apostrophenow

"Would you consider us best friends?" -that's my cousin J, leaping to conclusions.

We were close when we were kids, then there was a twelve year stretch where we barely talked at all. We didn't start hanging out again until after I'd quit the graveyard shift to face-down cancer, by then his marriage had long since deteriorated. We both found ourselves with an inordinate amount of free time.

Thanks to him, I've seen every bad movie made since 2002. His terrible taste has cost me hundreds of dollars and I've wasted huge chunks of my life that could've been spent reading comicbooks or planning the revolution.

I'm almost five years older than him, but on several occasions I've been mistaken for his son.

It's on account of him that I've acquired the strangest of reputations in places I normally would have never ventured into. He dragged me down to MCC to sit in on his Chicano studies course where I became a favored sounding board of the professor, somehow impressing the kids, who encouraged me to join MEChA. Their idea of a good time seems to be travelling hundreds of miles to protest in places where they're not welcome. That's kind of punk, isn't it?

Then there was the time we went to see "The Fountain"; standing in line at the snack counter, my cousin ran into some girls he knew from highschool and persuaded them to skip their movie and come sit with us in ours. I thought the premise was ambitious but the execution was overwrought. I mean the movie, not my cousin's play to get with these girls.

Anyway- afterward, as the credits were rolling and the auditorium lights came up, the girls turned to my cousin and asked him if he understood what just happened.

I saw a lot of Joseph Campbell's theories at work in the movie so I explained it to them from that angle. A kid sitting with a group in the row in front of us turned around, reached out, and shook my hand, thanking me for making sense of it all. The people sitting in the row in front of him called back and asked me to repeat what I'd just said and the next thing I knew I was giving a lecture to an audience of about 25 mystified moviegoers. Even the kids sent in to sweep up the floors for the next show seemed impressed by my evaluation.

My cousin didn't hook up with either of those chicks though.

There's a metaphysical concept that goes something like - the people you share some kind of connectedness with in this life were people you were connected to in past lives. They're people you'll keep meeting in the next life, and the life after that. To some degree this also extends to the people you come into conflict with.

In the next life, you might be asking me the same silly question my cousin J did...

"Are we best friends?"