Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.
SWEET, MERCIFUL CAPSLOCK. Has it really been ten months since this thing was properly tended? If I don’t jump on the proverbial horse I don’t think there is going to be a journal crop this year. All the immigrant children are going to intellectually starve without knowing my highly exaggerated going ons.
SOMBER THINGS TO BE NOTED: My brother and I shared a beer and toasted to the fact that Pap Pap was “never going to fucking die.” 11:15 am the next day we got a call from my Grandma that he was infact dying, despite our previous, half-drunk prophesying. He was proclaimed in December after spending ten days in the intensive care unit after collapsing at my great aunt Moo’s funeral. My grandfather [AKA: Pap Pap], the invincible, robot of a man who beat cancer with the fuel of two glasses of orange juice every day finally succumbed to the weighty pressure of being the patriarch of an enormous family at the age of seventy-six. With his body he took a steel knee, a plastic knee, and two cadaver bones in his neck. All the children and grandchildren got to say our last goodbyes in private. What do you say to a man who has given you everything you could ever need for your entire life and then challenged you to do more? Nothing, you hold his hand and repeat “I don’t know, I don’t know, I love you, thank you.” Then the man who is intubated is breathing better than you are and you say a goodbye. I can’t sum this experience up at all. He died the way he lived, surrounded by family and friends. I don’t know what else to say besides: I was holding his feet when he passed.
Two days after Pap Pap died my Great Grandmother on the other side of the family, Nana, also passed. This experience of watching struggled breaths on a reclined bed already seemed routine, so the experience didn’t hit me. I think that is what struck me the most, I was too worn out for meaningful sympathy. I was riding another crest of a great wave of emotions and I didn’t have enough time to get out of the ocean from last time. Edith Myers died around a handful of family members, fifty years from the day that she was widowed. She had outlived most of her friends. Ninety-nine years is a big number.
I graduated from college. I am now a degree holder and I think my biggest tribulation will be convincing myself not to say “I’m an English major.” I started this journal five years ago on a promise to myself that I’d keep up with it and some of the stories, hyperbole or otherwise, contained herein are some of my most treasured memories. I graduated from IUP and I got a picturetextcellphonemessage from a friend of them tearing down the dorm I spent my first year in. I like to think they did it for a legitimate reason, like there being spiraling catacombs underneath with unheard of wealth and powerful artifacts, but I am pretty sure they were making room for a new, pre-fabricated dorm with thin walls and a parking lot. It will have lost its “made entirely of solid brick” charm. I don’t have a right to be upset, it’s their business/institution to run, but if I had it my way I would have just repainted the thing and maybe jazzed it up with some gargoyles. No need to build faux-post modern structures with Roman numeral clocks. The rooms were awkward, small, poorly furnished but in the end it was only roof for the people. The people made that place shine (not literally unless of course I have discovered that true friendship is a form of free energy or cold fusion, and if that is the case I am totally making after-school special and harvesting the sweet electricity that comes from children telling each other that they are BFF’s.)
I shaved off my beard. Again. Playoff’s are over and the Penguins couldn’t pull it off. I tried to start my own trend of “Post Season Mustache” but as it turns out it doesn’t look good, at all.
More interesting things of note: JD [aka: w00t, Norbert, John, Buddy, Pal, Broheim] moved to Seattle because electrical shortage decided to hold a party and invite his friend “Smoke” to JD’s store. Of course Smoke is like best friends with “Fire” and they totally wrecked the place. JD didn’t have insurance on the items within the store and after the firefighters showed up Smoke and Fire skipped town so there was no one to hold accountable. Those assholes. I like to think the fire did it for a reason like there being a monolithic structure stuck in the foundation of JD’s store that would grant a series of wishes, but not like a jerk genie that gives you a wish but plays off the imperfect nature of the English language. So you are all saying “I wish I had a million dollars,” and the genie is all like “Okay, you HAD a million dollars but you gambled it all away and actually now you are in debt. That sucks doesn’t it? You got two more wishes.” So, without a business JD got a job offer for a Canadian based company out in good ole Washington State. This means that the Diplomat’s club is gone, beach room is gone, poker room is gone, and graffiti kitchen is gone.
I haven’t seen Matt Adams since I graduated, but he is a busy man with one of those phones with a keyboard on them. Which I assume is for scheduling and real-time blogging. I miss him in a dude way. Like, I miss bumping chests and shooting wild game with him and riding all manner of four leggidies across permafrost.
There isn’t much going on. Frank, my Momma’s boyfriendfianceNativeAmerican, has started collecting bicycles for us to restore. We are planning a trip up to Freeride in Pittsburgh to actually learn how to replace parts aside from just shining up rusty handlebars. We have two workman tri-cycles, two bicycles that fold in half (which I like to imagine a business man with a bike in his comically oversized briefcase), and two banana seat bikes, one of which is THE LEGEND the other one being some purple thing that I am not too sure about. I think it may be a ladies bike and if I ride it I think it would be a hit to my “masculinity points” however it would be a generous boost to my “ironic male” status.
I am living in between houses at the moment. Sleeping on couches and recliners and treating my graduated life like it’s just another semester break. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the bar alone, watching the people and waiting for something influential, fun, or familiar to walk through the door while I am drinking a boilermaker (the beverage, not the laborer.) Maybe, all of a sudden someone would come in bragging about this tattered map they found and I would buy it with a free drink chip and a silver dime. I’d follow the inevitable dotted line and find myself in the wreckage of Wallace or the basement of Your PC Shoppe. More than likely it would just be a cleverly disguised MS Paint of a wiener which would lead me to an overpass with a graffiti that says “HERE’S YOUR TREASURE BABY,” with an arrow pointing to another picture of a wiener.
I would go into my many forays into lady-ville that have occurred in the past almost-year, but I don’t want to. Ladies have never been more of a blurb in these and I don’t want to start the heart wrenching stuff here. Especially since I am not a surgeon and I don’t own a heart wrench, though I have had my eyes on a liver spanner for a few Christmases, so there is a gift idea.
I will make no update promises, because when I do that I feel I have my word bonded in a procrastinators oath and will purposely miss my own set deadlines.
Kyle Lee Hufnagel
"If I were Asian and my name were Sho Ping, I would make the first ever ShoPing Mall."