Teenage Fanclub

Xxxx,

That email you sent was epic. I can’t address everything in one response, but here is my reply. My hope is that we can have a continuing conversation.

I’ve been working in the city for the past decade. My profession is, and had been since college, medical advertising.  I write snappy headlines and copy to sell pharmaceuticals.

In a grand miscalculated equation, it seemed as a way to define myself.

The writing came easy. It’s in the family genetics. But don’t even ask how I learned the science. The mystery is beyond all but a chemistry teacher at HHS. Mrs. Grocott once kindly gave me a B instead of a C on my report card because I drew a picture of a stick-figure cat instead of answering a question on a test.  Somehow, drawing that cat as a 16-year old tilted the deck in my favor. I’m still drawing stick figure cats.

Anyway, as to how I got to NYC… I was living in Red Bank, NJ and sacrificing 4 hours a day to ride trains to and from the city.  It gave me time to read a lot, but I could feel the leeching of time in in a micro and macro sense. So I quit my job, packed my surfboard, and travelled to Mexico, Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Antigua.

After my grand tour of the tropics, I came home and chilled at the beach for a year.  My girlfriend, Lynn, had a place in the city and would visit on weekends.  An apartment in her building opened up and I took it to be closer to her and where the business is.

But I’ve painted myself into a corner. At the age of 45, I’m disgusted with the professional path I committed to 20 years ago.  It’s not exactly the writing gig I, or my professors had in mind.

I decided to get in touch because of a dream. All my friends had died and I was the only one at the funeral. I was surrounded in a Mandelbrot set of spiraling caskets. I awoke sweating, feeling weak in the haze of the heat. I remembered you and how much laughter and drama and fun and teenage closeness we had in such a concentrated touch of time.

After that dream, and after I reached out to you, a great friend of mine killed himself. He jumped off a cliff at Rockefeller Lookout at Palisades Interstate Park. He was suffering greatly from MS. It broke me, Xxxx.

We are — here on out — going to be losing more friends than we gain. Let’s at least keep in touch with the one’s we truly have.

PK