old skool posse

It's astonishing to me, especially considering the absolute loathing that I feel for the city of Springfield, just how many truly amazing friends I have from my years there. I think a lot of people would consider themselves extremely lucky to know and be friends with... oh, say half a dozen of the kind of people that I'm talking about. I can think of at least two dozen without even trying. We're talking friends you'd take a bullet for, friends you've been through everything life can throw at you with, friends that enrich your life just by the very fact of their existence. And it wasn't like I just luckily stumbled across a pocket of them one moonlit night when the planets were all aligned - every year I spent there just somehow seemed to add two or three new people to the Cool As Shit List.

The wedding I went up there for this last weekend? These people go waaaaaaaay back to the beginning. I met Justin (the best man) during the first few weeks of my time in Springfield, Jimi (the groom, and one of Justin's best friends) within a few months of that, and the core of "the group" - we never had, or needed, any more of a name than that - really formed pretty quickly from that point.

Hoo boy, you want to talk about a bunch of people who went through it all together? You name it, at least one of us either did it or had it happen to us. We made more than our share of mistakes, had more than our share of happiness, and lived way more than our share of life. Looking back, the period of time when we were a tightly-knit little community unto ourselves (Long Live Mortal Kombat 2!) was actually surprisingly brief, but even after we splintered off into our own little subgroups and started collecting different people around them, our paths still managed to keep crossing and recrossing in the strangest of ways. I mean... Jimi and I were carnies together, for crying out loud! That probably says all you really need to know about what a long strange trip it's been.

And here we are, thirteen years or so later, celebrating the marriage of Jimi and Connie. I'm not the only person who escaped Springfield like they were strapped to a rocket as soon as they got a chance - as a matter of fact, there's nobody left there now except for Dave, and I think we all agree that he stopped mattering a long time ago. Somewhere around the time when he turned into pondscum. But I digress. We scattered to the four winds years ago, and so there were noticeable holes in the lineup - but everyone was there in spirit. It was obvious as soon as you got even a small number of us in a room together. And whether a few more people had managed to make it or not, I don't think it would have been possible to have any more fun than we had. (And the fact that every waitress in Springfield apparently wants to sleep with me doesn't affect my opinion of this the tiniest bit. That's just a bonus.)

I truly miss these people. I miss 'em a lot. No other group of people, and I've found myself in the middle of a number of great ones, can make me laugh quite like these guys still can. We need to start holding yearly family reunions or something. And if Jimi and Connie are as lucky in love as we've all been in friendship, they're going to be together forever.

I wish them nothing less.