when your friends get famous.
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The boy I almost lost my virginity to was on Saturday Night Live this weekend. I found out by accident, and then stayed up late to watch. He is very bald now... his hair was thinning even back in 1996, when I first touched it. That little thing between us... what a funny little thing that was.And speaking of funny little things, the tiny, mousy, quiet girl that we used to pick up for school at her parents' house beyond its acre of grapevines... her last album was one of the most highly-acclaimed of 2006.I'm from "a very small, weird town" with a big artistic community, a lot of pride, and these days, a lot of confusion. Imagine what happens in a small town, when two of your friends get famous.These days, when I go home, everyone is achingly hip. People have grown out hair in funny shapes, squeezed themselves in to painfully tight jeans, changed their middle names. Everyone can play guitar; everyone wants to be in a band. The bands are all either freak folk getups, or hard rock gothfests. Everyone has talent; everyone is working hard; everyone knows that, if Joanna and Hunter could do it, they can do it too.So they start their band, and then they move to Portland to work the indie scene there, and they get some decent reviews in mediocre publications, and it's all this horrid, endless struggle.When your friends get famous and you don't.I mean Hunter always had that special something, you know, and he worked so hard for it. He was working for it before the rest of us knew what "it" was.And Joanna, she was so talented, and she played that harp since she was little, very studious with it.But there are some people from my town that we all just knew would be famous. And their names are not Joanna or Hunter... and they are still out there, working every day for it, working so hard.In the meantime everyone is tossed around like bits of debris, caught in the eddies, and Joanna and Hunter leave us farther and farther behind, and the stream is drying up.Don't get me wrong, though: I couldn't be more proud and happy. I really am. These are two beautiful, talented, noble chunks of humanity. Thank God it was them and not, say, me.Seriously.
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