1997

I found this photo while I was back in Delaware going through a big crate of film and random terrible pictures. This is the first friend I made at the University of Delaware. I have a very strange sense of memory of this time period in which I remember really mundane details and yet other more vivid experiences meld together with a haziness of late morning dreams and memories rehashed and recited and pitched together into a cloudy intangibility. I say this because I remember I first saw Sally on my second or third day at UD in Anthropology class, and when I finally talked to her it was in the library on the third floor. We were studying for some Anthropology test or quiz, separately. She was wearing a Batman T-shirt, I remember that very clearly. I got an A on the test.

A year later I dislocated my ankle skateboarding and was hobbling around on crutches for most of the summer and I went to go visit her in Smyrna or someplace just south of there. Here's where my memory becomes unreliable. I remember walking around some redneck town where she's from: a girl with a mohawk and a China-man on crutches. We went to go eat pizza. We went to the video store to rent "Better Off Dead." We went to this empty, dilapidated pier to sit by the river. This part I remember so vividly that I have to be making this up: I remember there was a breeze at our backs so there weren't any bugs. Across the water I could see the river widening and opening into the ocean, and above that the sun was setting in a deep, humming orange behind these huge ominous dark clouds and lightning was flashing intermittently making them glow and appear to creep across the horizon. See? It was so hauntingly beautiful there's no way I could remember all of that, but that's the memory I have most about that day. That and riding shotgun in Sally's pickup truck listening to Action Patrol. And her high school graduation picture in which she looked like such a normal, nice girl in a white summer dress.

Not that she was anything but nice. She was pretty awesome, highly intelligent, and very sweet to talk with. I'm pretty sure I had the hots for her at one point, but then I saw all these dead animals she kept in her freezer. We were friends until she graduated from UD and I don't think I've seen her since. I probably took this photo with either a really old Nikkormat with a 50mm, 1.4f lens or this Canon Elan IIe I bought a couple months before I went to California then sold shortly after I got back to buy a Nikon N90s. Yeah, blah blah blah. It must have been on the lawn near the Pencader dorms.

1999

This past weekend I was back in Delaware, driving around Newark with my nephew in the back blasting some Jawbreaker out the speakers of my brother's car. It felt like it was 1995, if you didn't think about the fact that none of my friends were around and pretty much every Main Street mainstay is gone to the yuppies save for a few survivors like Bing's Bakery, the National 5&10, Wonderland, the Newark Paper Store, and Al at Newark Camera. The diner is turned into some kind of condo/fancy restaurant with a parking garage, the Stone Balloon is now a wine house and condo, Bert's got bought out by that Gelato dude, Rainbow is still there but it's been sucking since it moved the first time, the bank wall and the parking lot are all either gone to the yuppies or cordoned off by the city to generate a few more bucks from charging for every kind of parking imaginable in a three block radius of Main Street. I'm usually glad I don't live there anymore, but occasionally it's nice to visit.

I got to hang out with Sarah today, which was really good since I haven't seen her since her daughter's birthday in March. We are best friends, but don't get to see or talk to each other often enough since I'm in New York and she has a family with two little kids in Delaware. I must have met Sarah when I was 16 or 17. I remember thinking she was a snobby bitch when I first saw her in Newark Shopping Center one summer night because she looked so cool and I was so dorky and she seemed to know everyone and I was just meeting people like I'd just moved to town, even though I'd lived there my whole life. Anyhow she seemed like one of the popular punk girls and I pretty much thought everyone looked down on me and thought I was ugly so I usually reacted to this ridiculous self-consciousness by being a dick and thinking every girl was a snobby bitch, and otherwise not talking to people, which usually pretty much fulfilled my own prophecy. I guess sometimes I still do this, to my own detriment.

Not with Sarah though. She somehow kicked down the door I left half closed and it seemed like only one day before we were talking all the time, laughing at pretty much everything we said, and arguing in epic clashes that reminisce an alcoholic couple married for 30 years. Only her husband may have experienced more wrath, but mine was probably worse since he'll usually quickly give in, but I would dig in for the long haul like I was preparing to take a hill in the Pacific Theater. I'm just as stubborn and hardheaded as her which would draw out our fights for months in my vain attempt to win the argument. Even during these times we would still call each other every day and start talking like nothing was wrong, until inevitably our conversations would quickly degenerate into full-blown screaming fests over the phone. Sometimes we'd do this a couple times a day, and it would go on like this until I finally admitted she was right and I was wrong.

But I can't begin to count the great times and experiences we've had together for the last 16 or 17 years. Our relationship has never been sexual in nature, so it's always been like we were high school kids on the first days of summer vacation. Today we sat in a park eating fruit and talking shit like always and it's always so easy to talk about everything that we've missed in our lives no matter how long it's been since we last talked. A ferocious storm blew in with gale-force winds and hail so we ran back to her car, and when we saw it was raining too hard to drive we sat around listening to emo-hardcore tapes old friends had made her in 1995 or 1997. She'd just seen Cap'N Jazz the night before, and I laugh because that time period is funnily awful to me and I'm a little embarrassed at myself about it. Talking with her in the car, listening to those tapes, watching the rain and hail blow sideways down this little green valley in the park, made me really glad some things don't change. When the shit hits the fan in my life, Sarah is the first person I need to talk to. She's my best friend.

I took this photo on our first trip to New York City in 1999 outside a bubble tea place on Mott Street. I was going to visit with Pat Tsai and Samantha, who was visiting from Yale. I met Samantha through Pat the previous summer in LA. Sarah and I were super late as usual, and I remember we didn't bring a map because we thought we'd find the street address by driving around, which we did, 2 hours after crossing the Lincoln Tunnel. I ended up making out with a girl under a sleeping bag that night on Pat's kitchen floor, with Sarah sleeping on a couch a mere 10 feet away. She didn't know then, but I think she would have understood what I was going through had she known.

mojave two

hmm.... apparently this photo is too racy for Photobucket because they keep flagging it as a violation of their TOS and taking the picture down. so now i'm trying Flickr, which took me a long time to figure out how to link to the full-size image. it's just not as intuitive as they think... i think. anyhow, this is a shot from the Mojave Desert. nice belly. hopefully Flickr doesn't take this one down also; if they don't i'll probably just switch to Flickr full time.

summers in san francisco

these are a couple of old photos from SF when i was living there, probably around 2002 or 2003. the top one i took with the Olympus Pen-EE. the film got heat damaged at some point, which you can see pretty well in the left photo. i'm not sure why i didn't put this one in with the other Mission Records posts i did a few months ago. i've been digging through a bunch of film and scattered prints in an attempt to get organ-izized and i've found a lot of stuff that i missed because i'm so dis-organ-izized. but i'm getting there...

the second photo is a cross-process pic of sara sandberg at a cafe near the Bay Bridge, right by the bay in fact. i can't remember what it is called. we went on a walk around SF after i moved there. i remember we went back to this apartment she was subletting in the Tenderloin, bought a bunch of 40s, met up with Cinque who cooked this amazing and incredibly spicy thai curry, then we all got super drunk and passed out for a couple hours, and woke up and it was just light out in the evening. i remember summers in San Francisco as cold and foggy; every late afternoon i could see the fog rolling in thick over Twin Peaks from my window, whenever i happened to look out that window. i've been feeling pretty nostalgic for SF lately, maybe because the weather's been so ugly here in New York, but i'm beginning to wonder if i could ever live there again.

SF graffiti