It’s that midweek feature that turns one blogger’s treasure into The Nest’s trash. Let’s get our thumb and forefinger poised to flick the game board’s cheap plastic spinner for another exciting edition of Random Image Inspiration! Here is the latest batch of numbers fresh from the Randomator’s easy bake oven…
44, 18, 65, 34
The 44th post in my Reader was this one by Biker, Books and Yarn (Her third RII appearance despite infrequent posts. Take that River Girl!)
The 18th word in that post is “let”
The 65th word in that post is “tell”
Normally, when I come across an “image” that is just text, I skip it and pick the next one. But this one was pretty blunt (And I don’t mean that in a Fuzzywig kind of way)…
Putting “let tell” into Google Images brought this up as the 34th result…
Well, OK. Who needs to find inspiration when the image pretty much tells you what to post?
And if the image told me to jump off a bridge, I guess I’d do that too…
As someone who adapted to the life of a loner early on, and has since grown to embrace it, friends aren’t really something I can claim to have. Sure, I have people I know… mostly at work, but they’re not people I hang around with outside of the job. Of course, there’s a lot of people I know online as well… but cyber-friendship has its real life limits. No, Evil Squirrel doesn’t have any friends… and certainly not one he would call a best friend.
Even Friend Bear hates my ass.
Peel back the years to before high school, and you would find that even my pathetic socially retarded ass had a friend. A BEST friend. A friend who, for a few years, I spent more time with than the rest of my family. His name was Shawn. The 80’s were riddled with boys named Shawn, or Shaun, or Sean…. it was a fad name that had a billion different spellings. The late 20th century male equivalent of Amy. For much of the late 80’s, me and Shawn were besties.
Shawn’s the goofy one in the yellow shirt in this 32 year old photo from a class field trip. The kid sitting in the middle was also named Shawn, which proves my point about the name.
Shawn was in my grade school class and lived about four blocks from my house. Since texting wasn’t exactly a concept in 1987, that meant I had to do a lot of walking or bike riding back and forth from his house. That was nothing for us kids from the 80’s… we walked and biked all over town rather than sit on our asses and play with our phones. We played many a one on one game of whiffle ball in his back yard (And only broke one neighbor’s window by using a tennis ball), annoyed his older brother Todd (Every Todd I’ve known in life has been a major jackass), and…… well, sat on our asses and played a bunch of Nintendo games on the still relatively new NES system. Fun times!
We played the hell out of The Goonies II, and never did find that damned Transceiver.
While I am the oldest of five kids, Shawn was the youngest of seven. Because of this quirk, his mom was damned near as old as my grandparents… which I always thought was weird. But she was older, wiser, and knew how to lay down the law… thinking nothing of backhanding both me and Todd when we got in a scuffle once. Yeah, the good old days when you could even physically discipline other people’s kids when they acted like assholes and not end up in jail!
This is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you, mister…
During the summer vacations of 1987 and 1988, I swear I spent more time at Shawn’s house than I did my own, often staying the night. I’m sure my parents and especially my sisters appreciated my absence. But all good things must come to an end, and so it did for my best friendship with Shawn. He dropped by my house one day in April of 1989 and had me search my upstairs room for a certain baseball card with a printing error that he found out made it more valuable.
Not this one, but it’s the coolest baseball card ever. Phenny’s Mama isn’t the only one who likes to write that word on things…
While I was looking through my baseball card stash, apparently Shawn was busy looking through my Dad’s much more valuable baseball card stash and getting sticky fingers. It took a few days for my Dad to notice some of his cards were missing, but it didn’t take long after that to figure out who had done it… and it didn’t take the CSI team to get Shawn to break down and confess his crime once the matter was in police hands. Dad got his cards back, and I don’t think I ever spoke to Shawn again. I completely lost track of him once we both entered high school the following Fall.
And I began my very sheltered life thereafter.
So there you have it. Even I once had a BFF, even if he turned out to be a petty criminal (who was later suspected of burning down our elementary school after it closed down in ’89). And thanks to the Randomator, now you know about him…
Now I hang out with friends who are actually cool. And yeah, I’m a loser, baby…
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
Shawn in the middle looks a bit scary and hope it’s just one of those moments young guys experience when confronted with a camera aimed at them.
The Shawn in the middle was actually a pretty big dork, even by 80’s standards. For one of his birthdays, his mom hosted a slumber party for all the other boys in his class. First and only time I had ever heard of a slumber party for boys (Yes, I went)…
Damn, I need to step up my game… my roll seems to have ended.
And now I totally want that baseball card!
Ack!
Just found it on eBay for $655!
Cheaper to just buy the Kool Aid…
Loser? You? King of Squirrels? I think not! That photo reminded me that we’ve come a long way in the film and camera department. I can think of some good captions for this photo of a rocket though………. 🙂
Pam
It doesn’t help that the picture is very well worn from having been in my box of cool stuff for over 30 years before I finally scanned it. What a bunch of geeky kids!
