(NOTE: The following was written by bran new blog collaborator, Reuben Saunders. Tell him hi.)

Portions of the following were previously published in Newstime!!! Magazine

Mike and I met when we or in preschool or in fifth grade, depending on whose mother you believe.  There's a mutual childhood friend in the mix; it doesn't really matter.  Certainly, when we (re)connected in fifth grade, it was love at first sight.  Mrs Jeffers' class.  Horrible woman, really.  Uncurious, unkind, unhappy, and had a terrible penchant for mispronouncing everyday words.  To this day, Mike and I both sometimes say "are-uh" instead of "are," and "p'yonsil" instead of "pencil."

Mike and Jesse lived near each other (Jesse was also in that unfortunate class), and I think they'd met already, and after the first recess, none of us could be seated near either of the other two for the rest of the year.  One of the first things we did was talk about and voraciously consume cartoons, action figures, mythology, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Jesse had different teachers the next year, but Mike and I decided to stay together for the children's sake.

Mike and I had the kind of standard childhood bonding that comes from years of shared interests, classes, school trips, and other source material.  (We produced a lot of oddly interesting stuff over the years.  When we divorced, Mike got the archive, and I got the kids, so ask him.)  Anarchy, zombies, horrible puns, Monty Python, comics, tv, technology, astronomy, physics, Transformers, pretty much everything except, strangely enough, music.    Mike was raised rock n' roll, and I was raised classical.  I'd been playing the viola, and the piano a bit, for a while before Mike got a guitar.  Starting a band wasn't really on my list of things to do.

After suffering miserably through junior high (yes, it was so long ago that it wasn't called middle school), Mike and I geekdorked our way into high school.  There, we met and gathered Mark and Allan, I think through a shared disdain for gym class and an enthusiasm for James Bond.  We were lucky enough to have very indulgent teachers for English, Drama, and Debate, and they let Mike and me free-associate, essentially, for credit.  We wrote skits, parodic prose, quoted Python endlessly, and generally assed around for four years.  Mike and Mark had started a band or two already, and eventually they ended up with Great Awakening, which had some success, and to which I contributed a couple of viola lines.

Senior year brought the great calming that it does, what with senioritis starting in August.  As we approached graduation, my parents offered to take me and five friends to the beach.  I asked around and gathered everyone but Josh, who couldn't make it until the following year, when we did it again.  Anticipating the massive foolishness that we could enjoy, Mike and I immediately got sugar high and started coming up with ridiculous songs, like You Can See Our Teeth.  We did this in Mike's bedroom, which annoyed his parents to no end.  This pattern - large doses of sugar, inane humor, and parental annoyance - would serve us well as we embarked on the mysterious voyage that turned out to be Bob.

It was about this time that Mike really nuked the fridge and started wearing glossy sparkle lipstick, platform heels, and fringe mini-dresses.  And not the sexy, Tina Turner-Proud Mary kind of fringe; it was made of dreads.  1980s Whoopi Goldberg dreads.  Like a hundred giant Sharpies were gutted and dried in the name of couture.  God I hated those outfits.  Besides, Mike made a very... lumpy woman.  He was a wheelbarrow full of doorknobs, in a dress.  That's why I had to leave him.  I didn't mind that he liked cross-dressing, far from it, it's that his fashion sense sucked.  I couldn't take the lack of aesthetics.  Don't even get me started on his current penchant for ultra-low-rise ass-less jeans.  You see him and think, "why are his back pockets pink? Oh, AHH, ECK.  NO.  No no no. Too flat. Fill the damn things out or stay home."  Sigh.  Lord love him.  He just wants the attention.

Mr Schaffer, you have two minutes for your rebuttal.