It would be nice to think that since I was 14, times have changed. Relationships have become more sophisticated. Females less cruel. Skins thicker. Instincts more developed. But there seems to be an element of that afternoon in everything that's happened to me since. All my romantic stories are a scrambled version of that first one. (High Infidelity, Coldplay, and Things Vaguely Resembling Chemistry)

Longtime readers of ASCTR (all 21 of you?) remember back on the Fourth I had a story to tell, but due to a hard day's work I was in no mood to tell it. Another hard day's work today, but thanks to the new Coldplay song I'm downwiring to my brain (so I can push out something like, say, people's names) and where I worked today, I want to tell it.

It'll be better for me if I do; this is like an electronic couch and this my therapy if not my catharsis. And yeah, I'm waiving the Dragnet waiver because this is autobiographical after all; I expect you to roll with me now you should have some idea of where I've been. Also, I've come to the conclusion that the three biggest heartbreaks of my life don't really have a 1-2-3 as much as a 1a-1b-1c. They all hurt in different ways.

This is one of those stories. Let me fire up the Coldplay.

A warning sign
I missed the good part, and I realized...

Also, in addition, I've shoved us in the Wayback Machine and propelled us backwards through history to late March of 2001. Hope you didn't have anything key going on in the present.

Me? I was slowly, s l o w l y flunking out of America's #1 party school. However, I didn't know that, so I went on Spring Break. With me went Dustin and Amanda who you all know and love from the wedding story. Dustin brought his (now ex-)girl Jessica, and more pivotal to the story Amanda brought her friends from Berkeley: Hannah, Bill, and Liz.

Bill? Great guy, snores of a new guy in hell being prodded by a cactus. Hannah, pretty girl, funny, and yet right between my brunettes rule the school phases.

Well, you don't have to be Lanny "The Genius" Poffo to know in which way the wind is a-blowin. Elizabeth McMunn. In the olden times they would've called her pixieish, and she had the smile to go with it. And yet beneath the innocence of the surface, you could almost see gears working in concert to produce evil--not just produce it, but how to use that smile to get away with it. Yeah, I think it's safe to say I liked ol' Liz right from the start.

But before that went any further, it was still Spring Break. And so I drank my body weight in Corona, matched it with lobster, put on the Rey Rey mask now in the home of Roberto Harris and the pimp hat lost on the streets of Berkeley and got down OLD SCHOOL. And yet, despite (because of?) all that, I was able to make myself happy very simply: I set up and played an intricate April Fool's Day joke on Hannah in which I told her on the last day of the vacation that I had fallen for her despite the fact she had a boyfriend. We all laughed. It was funny, and I had no problem dropping the curtain to reveal the little things I'd done along the way.

Our laughter filled the air. Hannah went goodbye, and Liz began asking me more questions about how I'd done it: how'd you act when X? Was there body language? So, to test her, I started a fake argument (which she helped out in, given time). She knew the darkest secrets in my own evil Inside the Actor's Studio.

*sigh* Yeah, I think it's safe to say I liked ol' Liz right from the start. And yet.

Someone...some force, somewhere...I'll call it JesusWhitey since that's who I blame when things hit the crapper...was very much NOT laughing.

At least not yet.

I started looking and the bubble burst
I started looking for excuses...

Panel recognizes the freak in the third row waving BOTH his hands what is WRONG with you?

"But, Butch, you talked about Hannah a lot there, I guess because her having the boyfriend set up the joke, but what about Liz?"

All right, siddown. She was single. I wasn't sure if I was into her into her or not; a brief quasi-stalking of a track star I was covering for the paper muddied up that water. But, in an attempt to find out I got her AIMSN. She'd be up late in Berkeley and I'd be up late because when you're flunking out you sort of let other things like punctuality hit the floor too, and we'd have some late-night chats. The track star thing fizzled out (boyfriend--how DO they do it, I ask?) and I was especially sure after some more talking there was a possibility of a future there. It'd been roughly a year since my last heart smashing (though in lieu with the two that were to come THAT one looks more and more every day like a mere love tap to the ribs with a Buick), and I was a bit hesitant in my steps. Not that my steps are that confident around girls to begin with, but especially then. IRREGARDLESS!

Come on in
I've gotta tell you what a state I'm in
I've gotta tell you in my loudest tones
That I started looking for a warning sign

So after a while, I found out Liz would be coming to San Diego for the summer. Beautiful. I didn't want to ask her out over AIM, and I didn't want to phone--how would I date? So, she'd be here in June...April now...and like the five richest kings of Europe I'd bide my time and polish up the asking. You know, make sure it was infallible and cute and shit.

A beef with hot girls, other than they won't have anything to do with me on account of the face: inevitably they make me forget that my asshole is merely a waiting receptacle for the universe's 56-foot dick.

Because what happened between April and June was April 20th. 4.20.

Namely, she found a boyfriend. And, oh, because this is my life and JW will screw with it as he pleases, let's make him a likeable guy I made friends with in the winter break of 2000. It'll be grrrrrrreat!

I still have nothing bad to say about Nate. He's got a sharp sense of humor, enjoys a lot of the same things I do. And he also made me insane with anger when Amanda and Liz got back to town a few short days after Round 1 at San Diego State had been deemed a TKO by The Man.

