Finally, Time to Work on My Memoirs

THE TALE OF MY 11th GRADE BEST FRIEND

I learned how to play guitar in my junior year of high school. I had a best friend named Josh who devoted his time to the hobby of putting together model jets and dreamed of joining the airforce, as his dad used to shoot machine guns from hueys in Vietnam. We spent long hours in sleepovers discussing jets and playing NES or Sega Genesis in his basement littered with action figures and toys all over the musty carpet. His little brother Dax played with those, mostly ninja turtles, but I believe that through my influence (I was the one who supplied the video games), he became a great nintendo nerd when he became our age.
Josh was from a broken home, and lived with his dad and step mom in Highland, while his real mom lived in SLC. In Highland, he lived next door to a kid named Kevin, who knew how to program computers and had worked on a video game (a figure with a sword walked across the screen) and his older brother and his friends were famous new wavers in the 80's, inspiring the new wave party shown in the movie SLC Punk. Anyways, his best friend from his big city summer home during the summer- or perhaps it was kevin- gave him a blonde, super cheap, old strat copy in an even older case (from some old 60's Tiesco or something), and he gave it to me. He may have charged me 40 bucks for it. He was always very generous and a very good friend.
He was very much into Jets, Guns, Vietnam, and other 60's stuff (he had real machine gun bullets and an expended rocket launcher in his basement storage). This also included Jimi Hendrix music, which I had never really heard before. I began to love the music and even bought a few tapes from the tape store at the mall that were post-death rehashes of his rougher recordings and throwaway songs (proving me to be a real fan).
When I was very young, my dad had taught me some guitar chords, and once bought me a finger-style dylan song book. My brother Joshua (who had studied the guitar for years at this point) once showed me the 12 bar blues and also how to play the rest of the basic chords, and he loaned me his private teachers book and cassette called "Larry Green's Guitar Method for Rock Guitar" or something like that, and I learned how to play rock licks. Then, for christmas, I got a book called "Jimi Hendrix: Axis Bold as Love complete Tabs" or something, out of which I learned a few complete songs, and became the best rock guitarist from Alpine to Orem. One day, later that year, my dad took me to the guitar store in Orem and actually bought me a 200+ dollar Epiphone telecaster and a crate 12" combo amp which sustained my music career for years and years to come, but that's another tale.
I played my crappy strat copy and listened to the Larry Green tape, played Nintendo with Josh, drudged through High School at American Fork High School, rode the bus to and fro repeatedly early in the cold, black, frozen morning or beautiful daybreak and then back home to Alpine. And, in my memory, the days passed like the quickly flipping pages in a book with only those parts being noteworthy, and the title of the book was "Getting Up Early Makes Life Hell" subtitle "The Search for Meaning in a Numbingly Mundane Routine".
Me and Josh drifted apart during our senior year as we both began to discove and hang out with friends we thought were cooler. For the life of me, I can't remember what happened to the blonde strat copy, which is very distressing as I've only thrown one guitar away in my life, and I regret it. The Epiphone my dad bought is hanging in my school, stripped and mangled, with many paint jobs showing through, and with permanant marker around the border saying, "Food, Heat, Sleep, Aesthetification". I never actually had a proper guitar again until Leena bought me one for my birthday six or seven years later.
I saw him ten years later at the bar and he said he had a Ghosts'n'Goblins arcade game that I could have. It was in his dad's garage back in highland. I met Josh at his house in SLC, which he rented with some friends, and he showed me that he had learned to play the guitar in the meantime and he played me, with singing, a shredding rockabilly song he had written for a group he wanted to start. Then we drove to Highland and got the game and drove back, and I can't even remember just we we talked about during the drive, but I havn't seen him since. I think the reason I found him appealing in the first place is because he would selfishly dominate the conversation, which is something I've always done.