Vintage Outlandish!

This Content From 2003 (or earlier) see index

Luke

Luke, fearing daylight

Luke sometimes seems to fear the daylight, but don't tell him that to his face. He'll shiv ya.

Luke: "Flap Jack Johnson, how you doin'?"
Me: "Pretty boy floyd, roll. me. a joint!".

We said that kind of thing a lot in jest, Luke with his lost rebel stylings and me the tangled chaotic oddball. The lost rebel. Teenage girls in our town used to call him that when they'd see him working at the gas station. He's a genius and a lot of fun to have around because a little unstable, in the sense that he'll do off-the-wall things if he gets very bored. Going to Reed College probably fostered that propensity (as well as the genius).

I just spoke with this guy and he's going down to Berkeley in the fall, getting paid $17,000 in stipund (plus: *cough* full scholarship) to study on a 5-year PhD track. Way to go! Making me look bad out here.

I should mention before that Luke is an excelent writer. Here's an excerpt that made me laugh out loud from his latest email. Seems my suspicions about Reed college were correct...

I think Reed College has destroyed any hopes I had for a life in corporate middle management. There go my dreams of a pre-fabricated, cream colored house with a rock garden in a gated suburban community where I am in constant competition with nieghbors and friends all of whom I loathe for ever extraneous comsumer goods so that I can please my plastic bitch wife and hopefully engage in timid bunny sex once or twice a month.

Pensive Luke

Luke often seems pensive, like in the midst of good times he's always expecting the bottom to fall out. Sometimes Mark and I taunt him, just by saying "half full." It's actually kind of mean of us.

You can say that again, buddy. When we were but kids (I dunno, 15 or 16 years old), I remember that Luke used to write this great teen-angst poetry. I really mean it was good. He took all that shit that goes on in adolesence and stripped it down to the bare pathos, all without resorting to cliche. He wrote a thesis for Reed (everyone does) and I read part of it. It's acutally pretty good. If anyone needs a savvy young sociologist with stellar punk-rock fashion sense, this is your man.

Luke & Mark & Josh
Luke and Mark and I formed some kind of a king-hell axis of friendship our sophomore year of High School. Mark was going to Waldorf School while Luke and I were at South Eugene High, but we all started hanging out all the fucking time at my house, just doing nothing, being adolescents. There are a lot of good memories from those days, most of them involving listening to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack ad nausium, playing videogames or talking about girls (and the lack thereof at the moment). Those we the days.

Later on we discovered Booze and Parties, and we had a nice run in that scene as well. I'll write out some of my better High School stories at a later date. There are quite a few. College split us up geographically, but the bond of friendship has been fairly steady over the years. It's one of my great desires in life to connect with these cats and do something big before I die.

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