I met Kenneth Robert Wootton in junior high even though we attended the same elementary school together since 3rd grade.. We were assigned to do a science project together. We decided to poll people and make a connection with the amount of sleep one gets and the grades they earn in school. It was the typical science project complete with a poster board, a hypothesis, some research, and a conclusion. I don't remember much about the science project, but I quickly realized the connection I had with Ken. He was another awkward junior high boy looking for his place in the world. We soon started hanging out together and skating. When I was in junior high I had only a few things that I clung to to try and form my own identity, they were: skateboarding, riding motorcycles and three-wheelers in the desert and in the hills around our house, and being the class-clown. Ken skated and occasionally screwed around in class with me, but his mom thought riding motorcycles was dangerous. 
Ken was in advanced classes and got better grades than me. Ken didn't need to be the center of attention, but Ken could be quite funny. Kenny, as we called him in junior high, had a more distinct nerdy/awkward phase than I did due to his glasses, larger than average nose, and gawky body. Ken and I met in junior high, but we didn't become best-friends until I punched him in the face during lunch our freshman year.
They say you are who you hang out with. My freshman year I hung out at home with neighborhood kids younger than me. Ken and another kid at school named Brooke picked up on this and started making fun of me and giving me the nickname "6th Grader Andy." I even remember them calling my house and yelling "6th Grader Andy!" over the phone and then hanging up on me. One day in September after a summer of being made fun of I was hanging out at lunch at Rancho Buena Vista High School with some friends when Ken, in a typical high school manner attempt to put someone else down to make yourself look good, hit me in the head with a Blow Pop and yelled "6th Grader Andy!" at me for the last time. In anger and embarrassment I turned around and swung for his face. I made contact with the side of his face and head. He fell to the ground and said, "What the heck did you do that for?"
I replied, "Stop calling me 6th Grader Andy!"
He responded, "You didn't have to punch me!"
"Blow Pops hurt, you ass."
"Ok."
Ken and I experienced our "coming of age story" together and literally did everything as friends. High school was filled with skateboards, skateboard ramps, motorcycles, motorcycle jumps, endless hours spent shooting at mockingbirds with pellet guns from his back porch, church and youth group, surfing, the most inside-jokes ever devised, Alberto's trips, concerts, The Crucified, girls, practical jokes, Spaceballs, camping, watersking, In-N-Out, farting, Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, slug-bug games, farts, weightlifting, making each other laugh in class, burps and farts, talking about and discussing the joy of breasts, street bowling, off-roading, getting stuck, driving through mud, dust!, sagebrush, fire, fire and fart combos, making moto videos, snow sking, eating food, getting in trouble, acting like idiots, encouraging my mom to peel-out in the 1972 Chevy Nova, and much much more.
Another thing we did together was take trips and go on vacations. Our families went to the desert together once his mom allowed him to start riding motorcycles. We went to Lake Havasu, Bass Lake, Oahu, Hawaii, Yosemite, New Zealand, and many other places. The summer we graduated from high-school, and a few years before we moved out together, we went to Hawaii, Yosemite, Bass Lake and camped on the beach all in one summer.
Bass Lake was a family tradition and every year we were allowed to bring a friend. Ken was that friend. We always stayed in a three story cabin that had enough beds for everyone and whose centerpoint was the pool table. If we weren't on the lake or eating; we were playing pool. The pool table was a spot for games, jokes, farts, and fun. I might have laughed harder around that pool table than anywhere else in the world. It was near that pool table that Ken and I found a closet of old clothes late one night. The clothes were not only old - they were hilarious. There was no choice, we had to put them on in the most ridiculous fashion and take pictures. We laughed until we had sore throats, until we woke up my parents, until my stomach hurt, until we were sweaty from changing clothes so much. When I think of pure unadulterated joy, I think of Ken's laugh. There was no laugh ever like his. It was dorky. It was hilarious. It made you want to laugh as well. It was contagious. It was entertaining. It was funny. 
It is missed.
