This is me giving a video tour of South Eugene High School for my mom in 1986. It was shot by my friend Nathan Marcel while we were Sophomores in Eugene, Oregon.

My brother and I had decided not to move with my mom to New Mexico when she remarried. We wanted to go to South. We would be moving in with our father and his new wife and child, who had rented a house in the school district so we could transfer from Springfield.

I was trying to comfort my mom about our living situation, though I seem rambling and nervous. I was a presumptuous and awkward teenager, a smart-ass who wasn't really that smart. I am most struck by how most of my peers seem pretty tolerant of what an annoying dork I was. Eugene kids are nice. And what the hell was I wearing? Clueless in so many ways... But the video is a little time capsule, SEHS looks much different now, I'm sure all those cool murals are gone. I'm posting this video unedited in it's entirety.

Some of the people in the video I am still good friends with today. The first guys I talk to in the hallway, Chris Nelson and Josh Foster, I went on to form a band with after high school- The Good Madmen, and we spent a couple years terrorizing the locals with our strange brand of Folk/Punk/Reggae. At the time, I had a band with J.P. Scofield, the guy outside the gym with the sailor hat and badminton racket- The Skeptics, and we played some school dances and house parties- some of the best times I remember from those days. I have no idea where J.P. is now. Some of the people shown here are dead. I make a reference to a student who had committed suicide a couple of weeks prior, I apologize ahead of time to anyone that this may bring bad memories.

There is also the response video my mom shot from her classroom in New Mexico. She put herself through graduate school, bought a house in Springfield, while teaching Special Ed. in the public schools before becoming a School Psychologist. All this and she was a single mom, dealing with the daily pains of being "physically challenged." Amazing lady. This was the first time my brother had lived apart from our mom, he was 14 and I was 15.

This is for you, mom.

And to my old Eugene friends- if you see someone you know who might enjoy a glimpse of themselves all those years back in time, please pass the link on... still annoying after all these years.