My Jackass

So, it was eighth grade, and we made this movie, because Emily's glasses have negative effects. When you put on Emily's glasses, it's required that everything you say begins with, "I'm Johnny Knoxville, and..." Emily's glasses also made you do really, really stupid things.

I think I must have started the trend. I think I put them on, and decided that the yogurt in my hand was a comedic prop. It was peach yogurt. For the longest time, I couldn't even think about eating a yogurt, without thinking of how yogurt filled the pores of my mouth, seeped into my throat, and coated every square inch. But I don't remember exactly. I remember that the peach yogurt came back up more than once. And I remember that I felt, back then, that the only way I kept my friends was by being that kind of exhibitionist.

Emily must have edited it, but The Shed was tried more than once. The object was for Willy to run at the shed and run up its wall until he was on the shed's roof. So he ran at the shed, and ran at the shed, and he just kept crashing into it face-first. Then, at one point, he caught onto the roof's edge.

By that time, Dobbl and I had gone inside. We were afraid of getting in trouble. And as the year progressed, we started going inside because we were sick of it all. We'd gotten somewhat popular, and it just started killing us, how everyone was so demanding and loud and like a wiggling stream of riot, every lunch. We had a fight. We both broke down. I cried in the bathroom, and she and I sat together there for the first time. That was around May, and from then, we ate our lunches sitting on the bathroom floor.

I miss that fun that we'd had, though. When we all had such a great sense of camaraderie that we cheered when we did stupid things to impress each other.

You can't see the complications running through that video. The bubbling, bubbling veins between Dobbl and I that would grow into our ill-defined friendship. I can't remember. Had the friendship been hung on thin strings by that video? Can you see the strange tones that were my quest to find self? I doubt it.

But looking back, I wish I could just watch the video, and remember fondly the things we did in the mid-May sun. I tell myself that there will be another summer day when my life seems so easy.