Prince

In the soundtrack of our lives, some artists loom naturally larger than others, tying themselves inextricably to a time and a place and a memory, such that they become a part of your life, a part of you, a part of that moment that cannot be separated from the whole.

This thought occurs to me, now, as I sit in my room, thinking back to my very first run with the dinner theatre, living in a hotel room, with no roots in the town in which I lived, inviting the cast over, night after night after night, for endless games of Doctor Mario, games that would go on until the sun came up, because we had nowhere to be until four o’clock the next afternoon and we didn’t want the night to end…

And Prince.

We would play every Prince album I owned, and I did own most of them, play them again and again, but we always came back to the Gold Experience. It’s not his best work, not one of his classics, but it was the one we wound up listening to, for reasons that years later I can’t begin to remember, and when I hear it now it still takes me back to that sense of belonging, that community, that camaraderie.

That funky-motherfucking sense of camaraderie.

I’m listening to the album now, as I type this, and I’m thinking about that period of my life, a time I’d count among my very best, and I’m thinking about the people with whom I’d spent it, people my life is infinitely richer for having known. And I’m thinking about Prince. And I’m thinking about the Gold Experience, and playing Doctor Mario, and the younger me I used to be, and I can’t help smiling as I do.

Everybody’s trying to sell what’s already been sold.

Everybody’s trying to tell what’s already been told.

What’s the use of money, if you ain’t gonna break the mold?

Even at the center of the fire, there is cold.

All that glitters, ain’t gold.

But in that case it was. It was a very golden time indeed…

Friendship

It’s been said that, while a friend will help you move, your best friend will help you move a body.

And he IS my best friend, I’ve known him years and trust him more than anyone else on earth, so here I am, helping dig.

And I’m doing it with a smile on my face. That’s what friendship is, after all, it’s the willingness to put yourself out there to help another person.

It’s just…

There’ve been an awful lot of bodies, of late, is all.

I mean, I love him like a brother, but still…

Friendship does have limits.

Disposing of my Remains

I’ve heard stories about funerals during which the deceased, as dictated by their living wills, distribute jewelry to their mourners, little glass jars on little silver chains, each jar containing a portion of the ashes that are their earthly remains.

After cremation, the notion goes, rather than having your ashes blown out to sea the option exists to send each and every one of those who’ve come to see you laid to rest home with a portion, that they might have some part of you, some real, tangible thing, to remember you by.

And I do admit, I find myself impressed by the notion.

It strikes me as the perfect sort of weird, passive aggressive power play to make, and one that you will never, ever be called to account on, because who would be crass enough to speak ill of a dead man at his own funeral?

You would know why I had done it, but there would be nothing you could do about the matter without seeming like the worst sort of person in front of everyone who’d ever cared about me. So you’d smile, and accept the little glass jar on its little silver chain, and pretend that it held some kind of meaning for you.

And, from beyond the grave, if anything beyond the grave does exist, I’d laugh.

“Here,” I would tell you, “have something you do not want, but can never, ever, for as long as you might live, throw away.”

And you would have to grin and take it, knowing as you did that I had, one last time, gotten the better of you with the sort of weird, petty, childish prank that you’d so long put up with during my life.

And perhaps this reminder of who I had been, and what it had been that drew you to me during my life might make you, for one brief moment in the middle of my funeral, smile.

Or perhaps it would not.

Either way, you’d be stuck with the jewelry.

Gotcha!

Weekly Prompt Story: Good Buddy

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=27939

On the Nature of Friendship

By Christopher Munroe

You can’t spell “Good Buddy” without “Good Bud,” and that’s why I believe that a true friend will help you find marijuana.

That follows, yeah?

I don’t often smoke the stuff myself, it puts me to sleep, but if somebody comments on wanting some I like the challenge, it makes for a fun game for me.

I’m a grown-assed adult, with zero drug connections, but I’m reasonably intelligent and extremely tenacious, and if I want to buy drugs, then BY ZOD I am going to find someone to sell them!

Yeah, I’m also surprised I don’t get arrested more often…

Friendship

Nothing in this world is more important than friendship.

Your friends, after all, your true friends, are the ones you’ll need through your life, the ones who’ll always be there for you, the ones you can truly count on. And that’s a valuable thing, perhaps the most valuable thing in the world.

That’s the power of friendship.

I know who my best friend is, for example, because he gave me a kidney.

It wasn’t his, and I didn’t need a kidney, and the less we think about where he got it the better off we’ll be, but still, it was an incredibly thoughtful gift. And nicely wrapped, to boot.

Wetly wrapped, soggily really, but nicely.

And it was wonderful to receive, very much appreciated. I still have it, mounted to my wall as a conversation piece.

A profoundly disturbing, probably illegal conversation piece.

I can’t take it down.

I wouldn’t want him to think I didn’t appreciate his gift, after all.

I wouldn’t want him to think I don’t value his friendship.

After all, the man harvests kidneys…

...on teaching English.

I’m teaching a friend of mine English.

It’s easy to do, conveniently, because he speaks English nearly fluently already.

It isn’t his first language, granted, and there are certainly gaps, but he speaks it well enough to get his point across with zero confusion, I’ve never once had to ask him what he meant while we was speaking, and the number of times he’s had to ask me to slow down can be counted on my fingers.

Which is impressive. I talk fast and use a lot of slang, I can only imagine what a nightmare I’d be to someone for whom English was a second language.

It’s the slang, in fact, that I’ve been tasked with teaching him. The idioms, the colloquialisms, the cute little turns of phrases and clichés and expressions that a culture accrues to itself over time, that outsiders to that culture, looking in, don’t have the context or perspective necessary to understand.

He feels that as a writer I know about such things.

He’s probably right.

So whenever he hears a word or phrase he doesn’t understand, he writes it down and brings it to me, so I can explain it to him.

And, to the best of my ability, I do.

I try to, at any rate.

Some phrases are hard to explain, some hinge on a shared bit of collective history or reference to pop culture, but I do what I can to make the meaning of each tidbit as clear as is meaningfully possible.

A task made even harder by the fact that I know I could tell him literally anything, just to fuck with him, and he’d believe me without question and add it to his personal lexicon.

And that would be hilarious, to me.

Because I am a bad person.

Still…

I like the dude.

I’m trying to be good.

...on friendship.

He’d been depressed, convincing himself he was utterly alone, and we couldn’t allow it. So we threw a funeral.

His eyes widened when he saw us, gathered to celebrate his life. Clearly he was in shock we’d made the time.

And he was near tears during our eulogies. He’d never realized how many people he’d touched, lives he’d changed for the better.

He struggled a little when we buried him.

He struggled a LOT when we buried him.

I’d like to dig him up and ask how he enjoyed it, but it would only make the gesture feel less genuine…