Day Sixty-two - Subculture

But before we get how I got back in the Air Force, let's see how my friendships were blossoming during those years between 1995 and 1997. What had up to then been my most valued friendship - the one I had with Valter - had gone for good. I tried, in the very beginning, to make amends for what he perceived as a slight to him, and to maybe rebuild those bridges, but he was nothing if not very proudful, and he'd rather just lose me as a friend. It did hurt, and as I've said before I don't think I would've reacted the same way, but I had to learn without that friendship.

Luckily for me though, other friendships arose and would prove to be just as fierce, if not, indeed, even moreso. Let's begin with 'James' - he'll always have that alias here - and sometime around '95 he started fo become a more frequent fixture of my life. Again, when we went to school together we didn't really get along that well, in fact I don't think we even liked each other, really. But for whatever reason, after I left school we started to hang out more, and I got to know him better. He'd soon become part of my close knit group of people who I called friends, and me and him and Dora would go out all the time. Together with S. and N. we'd go to a lot of gigs together, and sometimes the bands would have these autograph sessions at the music megastore we still had back then, and we always scooped up some nice autographs. Gigging, too, was a lot of fun, we always got quite drunk, and we even sometimes travelled up north to go catch some gig that didn't tour through where we lived. It might've been around this time that I first started to notice just how bad alcohol was affecting 'James's' behaviour, but I did very little - if anything at all - to bring him to reason. I think that these two years were where we started forming a good frienship, but only a bit later - around '98 or so - did we become really good friends.

Now, with both S. and N. things were quite different. We all followed the same wanton path, I guess, at least for a couple of years. They - just as I was - were prone to truancy, and that cost them a couple of failed years at school. But whereas I learned nothing from what lessons could be gleaned from failing, they actually stuck with school, and both of them performed much better than I could have ever hoped for myself. I was always closest to S., though we and N. also had a good friendship. He was... challenging, to put it mildly. He was that kind of guy who always seemed to be twenty moves ahead of you, on some sort of endgame only he could grasp. But he was a voracious reader, they both were, in fact. And that spurred even further my reading habits.