Okay, one more this week cause the last one was kinda cheating, we had already translated those lyrics before. Have a sit and let’s listen to Bill and Dan:

FROM BILL:

Dan Graupner was Spencer’s best friend at Interlochen…By the way, he plans to play a couple of songs at the Callahan’s concert in August -

Dan Graupner sent a letter to Marney Keenan for her Detroit News article back in the summer of 2007 before our big fundraiser at the Royal Oak Music Theatre (Marney’s Detroit News Article is on this site under the “For Spencer” tab).

The following are excerpts from Dan and Spencer’s days together at Interlochen.
FROM DAN GRAUPNER:
My name is Dan Graupner. I transferred to Interlochen from my high school in Wisconsin midway through my junior year (Spencer’s freshman year). I was given a room in the Hemingway dorm on the same hall as Spencer. At the end of my first week there, eight (about half) of the guys on our hall got expelled….and I ended up becoming very close with Spencer. You’re locked into your section at around 10:00 PM so you end up seeing a lot of those guys. Spencer was already about as tall if not taller than I was and had a lot of his baby fat still, he must have been 14 or 15 then. Spence was loud and outgoing, and also one of the only people who would talk to me. It seemed like most of the guys were gay there and it was nice to hang out with somebody who wasn’t going to hit on you. Spence already had the kind of no bullshit personality that he maintained later in life…people who he viewed as liars, or who put up a false image of themselves, as most highschoolers are want to do, were a target for his many observations and jokes.

After a semester of scrapes and pranks (many on each other) we decided to live together the next year. My younger brother Ben came the next year as well, along with a whole new batch of students. Most students there come only for their senior year — so the bulk of the students are 17-18. We formed a circle of friends: Me, Spence, Ben (my brother), Will Schmidt (also from Madison, WI), Kenn Mann, J. Rathbone, Alex Boyd and Chris Wallenger and, well, many more).

The first day of school was 9/11. They found it in their hearts as a school, to give us half the day off, for mourning and the like. I remember watching the news in the dorm transfixed thinking that it might end up being a big deal and hoping for more school off…and Spence and Alex snuck up from behind me and pierced my right ear very quickly/poorly with this huge safety pin they had found somewhere. I wore that fool thing for about a week before the infection was so obvious I felt like I might get some unwanted attention from the staff.
Everyone liked to sneak cigarettes and chew tobacco (way easier than trying to cover up the smell of smoke…and Spencer was no exception…we sold Dip for awhile as a way to make money — we also brewed our own booze we called Arab Rum (we used a durable Champagne yeast in a sour mash and got this stuff that was around 20% tasted like apples and bacon.)

Anyway after a month or two, all but Ben and I had been caught for something, i.e., smoking violations, being in a girls room, going off campus, possessing porno, missing sign-in or just having filthy rooms…The staff sent home a letter to the parents of the entire student body saying that a group of “Lost Boys” was corrupting the rest of the students, and not to have us over for the Holidays. We became known as the “Lost Boys”. Later we would all get tattoos on our stomachs reading “I’m Lost”. The “o” in Spencer’s tat was the head of a stick figure man..who might have been wearing a sombrero —I spent hundreds of hours with Spencer with his shirt off and I just can’t picture it…he also later got a tattoo of an Ouroborus on his left forearm. I have one on my back as do several of his close friends.

Bill Notes: I did a little Wikipedia research on the Ouroboros symbol and came up with the following:

Ouroboros symbolizes constant change and rebirth, hence also eternity. The snake goes in circles meaning that we can’t escape ourselves. Despite journeys we take and changes that happen to us along the way, we eventually go back to who we used to be (which may be both positive and negative, depending how you look at it) and in a way also go back to where we started
Norse mythology

In Norse mythology it appears as the serpent Jörmungandr, one of the three children of Loki and Angrboda, who grew so large that it could encircle the world and grasp its tail in its teeth. In the legends of Ragnar Lodbrok, such as Ragnarssona þáttr, the Geatish king Herraud gives a small lindorm as a gift to his daughter Þóra Town-Hart after which it grows into a large serpent which encircles the girl’s bower and bites itself in the tail. The serpent is slain by Ragnar Lodbrok who marries Þóra. Ragnar later has a son with another woman named Kráka and this son is born with the image of a white snake in one eye. This snake encircled the iris and bit itself in the tail, and the son was named Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye.

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This entry was posted by Angie on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at %I:%M %p and is filed under The Ties We've Tied. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.