November 4, 2025

i might be a little young but honey i ain't naive

and you're a rocket queen

i want to tell you a story that happened the summer i was twenty-two, but feels like something straight out of a YA novel. with, okay, a lot more alcohol than those tend to include.

to set the stage: we had just lived through y2k. only a year or so had passed since the phantom menace. i lived in upstate new york and my boyfriend had just left me to move to california (that story wasn’t over yet, but i didn’t know that at the time); before he left, he had worked at a bar, and after he left, two of his regulars adopted me as a drinking buddy. one of them, tommy, had a bit of a crush on me, and we had bonded over our mutual love for the song “rocket queen" from appetite for destruction.

one night the three of us went to some house party, where we did normal party stuff (socializing, heavy drinking, smoking cigarettes, bonfire) for a while. then tommy and i looked at each other across a group of people, our minds on exactly the same thing. 

“we’ll be back in eight minutes,” i told the crowd, who all went “oooh!” in exactly the way you would expect. 

so we went to tommy’s car, sat in the AC, and listened to “rocket queen.” absolutely nothing else ever happened between us, and it’s a perfect memory. 

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i thought of this after discovering on friday that i still know all the words to “november rain.” different album and even longer than “rocket queen,” but sufficient to remind me that for some reason i love this damn band.

also i got some halloween flash!