Queer Bitch Outakes

For Dano's bachelor party, back in 2002, we planned a week-end camping trip in the woods of Vermont. Of course it didn't have much appeal, I suppose, as a bachelor party to other guys on the invite list-- camping, long drive, no girls or strippers but we knew Dano would love it. So it was a small party-- myself, Dano, Rich and Rick. Bergie showed up on the second day. I'm pretty sure that was it. I do have pictures kicking around somewhere on a hard drive. Of course back then I was still making my skits with the guys (pre youtube) and we had an idea to spoof the relatively new flick, Blair Witch Project. During one of our hikes up a mountain we made what I thought was a really funny Queer Bitch Project skit. It got edited and finalized. I took the extra footage, bloopers if you will and put them together for a laugh. Then one day, the actual skit went missing. I figured it would just pop up sometime and it never did. This truly sucks. But at least the outtakes remained.

I don’t know what his habits were like

I don’t know what his habits were like in his 20’s so much but as he turned into a thirty something, say around 2000, my guess is that was about the time he began using pills. He always enjoyed his Captain Morgan and weed but when pills came into the picture, his motivation for life seemed to lower. Desire to live life at full speed went out the window or even half speed. Back in his days at Blue Hills he was involved in art and drawing and a little later, photography. It was he who actually got the whole dark room thing going down in my parent’s basement— Blue Hills gave or sold him an older Beseler enlarger, he got his friend Rob, a fledgling carpenter to build a small room in the basement and then picked up some print trays, hung a small clothes line to dry prints and mom gave him a stand-alone lamp with a red bulb so he could see but not destroy sensitive images in developing trays. I always loved taking pictures and had hundreds of them but I had no problem dropping my film cartridges off at Fotomat to get developed and printed.

So taking a little fictitious license here I will pretend Dave never got into pills and somehow lead a happy productive life and went on to graduate the Graphics Arts program at Blue Hills, went to college or Photography school. He dated some but he was always loyal to his friends and put them ahead of girls he only liked— he coasted through his 20’s living a life of fun and adventure. By the time he reaches 30 he has a nice job now as a magazine photographer and met a model whom he thought about all the time— a girl like no other girl and it wasn’t long before he started blowing off fishing trips and golf weekends with his friends to spend more time with her. Of course he marries her and they have kids and he becomes a soccer dad….

Mom died in 2007. It crushed all of us but we soldiered on. Dad remained at the house, alone. Occasionally, Kyle would move in for brief spells but he had his own demons to deal with and he could not commit to the house. Over the years, the grief of his wife’s early death combined with his alcoholism caused his drinking to only worsen and his bank account dwindle….

This is not going where I hoped when I imagined it and is nothing what I thought it would be or go to….

So I'm at work and all the guys are talking about how different life is now for kids as opposed to when we were kids... and it got me thinking. And I brought up my road experience, thumbing across country attempt and I realized as I was talking that, back in those days, for me, it was a time of absolute freedom, a time before Facebook, cell phones, internet, email, GPS-- back then, you were on your own, you were not a slave to devices, you just moved along, you were alone, and you had no connection to family or friends but for a payphone or letter or postcard, but you were free. Today's kids will never understand that. In this computer social media age they will never know what its like to cross the country alone, go to the beach alone, hike a mountain alone-- and by alone I mean not by yourself but without some form of Wi-fi connection to others. They will never know what its like to wake up and think about life, interpret it and live it alone, happy, sad or indifferent. Anyway I'm buzzed and will fix this tomorrow haha they will always be tied to something

Postcard I sent my brother in 1998

What if I woke up tomorrow and had no more journals to write, no more poems, skits, short stories or observations? No more nothing. No more passion or desire to write... just finally after all these years, nothing more to say? What if I just shut it down? Would it matter? Would the writing actually stop? If I said no more that's it! Well the thing is I don't think I could ever shut it down. It's who I am. I write. I would not wake up tomorrow and never want to write... because I am a writer and always have been and always will be.