2012-02-25 - 11:16 p.m.

Just watched a video, posted online, from my second year of college. I was home, for spring break, with some guys I knew well. We hung out in a friend's father's garage, sitting on lawn chairs, Coleman coolers, upturned milk crates. The video, shot on VHS, is grainy and jumpy, but there we are, young and smoking cigarettes and chugging beers and all of us crude and, from the looks of it, happy. There was one girl. She had curly dark hair. She was pretty, not very bright, always smiling. I hadn't thought about her for five years. I can't remember her name. She sat next to me in calculus.

In the video, I say some crass things. The kid with the camera made all of us stand against the garage door and ordered us to recite a quote we thought was important. The first guy said "piss off." Another said a line from The Simpsons. Another said a line from a Doors song. When I appeared, in a button-up shirt open all the way down, taking a long drag on a cigarette, I repeated a line from a Led Zeppelin song. It made me cringe, the earnestness of it, but it all came back: the two years of college that made me feel that earnestness, the cockiness of it but also how scared I was at being found out as a fraud.

Those kids are all gone now, of course, all of us with jobs and bills and some of us with kids. We were twenty years old then, nineteen, not even old enough to buy beer. Someone's older brother had to get it for us. Crass and crude and stupid, but hopeful, maybe more hopeful than we are now. Full of restlessness, I know, full of smart-assness, for sure, full of just about everything there is except years.

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