BGJ was what I termed an "anti-fraternity." In 2003, at Thanksgiving, my father, Scott and I were all in the kitchen of our previous house and were getting ready for a bunch of my friends to come over for the meal. I, as usual, had been throwing down Smirnoff Ice Vodka Coolers all day, so I was pleasantly happy. My father was talking about how we were all so much younger than him that it made him feel like he was watching a fraternity circling around him, and the idea took hold. Given that we had just experienced the movie Jackass for the first time that same week, that was in my mind when I thought of the name for our little group. Knowing that actual fraternities used Greek letters for their names/logos, I deemed us BetaGammaJackass, and it stuck from that day until my father died in October 2006, a couple of days before Thanksgiving (he was pronounced dead at midnight of the morning of October 6th, and the holiday was that weekend).
The "anti-fraternity" idea struck hard. I started to try and find people to join us, and kind of opened the house for people to drop by. This was also at least partially spurred on by my ex-wife having left me in December of the previous year and my wanting to meet new and exciting females and make their toes curl, and also partially by the idea that if we had enough people who wanted to do similar things, we could apply and qualify for Group Discounts on things like theatre tickets and vacations. I still think the Group Discount idea is valid, no matter what anyone else says.
Anyway, we had a website and all, which I still have in it's entirety her on my computer, and it included the blog, plans for upcoming get-togethers, a menu of what I could whip up for people who dropped by ($2.00 a meal is a better deal than you'll find anywhere, and I wasn't talking about some canned food shit, I'm talking my homemade chili, my Chicken Paprikosh, my spaghetti, and other actual recipes I have been told a restaurant could serve successfully - don't believe it, come by and try them yourselves), photos of all the members, and even a 200 question movie trivia contest that was being played for 2 Santa's Choice Christmas hampers. The site was over ten pages large, of unique material, and I maintained it pretty comprehensively until the end of the year 2005. At that point, because we had moved in August of that year to a house further away from people, we had less get-togethers and we started to break apart. To be fair, our core group was only six people strong anyway, with one being my ex and another being the other "friend" who buggered off the next year. So, suffice it to say, I stopped with the website and pretty much put the "anti-fraternity" to rest except for one small coda at the end.
When my father died, to commemorate his passing (and because in my grief I really had no fucking clue what else to do) I had a tattoo artist put the skull and cross-crutches logo on my arm with the label betagammajackass underneath it. As such, the journey came to an end, except to re-post my writings for anyone interested to read them, and hopefully think I had some kind of writing ability after all.
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| Best picture I have of the tattoo |
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| Not the original, as I don't have rights to it |
