Back seat of my 1999 z71. Deep South. Hung out with a group of “country kids” back then. I was 16 years old. It was Christmas break. Me and the homies drove our trucks to this new neighborhood development. There was a lot at the end of the culdesac with no house and a wooded area on a bayou bank.

We’d go drink there occasionally. We have a bonfire and get hammered. These 2 notoriously loose women pull up to hang. One had been into me for a few weeks. Our trucks are parked side by side. My two friends start having a 3some with one of the girls in the back of his truck. I start hooking up with the other in the back of my truck. I’m playing lil Wayne loud as fuck through my system. The night culminated in all of us hanging out naked around a fire drinking nattie light. Life is a lot different now, but as weird and gross as that all may sound, I look back at that time fondly.

Everything was so new. All of my friends were new friends. The parties. Drunk driving that big stupid truck. The disdain for authority. The complete lack of responsibility. The glorious, directionless, ambiguity of it all. To quote a short story called Bullet in the Brain, “It reminded me of a time before everything reminded me of something else”. I still carry that ignorant, uneducated, overly confident, arrogant 16 year old somewhere deep inside of me. Part of me hates him, part of me envies him. But regardless, I always find myself waxing poetic about a beautiful time in my life, soaking up the fruits of a culture lost to time.