Untitle

 Tonight I kinda feel like writing, reflecting, pondering. I drove to Chicago today to visit the folks for a little bit, plus hang out with my longtime best friend for a few days as well. As tradition demands, my mom commandeers the computer during the prime evening hours (I didn't bring mine down, so that's one fewer than I would like), so I had to fend for myself this evening. Bored, I retreated to what was once briefly my room (we moved to our current residence the summer after my junior year in college) and flipped the pages through one of my sketchbooks. I apparently liked to draw maps a lot as a kid, something I continued through high school, college, and even contributed a little bit tonight. But some of the other things that were in there, mementi from the NBA Nintendo game I once played, and repeated attempts at casting for a fictitious movie based on a long short story I wrote as a kid. This was a project I started around when I was 10, finished at age 15, clearly my biggest continual literary project to date. In the story my best buds and I made up a secret boys club who liked to play basketball against the same rival over and over again; the parallel story focused on a community of cats, based on those that I knew growing up, that met up with us at the end. The movie adds the intrigue of my character being crazy, thinking that these cats I knew were anthropomorphic, and were consequently haunting me, thus needing to visit a psychiatrist who would tell me that it was all in my head. But it was not the flush of memories of my entire childhood and collegehood that hit me this time; no, that took place last summer. Rather, it was the two or three updates (I've lost count) of this movie casting of some of my favorite peops at the time: one of them clearly had to have taken place in the last year before I went to college, as everyone cast was either from the remnants of my St. Luke's brotherhood in high school or North Shore; another of the updates was drawn up sometime in late 2007, comprised primarily of my college friends from my junior year, as well as a few others from Chicago that I'd successfully managed to keep in touch with (yay!). What's amazing to me is looking at the names I've written down over the years, and understanding how much these people meant the world to me (and still do). At the same time, I am saddened to realize that creating yet another update (ca. 2009) would make me realize how much the whole scope of who I talk to on a regular basis has changed. I still highly value several of those that I have written in as pretend actors to my pretend movie, or whose last names I write for street names the rare time I sit down and make up a new city map. But I look at my most recent update from late 2007, which was not even two years ago, and see how much things have changed for all of us. It's weird. Funny thing is, I've gotten much better at keeping in touch as I've gotten older and more adult, but at the same time, that's about as best as we can do. Truth is, we're all too [doggone] busy with life to do too much more than that, and all I can ask is, how did it get to be this way? And, while I'm at it, why? When did it become a rule that life had to stop being fun? Why are we so concerned about money and keeping ourselves in the game that we stop making time for each other like we used to?

I should probably stop there. Don't need to vent any more. After all, yesterday, I returned to Northfield from the Great North with one of my good friends, and tomorrow I'm going to hang out with a friend I've known since first grade. And the day after that. And for a few days next week. I just wish I could have the privilege of doing that with a heck of a lot more people on a regular basis, and not just on a semi-regular basis.