Blowing out of class at 2:15 pm, no seventh period, on a Friday, track season over, sun shining, jumping into your '88 Ford Escort and peeling out of the parking lot with a couple of other guys, driving through the McDonald's for the largest fries and the largest Cokes you can get before crashing in the one guy's basement--the only child who lives with his divorced mom and who's stacked with electronic goods designed to tranquilize the pain--and play Resident Evil 2 or the new Gran Turismo for hours, laughing and mocking each other and talking trash and eating and drinking. The landline rings, and a couple of people are going to see Godzilla. Of course you'll go, but you're driving a little early to pick up your paycheck--about $175 mostly in cash from busing tips, a small fortune for gas and food and movies in the next two weeks--so you jump in your car and call out you'll meet them at the theater, and there's a moment when you're driving with the windows down, and the sun slowly setting into the dusk, but the air is a mix of unseasonable warmth and the chill of the evening, as you slow for a traffic light one of the out-of-the-way intersections, and you can hear the crickets as you turn down the the Red Hot Chili Peppers blasting and you breathe and feel yourself overwhelmingly possessed in this single moment in time that could last absolutely forever.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#30571179)

Your parents unlock the door to the cabin and you practically fall inside, smelling the familiar musty scent, glancing about the dimly-lit rooms shaded under mature pines. The water is calling you, you know. But you grab the (happily cordless) phone and tell your mom you'll be "just a minute" as you call Christina, just as you promised. She's home watching a movie with her friends but she takes your call and slips up to her room and you breathe on the phone for a moment with soft "hi" and "what's going on" and little else. You make a joke that's not great but she laughs the way she always does and you involuntarily sigh and tell her, three hours since you left, "I miss you." And your mom is asking for help shucking the corn and your little brother is already on the dock in his swimsuit yelling for you, but you and she are in the perpetual game of "no, you" in refusing to hang up the phone, and you smile reflexively and feel a sensation of unending warmth and bliss, a hundred miles from civilization, as summer opens.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#30571215)

The bonfire seems larger and warmer than ever, the stars brighter than ever, and the quiet of the night sounds surround you as you stoke yet another marshmallow on the prong and smell and watch it char and nosh it and laugh at something stupid your dad said. There's no television, you just trounced everyone at Scrabble, your mom's finishing the dishes by hand, and you're sitting around the fire with a couple of others from neighboring cabins you haven't seen since September, and you're talking about video games and music and movies and how crappy your boss is and how sweet your car is and how fast you've driven on a highway in the middle of the night and how good Jordan and McGwire are and how little you think about school on nights like tonight except to anticipate the 107 days separating your sophomore year from your junior year, and you eat something charred and sweet again and laugh at something that's long been forgotten and tug at sleeves on your flannel shirt as the heat from the fire warms only the parts facing it, smelling contently the scent of summer as the late night drifts slowly on, oblivious to you, and you oblivious to anything except the small circle of companionship right around you.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#30571264)

this is really great

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#36126055)

The minivan rumbles back into the driveway, and with hardly a goodbye you jump into your car and race across town, something by Savage Garden or K-Ci & JoJo or something that's already making you feel nostalgic piping over the radio, and you pull up to Christina's house, not even needing to knock because she's been sitting on the front porch, a lithe 5'0" with seemingly endless brunette tresses and endless limpid blue eyes who lights up and bounds off the porch and patters around to the passenger side and jumps in, and says "Hey, you," and you smile and drive off to the park, where you walk around in the dark and talk about nothing except the minute-by-minute minutiae of the weekend before settling in the chill of the night on a bench at the back end of the park, fingers entwined, her tiny frame pressing against you, as you simply breathe together for a while in the coolness, content for what might be hours under the waning pale light of the moon, trying to make this moment last forever.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#30571302)

You kept her AIM going for as long as you could, watching her when she'd sign on and sign off but never daring to send a message. At Thanksgiving, you don't see her, but one of your bros tells you she's still single, and you're not really hopeful because you can't figure out how it'd ever work. By her second year of college, you hear from a friend she's dating someone--her second ever. You're knee-deep in law school applications when you learn that she's engaged. You're not invited to the wedding; not that it mattered, you don't get back home much, anyway, and these summer internships aren't going to stay unpaid on their own.

