A Prose Ode to Keri and Mind-Melding

Just got back from sushi with the long-lost Keri. (Okay, she wasn’t really “lost,” but I couldn’t find her.) Keri and I spent about 80 hours a week together for several years back in the mid 90s: working together in the UA, commuting to NYU, and getting into all sorts of after-hours scrapes that usually involved:

* our cars—the Ick and Keri's Cherry, aka the No Fear Cavalier (renegade steer clear…)
* compulsive playing of CDs by a random assortment of bands.
* mixed tapes of our own and cassettes made by DJs no one else had ever heard of. Yes, people were still making mixed tapes then. My God, we’re absolutely archaic. We went from grunge to house to punk to rock to disco and back again. Eclectic, yes; boring, never.
* girls who hated us (there were a lot of them)
and
* boys we’d just met (uh, them too. I use the word "boys" purposefully.)

Which brings up a few thoughts…

You know you’ve finally healed the wounds of the jobs you resented when you can think about the uniforms (purple & teal???) and really, truly laugh. I know there’s a million of you out there who can relate to this. So if you think it’s been long enough to have healed all those post-adolescent soap opera hurts, I urge you—find someone that “knew you when” and take a trip down memory lane.

Mind-melding: Some people, from the first day you have a conversation, can read your mind and finish your sentences. When you’re talking to each other, you both get ideas at the same instant and blurt them out, but then you have to go back and start again because you each missed what the other was saying. And usually, when you repeat it…well, you were both saying the same thing anyway. It’s scary, but it’s fun-scary. You only get a handful of these people in your lifetime. They don’t flinch when you tell them how many gigs of mp3s you have on your external hard drive or how many CDs or DVDs are sitting alphabetized in the corner of your room. Keep these people around. Don’t let them fall out of your life no matter how far away they may be.

Although, if they do fall out of your life, when they drop back in, it’s as if they were never gone. But you knew that’s how it would be, didn’t you?

Sometimes they give you presents and sometimes they give you scars. They’re equally valuable. Even that scar that you have on your hand from the night you carried her from your friend’s backyard down into the basement bathroom because she drank too much, and she fell onto you and you both fell into the stucco wall, but you were able to hold both of you up and get out of it with only a squiggly bloody scratch on the knuckle of your right ring finger. And in the lyrics of the ONE quotable Goo Goo Dolls song, "Scars are souvenirs you never lose." As far as the psychological scars from holding someone’s hair back all night while she’s vomiting…well, no one asks you about those because they can’t see them. But they’re just as valuable as a snapshot would be.

Oh, you did take a picture? Well, don’t put it out there on the internet, ok?

And back up those tapes digitally (the bootleg ones of things you can’t get in mp3). You know you’ve still got them somewhere. Analog degenerates, you know.