For Charles (who will always be Chip to me) 🐎
Recorded a voice over for this one so you can listen too!
Did we have cicadas in Indiana? I mean, of course, we did, but did we experience them when we were in college there? We’d remember, wouldn’t we? I joke that I blacked out most of college, that weed clouded my head so much there isn’t much left I remember, but I would have remembered those giant bugs and the sound that sings of summer to me.
Do you know that it’s almost been a quarter of a century since we graduated college? I wonder if you have a life you're happy with now, is this everything you thought it would be? Back when we were getting lost in the woods behind campus, walking across creeks on dead trees that could barely hold our weight. Were those woods as vast as I remember or were we just smaller then?
I remember beating on drums, our hippy hearts laughing, and falling back on the dewy grass. Falling asleep on the Heart and waking up to students shuffling past us headed to class. I remember singing for our dinner, and buying snacks and cigarettes for all of us with my Sunoco gas card - did I get the idea from Reality Bites? Probably.
What I’m trying to say as I conjure up memories of our life in Indiana is that I’m glad there’s still this thread between us. I’m glad we both got dragged to San Francisco and never left even though we swore we would many times - you more than me, but you could never make up your mind, especially not back in college. Back when we were writing plays and acting and you were a thespian.
There was the creek and the blue mud and the perfect little country market - what was it called? You will remember, you remember so much more than me from those days. The long drive down that winding road through the woods - we had such simple pleasures - a cold soda on a wooden bench in the middle of a country road. I forget all the names but you will color them in as soon as I start to ask. I remember gunshots in stop signs and how foreign it felt to see that, so unlike anything you’d stumble across in the safe suburbs of Jersey, someone was just out shooting for fun you might have told me. We rolled up our jeans and put our long hair in buns, and waded into the creek and dug our hands through the cool mud and we were all so happy then, in our own little midwestern bubble.
We took road trips and ate too much pizza and you tolerated me reading my bad poetry to you on every car ride, any evening or morning or afternoon – you would always listen. Like I listened so intently to you all play music in the basement, the cello and guitar, and pretty vocals and you were going somewhere. The stick art, and Everclear, and Zima, and liquor Dan selling us booze, and the fake ID you made me and Gene’s Stumble In and Cara playing pool and a million memories we’ll never recall, they’re lost in the air somewhere between Indiana and California.
Are you happy with your life now? Are you where you thought you’d be? Is it dangerous to ask that question at all? I’m glad we share the Bay and the fog and can both appreciate and roll our eyes at the annoying fucking way this city has changed. We have the old school cred of moving to San Francisco when it was still cool in the 90s. When everything was different and better of course. When you wore fake leather pants to a Good Vibrations party and when we still didn’t know what we were doing with our lives but it didn’t really matter because we were having fun and making enough money and sharing our apartments and living in basements and eating falafel and burritos and drinking at Shotwell's and going home with bartenders way too old for us. Remember the season when I was convinced gin was killing me? Bombay Sapphire and tonic and now I can’t stand the taste of either. Our dirty street in the mission where dudes would ride by and smack my ass and the time you evicted the homeless couple from my car. And all the songs you wrote in that weird little basement that was never supposed to be an apartment with your waterbed and your black chest that you used as a coffee table – you dragged that thing around for a long time into adulthood.
What I’m trying to say is that I think your mom would be happy we still have this thread between us too – I think about her more than you probably know and I’m always surprised by how much I can remember her - she loved our friendship. And even if you move to Spain or Italy and we let time take too long between us, even if we forget to fill in the details for months and years, even then we’ll still have this thread - this tiny thing connecting us - we’ve traveled through too many decades together, lived in too many of the same cities, shared too many sad stories, played too many haunting songs for it to ever disappear, it’s like tattoo ink on our skin at this point. A memory we may not recall but a feeling we’ll never be able to shake. That’s what your friendship is like.