Youth is Wasted, or...

...This Week in Gratitude!

This week, my friends Moby and Rich and I put a new laminate floor into the downstairs bedroom at Rich's house:

Just getting started - baseboards, casings, closet doors, carpet, underlay, and smoothedge all out, and those first fussy few courses in...

This same week, Rich got a new scanner, which he has been using to kind of pay a little back on the floor job, although he so doesn't need to. The upshot of that has been a trip down Memory Lane, going through slides and pictures from millions of years ago, for him to scan and clean up.

I'm not so sure whether you recall at all what I look like now, but this is what I looked like about  37 years ago: 

From my eponymous LP album cover in about '79 (retouched by Rich)

Sorry about the quality, this is just a photo of a photo to compare with the guy two pictures down.  Somebody told me this looks like my Chuck Norris phase.  Chuck Norris should be so lucky.

This is a picture of a car I used to own, the second car I had, parked in front of the house I grew up in: 

A '68 Volvo 142S...much better than the '59 Morris Oxford Estate Wagon that preceded it, although the Estate Wagon had cool options like the ability to do a hand-crank start.

This is me in front of that same car the day after I totalled it after hitting some frost in a shady patch on the way to King George Park in mid-October about 1975, when I was 18:

Check out the little bit of cedar tree lodged in where the back window used to be...all glass broken, three tires flattened, jeans I had been wearing eaten by battery acid...

I look all serious because I had had no idea what a mess it was.  The guy at the gas station didn't know it was my car and told me he was pretty sure whoever was in it was dead.  I wasn't wearing a seatbelt - my foot got caught between the brake and clutch pedals and I guess that held me in inside the car while it did a couple of end-over-end rolls (I remember the first one) and then several "normal" rolls.  I remember waking up in it, upside down, and crawling out.  Then I was tired and needed a rest.  I had a concussion and a cut in the back of my head where the back seat knocked me out. 

So, all things considered, and in spite of my complaints about things like sore aching hands, I'd say that having those complaints after a day laying floor with my two oldest best friends 40 years after those pictures doesn't seem like such a bad deal.  That was my little reminder/learning moment this week.

Lighter note: here's another old pic from way back there of McNulty on the left, another actor named Keller, and me. I told those guys I wanted this picture posted (which in those days meant taped to the fridge)  because the people who came to the parties McNulty threw at our house never knew who I was or why I was there. The picture didn't really solve that problem but it was fun.

We were supposed to be looking assertive