7th grade (1985-1986)
dad sells his 1969 Datsun 2000, thus depriving me of my first sportscar. i don't talk to him for weeks. he ends up spending the money from the car to buy everyone in the family a gift. this is how i got my first guitar. something i won't take seriously until college, but its the only instrument i've ever stuck with. just owning it (even in high school when i can barely play "smoke on the water") begins to shape and alter my identity.

8th grade (1986-1987)
the first party i've been to where the focus is romance and teenaged fun instead of gifts, candy and bowling. the only reason i've even been invited to this party is because this guy and i grew up together and i think his mother made him invite all his "grade school friends". after spending a lot of time playing ping pong, a popular girl in my class asks me if i want to dance with another one of the popular girls in my class. up to this point in my life, these people have not spoken to me. i jump to the conclusion that this is a set-up and they want to make fun of me if i say yes. so i say no. i refuse to explain why. i found out many, many years later that she had been serious. had we dated, i might have made the transition at that point into the "in" crowd. who knows who i'd be today if that had happened. oddly enough, this may be one of the single biggest decisions i ever made.

12th grade (1990-1991)
i make a conscious decision not to buy into the "everyone in the Top Ten and Who's Who and the National Honors Society has to -want- to go to a tier one school, let alone actually end up attending one" mentality. i choose a small (1300 students), non-denominational protestant, liberal arts college about 40 miles north of Boston, just south of the base of Cape Anne. true, its #3 in the christian consortium, at the time it was in US News top 50 for "best value" and had an exceptionally well respected program for those who wanted to become teachers (regionally), but it certainly didn't have the "umph" name recognition of, say, Harvard, which, at this point, i'm pretty sure i could have gotten into if i had wanted (ignoring issues of money, family name, influence, etc). even though i said i was i'd been dating a woman for some time and we'd actually begun to plan our future lives around each other. she had a degenerative spinal condition, which, sometime shortly after our 18 month anniversary, she found out was most likely terminal. for all i know, she's dead by now. at one point she mailed me back my class ring (she lived a good 30 miles away) and stopped calling me. i took the hint. i never heard from her again. this bears mentioning
1) because if she hadn't been sick, things would have been very different
2) she cemented me into an already established pattern of dating extremely eccentric, extremely damaged, extremely high maintenance women.

college (1991-1995)
i take electives in rhetoric, logic, ethics, ideologies, old and new testament studies, and 20th century art theory. i start on the school paper writing 'arts and life' section articles (humor columns, music reviews, events coverage) and by senior year i have an entire editorial page for my own use. i'm attending school on a "leadership" scholarship and i actually con them into buying into the idea that rather than being a leader by participating in their endless parade of missionary events, volunteer groups and other pre-fab activities, that i'm being a campus leader by simply being an exceptionally vocal and public devil's advocate. this is pre-world-wide-web and the campus barely has internet access at all. when i say "the campus bulletin board" i mean a piece of wood that people tacked letters onto. between this forum and the newspaper, i set off on a mission to completely re-structure the size and shape of the box most of these people label as christianity. had i known then that once i found online forums for these activities i'd become horridly addicted to these kinds of debates, i'd have steered clear entirely. during the course of most of this, i systematically break down everything my parents and my home church have taught me, and begin to form my own faith and my own view of the world. to this day, my relationship with my parents has never been the same.

