I'll pull the damn blog over right now....
8/22/2003 2:50 PM
Sheesh...you people. "Jared you haven't updated your site in a long time...Jared the grammar sucks...Jared the spelling sucks...Jared you have a problem with premature ..." Well, maybe I've said too much. I promised an up beat piece last time and dammit you're going to get it. Spelling, grammar be damned. I said early on that I suck at both. So again forgive me dear readers. The summer is waning...The kids can't feel it. That is anyone under the age of 25 but the rest of us. We have that "lost time" look.

"Uh...wait it was just opening day...then it was Summerfest...Labor Day is in 2 weeks?" I miss the days when there was nothing but giant, vast expanses of time to fill and you filled them with wonderfully dumb things. Your friends were always available...you never even had a plan of what to do. It was bloody marvelous. So take my hand and lets wander down the memory trail...

We lived on a street just down from a factory that owned a mammoth amount of unused land. The neighborhood simply referred to it kindly as "the field". The factory referred to it as "the dumping area". But this was the 70's when it was ok to dump what ever you had left from a factory/assembly lined process into the unused real estate adjacent to your company. Why I'm sure it was in the handbook. It was the 70's before that pesky EPA and before the days when Mercury was toxic. If it was my kids and it was now...I don't think I would have let them on the land with out a chem-suit. I will say this it made for a cool play area. Hell, they didn't even fence off the storage or high voltage units that dotted the area. You were pissed as a kid if one as actually locked. We would wander over the acres catching frogs, talking about girls and whitewashing Becky Thatcher’s fence. There were train tracks but no train. And best of all there were no adults to screw up the fun. It’s in "the field" that I saw my first naked woman, in a discarded issue of "Oui" magazine. Her name was Tracy. She had curly brown hair, deep brown eyes, she wore these hippie beads around her neck and according to her bio she was single, liked soft jazz, long walks and guys with a sense of humor. I liked long walks…I had a great sense of humor I didn’t know what jazz was but I'm sure I would like it if such a free thinker like Tracy enjoyed it I'm sure I would learn to love it. It was 7 page pictorial shot with an extremely soft lens. Looking at the pictures it confirmed something I suspected for a very long time..."This is what single adult people are doing...They are taking long walks, listening to jazz and they are naked!" Next to Carrie Bristol (the little red haired girl of my Charlie Brown life) Tracy was the first woman I was in love with. Tracy and I would be married, they would play jazz at our wedding we would go home and she would put on her hippy beads and walk around nude in our mansion. But there was a cloud on the horizon because my next-door neighbor, Ed was with me when Tracy and I met and from the look on his face he too was falling in love with her. I couldn't have this! Jealousy rears its ugly head at such a tender age. In retrospect it should have been an early lesson to me about friends and women. But I had a plan…we would split the pages between us and I would ensure that I got the larger more naked picture of her. It was a Trump like maneuver. I had to laugh as my short legs carried me as fast as I could home. I needed to secure a hiding spot for my new love. And I did find one. In fact it was so good Tracy would never be seen from again. I secreted her behind a loose mopboard in my bedroom. As I delicately...gently slid her between the slot of the board and wall. I lost my hold on her. The carefully folded sheets of the magazine slipped down into the wall and dropped out of sight...forever. "Oh no! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" I thought to myself. There would be no nakedness...no mansion....NO JAZZ! I sat there for a long time, starring helplessly at the wall. Trying the best that I could to formulate the best recovery plan that my 8-year-old brain could formulate. But aside from calling a contractor to come and disassemble the wall I would have to come to the very real denial that she was gone. Well...stuck in a wall but "gone" nonetheless. Years later in high school I recalled Tracy and did try to organize a rescue effort by removing the mopboard in hopes she had just fallen a few inches but no. She was gone. She had moved on...at least a few more inches down into the wall was my guess. Later, I questioned Ed in regards to his pictures of Tracy in hopes that I could broker some kind of deal but sadly Ed forgot her and left her in his shorts. They were then washed where they were discovered in a wrinkly pulpy mess by his mom. Ed went on to serve a one-week grounding for being even dumber than me. There were far more adventures to happen in "the field". The time we played "war" in the trenches that would one day be the sewage treatment plant. The numerous encounters with the police patrols. Who were looking to shake down the dopers that went there to smoke their pot and found a 12 year old was a lot harder to catch in a sprint than a 17 year old burn out. And the time Wil Wheaton, Corey Haim and I went to look at the dead body by the train tracks...but these are all stories for another time.