When the truth is, I miss you
Yeah the truth is, that I miss you so

A warning sign
It came back to haunt me, and I realised
That you were an island and I passed you by
And you were an island to discover

Ah, I grew up in the ghetto, so I think that's to blame. Because if I'd known anything about real estate, I would've learned rule #1: Location. LOCATION. LOCATION. It was all proximity, and me in my little bubble were well and truly screwed.

Despite that, my friends are my friends, and so without Nate around for the summer we ended up hanging out a lot. I had summer school but head going more over heels in addition to the feeling I had just flunked out of a party state school and was going to have to deal with my angry mother I pretty much blew it off at every opportunity. And a couple of you taking your finals at Bovine University might be surprised to learn that time that I should've been spending in class or running to somewhere safe like Sarajevo was being spent with Amanda, and by proxy at that point, Liz. Movies practically every day, phone and/or AIM when that wasn't happening, weekend parties, bonfires, and so on and so on and la da di dah, we get to the Fourth.

Come on in
I've gotta tell you what a state I'm in
I've gotta tell you in my loudest tones
That I started looking for a warning sign

And suddenly, I saw myself for what I truly was: an evil, despotic bastard.

For this was the first time I found myself enthralled with a friend's significant other.

And the answer that came screaming back at me from every corner of my mind was SCREW. HIM. It's horrible for me to admit, but the truth usually is, and Nate, sorry if you're reading this after the fact. That's just where my head was.

And on the fourth of July, the lot of us who went to Spring Break together ended up going to Coronado together, sans Bill. Coronado's an extremely ritzy part of town where we have our annual bonfires. You may have also heard of the Hotel del Coronado being stayed at by this president or that one, and that should give you an idea of what I mean when I say ritzy. I was singing "Yellow" (ah HA) which was a favorite of both of us by then as we made our way to the end of the island to watch the fireworks in the harbor. Now, I work on the other side of it. But that night, you got to see the Coronado Bridge and the downtown skyline illuminated with fireworks for about 30 minutes straight, and holy god was it awesome. We all sat there in a modified huddle at the water's edge looking up. I was sitting right next to her. Some part of me somewhere is still about one word away from leaning over and kissing her, and wouldn't that be a frightening alternate universe for some of us?

When the truth is, I miss you
Yeah the truth is, that I miss you so...

She went back to Berkeley. The last day of August, I followed. Just packed up everything I wanted, tossed the rest, took all the money I'd saved, and got up there. I had to say something. I didn't know WHAT it was going to be per se, but I needed away to follow this thing through to completion. If there was a chance of happiness there, no matter how unseemly it felt to me at times, it was worth pursuing.

And so while I ruminated on that, I stayed with my friend we'll call Hurricane in San Jose. I'd figured out what I was going to say, and to my consternation found a lot of it echoing, if not verbatim, some of the things I'd said to Hannah in my April Fools speech. But I watched Clerks, and I went to bed, and in the morning I'd head back up and throw my heart out there.

As I went to sleep, it was 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

The day was September 11th, 2001.

I still don't remember that much about most of the day other than withdrawing my remaining funds from the bank in case it was going to have to be closed long-term and just watching the news. Didn't make sense. You go to sleep, there are Twin Towers, you wake up, there are corpses. Just didn't connect.

Liz didn't see the Towers go down until the 11:00 news that night. I'd sort of gotten burned out on the horrific footage and was sitting in the next room talking to friends trying to figure it out; the same friends who were trying to desperately fend off my mother in her search for me. I heard it again, and I heard a horrified gasp as she saw it, and then she began crying. Right into Nate's arms.

And if you slow down the tape, you can pin-point the exact second where my heart breaks in half. Again. 4 years since the last one, but if you think that makes it hurt less you can get the graduate Bovine U. degree. I felt this whirl of conflicting emotions I was not prepared to deal with. I felt like an asshole for even coming. I felt like joining the Reserves and laying down a symphony with my fists on Osama's face myself because pissing me off was all right but driving her to tears wasn't. I felt like even more like an asshole for trying to take her from a friend when all seemed well between them. And I felt lost. It'd SEEMED like I was doing the right thing 24 hours ago. The terrorists were thinking the same on a far more fiendish colossal level. I sat in the room next door, slowly drinking port wine, and coming apart.

Let this be a lesson to you who've been lulled in my culling song by the Simpsons quotes and witty banter. I, too, am a fuckhead.

That was pretty much the end of that. Once things settled down, I came back to this, and Liz & Nate continued to go down the road of bliss together, and I still flick off 9/11 footage in any shape, way, or form whenever it comes on.

Not proud of these things, but these things are the bricks in my wall.

The more astute Coldplay completists of you will notice I left the final six lines off the song. Make of that what you will. But there was something about me being half-asleep yesterday and hearing this song for the first time as I nodded off, coupled with working a dock supervision that let me look at Coronado all day...this story was coming out sooner or later. It's not even that I want to get together with Liz anymore, as her and Nate are due to get married any second now, metaphorically. This is just what I felt when I felt it.

And like most things I feel, now that I'm done with it, I'm done.