age 24 (1997)
its mid-summer. i am engaged to be married, in september, to a woman i've had a crush on since the day we met, during the summer of 1992. I've just gone temp-to-perm at a UK owned and managed software company in the not even yet completed Cummings Center in Beverly. i don't own a home computer. aside from the almost exclusively non-GUI use of the internet i did in college (the web didn't hit our campus until something like 1994, and even then, the dorms weren't wired until after i graduated which means i did most of my computing on terminals) i am a complete online n00b. something, and i have no idea what, possessed me to start reading alt.gothic using dejanews and a geocities email account. this will set in motion several things at the same time which will radically alter my life, seemingly forever.
1) my eventual introduction to the boston.net.goth mailing list (through cusraque whom i met on alt.gothic by way of a several hundred page long debate about supposed contradictions in the bible. a conversation i never would have bothered with if i'd known he was merely quoting a book at me, not speaking from his own knowledge).
2) my first post on said list which was a comment in a thread about female imagery in god myths. i mentioned my favorite, the quote from the new testament where christ states that G-d loves G-d's children like a hen brooding over her chicks. this results in my first boston.net.goth flame war during which i discover just how openly and vehemently anti-christian that scene is. rather than taking the hint, i choose to plow on for almost 4 years.
3) my (by then) wife beginning to attend manray, meeting hundreds of people, and her eventually leaving me for someone who had much higher status in the scene than i did (she was obsessed with social status).
4) my being noticed by a co-worker en route to some event or another in full regalia and my resultant dismissal from that UK based company. from there i eventually ended up working at JFF with bratling, and this set me down my path from office assistant to self-taught developer.
5) the formation of Scissorkiss, Oubliette, Aumlaut and many other musical projects.
6) meeting aiden, who is now my (significantly less damaged, significantly less high maintenance, significantly less insane, and hand's down infinitely hotter) wife.

the above is the one i think that freaks me out the most. because for the life of me i cannot recall
1) why i was suddenly interested in participating on use.net
2) why i was suddenly interested in the gothic sub-culture (which i'd really only flirted around the edges of in high school and college, being far too interested in far too many things to get pinned into a single genre like that).
and without this choice, i would not be who i am today. lessons learned, bands formed, music made, friendships formed and lost, not to mention meeting and marrying the love of my life.
there is no room in life for mistakes or regrests, and this is a clear example of why.

age 25 (1998)
its again mid-summer. i'm moving out of "our" apartment. i've been led to believe its a temporary separation. we've divided our posessions based on who's new place has the room. she takes my cat because my new place doesn't permit pets. a few days after i move out i find out two mind-boggling things:
1) she's accused me publically of physical abuse (but hasn't filed charges)
2) she's already got a lawyer and is filing papers for divorce.
i end up in such a paranoid, semi-delusional panick over this, and am so ashamed of people even finding out that she'd made these accusations, that i end up caving in on a vast number of things during the course of the divorce. she ends up with both the queen sized bed and the kitchen set that my parents gave us for wedding gifts. she loses my cat because in a further attempt to shore up this claim of abuse she doesn't actually move into her new apartment, of which i know the location, but moves in with friends who have a 200 pound dog who runs my cat off the property within 30 seconds of them arriving. to this day, my parents don't know about those accusations, and to this day, i think they wonder why i was so keen to just smooth everything over, give her what she wanted, and make it all go away.
while on the one hand, the sudden divorce and needless accusations made the situation much uglier, and therefore made -her- much easier to get over, on the other hand they created their own entire suite of bitterness and cynicism which to this day i haven't completely recovered from.
to this day, there are a small number of people who, either because they saw her "evidence" (she had a few bruises from falling into a massive candlestand in our bedroom during a massive fight we were having) or because they chose to actively mis-interpret things i've said (i said that her bruises were partially my fault, which was true), still believe that i am/was a wife beater.

that is really the beginning of the end of my life in the boston goth scene, even though i won't realize it for a long time.
people on the mailing lists quickly pigeoned me as a hyper-conservative religious fanatic and refused to ever read what i had to say on face value. the more i tried to couch things carefully and the harder i worked to avoid controversy, the worse it all got. even the creation of splinter lists over time eventually exposed the same scars and wounds, still festering beneath the surface.
i become increasingly less willing to attend the boston clubs, and its actually less than 6 months from my move from Beverly to Cambridge that i'm moving to Providence.
within a year, the only reason i'm even remotely connected to the scene is because Scissorkiss is utterly unable to get out from under the "gothic" label, and so the scene represents our core audience for years to come. until the end, our biggest shows were when we played at Manray, Ceremony or Substance events.

