Sunstroke

Sat 5/10 was our annual gamble-off in honor of one DJ-san's birthday. It should perhaps more accurately be described as: "First watch grown men duke/choke/bloody it out, then gamble your government check till you are broke and it's 3am check-in at bummy motel-off."

As long time High School friends birthdays usually consisted of lasagna or spending a day at the park. Since coming back from college it's become somewhat of an elaborate full-day celebrate-athons. Over the past year things have seemed different. We all now have busy lives and jobs that take up our time. Hanging out feels a little less organic and someone is always missing from our group.

This is something you expect, you know it's coming, but can never truly prepare for. Losing what little contact I had with J$ was somewhat expected; his move to Amherst was the canary in the coal mine.

My thoughts started off in one direction; but I've of course lost my original, likely trivial, point. What does occur to me is that the aforementioned celebrate-athons are an attempt to replace spending after-school with each other, or long do-nothing summer days together. Long gone are the days where we would play ball till there wasn't enough light to make out the backboard from fence. Evenings filled with the insane ramblings of "worms" over pizza are also things of the past.

The thing about these special days that we now do is that by definition they are singular occurrences; to be cherished at the moment and held onto till the next event, the next time, the next year.

I kinda hoped to get to a nice and neat closing point where all my thoughts eventually made sense, but this obviously is not gonna happened anytime soon. The nice and neat closing may be that there really isn't one.

To be continued?