By '05, you're on Facebook, and you add her one night when you're buzzed and you should be outlining and you figure it's cool. Her profile photo is picture of her and a guy who looks like you but an inch taller and a better jawline standing in front of the Grand Canyon--you told her it's prole one time in high school and you stand by it. Over the years, you watch her amusing anecdotes of the craziest things first graders say. Then you see her give birth to a boy, and another boy, and finally a girl, before announcing that she's not going back to teaching after this one. She lives on a desirable street 6 miles from where you grew up. Her sons play little league and Pop Warner. Her husband runs his own accounting firm. They have a big chocolate lab and travel to Orlando every January. She still runs. She still looks good. And you've just finished scrolling through the last of this backlog of toxic Facebook memories as your phone vibrates and draws you out of this reverie.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#30585509)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1fzJ_AYajA

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#30571478)

I'm having much more fun this Memorial Day than I did in 98

back then you had to listen to parents and you and your friends had no money no booze etc

now everyone has money booze and drugs, no parents to listen to, people have their own place oh and best of all - you get to have sex!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#30575639)

The greatest pleasures come not from the orgasm or the buzz, which are easily and cheaply replicable, which are lost in a moment and drained in the diminished sensory perceptions, which are fleeting and only draw the desire to do it again rather than reflect upon it. Instead, they are from the irreplicable experiences that maintain their potency precisely because they are not dependent upon your own senses, because they are not dulled by the experience, and because they are not easily recreated with a couple bucks, a swig, a few thrusts, a pill. These are the experiences dependent upon others and upon the world around us. These are greater, indeed.

And the "liberty" of a ruleless contemporary world is the greatest perversion of freedom. The greatest joys operate within the framework--they spur the imagination toward working within limits, toward overcoming obstacles and striving toward joy. They compel man to secure these moments of pleasure creatively. The one with boundless money can easily find some moment of pleasure; but the one with little can find far greater joy within constraint. The one without a curfew can fritter limitless time; but the one operating within the structure of time knows that each moment counts far more. Like the glutton who endlessly eats the mountain of food and boasts of no limits to his diet, so, too, is the one who today boasts "no rules, no parents, lots of money!" It's a gross, depraved excess far worse, for the prison's walls are construed by one's self and grow more impossible to escape by the day.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#30581837)

first un-retirement thread after your FOAMboi Rubio crashed&burned?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#30581904)

Bizarre that I find myself agreeing with Blue Smoke yet again.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#38259205)

Forty-seven.

It's more than midway through the month and you've logged all your hours and you've padded them a little and it's still just forty-seven. You feel your mouth drying out as you look one more time through the log. It includes the eight hours for the ACLU pro bono project you swore you'd never do and even then you're being generous to yourself as you include them. You've got to hit a hundred by the end of the month. You've got to. That headhunter you called a few weeks ago, the one whose calls you've been ducking, the one whose advanced you spurned in January (damn fool you were then), well he's said he's going to "do is best" but things are "crazy now" and of course he's got another call in X minutes and he's working from home, too, but you of course understand.

Forty-seven.

Your wife steps into the dining room just as you hit a particularly exasperated sigh. She stops, Lay's bag ceasing its ruffle, looking at you.

Initiating conversation with a woman is more challenging for you than anytime since you've turned twelve but here it goes.

"So, the lake this weekend..." you open casually, or as casually as you can, because your mouth is still dry and you half-choke out the words.

She laughs abruptly. You know it's over, five words in.

"The lake??" she presses. "Dr. Frank says the county lakes are Level 2, we are *not* going there." (Dr. Frank is the casual eponymous county public health technocrat whose daily livestreams now consume your wife's attention and dictate your life's affairs.) "Maybe if we went up north, it's Level 3 up there, but even then I'm not a fan." (You've given up asking what these coded warning standards, e.g., "level," mean.)

"It's just outside--" you open again, recognizing you've retreated still further into a defensive posture, and you imperceptibly begin to slouch in your chair.

"Look, you're not going to kill us with a trip to the lake," she icily recites. "I've seen way too much about the R-naught factors, and we have no idea the range of airborne exposure to this illness. Now, I've got real work to do--to go relearn long division for Jayden's homework," as she spins on her heel out of the room.

"Oh," she hesitates at the door frame, looking back at you. "Door Dash in twenty, mine's the mac and cheese."

You sigh to yourself, staring at the computer screen again. You alter one of your phone calls from May 2 from 0.3 to 0.4.

Forty-seven point one.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#40187917)

more powerful by the year

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#40192744)

This thread is going places.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#40192750)

http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5345720&mc=18&forum_id=2

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#46359827)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3235925&forum_id=2...id.#46359830)