Strange Social Circles

I want, for some unknown reason, to explain my social circles that I travelled in back in my high school days, since they weren’t your typical run of the mill. First off, while I had friends in High School, I never participated in a single extracurricular activity with the school. Outside of school I didn’t spend much time with other Hastings High School students except for a few select friends (mentioned below).

I say my social circles were unusual because most of my friends lived in other towns, sometimes other states. This was because of 3 independent social circles that I travelled in;, YRUU (“Young ‘Religious’ Unitarian Universalist”) youth conferences, Quaker youth conferences at Powell House and… TBC.

If it isn’t already glaringly apparent, I’m a computer geek. This isn’t a persona i adopted in the mid-90’s when it was trendy, I like to say I was geek before geek was cool; I was geeky in the 70’s! Growing up in a house where my father had teletype terminals in our house that connected to his workplace at IBM, ComShare and American Express, I was raised with a healthy dose of text based computer games (Star Trek and bowling being my favorites), along with long ‘what if’ discussions with my father about the future of multi-user/interactive games.

So with a healthy sense of wonder and potential, the day my middle school got TRS-80’s and Commodore Pet computers, I was there waiting after school for more access. Luckily the science teacher who was put in charge of these labs was very cool and trusting and basically gave me and a few other kids the keys to get in the lab whenever we wanted. (Kudos to Mr. Peter Westrell if he some how googles this page someday!). So I spent many hours dabbling in basic, writing programs off to cassette tapes, and again.. chatting with friends about ‘wouldn’t it be cool if the computers were connected so we could play games together?’. So then I got a Commodore Vic 20 as my home machine, and after a few years I got, what at the time sounded like a really cool new machine, the Coleco Adam computer. This machine suffered through several power supply problems which was briliiantly built into the printer mechanism and thus crippled use of the entire machine while I waited for the repaired machine to be returned. So after a few months I sold that to a family down the street (Sorry Keith & Buffy) and I got an Apple //e. My father also had an Apple /// computer and was on Compuserve, so I dabbled on there enough until I found a list of 914 area code bulletin boards and got an applecat modem for my //e.

So after dabbling around all over the local area code and learning through my mom’s long distance bills that it included n’ar half the state of NY, I found some local C-Net BBS’s (run on Commodore 64 machines as I found out later) that seemed to have an interesting variety of discussions ranging from computer geeky stuff to politics, bad jokes, and other silly teen stuff. So I started meeting people via their login names, Dragon, Aahz, Unicorn, Ocean Water, Lord Rancer, Muad Dib, Xakor, Skeeve, Frumple, Hexnut, among others. There were other folks who would sign their names with all the acronyms of the elite phreak/hacker/warez groups. So a bunch of us ‘normal’ (mere mortal) folks decided early one morning at IHOP to start signing our names with TBC, aka “The Breakfast Club” (shh.. we’re not supposed to tell anyone what it means).

The funny thing is, once TBC started signing our posts, we started getting all these other people asking us how to join. Since we were just a bunch of goofy friends, anyone who seemed sufficiently silly, sarcastic or weird was allowed to join us. Eventually those of us who were the original TBC formed the ‘elite’ TBC group of DASBS, after a quote from the Breakfast Club movie, ‘Demented and Sad, But Social’. I’d spend weekends at parties at friends houses across the Hudson, helped organize strange get togethers dropping breakable objects off a huge concrete dam, and of course ConeQuests (which I’ll elaborate on at a later time). All of this was done over computer bulletin boards. Now these days that would generate a ‘so what?’ response, but this was 1984, not many people even had personal computers, let alone modems, let alone the time and geekiness to actually meet people online and then arrange ‘offline’ meetings. Trust me, we were a weird circle of friends.

So this was my main circle of friends outside of school, a bunch of computer geeks in Westchester & Rockland county. I even dragged a few friends from Hastings High School into this circle, ‘Uncle Sam’ aka my friend Eugene Spagnuolo (whom i’ve since lost touch with, I hear he’s a doctor in NYC now, if you’re out there Gene, drop me a line), ‘Drumsong’ my friend Jenny (now known as anarqueso and our mutual friend Pegasus, aka Jenny (who can now be found here).

I mentioned earlier I also went to youth conferences. I went YRUU conferences, originally just in the Metro District at places like Ridgewood, NJ, Murray Grove, but then eventually expanding to conferences in Massachusetts and Vermont if I could convince other friends to road trip up that far. At the same time I was going to Quaker youth conferences at Powell House. So through these 3 seperate and occasionally overlapping circles, I knew well over 100 teenagers/20 somethings in the NY/CT/NJ area, and some folks even further away. And with them, I was a cool guy, “they liked me, they really liked me”. Also, hey this was high school, there were a lot of young, cute, smart, friendly huggable Unitarian & Quaker women that I got to know. I was an avid penpal with lots of friends from these conferences, some male, mostly female. I even started going out, fell in love (or what I felt was love at the time), and broke up with Julie Rose Beckwith of Medford, MA (full name and town included here for Googling purposes), all through the mail. Never even kissed her once, but i still remember the poems she wrote me (“Steady as you are my silent shooting star”). Ok so I was still a geek, and living in these weird social circles didn’t exactly help me figure out normal social interactions very well, but I was happy so…

What was even more fun about this was, as far as 99.9% of my high school was concerned, I was this big hairy antisocial guy who wore weird bleached jeans jackets with star trek patches and strange buttons, but that didn’t do anything social with them. I think it confused some people that I was a pretty happy and confident person without being part of the preset social circles and cliques at the school (and this i enjoyed even more) (For the record, I REALLY didn’t like my High School for various reasons). I was quite happy about them being confused about me, and I also didn’t really care what they thought, since I knew there was a bunch of computer geeks in the area who knew me as M00nshadow, as well as various quaker and unitarian youth who knew me too, and they all thought I was pretty cool. I can’t recommend this enough to a high school student/teenager. Having friends outside of your school is very very very key to survival, especially if you don’t fit into what i called earlier, the preset social circles and cliques.

I’ll elaborate more about YRUU conferences, Powell House, Rowe Camp, Star Island YRUU week and Ferry Beach, as well as ConeQuest, but for now, there’s my 30 second synopsis on my High School social life.

As if you cared 🙂