Just remember this (from someone who’s old enough to know) – what is now “geeky” was at one time “cool”……… !
While you assert that Todds are the worst, it is possible that Shawns, spelled any way you like, might be as bad as Todds. Maybe worse considering this story. Just saying…
It’s possible, though he’s the only Shawn I know who was a bit troubled. I’ve known multiple Todds who seem to have major personality issues, though. Not to say that there aren’t any decent Todds out there, but the ones I’ve met have not been my favorite people.
I have the same dynamic going on with Bruces as you do with Todds. Don’t know why, but I’m wary of all of them.
One of my “friends” stole my mother’s stash of bicentennial quarters during a sleepover. They were in a china cabinet and not easy to see. Whoever did it had to unlock the cabinet (the key was right there) and open a squeaky glass door. Mom discovered it after they’d gone. We never knew who did it. It makes you think differently about people. I’d probably be surprised if I knew which one it was.
Damn friends! The only reason we had suspected Shawn was because my Dad had recently shown him the cards on one of his visits… so he knew they existed and where they were. Sounds like one of your friends was not only a thief but a snoop!
Yep. My mother was not happy. Needless to say, those friends were not asked to stay overnight again. I still talk to them online to this day (over 40 years later), and I sometimes still wonder which one it was.
oh how sad that shawn was such a false friend… in germany they use “false friend” for a wet fa*rt .. maybe they knew him too?
LOL! And they both leave a nasty stain behind them when they’re gone…
Oh my god Shawn, wtf? I had a friend like that in school too, her name was Fat Kim, well it was Kimberly but everyone called her Fat Kim because she would eat everyone else’s leftover lunch, and she was just a tad overweight, lol. Once when she was at my house she said she was going to the bathroom and instead went into my parents room to filter through my moms jewelry. Like you, it took a couple of days for my mom to notice that one of her gold rings was gone. But my mom knew who it was and we drove over to her house, ironically her mom was wearing my moms ring. Her mom had told her that her “kids” got her that ring for her birthday, and my mom was like “Nope, you daughter stole that ring from my house to give it to you for your birthday.” That was the last of Fat Kim, lol.
Fat Kim! I love the old horrible nicknames we used to have for other kids at school back in the day! The kid in the photo who’s turned around (in the awful 80’s short shorts) was more of a friend of Shawn’s than mine, and everyone called him Boner. I have no idea where the nickname came from, other than it kinda went with his last name (Boner Boyer), but man, I love that we were allowed to be a little mean!
I know right, although it didn’t make it acceptable then but we were kids that played in playground equipment that was embedded into concrete baked in the sun all day long, endured all kinds of teasing and we made it out of the 80’s okay.
Jennifer was also a popular name. My BFF in public/high school was also a Jennifer. I was her maid of honour. After I moved away, I tried to keep in touch, but all she talked about was herself. She visited the city once, invited me to her hotel room to swim and go out for dinner. I canceled plans so I could do it. Then she blew me off an hour after I arrived. I ended up sitting in the train station alone for over an hour waiting for the next train home. I realized that most of our friendship had been all about her and I had enough sucky things in my life to deal with and I haven’t been in touch since. My other BFF died in a car accident. And any since have moved away. Jennifer didn’t steal anything but the spotlight, and I want that for myself! Willing to share it with you though. LOL
Jennifer was a crazy popular name, though 99% of Jennifers were all spelled the traditional way as opposed to Shawn/Shaun/Sean/Amy/Amie/Amee/Aimee/Aimie et.al. One of the softball teams by sisters played on back in the day had a Jennifer Dallas and a Jennifer Houston on it, which is funny since both last names are big Texas cities…
Darn you, Shawn. Darn you to heck.
That told him.
I hope you menacingly wagged your finger while you said that, otherwise it won’t get through his head…
I think we were ALL geeky kids. I certainly was, made merely geekier by the addition of braces in fourth grade and glasses in the sixth. I had a best friend and she completely rewrote her history. It was completely untrue, but since she was teaching in a college, I guess she was passing this fake history on to all her students. Amazing how the best friend of kidhood turn out to be smarmy assholes as they age.
It’s amazing how what looked so normal at the time can look so weird and geeky such a short time later. I never thought I would see the day when my childhood looked so dated…
Aw, Shawn, why did you have to turn into a thief? And a suspected arsonist? He sounds like my next door neighbor, Roger, who had a buried stash of stolen goods and always threatened to burn down our house. He eventually did build a fire in the woods between our houses and, when my dad caught him, he tried to hide the fire by standing in it. Kids can be so dumb!
LOL, I’ll bet Roger’s a top notch meth cook by now. If he hasn’t blown up his trailer park yet…
Sadly, Roger died of a stab wound inflicted by his own father when he was only 22 or 23. But, funny enough, there is now a trailer park where his house used to be. And I’m sure at least one of the trailers has had some meth cooked up in it