Soundtrack To Friendship

After Saturday's book signing I had the opportunity to spend the evening out on the town with friends. Anymore it's rare that we're able to get together like this. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I've been with them let alone going to a club. But several years ago that wasn't the case as we would go out three and four times a week.

It sounds stupid now, spending so many nights up that late and then forcing ourselves to get out of bed for work a few hours later only to do it all over again that next evening. But being drenched in the laughing, and the commiserating, and and the celebrating and the dancing, outweighed the foggy, hammering hangovers we knew would be waiting for us in the morning. These moments of idiocy (and we were idiots) created a bond between us, and we reveled in the temporary freedom granted us as we escaped from the more confining aspects our lives (specifically our jobs in the increasingly demanding real estate business).

As I said before, that was years ago. Years. It's surreal to mark the distance between then and now in such a vague context, but it's easier to explain things in those terms as opposed to the number of marriages, divorces, breakups, friendship-ending arguments, pregnancies, moves, and job losses that have occurred since then. For reasons both good and bad, our merry band has fragmented according to the edicts of real life. That's how it goes. Nothing lasts.

My friends and I know those days are over, an admission made whenever one of us predicts that sporadic reunions such as this past weekend's, will be "just like old times." And to some extent Saturday did offer moments reminiscent of those memorable nights together. We laughed, we drank, we danced. We were minor idiots (minor in the sense that the utter stupidity of before was blunted by a since-gained respect for the consequences of such behavior).

Yet despite all the familiar fun, it felt different--not for the obvious reasons, but in the sense that everyone seemed like an altered version of themselves. It was as if the last few years had strained out every ounce of the person I once knew, and left them instead with fear, pain, frustration and loneliness, the combination of which formed a tone of desperation in their voices as they each summed up their lives in two words: "fucked up."

I understood what they were saying; I had been there too. Even so, this couldn't prevent the helplessness that overcame me as I watched my friends splinter off at the end of the evening. The feeling only intensified listening to my best friend talk later about her struggles as we sat outside of her place eating greasy, Jack in the Box burgers that always taste like the most delicious food ever in the early morning hours after draining a bottle of vodka together.

Her story and that of her husband's was particularly gut-wrenching because the two of them are the best friends I have ever had. They are the ones who were always there for me and who never let me quit as I endured the darkest period of my own life. Now, however, things were diametrically the opposite, causing me to grasp the drastic level of change that has affected all my friends.

This same thought greeted me later that morning as I rolled off my friend's couch, suddenly reminded like an amnesiac whose memories have return, why l quit smoking, drink minimally and go to bed before 10:30. By the time I left, that thought had dissolved into a poignant sadness, a feeling I have yet to fully escape from.

Driving home, I turned on the CD player. When the music started, it dawned on me that my wife had switched out my disk with a soundtrack to one the Twilight movies. I mention this detail only because, as we all know, no story is worth telling these days unless it in some way involves dysfunctional, forlorn, vampires, and buff, pouty-lipped werewolves; so who am I to buck the trend? Still, despite my disdain for all things blood sucking, I couldn't bring myself to change it to another CD.

There's something about hearing just the right song, at just the right time, at just the right volume that envelopes you in reassurance like a sun-warmed towel that you wrap yourself in after stepping out of cold water. It becomes a soundtrack of sorts, accentuating your current emotional state while suspending you above the circumstances of the present moment. It's an enigmatic catalyst that unexplainably triggers both happiness and sadness together at the same time with a power that demonstrates why music is so adept at accessing the rawest elements of our humanness.

I miss my friends.

I don't know why I'm sharing all this, especially when most people have no idea who my friends are. Maybe I'm doing it to sort things out in my own head, or maybe it's because I feel a need to capture the context of my friends' lives now in the hopes that it will mark the beginning of better days ahead. Or maybe it's because I can't figure out why a damn song with essentially irrelevant lyrics, from a movie I can't stand, causes my eyes to well up as I play it over and over.




PS. To my Canadian friends, I apologize if you cannot watch the video via YouTube; however, props to your homeland for producing Metric, the band that sings this. (You can find the video on MySpace.)

PPS. To my fellow Twilight haters, if you decide to watch this try to endure. I know, I know, but if I of all people managed to make it, you can too.





"All Yours"
- Metric

Other lives, always tempted to trade
Will they hate me for all the choices I made?
Will they stop when they see me again?
I can't stop now I know who I am

Now I'm all yours, I'm not afraid
You're all mine, say what they may
And all your love, I'll take to the grave
And all my life starts now

Tear me down, they can't take you out of my thoughts
Under every scar there's a battle I've lost
Will they stop when they see us again?
I can't stop now I know who I am

Now I'm all yours, I'm not afraid
You're all mine, say what they may
And all your love, I'll take to the grave
And all my life starts

I'm all yours, I'm not afraid
You're all mine, say what they may
And all your love, I'll take to the grave
And all my life starts
Starts now




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