“Recaptured” is a series of old content – music, recordings, writings, photos I’ve been coming across in random shoeboxes and plastic crates. (Hopefully) by digitizing/writing this stuff up I will keep it from being lost forever.

So as I was digging through tapes, the same time I found the L5D tape, I found this gem…

Yes, you are hearing correctly. That’s a man puking his brains out to the lonely strains of Journey’s “When the Lights Go Down In the City”.

Somewhere in 2002…maybe…me, Ae, Jon, and Andy all took a trip up Northern Minnesota to “backpack”. It was the stupidest trip I have ever taken. We thought it would be cool to “backpack”…to carry our whole campsite on our back as we hiked through the foothills, camping along the way and hunter-gathering our meals. Well, we forgot one important thing…that we are idiots, and we had no idea how to backpack. So instead, we decided to go halfway to backpacking, we just reserved a campsite as deep in the woods and as far away from everything as we could possibly get…

Which was also stupid because that meant that we had to hump our entire, poorly-packed campsite down 2 miles of Horsefly-infested trail. Ae’s back looked like the roof of the Griswold’s station wagon…with random pots and pans clanging away on his back, bedrolls duct-taped to sleeping bags…

So we never left the campsite. A trip to anywhere but the bathroom meant you had to tie a towel around your head and carry a full can of high-DEET bug spray, to ward off the Horsefly hordes that would eat you alive. So we would wake up, eat food out of cans, drink ourselves into a coma (no beer, just Jack), make a fire, and fall asleep on the rocky ground. By the end of the second day, we had regressed to the status of upright primitives, whooping and fighting and stabbing trees with machetes. It also got pretty gay. Jon macheted his jeans up into short shorts.  Andy stripped and ran barefoot through the woods.  Ae chopped down a tree with his bare hands…while wearing a thong.   Always the one to take things wwaaaaayyyy too seriously, I stayed in the tent and pretended like all of this wasn’t hilarious.

So at the end of the day, after drinking nothing but Jack and acting like a caveman, Ae ended up puking his face off for hours outside the tent, while the radio (tuned to the only station that worked…”The Journey Station”) solemnly played on. We tried to stifle laughter from the tent, while occasionally poking our heads out to see if he was OK. I also recorded it. Because I am a good friend.

Ae pukes with his entire body. To this day I have never heard anyone throw up like that…you can literally hear it coming up from his toes…like he’s a fucking oil vein cracked open about to spout refunded Chef Boyardee all over the place. Awesome.

I also found these drawings from the trip. If we went missing or died, that tape (which also had Jon taking a shit), and these pieces of paper would be our only legacy. The last thing our crying parents could clutch to remember their beloved sons.

Pretty accurately describes what happened...

Ae won...apparently....

Things got poetic...

Not sure what's going on here. I think I'm the one with all the beers...

I'm a Gay Fag, apparently...

One more time for the people in the back…

EDIT:  Ae just informed me that it wasn’t Jack, it was Windsor Canadian.  That explains a lot actually, and it seems fitting because we were so close to the border that Ae probably puked on Canada.