william_miller

Some day, I'll figure out my obsession with angels. I'm not even close to that sect of religious practice -- the Christian/Judiastic world in which angelic figures are usually presented in -- but yet, I love the idea of them and how there's always a natural grace about them.

And, oh yeah, since Tilda Swinton whomped major ass in Constantine as Gabriel (look at those fucking wings -- CG! And those wings are absolutely fucking beautiful!), they get extra points anyway.

I guess it could be because angels are always presented as feminine, beautiful, strong, and fearless. C'mon, that's some hot stuff, people.

Oddly enough, I don't really enjoy the movie City of Angels. Go figure.

***

Sometimes, I love iTunes. I was digging through old mix CDs from when I was in high school, and stumbled on one that had bands like Clawfinger (best known for the song "Biggest And The Best") and Custom (a Scottish band that never actually got signed, used to be on popwire.com before it became a crap outreach of record labels). But the last track on it? The Goo Goo Dolls' "Here Is Gone". Must've been just as the album was being released. Anyway, listening to it, I remembered the video, and how I used to love it (and it was one of the only videos of the band's that I did love).

So I hit up iTunes. And they have it! So I downloaded it, and it was just as good as I remembered. It's like an epic 80's teen movie from John Hughes mixed with the indie teen movies of the early to mid 90's. All set in a pretty good, if not depressing, pop song.

It seems rather good that I got into them when I did; this was pretty much how I prepped myself for the kings of sloppy, fun, pop-minded brilliant rock music, The Replacements. Which patched me into The Pixies. Which led to Velvet Underground. Which swung around into The Strokes -- all of that within a year.

I also found an old, all-orchestrated CD. Half of which is Nobou Uetmatsu compositions.

Which goes to show that not much has changed since school; I was a dork then, I'm a dork now.

Y'know, this Goo Goo Dolls/old mix CD thing has got my nostalgic juices flowing. So I think I'm going to recall all I can about my high school years, one by one.

It All Feels So Stupid Now: Quick Memoirs of High School

Freshman year -- a new school, the newest in the state, was upon me. This was 1999, and I was just barely 14. I was what you could reasonably call a geek; I spent a lot of time around the same friends I had hung around with in junior high -- some members of the school band, some kids who were just too weird to really find a place to land otherwise, etc. I couldn't have been less sure of my lot in life than I was at that time -- neurotic as a Woody Allen... well, just as neurotic as Woody Allen. I was a barely average student. My best class? English. It was always so easy for me to present my arguments, as outlandish and not thought out as they were, in a way that sugarcoated them and sweet-talked my teachers into believing they were valid. My worst class was most definitely math -- I found myself taking Practical Math (which, of course, I would ace -- why my 8th grade teacher had pushed me down into that class despite my obvious ease of use with basic math never quite made any sense to me).

It was tough getting adjusted to the new school. Classrooms were seperated into say, a "history pod", where six classrooms, each with the teachers for that field, would be bundled around a center computer lab. It seems easy, sure, but when the school's three-quarters finished, it becomes a bit tougher. Particularly when one stairwell wasn't even done yet. What was worse was the fact that the first day of school was the first day for most of us to actually be in the school -- the regular "step-up day" that most schools have was never done with us due to it being under construction when we would've done so. So it was a complete mess of a first day. I don't suggest it to anybody.

Day by day, though, I got accustomed to the life. Don't we all? School slowly but surely becomes just another fact of life, filled with singular points to going to it (and it was never, ever to learn; what did you learn at high school that you didn't actually already know? Usually nothing), with friends to see, love to be formed and broken, occassional work to be done, gossip to be spread. Watching girls blossom into women. I have distinct memories of watching an old friend of mine go from a flat-chested tomboy (and my best friend) to a vaunted-after jock as her body, particularly her chest, become, well, bud-dum-ba-dum-bum. I remember the girl I had a crush from 7th grade until sometime in 10th grade showing up in my gym class on the first day, and being quite happy about that, since it meant I'd be seeing a lot of her in shorts.

For those of you going "God, he thought with his dick", yes, I most certainly did. I was 14. No 14-year-old boy doesn't think with his dick first and mind second.

If I can, I'll see if I remember my schedule from back then: English first period, gym second; science third period, and I can't remember the fourth -- no, wait, it was Spanish. Fifth period was my study hall -- a hell of a thing to have, since fifth period was lunch, and if you didn't have a study hall that period, you'd be spending an hour in class every day. My old friend with the bud-dum-ba-dum-bum was in the same study hall (as well as my English class) as me. Sat right in front of me the entire year. I would end three out of the five days with sixth period math and seventh period history.

The first few months of my freshman year aren't really lodged in my head. Not much about it is, period. I just remember coming back from February vacation, getting on the school bus. When the school bus picked up a friend of mine, he got on and sat in the seat behind me, as I stretched myself out in a lazy half-asleep position.

"Mike Wile died yesterday," he told me. No greeting, just a horrifying shock.

Mike Wile had been my first best friend -- and I had been his first friend when he moved into town back in the third or forth grade. I had intermittedly seen him since then -- he was in my English and science class -- but I instantly thought of way-back-when, how he had been amazed at my ability with Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (when I played it at his house, just passingly, I discovered an area I have not seen since), how he lived in a duplex, how he had something like 6 siblings. The kid had grown ridiculously tall in the years since we had grown apart as friends, and he had a good sense of humor (although Aislin will tell you otherwise -- she never really liked him). He had also discovered snowboarding since the old days, which is what killed him. He had slid off a path, and gone ribs-first into a heavy oak tree -- killing him pretty much instantly.

He was the first person I knew who had ever died on me. I was stricken with grief, but couldn't cry. All my memories of this day are vivid as the day it happened; coming into English class, half the girls crying, sitting down next to his empty chair (yes, I sat right next to him in first period English -- spooky). He was really gone. The announcement from our principal -- probably the best principal ever -- about Mike's death, explaining that the "Learning Center" (a room on the bottom floor of the school -- see, our school was built on a hill, with the entrance for buses, cars and etc. being on the top of the hill, and then the school's back end being on the bottom of it) was were you could go see guidance counselers and basically just let all your grief out.

I saw a friend at the end of the day who had just spent the entire day down there to get out of classes. I remember hating him for it, because I had actually gone through every class that day despite my deep roots with Mike.

The only other thing that pops up out of the mist is the funeral. It was held in the Baptist church down the street, and there was barely any room by the time we had gotten there. The entire class year seemed to be there, in addition to friends of the family, extended family, and a mess of others. I ended up in a room right beside the pulpit's stage, where I heard, without seeing, many people come and go, saying a few words, a woman singing "In The Arms of An Angel". Oddly enough, I also recall a friend of mine being thanked for his speech after the services by my crush's mother. These are the kind of things that stick in your mind because of how different it felt to be in those moments.

The immediate aftermath was the first time I ever actually skipped a class. Getting back at about 1 PM (the service must've started at something like 10:30 that morning), my friends and I decided there was no real point in actually going to our last class, and we hung out in the "pod" right outside the school cafeteria, which contained beanbag chairs and other minor comforts. It was meant for honor students -- which was definitely neither me or my friends -- but nobody really cared.

I think I still remember my final grades from that year. In English, I got a B; Science, a C. Math was an A, Spanish a D, History a B-, gym an A-.

It would go pretty much downhill from there.

And, oh yeah, during the year, the millennium changed or something. Nobody cared.