An ode and memoir to the man of the hour
Jared Adams
Issue date: 5/2/07 Section: Opinion
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"Hey! Wanna play checkers?"
Those were the first words he spoke to me. I was five and he couldn't have come into my life in a more hopelessly innocent and painfully ironic way. Two happy-go-lucky kindergartners we began our game of the mind, too young to know there was a world outside of Rhinebeck, almost too old to urinate in our overalls. The world was in front of us and a brotherhood unparalleled was just beginning. This is the story of a great man.
It's funny how the years all merge and blend together now that I look back on them all. They've become a raging sea of vibrant, raging, laughing youth across orange skies of summer dusk, where we and our comrades and arms would ride just as quickly to where something was happening, as we would to absolutely nowhere at all. Just casting a line into them I find that the waters are rich with the catch and I can effortlessly draw moment after moment from them.
Sepasco Village where he grew up, we would spend summers in his basement once it was ready for us. It was there that we played our first N64 games, watched our first R-rated movies and eventually first porno, along with the second, third, fourth and so on. This house was also the third place I heard Crosby, Stills, Nash (AND YOUNG!!!), the second place I heard the Grateful Dead and the first place I heard the Gorillaz. We credit ourselves to pushing "Clint Eastwood" into success on one of MTV's video battles, we must've voted at least 1000 times in three minutes.
One day I dropkicked a box of Legos into his face. It was possibly the greatest day of my life up until that point. This was partially because of the obvious, but mainly because we got it on video. This was part of a long-standing tradition of stunt videos we made that proved that the disclaimers at the beginning of "Jackass" videos were completely ineffective on the adolescent male psyche when viewed within the town lines of Rhinebeck.
After attending the Spice World Tour's stop in Hartford, Connecticut we found ourselves in Bulkley Middle School, and then everything began to change. With the sudden availability of the Internet, South Park and gangsta rap, he took on a very new and very abrasive dialogue. I can credit him as the very first of my close friends to drop a forceful and uninhibited "F-bomb" in my presence. I was horrified initially and remained that way for the next several times of its utterance. It took one fateful afternoon, while we ate Doritos in his kitchen while his parents were gone, that I finally dropped the very same bomb.
Those were the first words he spoke to me. I was five and he couldn't have come into my life in a more hopelessly innocent and painfully ironic way. Two happy-go-lucky kindergartners we began our game of the mind, too young to know there was a world outside of Rhinebeck, almost too old to urinate in our overalls. The world was in front of us and a brotherhood unparalleled was just beginning. This is the story of a great man.
It's funny how the years all merge and blend together now that I look back on them all. They've become a raging sea of vibrant, raging, laughing youth across orange skies of summer dusk, where we and our comrades and arms would ride just as quickly to where something was happening, as we would to absolutely nowhere at all. Just casting a line into them I find that the waters are rich with the catch and I can effortlessly draw moment after moment from them.
Sepasco Village where he grew up, we would spend summers in his basement once it was ready for us. It was there that we played our first N64 games, watched our first R-rated movies and eventually first porno, along with the second, third, fourth and so on. This house was also the third place I heard Crosby, Stills, Nash (AND YOUNG!!!), the second place I heard the Grateful Dead and the first place I heard the Gorillaz. We credit ourselves to pushing "Clint Eastwood" into success on one of MTV's video battles, we must've voted at least 1000 times in three minutes.
One day I dropkicked a box of Legos into his face. It was possibly the greatest day of my life up until that point. This was partially because of the obvious, but mainly because we got it on video. This was part of a long-standing tradition of stunt videos we made that proved that the disclaimers at the beginning of "Jackass" videos were completely ineffective on the adolescent male psyche when viewed within the town lines of Rhinebeck.
After attending the Spice World Tour's stop in Hartford, Connecticut we found ourselves in Bulkley Middle School, and then everything began to change. With the sudden availability of the Internet, South Park and gangsta rap, he took on a very new and very abrasive dialogue. I can credit him as the very first of my close friends to drop a forceful and uninhibited "F-bomb" in my presence. I was horrified initially and remained that way for the next several times of its utterance. It took one fateful afternoon, while we ate Doritos in his kitchen while his parents were gone, that I finally dropped the very same bomb.
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