age 29-30 (2002-2003)
the final ties with the boston scene are cut. aumlaut implodes, scissorkiss goes on extended hiatus, (lisp) ends up being stillborn and solo material is still too much of a genre scatter shot to warrant any kind of public release. i'm clearly in a musical drought at the moment, and i've begun to learn not to fight it.
spook and i move to the suburbs and switch from affordable, spaceous, old apartments with lots of personality and problems to a cramped "luxury apartment" which is brand new, if a bit bland. we also figured out we really preferred having everything be brand new.
we got married.
we seem to be slipping quietly into a much more boring, much more stable, "adult" lifestyle, which i'm still not entirely certain is what i want out of my life.
boston's club scene is now a joke, what with all the smoking bans in effect, and providence's club scene has remained a one horse town since our Pulse event died a pre-mature death. we may or may not find new life at the new event there, but given the reaction of the younger, more arrogant, better connected set, who, ironically were aggrivated at how up-to-date the music was, its unlikely to supplant the heavy hitters anytime soon.
we throw spook's sister's 21st birthday party (which ends up having a tiny hint of jhimm's 30th birthday mixed in), and realize in the time since that this will probably be the last big party we ever throw. two attempts since (including the one scheduled for the end of this month) have been met with less than enthusiastic responses, and our perpetually shrinking social circle just can't provide the critical mass anymore.

and i guess that's what spawned this entry in the first place.
the realization that at this point,
every time i lose a friend,
i'm losing a measurable percentage of my social circle.
at this point,
you could even say its pushing the point
where i'd be losing a two-digit percentage.
when people ask me what's up, or what i've been doing,
i have no answer.
i work.
i go home.
i watch tv.
i play video games.
i occasionally attend small dinner parties.
i systematically update all my stuff to better stuff.
this is absolutely not the direction i want my life to be headed.
but right now,
i don't see any way around it.
there's a strong chance that continuing education for spook
will eventually result in our moving from the area.
i think i'm at a point in my life
where i'm looking forward to it.
other than the desire to someday "settle down" up near or on Cape Anne,
i really have no attachments to any places anymore.
my few friends are scattered across the whole country,
so there's nowhere we can live
that means we're "close" to everyone.

and so,
i look back on my life,
and i look at these turning points
(and a lot of other stuff that i'm not going to write down just now),
and i wonder if i got some of them wrong.

a significant portion of the discontent in my life
began around the time
that i began to become socially and spiritually active.
am i too educated for my own good?
no matter how often i re-examine my ideals,
i cannot find a way to maintain those that i deem most crucial
and at the same time become a bit more flexible
when interfacing with the real world on these fronts.
our country is headed in exactly the opposite direction
from the one i think it needs to head,
and The Church isn't going to reform until the final days.
my inability to be anything other than a major pain in the ass loud mouth
has systematically destroyed my social life.
then again,
why should it be my fault,
that so many of these people are so severely damaged
that they can't handle meeting someone who disagrees with their views
who isn't the ignorant, red necked bigot
they've had to always assume "the other" to be
in order to live with their own intense hatred
for people who don't think like they do?

spook used to have a huge circle of friends.
many of them have ceased to see her because of me.
she doesn't blame me (openly),
and i'm not even saying i blame myself,
but the simple truth is,
i -am- the reason they've begun to keep their distance.

i can look further back and wonder
if i hadn't spent my whole life on the fringe,
would i be so frustrated with how ubiquitous my life has become?
the again,
having dove into the in crowd back then,
i could have ended up
one of those washed up sods
who still lives within 5 miles of my parents,
has 4 kids,
and drinks beer on the weekends
wtih the guys from the football team.

regret is a bitch.
i used to not have any at all.
over the last 10 years,
a lot of regret has begun to creep into my life,
and i,
more than anything,
want to find a way to remove it.

age 33 (2006-7)
(lisp) rises from the ashes and i make some of the best music i've ever made.
i finally get a job i love and can succeed performing, but am forced to give up due to our move to Chicago. However, this still marks a turning point in my career from web development to software engineering.
aiden gets accepted to the MAPSS program and we systematically make plans to leave new england. i will fall short of living in new england for half my lifetime by only a year or two.