Friendship

Friendship.....you just can't live without it.

Everybody needs friends....people to turn to during stressful situations, people to build memories with, people who can rely on you for advice & guidance....& maybe people who will chip in on a 12 pack of beer once in a while.

I've been blessed with being able to make a lot of friends in my life. From childhood to the present time, I can't even begin to list all the individuals who I have come across. Each & every person has left an impact on me, whether good or bad, & I can crack a devious smile knowing that I can re-live those memories, be it in my head or through old videos & pictures.

But now I'm 32 years old & the brutal reality is that I rarely hang out with anybody anymore. A lot of it is life....you tend to go down your chosen path & end up not having any time anymore for those old shenanigans. But once in a while I still would like to believe that, one day, all of us could get together & re-live the experience one more time....for old time's sake.

Nowadays, there really isn't a group or clique that exists anymore. The last, tight knit group of friends that I have (known simply as "The Guys") rarely make appearences anymore. Pat & Mike are burdened by no transportation & Mike's current work schedule at Kroger's, Matt Keith has limited his appearences to mainly Wednesday evenings due to his thrid shift commitments at Wal-Mart, and Rob, for reasons only known to him, has decided to pretty much stop calling & coming over altogether...I haven't talked to him or seen him since May. Yet I still consider these guys my friends. No arguments, bad falling-outs, or anything like that...it's just the way the cookie crumbles, so to speak.

The world of Facebook has allowed me to reconnect with a lot of individuals from my past & it's been nifty....that's right, I said "nifty". The greatest thing about Facebook is that I've been able to locate the majority of my old friends from years past, people who I haven't seen or talked to in many years.

For starters, there's "The Brotherhood"....a ragtag group of trailer park hoodrats who made my childhood quite fun, to say the least. The list of misfits from that clan reads like a high school yearbook (or criminal defendant list, depending on who you ask)....Scott Cadell, Andy Carlson, Rob Smith, J.D. Nicholson, Jason Silva, Jake Slawik, Rhyne Spencer, Craig Scott, Jason McClaskey, Dwayne Tesch, Jeremy Williams & his stepbrother Mike K. These guys & I were a tight knit group of teenagers, causing chaos while having loads of fun doing it. We were all involved with an equally mischevious group of girls from East Peoria who kept up with us in every aspect....Erica Forden, Tiffanie McNeese, Sarah Hoffer, Kristina Sayers & Autumn Martin (who resided in Pekin), among other supporting cast members. Facebook has reunited me with almost all of these individuals (except for Andy, who is busy with work & family, although I do have his sister Juanita on my friend list, Jeremy because I have absolutley no interest in locating him as he was disowned long ago by everybody & Autumn, who has vanished from the face of the earth). Let me ask you this....if Facebook wasn't invented, do you REALLY think that we all would have kept in touch?

There also was "The Rock & Roll Society", my high school clique. Jesus H. Christ, Esq., were we ever a bunch of troublemakers! Rob Spear, Rick Miller, Jake Simonsen & Mike Johnson brought me out of the trailer park & into a whole new world of hell raising. To document our exploits would be a riot....it would also probably cast some of us in a non-favorable light. With the exception of Rick, I maintain FB contact with everybody else, & as mentioned earlier, Mike still makes occassional apperances.

My other friends have come from different eras of my life. Some were other childhood friends from the trailer park, some were other buddies from high school. There were the main trailer court chicks that I grew up with...& then there was everybody I met during the infamous Summer of '98, particulary those hip cats from Princeville, the lovely women from Metamora/Germantown Hills & East Peoria & other well-to-do people from the Tri-County area. Sorry if you're not named, but you know who you are!

I'm rambling here....

The point of all of this is that it's a honor to still consider all of you as friends. We may not see each other much, we may not hang out every weekend....shit, we might barely get the chance to even talk. But what matters is that we all can still (via Facebook, at least) keep up on tabs with how we all are doing. I would like to believe that while we may not physically be kicking it together, mentally we can still throwback to the days of yore, when there wasn't a damn care in the world & we did whatever the fuck we wanted to....with reckless abandon.

Maybe one day, all of us can plan a one-off reunion. Get everybody together & have a BBQ perhaps, or meet at some pre-determined location & have one last hurrah before we all dive back into our individual lives. Now THAT would be something for the books........