Jesse’s birthday is on Saturday. He is celebrating on Thursday night, which I hope, there’s some reason for that…I gotta remember to ask him, because why, why would you want to go out on a Thursday night when your actual birthday is on the fucking weekend? I feel like that is. The natural way of thinking. Take last year, for example, Jesse’s birthday fell on a Friday and the party was planned, as expected, for Friday fucking night. Ok, maybe I sound a bit like a child right now…but really?, everyones agrees with me that its bullshit. All I’m saying is I preferred the scheduling last year… which now that I’m thinking about it, turned out to be an absolute disaster. What was going on? Oh yeah, Jesse’s sister-in-law Brenda asked that his party be scheduled for any date other than Friday, because she had some mandatory work function that she could not, under no circumstances, be absent from— Ok, I get it, work stuff sucks and sometimes it completely fucks with shit you were planning but our buddy Patrick was coming in from out West…he was spending some time visiting his family— They were originally from Glenville but moved years ago somewhere a couple hours away…anyway, Patrick’s flight back home was Saturday afternoon so that complicated things and oh yeah, Judy, Jesse’s wife, had gotten sick a few days before his birthday, maybe it was Covid or something like that, I don’t know, but it was something where we were getting texts saying maybe he shouldn’t do a party that year, which sucks for Jesse because honestly his birthday parties are kinda cursed.

I’m not sure if anything interesting happened at previous birthdays…I met Jesse in high school but we weren’t close friends until junior/senior year. We actually shared a few classes freshman year but we ran with different crews and didn’t associate much inside or outside the classroom. He played baseball and hung out with those kids. Also, we were in big town, the kind that has 3 or 4 different middle schools but everyone goes to the same high school…so Jesse initially hung out with kids from Pelter middle, which was kinda the snooty middle school, and I went to Ramses, which was objectively the shittiest middle school in the town— it had it’s upsides though, if you wanted to be a smart ass and get away with shit, yeah you could do basically whatever you wanted there, but if you wanted to be a smart kid, well, good luck. We had this teacher, Ms. Kraft, completely checked out…a seventh grade science teacher, she just didn’t give a fuck you know, she’d put on a “science” movie and just pass out in the back of the dark classroom. We could hear her snoring away but no one said anything, obviously, we would just play around and do whatever we wanted…but I’m sure that was a nightmare for some kid, super interested in science, and the teacher just phoning it in and the rest of the class acting like animals…that would suck if you were that kid, but I wasn’t that kid, and I liked being an animal sometimes. So high school was a little weird that first year or so, cause everyone had their own small little groups they were comfortable and familiar with…like the lunch room was basically divided into groupings matching the middle schools, and in classes, when you got broken into small groups or partners, everyone immediately linked up with people from their previous school— its interesting now to think of how those freshman year groups started to divide and dissect and join with other dismantled groups to form tight-knit friends based on common interests and personalities. At least I can look back and see that with my school, and that is definitely what happened with Jesse and I, and Patrick, Mara, Trey, Sam…none of us were really friends freshman year.   I don’t remember seeing Mara in any classes before she started dating Patrick and Patrick was more Jesse’s friend but we had an English class in sophomore year and I remember thinking this guy is pretty funny…anyway Jesse and I became friends during the end of sophomore year— I wanted the new Tool CD so I made a deal with my mom to bring me to the music store in exchange for cleaning out the garage, my mom made deals like that all the time…you want something, ok, you do something for me or the house or the car and I’ll get you that CD or game or book…I think it worked cause I never expect things without doing some work for it. But yeah, we go to the record store or whatever, most people were just buying CDs, some people still used tape players, but we called it a record store even though I never really even saw a record player until I was in college…and that was part of a super high end audio system this kid had…anyway, Jesse is at the same store, buying the new Tool CD. So I’m like, ok, this kid likes Tool too and we start talking about music and it turns out that Jesse plays drums which was, and still is, always cool to find out. Jesse’s mom was also with him so while we’re talking, our moms end up talking to each other and before you know it, I start going over to Jesse’s house and start hanging out with Patrick, and then junior year we would meet up with Mara and Sam and some of their other friends and go to the mall. The mall days. Our parents would drop us off like 2pm on Saturday, always after eating lunch at home, and we would walk around the mall, east to west, floor by floor, stopping and chatting with other groups, doing stupid things to impress each other and make each other laugh, and we’d get picked up hours later, most times without spending any money— if someone had money that was just a huge bonus and you felt like a boss because since you technically could buy something at the store, you were a legitimate customer and the customer can be a dick. 

But Jesse’s 18th birthday was not 

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