Who Needs Facebook When There Are So Many Real Life Losers?
Well, one of the most amazing things about Facebook is that people seem to resurface and connect with you that you haven’t seen in years. And is it just me or are most of those people people that you really didn’t know in school who treat you like a long lost friend, or people who treated you like crap or worse yet totally ignored you, but now act like you were kind of tight? (for my overseas readers this expression means you were close friends who shared secrets and stuff)
It’s weird how time distorts your memories. Maybe they were close friends and I don’t remember that, or maybe they somehow “remember” that we were friends. Thing is that I was pretty friendly with almost everyone, so maybe they remember how I treated them, but not how they treated me. Like I said, maybe I don’t remember well.
You don’t need facebook to run into losers though. Here’s a story of a loser who sometimes lived near me as a kid. I say sometimes because he mostly lived with his parents, but sometimes he would live with his grandmother, who lived across the street from me. He was a loser from the very beginning. He was one of those kids who was a know it all who happened to know very little actually. One of my favorite odd memories of Larry was of us going fishing, which we did fairly often. But we didn’t eat many of the fish we caught we were mostly catch and release, but we didn’t even know that term. But not Larry. He ate everything he caught. He would catch sunnies and filet them and the meat would be the size of a quarter. You could eat a thousand of those and still have room for a large dessert.
I lost track of him after middle school, and didn’t even think about him much, even though I was friends with his cousins, and saw his father and his grandmother fairly often. His Dad was a police officer who collected porn magazines and Larry would sneak them out of the house to show us. Good stuff there. It was ironic that his dad was a cop and later police chief in a nearby town, because Larry turned up in the paper fairly often in the crime log.
The last time I saw Larry he was on a street corner looking like a bum. I was just driving by and saw him, unshaven, dirty and sitting on a curb with his feet in the gutter. Like his life, I imagine.
The time before that, I was on my way to basic training at age 17. I walked into a bus station in Harrisburg and was getting a bus to the train terminal to go to Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. And there was Larry. Sitting in the station drinking some whiskey out of a paper bag. I walked over to him and said, Larry, how you doing? What are you doing in Harrisburg? And he replied that he was on his way to a juvenile detention center. Don’t ask me why he was unaccompanied, I don’t know. Don’t ask how he had alcohol, he was under 21, but looked about 25. Back in the day it wasn’t so hard to get served. Of course with my baby face, I couldn’t get served until I was 21, and always got carded until my mid 30’s. We made some small talk, and Larry tried to talk me out of going into the Army, but really he was in no position to talk about life altering decisions.
I wonder if he’s on Facebook?
