A satire site I did a logo for a while ago is gone, and I don’t know quite when it happened. I guess I’m seeing it as another sign of how terrible I am at staying in contact with people. It’s kind of sad. And now that I’m going through my address books, preparing for wedding invites and announcements, it’s really amazing to see just how many people I used to know that I just haven’t seen or heard from for years.
In my email inbox I’ve got a two year old message from a former college housemate. His initials were CJ and everyone called him Ceej. Ceej was a really cool guy, and once I mailed a TV set and a fish to Florida because of him.
Ok, slight digression to explain that… I was living in a double apartment one year and my rental-agency-assigned roomie (let’s call him Karl) was heading back to Florida for the summer. Ceej needed a place to stay, so he was going to sublease from Karl. The day they were supposed to meet, Karl sold his lease back to the rental agency. Ceej had two days he had before his old lease expired, so he suddenly had to scramble to find an apartment. The agency wound up putting two people in Karl’s old room without reducing my rent, since they charged by bedroom occupancy. And to top it off, Karl left a stack of boxes and asked me to mail them to a storage facility in Florida. I figured that they’d be sitting there all summer, so I went to the grocery store across the street, bought a frozen salmon steak and put it in to the box with his TV.
Anyway, Ceej and I wound up sharing a house with two other guys the next year. He graduated and moved away, I stayed to finish my second major and wound up getting a job. We e-mailed back and forth for a while, but lost touch after a year or so. Then in late 2000 I got an email from him, right out of the blue… He’s married and living in Texas, working as a freelance writer with a side gig as a school bus driver to pay the bills. Or at least he was two years ago… We chatted back and forth for two or three exchanges, but the conversation kinda stalled. The falling-out-of-contact happened with the other two people from the house too, but much earlier.
I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad. There are people I still stay in contact with that I’ve known since elementary school. I first met the Man in Japan in fourth or fifth grade during a community concert school play thing… I’m hazy on my recall of the exact details, but students from all of the local schools made costumes and provided a children’s chorus in a production called Noyes Fludde. We were skunks, because none of the other kids wanted to wear a skunk costume.
I met Rob around the same time. His grandmother lived about a block away from my house and he went to the same school as some friends of mine just down my block. I don’t remember our first meeting, but I do remember the second one. I was walking home from school and he was on his way to his grandmother’s house. When he saw me the first thing he said was “Not you again.”
And despite that, he’s going to be one of the guys standing up there with me at my wedding.
(2003-Mar-11) Quick follow-up: the site (pave-france.org) that caused the whole self-flogging pity fest isn’t gone after all! It had just gone all mysteriously inaccessable for a while…