My childhood friend Eric lived in a yellow house at the end of a cul-de-sac. We spent our summers and after-school evenings playing video games (SNES, later N64), ping pong, and street hocky. We blasted the Mortal Kombat soundtrack on CD and played tackle football in the back yard. Young and indestructible, we never donned helmets or padding, but wore our bruises proudly. Eric had a neighbor named Matt, a regular kid, but two years older than us. Matt was lanky and tall and, owing to the age difference, generally beat the crap out of us at any of the physical games we played. He was always nice about it, though, and we enjoyed our time together. In retrospect, I find the overall lack of drama to be quite surprising, although I thought nothing of it at the time. One September, Matt started high school, and things began to change. We still played football, even rougher now that we were older and stronger, and Matt started inviting new friends that he'd made in his new school. They pummeled us relentlessly, but we took it gracefully, and probably somewhat proudly. As a young person, there is a certain satisfaction in having the attention of older kids, and we found this attention to be well worth the lumps that we took on a regular basis. Matt started to change. His regular kid haircut morphed into three inch bleached spikes that he secured with Elmer's washable school glue. Jeans embiggened and wallet chains proliferated. He started bringing a kind of music that I'd never heard before. Loud, fast, angry, and sincere. Messages of defiance against authority, society, and popular culture. I would later learn that the genre was called skate punk. I saved my paper route money, rode my bike to the local CD store, and bought some of this music for myself. It was my introduction to what was then broadly called alternative culture. I still listen to some of this music today, over 30 years later. Matt became the cooler older kid that I looked up to and wanted to emulate. He started experimenting with goth style, acquiring piercings, a spiked collar, spiked bracelets, and painted fingernails. He didn't care what anyone else thought, and this was a behavior that I started to mimic as well. Following his example, my confidence grew, and I slowly shed the awkward insecurity that I had carried for most of my youth. A capstone to Matt's IDGAF attitude would arrive a year later, at his junior prom. His date, a woman, wore a traditional men's tuxedo. Matt wore a miniskirt and fishnet stockings. This was high school in the 90's, but he was too weird and therefore too intimidating to get bullied much. I owe a lot to Matt. Without him, I might never have discovered punk, ska, metal, and goth music. I might never have experimented with my own style as young person, pierced my ears, or dyed my hair blue, green, purple, or pink. I might still worry about what others think, and let that worry stand in the way of living my life in a way that feels honest and true, in alignment with my own values and sense of self. Thank you Matt, for knocking my life off the rails and onto a more exciting trajectory of possibility and discovery. Wherever you are today, may you be well, and may you still follow your own path. ~nullish