First let me just say — and I’ve seriously never felt dumber in my life — that I can’t believe I did not ONCE reference a single line from Billy Joel’s Scenes from an Italian Restaurant in that post. How is that even possible? I’ve honestly never wanted to go back in time to change something more, but I can’t, because it’s all over with — it’s final, it’s been written, scrawled permanently in stone onto the wall of the Interwebz, where it shall remain — sans even the painfully obvious working-in of the “did not know-ho! / you could ever look so nice / after so much time!” line.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? This actually hits closer to home as a serious reason to quit drinking for me than, like, coming to at 4am at the last stop on the 3 train in the Bronx. I’ve been waiting to use that song since about 1991, and finally a 100%-legit reason presents itself, and I fail. It’s like forgetting to reference Nothing Compares 2 U exactly seven hours and fifteen days after you’ve been broken up with — or Ani’s Superhero exactly two weeks and three days after someone’s left, or Janis’s Kozmic Blues on your 25th birthday — but times a trillion. I have hereby lost major, irredeemable points with myself.

Secondly: a couple minutes after I passed Rob, what song shuffled onto my iPod, you ask? Silent Lucidity, thanks. Not that big of a deal or overly significant in any lifechanging way, but still totally Rob Era™, so I texted my brother to find out the song’s exact release year.

Now, keep in mind that my brother is impossible to communicate with. Possibly even worse than I am to communicate with, which is saying something. He hardly ever gets back to me at all, but if he does, it will be, like, a week later and via the complete opposite method from which I contacted him — i.e., if I’ve texted him, he’ll call me back; if I’ve called him, he’ll email; if I email, he’ll send me a smoke signal.

I had that very night been waiting patiently on responses from him about approximately thirteen different — actually kind of IMPORTANT — things. And yet, before my phone had even gone back into idle mode after hitting “send,” in less than the time it takes for an automatic out-of-office to be generated, I receive an INSTANT text back from my little brother with Silenty Lucidity’s release year:

‘90.

I *heart* my brother.

It’s the drinking too much on my part combined with the Lack of Bernie in my life that made me forget about the Billy Joel song, though — a song that, by the way, is on my iPod and could just as easily have shuffled on in lieu of Silent Lucidity. But if Bernie were available for comment — if I’d called her the second I got to, like, the safety of a bench in Bryant Park three blocks away — the first thing she would have done is hum the opening chords of that song, and we’d both have cracked up, first over the corny significance it holds, and then over the alternative version we doctored up later on in school, post-Rob, when I’d moved on to *cough* other studies:

Wrestler in red, wrestler in blue:
is there anyone you’d rather do?

But she wasn’t available for comment, so instead I glided down the avenue alone, thinking about how weird it is that neither Bernie nor Rob is in my life anymore, and how thusly — come to think of it — my once-lifetime mob protection may have expired and I should really make a point of looking into whether there are any remaining buddies I can offer favors to renew that shit.

And instead of Billy Joel coming on, it was Queensryche, which was — in hindsight — fitting because instead of jumping up and down and phoning a friend to gossip, when I saw him there I really was so taken aback that as time seemed to stand still I did just smile to myself — silently, inwardly. Next to, well… him. In something not at all unlike lucidity.