Graduation good-byes

Last year at this time, I witnessed one of my best friends, Rick Alonzo, get his diploma and then get the hell out of Long Beach.

Alonzo, a former Daily Forty-Niner editor in chief in spring 1999, is the reason I'm in Long Beach.

I had spent four years in relative obscurity at North Idaho Junior College in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho -- population 25,000 -- attempting to write columns about white, redneck hunters for my junior college paper and trying to find a girlfriend who was not pregnant, Caucasian or my cousin.

And the enjoyment of working great jobs in the Idaho sawmill industry shoveling sawdust into a conveyer belt, cleaning toilets as a Motel 6 housekeeper and working graveyard shift at a convenience store was starting to become overwhelming. Thus, it was time to go.

Anyway, Rick, who was one of my best friend's in high school and one of the few Latinos in Caucasian Coeur d'Alene, had the good sense to invite me to write for an unaccredited journalism department in Long Beach in spring 1998.

"I know you're not doing s-- there," he said with as little compassion for core duh lane as possible. "Besides, Snoop is here and I know you want to write about hip-hop. You can't do that in Idaho."

We drove from the northern tip of Idaho to sunny Southern California in about a week and found an apartment just two days before classes began.

But after Rick gave that final handshake to President Robert Maxson to write sports for the Dallas Morning News in Dallas, it was over.

And when your first roommate you grew up with leaves after bringing you to Long Beach it's hard to forget.

This semester's graduation will be no different.

The Daily Forty-Niner editorial staff I've worked with this semester and last have been my best friends.

Who else would encourage you to smoke chronic from a bong for the first time or break a campus traffic control arm?

One of my favorite moments was throwing up in the front seat of my roommate and friend Jimmy Chai's moving automobile with an open window after drinking too many whisky sours.

Fortunately, the yellow and green colored puke floated inside the open rear window and landed on current Daily Forty-Niner editor in chief Matthew L. Green.

Soon, though, my editorial friends who have helped me through the vomit will leave me to clean up my own.

Such is life.

Wes Woods II is the city editor of the Daily Forty-Niner.