free drink or something.