This right here is a most clueless, exuberant 13 year old me astride a bale of hay, at Tenaya Junior High School in Fresno, California, posing hard in RED DITTOS at an afternoon sock hop (hence, LE SOCKS) with my very best friend, Miss Christianne Berry, whose narrow ass is wearing Chemin de Fer button-up drive-in jeans. BRILLIANT! She was and IS smart and beautiful and what she was doing hanging around with sketchy trash like baby is BEYOND ME. But she did — and, let me tell you, I am the better person for it.

Christianne comes from an amazing, erudite, generous, well-traveled, worldly, family of academics…and it is from them that I got my very first wondrous gaze into the kind of life that I wanted for myself when I grew up. She was kind, funny, loyal, had the GROOVIEST, MOD, orange bedroom (ALL TO HERSELF! Unlike my many- siblinged cockroach-like self, who didn’t even always have a goddamned BED to herself! Such luxury! Such wonders!), and, most importantly of all, she shared her fancy, delicious, hippified, handmade with love and care sack lunch with me every single day. I can still remember the taste of Alice Berry’s liver wurst and pickle sammiches. Tastes like…COMMUNION, baby.

Christianne and her awesome family welcomed me with open arms and no judgment into their cozy home, even though I was weird and odd and different…and by doing so, they taught me and changed me as a person…just by being who and what they were. I will always love them and thank them from the bottom of my trashy little heart.

PS) If you look very close, behind the tragic tears of a clown, you will see that my tender little pubescent heart is shattered into about a million pieces because that PIECE-OF-ASS, PIECE-OF-SHIT SOC, Stuart Dean, never not once asked my fatass to dance to KC and The Sunshine Band. NOT ONCE. Bastard. But, hey, I got no pride or no shame. Even though he’s got the most BEAUTIFUL grandson in the world, and I’m old, fat, and I gotta REALLY GLORIOUS GUNT, I would TOTALLY make out with him now. What say you, boy?