Searching for Friends

Another blog resuscitation attempt. I'm just gonna gloss over the last nine freaking months since my last post, and leave that to the annals of lost time. Honestly, if it weren't for my kids, I'd be blogging at least once a week, putting my Daily Journal thoughts into blog form. But I can barely keep up with my own schedule. It's those kids, I tells ya. 

Lately, though... Spring is here, Easter is coming, and resurrection is in the air. 

I have a life-long obsession with my favorite video game (JRPG) of all time, Final Fantasy VI. Although I call myself a "retired gamer" in that I don't own anything newer than PS2 and resort to keeping up with the industry/hobby via YouTube, I replay that game every year. Sometimes twice a year. The first nine Final Fantasy games are sacred to me. But VI is beyond "favorite" to me. 

Someone on Twitter once said that you can tell how old someone is by the fact that their favorite Final Fantasy game is closest to their 12th birthday. That person cracked the code of life, and should be in charge of NASA. 

Point is. The title of this post. "Searching for Friends" is the track title of a cue from the game's soundtrack, one of my favorite, most inspiring pieces of music, in the second half of the game. Halfway through, the plot takes a twist when the true villain of the story takes dominance and basically destroys the world as we know it, and the second half of the story is a post-apocalyptic, non-linear (which at the time was ground-breaking) series of quests leading up to the final confrontation. After rebounding from abject despair, four friends gain a replacement airship and resolve to reunite the full cast of characters before taking on the villain. Hope is kindle. Determination becomes the soup of the day. 

That's where I am. 

Partly in an effort to come back to a sense of normalcy after all the insane disasters since 2015, and partly because I am just that stubbornly loyal, I have been making an effort to rekindle old friendships, to get back in touch with those who have faded into the bleakness. 

At the moment, so far I've been centered on the iconic posse from Spring 2004, which I've talked about before, but I feel I should clarify once again. 

I graduated from Truman in December 2003, and stuck around in the spring taking graduate level composition lessons and the Friday morning master class, while composing music for the theater department, heading up the Shotokan Karate Club, and having the time of my life with a legendary circle of friends who weren't even involved with the music department. To most of those friends, it was their final semester at Truman. Everything was coming to a head. Spring 2004 semester was... memorable, to understate. 

But I am also intent on reconnecting with as many people as I can from the music department there as well, and then there's grad school at BGSU which was next... I will try again soon... 

Social media is insufficient. I am trying something different. Video messages. Think of it as Zoom Voicemail, if you will, only higher quality, because if you record a video with your phone's camera and send it in Messenger, it's way better, and you get about 2 minutes before it cuts you off. 

Pathetic that that's the best I can find. We are in 2021, we all have hoverboards and flying cars and self-drying jackets, but we can't send a hi-fi video message over 2 minutes? Come on. 

Hold on a second. This is not about the past. This is not about me reminiscing about a certain spring season that happened to be awesome. No. This is about the present and the future. 

Moving forward. It's not about what we were, but what we are now. 

"Searching for Friends." After the Collapse, after the world has been ruined, I am going around, hunting for former party members to re-recruit. Anyone willing. Anyone who still gives a damn. Because life and time are cold and indifferent, and it's up to us to reform the line and make any of it mean something. 

I keep telling myself I'll get back to making a weekly blog post just to organzie my thoughts on events and developments, but it never happens. I blame the kids. 

But maybe this is the start of something.

Something significant. 

Join my party.