semi-charmed life

A few nights before I graduated from college (a strangely quiet night, in fact) I walked with my friend Matt down behind our dorm, through a eerily dark but not so quiet parking lot, down the secret stairs and to a neighboring elementary school, Miller High Life longnecks in hand. Matt and I had quite a year. We went from being super tight friends to people who at one point barely spoke. The impending end of our college career had forced us back into some kind of friendship and so we took this odd moment to spend some time together, recollecting the past two years and talking about what God only knows now. In the stillness of one of our last Madison nights we sat on a swing set, just downhill from this large, looming rectangular box of a school whose presence was undeniable. The one thing I can distinctly remember talking about was how in these final days we needed to make some substantial memories. An awful montage of scenes fluttered through my buzzing brain as I listened to him go on a diatribe (a word I can thank Matt for adding to my Words for Regular Usage list). I knew for a fact that we had had some crazy times, not just the times that people usually reflect back on as crazy but some legitimately insane times where if it wasn't for each of us, neither of us thought we would make it out alive. The two of us had fashioned ourselves into the whackest of tag teams. How many people do you know that walk into a social situation with a meticulously crafted escape plan? With two years full of panic rooms, shooting galleries, (oftentimes grimy) New York City bars, rock anthems (I'll explain this later), characters out of the most frightening of comic books (Timemachine, Werewolf, The Ultimate Warrior, Metal Sheik, Killa Kasai, AK-47, etc. etc. this could go on forever), princes, disasters, and chuckles all alike... I deemed this not the soberist of friendships but incredible nonetheless. This night out on the playground, wishing we could go back and rewrite our childhoods and speaking of how much cooler we could have been, was fantastic and strange. No matter who we once were, he will still have been the awkward, pale kid with an almost-unibrow, and I the chubby kid whose mother made her to go public school in plaid skirts and knee-high socks for her entire sixth grade year.

Thank God for change, but despite how much each of us has evolved into pseudo hipster non domestic beer drinking pubcrawlers these ghosts still haunt the ends of our minds and unwillingly we accept that this has shaped us into the shells of people we proudly call ourselves today. Looking back on this particular moment in both our lives I think we each realized how alike we were and that we had in fact made memories. Please, this kid can't take a car ride lasting more than ten minutes without a drink in hand and I remember his temper tantrum from last summer about how I needed to drive faster because he couldn't be in the car anymore. Needless to say, the car ride was like 15 minutes each way, I was buying him dinner AND providing him with a place to stay. I digress, but if you're curious that story ended with him chugging Jim Beam in my basement upon arrival at my house.

Whether or not he and I struggled to carry an old, musty couch from some campus basement back to the large lawn in front of our dorms where we had spent numerous afternoons criticizing the physically fit people playing frisbee in the distance and drinking Twisted Tea from mugs so as to not get written up for "open containers" (the vaguest title of misdemeanors), our friendship was in fact real and tangible. Matt and I, both Leos born three days apart, are as he would say "reactionary people." We are people who have fought, smacked, hit, thrown TVs at each other, scream and cry holding each other in the middle of parties, holding back each others hair in our upstrokes... people who have said to piss of and piss on, I love you and hate you. We are two strange people who may have deemed Closer by Nine Inch Nails our theme song at one drunken time or another. I laugh as I type up all of this. Once we had brought that couch to Hoyt Lawn we sat and stared out at it. We were fortunate enough to live on the best part of the campus and in the mistiness of that night, while Fatty slept soundly after pulling an all-nighter for a four page paper, while Pablo and Eric did whatever it is they did, while the City hummed softly some miles away we were there, in silence, together.

For a fraction of a moment I forgot this was soon coming to an end. And then in the midst of it all we awoke the morning of graduation. Back to square one and "I hate you!" we stood in his room, Matt still drunk from the night before that had ended a little over two hours prior to the 9:30 AM line-up. In his wrinkled cap and gown, shirt and tie, he jumped back into bed declaring that he would not be attending graduation. After Pete and I forced him up, we walked to the Forum together for the last time, fighting the whole way. I'll say no more for to most of those reading these are no surprises, but if he is reading this, I hope he looks back on these times with great fondness as I am right now.