2/6

	I was laying in a friend’s bed, we were watching a video on a tattoo artist and his girlfriend who planned on making a sextape once they got one million subscribers. He was waiting for a girl to snapchat him back -and told me to ready my camera to take a photo of the nudes he claimed were inevitable. There was an odd sexuality in the air that I simply wanted no part of and was trying to play chess to drown it out.
	“And I haven't really been filmed having sex. I mean, there’s plenty of VHS tapes !#&(*!(& and I made, but  I don’t count anything pre-digital ad truly showing the intimacy and love that we have.”
	Is what I heard from his laptop.
	“Duuuuuude! She repliiiiiiiiied! Take a picture, take a picture!”
	Does anybody fall for fools mate anymore?
	“Fuck! It’s not tits”
	I didn’t stop to wonder why he was in his boxers.
	The girl he was snapping luckily went to sleep eventually before doing something stupid that would have made Ebert far too happy. We smoked out his window and watched a cartoon about loss, aging, and climate change, done in water colors. It was beautiful really.
	Then:
	“Dude, watch this.”
	The cartoon was turned off.
	He plays me a youtube video
	Milo Yiannopoulos DESTROYS FEMINIST on LIVE TV
	A painful 5-minutes of a bleach blond Goebbels speaking in circles and talking over somebody on the news. I asked him why we watched this. He said I needed to see it. I asked him to explain what Yannopoulos’ point was. He couldn't and tried to put on another video of the bombastic speaker (Ebert’s description what the fuck Milo actually does)
	I told him to explain to me what he’s saying without showing me a video of him loudly talking over somebody and mocking them. He couldnt. I tried to argue with him. He got uncomfortable and resumed telling me about the inevitable sex tape from the pair of tattoo artists.
	Now, I don’t know how we got to the subject of school camping trips, but some how we did, particularly the school camping trip last year that he was tried to go on (I almost went on that, !(@*^#!(*@& (Teacher leading the trip) was just being such a bitch) but was denied soley for the reasons of him not going to the school anymore, and the teacher’s dislike for him. Solid.
	It was on this camping trip where another one of my friends and I, after the canoeing was cancelled because of foul weather, spliffs were burned, Maine was explored, books were bought, we stood in a lake fully clothed, more spliffs, camping on an island somewhere along the coast, and a walk on the beach during the lasts legs of the trip, mere hours (2-3) before we woke up at the crack of dawn to swim in the frigid ocean. We got so sick from that, and then got everyone else sick. Which really was great, because if there’s one thing better than a group of angry highschoolers (un-happy campers) is sick angry high schoolers who can’t do the high part anymore and just get angrier. Anyway, we were on this beach walking around under the moon and the stars digging through the good trash on the beach. Very little bad stuff in fact. I tried to balance on a log with plank and almost ripped my genitals off, different story, for a different time. We talked about the things boys like us talked about; poetry, life during and after college (we were Juniors at the time), and, of course, girls.
	What I truly loved about this friend of mine, the one on the beach, not the weird one in the bed, was his intense love and possibly more intense hatred of oddly specific things. He’d tell me how much he loves  the dance of the wind and the sea and wondered if the fishes below could appreciate it as much as we did. This led to him telling me about cracking open crabs in Ecuador, the country he had been born and partially raised before coming to this vacation island. He hated the idea of anything he called edgy, which included, but was not limited to, the color black, pen and ink drawings (he prefered watercolor, charcoal, and pencil), western philosophy, the huns, comic books, the majority of movies that played trailers on youtube videos.
	He loved Jack Kerouac, we both did, and poetry, watercolors, art, the ocean, jazz, and a girl who wanted to be a filmmaker. I don’t think I day went by where I didn’t tease him for that. It was just for the response, which was always something like
	“Shut up! I just think she looks really cute sometimes and I want to let her know”
	So we talked about that on the beach that night. We talked about it for what felt like hours. So sober and so dumb on that beach and so in love, each of us, he for that girl and me for the story of it, of this unrequited devotion that, years prior, and present, I had known so well. And when the conversation came to my muse, as he put it, I was just speechless. Because of embarrassment yes, but also just because I was, am, too awkward to tell him that there was in fact a girl I liked and that every poem I wrote, and every piece of jazz I learned to play was because of her. So I did talk about it a bit, but not as in depth as he went.
	This latter part was left out of the story I told my friend in the bed trying to convince a girl he met over the internet to show him her breasts while simultaneously trying to reprogram my political beliefs towards his alternative, rightward leaning, flavor. So while trying to tell my half naked pal about the connection Matthew and I had on the beach, he quickly hijacked the conversation to tell me about the sadness brought on by being told he could not go on a school camping trip hosted by a school that he no longer went to and led by a teacher that no longer liked him. He was on the verge of tears when I forgot exactly what the original story was about and told him I’d make him a smoothie to calm down.
	By the time I got back from making the smoothie he was already back onto watching the tattoo artist and his girlfriend talk about sex. I handed him the smoothie and left a copy of one my manuscripts on his bed side table. I knew he would hate it and probably mock me for it but I had a thought deep in my mind that if there ever was a chance for a great movie moment, like the one on the beach, this would be it and this would be his turning point; reading a short story I wrote about someone trying to find himself a new book to read, that would shake Ebert so much he would leave his fear of immigrants at the door and focus his hatred on the work instead. Oh what a dream.