Nothing in the past or future ever will feel like today

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a friend of mine (lets call him Jimmy) who needed a ride back into town. He was in Sutton (a tiny town about 60 miles north of Anchorage). I got confused at first because when my friend (Maria) and I had left him, he was 20 miles south of Anchorage, camping in a parking lot. I realize that camping in parking lots on the side of the highway isn't considered normal in the rest of the world but it's probably the most normal part of this story.

When I asked him why he was in Sutton, he nonchalantly answered "oh! we hitchhiked! Met a really nice guy." Apparently he and his good friend (Johnny) got bored, so they grabbed two bottles and set off walking down the road with no particular destination in mind. Both of them were completely trashed by the time some young personal trainer picked them up. They quickly got to talking and it was concluded that they all would head to the strip club just outside Sutton. The caravan didn't make it that far. 20 miles from Sutton, Jimmy threw up all over the side door of the good samaritan's car. Johnny swiftly payed for the ride, grabbed Jimmy and they jumped out (though I'm told the man driving just laughed all of it off).

From there they needed to find a place to sleep. What they found was a mattress truck pulled over on the side of the road with no apparent inhabitants and clean mattresses. Obviously they took this opportunity and crashed in the back of the truck. But a few hours later, the driver of the truck came and woke them up and kindly asked them the get out. Nothing mean, the guy just needed to get his shipment to Anchorage on time. This is about the point in time when I received a call. The rest of the story isn't important. They made it back home in one piece.

The reason I'm sharing this is to point out that this shit could only happen in Alaska. The rest of the United States stopped giving rides to hitchhikers in the '60s after the beat generation turned into the 60s counterculture movement and hippies invaded the US. In a way, I guess that makes Alaskans lucky. We can pickup hitchhikers and hitchhike without the major fear that whoever you're sharing a ride with might be a serial killer or rapist. Now, I don't think I'd hitchhike alone but still if I ever need to, the opportunity is there.

I just think it's a shame no one in my generation will ever be able to experience the feeling Kerouac wrote about in his road novels. The spontaneity of just packing up and traveling across the country, and the experiences from doing so were all lost a long time ago. But at least there some opportunity to do so here, even if it is a trip across the isolated, mostly unpopulated state of Alaska.

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

I never know what to do when I find out a friend or classmate dies. It's a weird feeling knowing you'll never get to see or talk to someone who you're used to seeing everyday. It's a hard thing to deal with and it's an even harder thing to accept. It's been dubbed socially unacceptable to cry. You're seen as weak and overly emotional. That being said, I can count the number of times I've cried since age 10 on two hands. I instinctively bottle everything up and when it gets to be too much I spend the entire day crying, reading, writing and listening to Simon & Garfunkel.

A friend of mine from school died last night in a plane crash. It was the same crash that killed former Alaskan Senator and major Alaskan political figure Ted Stevens. There were nine people on the plane total. Only four of those people survive, some who are severely injured. Among the five that died was my friend, her mother and the previously mentioned Ted Stevens. So far the only thing the media has focused on Stevens, which with his 41 years serving Alaska is understandable but almost no information at all has been given about the others. It's almost disgusting how desensitized to death people are. Plane crashes happen all the time in Alaska (AK alone accounts for 36% of all of the United States' plane crashes). They happen so often that the 6 o'clock news barley mentions them and the newspapers have tiny blurbs.

My friend had everything going for her. She was a part of the DDF team (drama, debate & forensics), she was in the school plays, and she was a writer for the school newspaper (which is how we became friends). She went to Harvard last year for DDF. She had a good core group of friends. And now she's gone. When talking about her death another friend of mine kept saying things like "everything happens for a reason" and "at least she lived her life to its fullest." Honestly I think that's complete bullshit. Her life and her future was stolen from her. Those phrases would be better to describe the 90 year old deceased Senator than a 16 year old high school student with a bright future.

I didn't write this to get any sympathy because that would be better suited for her father and her brother who've lost a mother/wife and a sister/daughter. My intensions for writing this were to address just how fucked up our society is when it comes to dealing with death. It's even worse to know that the environment that I group up in made me just as fucked up as everyone else. Everyone would like to think that their the exception to the rule but that's almost never the case.