Best Thing I Ever Had In A World Gone Mad

The MiniDisc (MD) player rage was short-lived. I remember it from when I was head over, first time in love with my unequivocally brilliant best friend with whom I had a platonic relationship. I called him M and he called me D. He happened to be older than me by 17 years; I was 14 at the time. I guess you can say there was potential for statutory rape if events had unfolded differently.

There was more than a hand full of the younger generation who, by the frequent news of school shootings, kids shooting kids, reached some level of mental maturity sooner than they would have otherwise wanted to. I was one of those people. Not that I had to worry about a shooting taking place at my school of nerds, potheads, metal-heads, and the like, who all at least shared this in common – natural selection favoring societal outcasts standardly tested to have brains (as if that's an anatomical peculiarity). Then again, who back then was worried about a school in Littleton, Colorado called Columbine?

Like 9/11, no one needed to have a personal connection to feel sympathy, concern, and outrage. In 1999 I was going through the same set of awkward emotions I would have to go through again in 2001. But I wasn’t angry with two boys who killed too many, their parents, the jocks, or anything of that sort. I was furious over social injustice, what Americans know is not confined to school hallways yet will still turn a blind eye.

M and I met virtually, becoming friends and confidants because neither of us could ignore the reality of the world we lived in even though people were globally becoming more and more connected. While I can name industrial, grunge rock bands we both liked and would describe the indignation we felt, ultimately there’s only one song I associate with our friendship and my conscious decision to let it fall apart.

If I graph the progress of unrequited love, I think it'll look a lot like the exponential growth of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last hundred years. I met the one person I believed truly understood me wholly but only because the internet had become my medium of expression. We knew each other in person; that's not the point. When M and I started going our separate ways he said to me, “If you really loved me, you would try to still be my friend.” When I look back, he was probably right. But reason is all mental comfort. With our history gone sour I knew that there was no one left in my life capable of stopping my sad excuse of a heart from hurting like a mofo.

Going back to the MD player, I kept one MD with one song on it. I listened to it over and over until I was sick of it and sick of what I was feeling - Do these lines jog your memory? 

So when you think of yesterday/Remember all the things we said/And through the course of history/
I hope you'll still remember me/And there can't be no other way/There's nothing left for us to say/I've got to see it through alone/I've got to do this on my own