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​How To Stay In Touch​

Kurt thinks of me when he thinks about baseball Hall-of-Famer George Brett pooping his pants.

He told me so a few weeks ago because that video of George Brett was going around again. Maybe you don’t know it, but you might: George Brett, at the time a part-time coach for the Kansas City Royals, telling a few increasingly uncomfortable players the story of a very abrupt bout of diarrhea he had in the lobby of the Bellagio in Las Vegas a few years before, and how he extricated himself from the very messy aftermath.

I first discovered this video in 2010, and probably introduced Kurt to it a few months later. It is a video that 15-year-old me would have laughed at and watched multiple times, and I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that 45-year-old me isn’t mature enough to not laugh at it.

Every few years, the George Brett video recirculates, and a few weeks back, Kurt forwarded me this Instagram post, a reference to that video, which is enjoying another renaissance amongst fans of baseball, fans of epic and humbling digestive mishaps, and I guess fans of the original video.

The George Brett video is not the only thing that reminds Kurt of me, I hope. I think of him sometimes when I hear a Modest Mouse song, or pass by a thrift store, or tell the story of how he once played the Allman Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider” five times in a row on the jukebox at a bar in Golden, Colorado, too see if anyone would notice (they didn’t), when I drink out of the High Line Brewing glasses he gave us a few years ago (he co-owns the brewery, in Calgary), or when I listen to certain DJ mixes I find on YouTube and I think, “You know who might like this? Kurt.”

And then I send the link to Kurt.

We used to see each other a lot more, when he lived in the U.S. In one town we lived in, we smoked a lot of cigarettes and combed through a lot of thrift stores. Later, we hiked, and rock climbed, and went to restaurants. We should really get together more often, but we both have families, and careers, and there’s an international border and no direct flights, blah blah blah.

This happens to everyone lucky enough to have friends, I imagine: we get busier, or life changes, or we move, and we see less of people. And then we think about them because we hear a song or find a great recipe or see their favorite book in a bookstore or see a bumper sticker that we think is funny but can’t think of a single other person who would understand it except our old friend who we haven’t seen in a long time but are really due, or maybe overdue, for a catchup, or maybe we’re so overdue for a catchup that we think it would be awkward to even have a catchup because we haven’t talked to them since before they went through the breakup or their kid was born or that time we just missed each other when we happened to be in the same city. And then, we either:

1. Move on with our lives without reaching out to our old friend.

or:

2. Message (or even call) our old friend, saying, “It’s been a while. Saw this and thought of you.”
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OR, my favorite:

3. Without any context at all, send them a social media post/funny article/meme/photo of the slice of pizza we are about to disappear/video of a musician covering a song/weird-ass YouTube video because they will very likely GET IT and then smile and/or laugh and/or think warmly about your friendship for five to ten seconds, even if you haven’t seen each other in years, and maybe that leads to an actual exchange or short conversation, or maybe not, and that’s fine too because sometimes it’s enough to let someone know you were thinking of them, if not in those exact words, but in the language of our times, in which a digital thing you found provides a small artifact proving the uniqueness of your relationship with another person, which is a pretty good thing to do with a few seconds of your day, all things considered.

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