Chapter the first

Dear Diary

Todays story is chock full of fun and scary and wonderful things.

It's about a boy falling in love with another boy.

It's about first steps taken that end up radically shifting the direction that your life is heading.

Its about the joy of discovering real music for the first time and being transported out of your head into places where it doesn't matter who you are because every song was written just for you.

It's about your first real road trip; from deliberating for hours over the road music mix, all the way to driving home in the middle of the night with everyone exhausted and blissed out from the ferocity of being alive and invincible and doing whatever the fuck you want.

It's about discovering people who are just like you and falling in love with your first real friends and then losing them all because you went and fucked it all up.

And drugs, lots and lots of candy colored world warping binge eating inducing drugs.


Our story begins in the little town diner called Chili Time that was known for its wonderful crinkle cut french fries smothered in real shredded cheddar cheese, not that fake melted velveeta shit. If you were cool you ordered your cheese fries with ranch dressing instead of ketchup, if you were the bees fucking knees you ordered them extra crispy too. Some of the weirder folks would order them upside down so they could eat the fries first and then have nothing but almost fried, but totally melted cheese soaked in the tastiest grease, you could cut that shit with a fork and your mouth would realize that the game had just changed forever.

Our hero was 17 and just like Pee Wee fucking Herman he was a loner Dottie. A rebel. He lived on the wrong side of the tracks and in his case there were a very literal set of tracks to be lived on the wrong side of.

He was just coming off his last identity crisis in which he envisioned himself the next Sid Vicious. He still had the nasty razor bumps from the wonderful disaster that had been a Mohawk his last truly bad influence friend had said would be sooo cool. Turns out it really wasn't that cool at all, it made his head break out in all sorts of really not hot ways and boy fucking howdy the kids at school laughed their asses off. Fuck it though right, punk rock was all about scorning what others thought, anarchy rules baby.

There is a very good chance that he was wearing a pleather jacket with safety pins inserted all over it, there were probably lots of studs sewn in as well. Studs were the bomb, you could get them in all different shapes and sizes, little blunt ones all the way up to poke your fucking eyes out pointy. He wouldn't have been able to afford Doc Martens yet so he was probably wearing a pair of converse.

He loved his converse, he went through so many pairs of them, just wore them until they died. He loved all the different colors, he didn't have a favorite, he would wear em all. There was even a period when he wore mismatched colors. He of course did not realize until much later that a little girl by the name of Punky fucking Brewster had already explored this fashion no mans land. Oddly and quite luckily no one ever seemed to draw the connection between our little wanna be punk rocker and the other mammarily gifted juvenile punk rocker from the 80's.

He may have been wearing his favorite t-shirt, a ratty Megadeth shirt with an illustrated skeleton doing something horrible to someone probably undeserving. The shirt had started out it's life as his older much fucking cooler sisters. As happened more than a few times he borrowed (stole) the shirt and just kept it until she stopped asking for it back, it probably smelled weird by then. He had to have been wearing pants but he didn't really pay much attention to pants, although in retrospect we can really fucking hope he wasn't wearing anything stone washed, sigh, he probably fucking was though.

On this fateful day when he stood at the crossroads he didn't even realize that he was making a decision whose consequence would still be felt for many years to come.