Home of the Soul Cookie

Found out that the bassist for Linkin Park, Dave “Phoenix” Farrell, is the younger brother of a classmate of mine from high school, Joe Farrell, and went to school with the blogmistress.

That’s what kind of got me on the whole hazy shade/reunion vibe there: Thinking about the people I knew in high school, and how few of them I’ve ever actually talked to (including the time when I was in high school).

Take Joe Farrell, for instance. Really great guy; smart, funny. Could be a ham in front of a videocamera (I have video footage to prove it). Co-created a comedic political ideology called “Farvelism” that was so pervasive in our high school’s Model United Nations program that it spawned a counter movement (called, of course, “Anti-Farvelism”). Planned to go to Duke or to Georgetown or to somewhere equally impressive.

I wonder what’s become of him.

I wonder what’s become of Becky Girardin. I always had fun hanging out with her. The first time I went to a ren faire I went with Becky and Tom. The three of us cranked called a couple of times (and even remotely changed some woman’s answering machine’s outgoing message one time). I wonder if she ever knew I liked her liked her.

I wonder what’s become of Vernon Dolan, a kid from Ireland that lived in the area for a year or two during high school. He and another kid named Garrett were responsible for catalyzing my love affair with comic books that still exists today. Vern and his older brother Aaron would tell tales of life in and around Dublin. He moved away before graduation. He called me once, like a year after graduation, to say that he was in town, and would I like to stop by and say hi? Stupid, flaky, dumbass me never made the effort to drive the three miles and talk to him. I wonder how he’s doing.

So many people touch our lives in so many rich and varied ways. How unfortunate that contact and continuity drifts away, lost in the ebb and flow of meetings and soccer games and drunken karaoke like so much temporal flotsam.