from A to Z: Firsts - five short vignettes.
The first album i ever bought was the debut album by Information Society because i was really into their song and video for [What's On Your Mind (Pure Energy)]. The first CD i ever bought was Invisible Touch by Genesis. The first album i ever bought as a download in FLAC form was Church with No Magic by PVT.
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The first place i ever kissed a girl was in the fire escape hallway of the King of Prussia Mall. I had just gone on a date with a girl Jen to see Terminator 2, and afterward we were wandering around the mall after closing time. The security guard told us we had to leave and pointed to a fire escape hallway that we could use as the easiest way to exit the mall. In the middle of that, in the dark lit pretty much only by EXIT signs, i kissed her. I remember the initial thought going through my head was "wow this feels wet."
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The first time i remember truly believing in myself was after the first year i marched in the Westshoremen Senior Corps. Two years prior, i had watched DCI finals for the first time ever and was amazed by what a drum corps could do. Random circumstances had me try out for the Crossmen in 1992 and 1993 and get cut both years, but i was able to march a tenor spot in the Westshoremen with two drum corps veterans, Larry Cauley who had marched cymbals in Crossmen in 1992 and Mario DiLaurentis who marched tenors in the Crossmen in the 80s. I felt like a pure rookie, someone who was always trying to play catch up, and i worked my ass off to try to prove my worth to the organization and give it my all.
After the season was over, there was a point when a group of us were watching our 1993 finals performance. It got to the tenor feature (which we got awesome camera time for), and the first time i saw it on tape, my instinctual gut reaction was, "wow, i wish i could do that" before i realized that, oh wait - i was *in* that video. It was a major shock to my internal system because here i was being envious of something that i actually did, and there wasn't any excuse or reason i could give myself that could downplay that accomplishment. That was the true beggining seeds of me coming to terms with the fact that i didn't suck.
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The first inkling i had that i had a fetish for sado/masochism was during an Asian-American Christian Missions trip that i took to Nevada. There were a bunch of teenagers from my church that went together on this trip and we bonded very well as friends. We were all pretty into card games; we played a bunch of ratscrew, BS, hearts, spades, the works. One of the card games that i didn't know how to play until i got there was an asian card game called DPG. The game rules i don't actually remember except that it was sort of gin rummy-ish and that i thought it was a solid game, but the thing i did remember was that one of the aspects of the game was that the winner of the game had to spank the loser of the game in the ass a certain amount of times based on the point difference between the winner and loser, or something similar to that. The game in asian was called what i pronounce as "Da Pe Gu" which translated literally to "Spank the Butt."
We played the game multiple times and everyone got to be on the giving and receiving end of the spanks. Most of which were light giggly sort of taps, but even the light and fun atmosphere with the whole thing couldn't suppress the beginning seeds in my head when i was spanked how the line between pain and pleasure can be blurred, and i remember distinctly one instance when i was on the giving end and started to spank more enthusiastically than normal and enjoying that sense of power, that sense of giving my recipient that combination of pleasure/pain.
Aside from the fact that this was ironic given that all happened as part of a missionary group, this also happened way before i had my first kiss or started to have any real thoughts towards sexuality whatsoever. The application of such a thing towards a Kink wouldn't come into play until a decade or so later. To this day i wonder if anyone else in that group were aware of the sexual underpinnings of that whole deal. At the time i would have said no because i looked up to them as pretty pure and straight Christians that i thought everyone was in my naive age, but looking back on it now, i know better.
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The first time i remember mourning for the death of a person was my choir teacher. Honestly i forget if it was in middle school or high school. I think it was middle school. She had gone through chemotherapy in the fall semester or maybe for the full year, and either it was too late or there were complications or whatever, but she died int he middle of that school year.
I remember that in the morning, the principal and the other music teachers maybe and the counselor brought everyone in the choir into a room at a time before the regular day started and they told us. We were all in shock. I didn't really appreciate or think much about death at that time, but the idea that this person who had a huge influence in my life was gone shook me up. The conunselor said that we could take as much time as we needed to mourn her loss, to stay in the room with each other to comfort and support each other if we needed to.
People trickled out and went back to their regular classes gradually. I stayed longer than most, but eventually i ventured out, and i found that being in class was intolerable because to everyone else in my classes, everything was normal. People were laughing at stupid jokes and being their general youthful selves which at that point felt incredibly unfair and stifling because most of those kids didn't know her, didn't know what she had done for us, how much she made us who we were. I only made it through one period before i had to go back to the room where we were first told, to retreat to what felt like a safe haven to feel sad and to have people that could understand. Eventually life moved on, but it took a few days.