Today

. . . is Friday, September 21st 2007.

Ain't?!

When I was seventeen years old I jumped on an airplane and came to the US for the first time. Disney World was not in my flight plan and neither was a picture in front of the Statue of Liberty. My final destination was a small town in eastern Kentucky; a little dot in a map beside the town's name written in a very small font. It was far from any highway and any other large-font city.

Turned out to be even smaller than that: a narrow secondary road intersected by an even smaller one with almost non-existent traffic. I don't even remember seeing a stop sign in neither side of the intersection. Sitting to the side of the "wider" road was a gas station with an ever-empty Coca-Cola machine and a very shy supply of groceries. Few dozen feet down the same road was another store with greater variety on the shelves but broken ceiling fans: the owner was a chain smoker who didn't believe in opening the windows. Rumor had it that some of the cloudy air inside the store dated back from when Richard Nixon was still a popular president.

Down the same road, a hundred feet or so was the elementary school; a couple miles farther down, the farm where I lived; and few miles down plus some turns, an intersection to a bigger yet equally miserable narrow secondary road. There was a stop sign there. If after looking both ways to make sure there wasn't any tractor speeding in either direction you kept going around ten minutes, you'll cross a concrete bridge arriving to the outskirts of the thriving capital of the county. Population: twenty three hundred plus a foreigner.

In that intersection you'll come across the first out of a dozen traffic lights disseminated throughout town and, to your left, the one and only McDonnalds in the whole county. That American icon sat on the only access road to the High School for about 90% of the county's population. And less than half a mile away from the school so that a little hike there wouldn't be much trouble.

Do you think that was backward?

Hmmmm. . . .

Ever since I joined MySpace few years ago and Facebook just recently, I've been trying to find all those people that I met there. I've conducted searches by name, full name, last name, geographical location, high school and so on and so forth and up till today I have to report no success whatsoever. Not a single soul from my promotion or the previous promotion has bothered to join any of those services. There's a handful of people from previous years that I don't remember and quite a few of the new generation. But information on the people I met and the friends I made ain't nothing. Now, if that that shit ain't backward, nothing is.