I stole a vagabond's hat today. Well, really, didn't steal it, and it's from a former one. My brother's friend left his hat here and I decided it was fair game.

So now it's mine. It looks good on me, dammit. It's hard to find anything that looks good on me.

I think it's lucky, too. I put it on and found some stuff I'd been looking for, then wore it to the mall yesterday and some cute punkish guy checked me out. (Trust me--this is not an everyday occurrence. This is perhaps the second time it has ever happened in my pathetic life.) Nothing came of it, but I was still appreciative that it happened at all. It's the little things and all that.

I've pretty much given up on having any true, close friends and resigned myself to having figments of my imagination and silly daydreams to accompany me. I keep on displaying love and compassion toward everybody I meet regardless of the affection or lack thereof they have for me, but it seems that I couldn't keep a friend to save my life. I figure, it's been... *counts on fingers* Almost nine, ten years since I had a true, really close friend. The one that came closest was Kristen in fourth grade. My friendship with her was very important--I learned a lot about myself--but upon reaching late fifth grade, she dropped me like a sack of rocks for the more popular sixth-grade girls. I'm a bit bitter still, I suppose--she was a wonderful person, fun to be around, and very imaginative. I want another friend like her. Male, female, androgyne, whatever--I just want a loyal friend who's as nuts as I am.

And I gave up on romance LONG ago. Here's a person who believes firmy in peace and the saving power of love, but sneers at even the barest prospect of romance and intimacy. It comes of never having, in my entire life, somebody who's taken an interest in me beyond friendship or even mere sidekickdom. I'm fine with being Just A Girl Friend instead of being a girlfriend, I suppose. But sometimes, it does get lonely. Sometimes, just sometimes, I get bored with being the Independent Hippie Riot-Grrl figure, the Wise Earth Mama figure, the Unapproachable But Alluring Loony.

I think that's why I've got such major fangirl infatuations with old folks like Pete Townshend and Ringo Starr. They're the kind of people I'd like to hang around with. People who are crazy, but still good-hearted and kind. Cynically optimistic. Creative and destructive. Silly. Strange. People who understand. People who have a very important message to tell the world. People who are missing from today's generation--my generation. So, feeling lonely and isolated, I transfer my affections onto these strange old men that I've never met and most likely never will, and they become sort of knight-in-shining-armor figures for a lonely teenage nerdasaurus like me.

I go into the world every day searching for a companion, someone who Understands, someone who's looking for the same person. But all I find in the company of my generation is deadness. Dimmed, despairing souls who never even go searching for hope; complaints and anger without hope and determination to back it up and make a change; greed and stagnation and the pollution of the heart.

Sometimes I think I've been born in the wrong era--that I shoulda been born between 1940 and 1950 sometime, so I could've partied at Woodstock or seen a real Doors concert or attended an SDS demonstration or learned at a free university. I wish I'd been something important in the past. But then the thought occurs to me--

Maybe I'm here for a reason. Maybe I'm here and now instead of there and then so I can do something just as radically important as my heroes.

Got so hard, but we gotta keep tryin'~