A Revolution of Good Intentions
Sarah and I had big plans that never really came to pass. Besides being my constant partner in crime and general schemer for just about all my personal uprisings against everything over the past two years, she’s been an awesome friend. Besides all these really huge unreachable plans, we did have one that I was sure we were going to do. Sarah really wanted to travel. I had traveled quite a bit over the years and was happy here in Pensacola with my friends. But Sarah was a few years younger than me and had never really gone that far from home, except a few recent road trips. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to hit the road or not, but I thought going with her would be fun with her. Our plan was to get a van and go. Pretty simple huh? We didn’t think we’d have much money, so to make dough on the trip we were going to set up a spoken word tour and take donations. We both knew we had a lot to say and had listened to this Lydia Lunch CD almost non-stop for a few months some time back. I’m sure it would have been more complicated than that, but maybe that was all you needed. We practiced in her room at her Moms house after I got home from work. We had a few ideas of how what we’d talk about. Her dad had been in prison and so had mine so we’d start off on the fucked up criminal just-us shitstem (justice system). From there we brain stormed a bunch of ideas and topics. And when we did it, we were gonna tag team spoken word. Not poetry, but like Exene and Lydia did in that Rude Hieroglyphics thing. They really worked off of each other and we knew we could too. We were both really excited about the whole thing. Sarah had a zine called Ghetto Youth that for a while was the best thing done in this city, in my opinion at least. She was my inspiration. Sometimes after reading her zine, I wanted to make a molotov cocktail and set the world on fire. I saw this movie about this American Communist from New York that went to Russia during the Revolution. He wanted to go back to the states, but the Soviets really wanted him to stay in Russia because Lenin thought he could burn the world down with his pen. He’s buried in the Kremlin now, but then he was called the Romantic Revolutionary. That’s how I thought of her. I even have this tattoo on my arm that she inspired. It’s a black heart with "Revolution" written over the top. I never told her because I thought I’d embarrass her.
Well, after months and months of waiting to go on the road she got impatient. I was procrastinating and hanging out with another friend a lot and wasn’t sure if I still wanted to go. One day as we were riding around town, we got into this big fight. I think we kind of decided that we weren’t going anywhere. I can’t even remember what we fought about. I think she felt it was different between us now. It was it guess. I didn’t really hang around her as much as I used to and I think she felt dejected by me. I don’t know, but it wasn’t the same anymore and that made me really sad when I realized it. One day, her and her boyfriend hopped trains and went all across the country. While she was gone, my friend and I just slept all day and got drunk a lot. It was fun, but sometimes I’d wake feeling really bad and not know why. I lost sleep some nights. When she got back from travelling, she told me she was moving to Tallahassee. A little while later, she did. I saw her from time to time again. Her mom lives here still and when she comes back she’d usually stop by the bookstore and say hi and we’d hang out for the day. It was always fun, but we didn’t hang out everyday like we used to. I don’t know if that’s bad or not, but it’s just the way things happen sometimes. She moved back here for a while and I saw her a few times, but we usually made plans and never kept them. I was doing a lot of travelling then, too so I was never here to hang out anyway. My other friend moved back up North and I wrapped myself up in all this activist stuff. I went to Seattle a few times and got gassed along with a million other people and came back. I told the story a thousand times, but she didn’t get as excited as I thought when I told her we were throwing bottles back at the police this time. She hadn’t really changed or anything, and I don’t know why it was different now but it was. She just moved to Boston the other day and I felt like I wanted to do a Eulogy. Not for her or our friendship, but for that trip we never went on. And also for that zine we never finished together, for that Super 8 movie we never got started on, for that Lydia Lunch thing we never did and for the revolution we never started together. Here lies those all those good intentions, Friend. And for all of that she’s still one of the only people I say ‘I love you’ to every time we say goodbye. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll get another tattoo for her and we can finally get a van and go on that trip. |