Drifting Apart

Grant Schwartz is the most mysterious person I have ever met. Someone utterly in love with humanity but completely unsure that it deserved to be saved. A total flake, but at the end of the day, the first person I think of when I reminisce on laughs and good times. For a long time, I wanted Grant’s friendship more than any other person’s on the planet, and that’s saying something because, let’s be honest, I dig people and crave friends like a drummer craves rhythm. In some ways, we were friends and remain friends to this day, certainly never becoming hostile to each other or exchanging bitter words over events that simply didn’t matter anymore. But in others, we were friends for only a very brief moment in time, while the rest of our relationship, like all of reality, has been largely composed of empty air and missed collisions.

I met Grant my sophomore year of college, undoubtedly the craziest year of my life. I was living with Ta in Middlebrook and doing my very best to live it up while the living was good, throwing parties and meeting people left and right. Grant lived two doors down from us and was living with the classic “worst nightmare” roommate (smelly, anti-social, petty, etc.), which meant that he was looking for decent local company in the worst way possible.

From the moment I met him, I was struck with the impression that Grant was one of the most earnest, soulful people I had ever met. He was artistic and creative to a spooky degree with an insatiable thirst for good books, yet real enough that he would spend a whole day doing nothing but drinking and playing video games. In other words, one eclectic fucker. It was the first time I had met another person with the same wandering in them, that had the same experience of suffering sudden shifts of the soul as I did. And it was great.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I could talk to somebody and have them understand what I meant rather than what I said, which if you’ve never experienced it, is a life changing ordeal. It was never so much what I talked about with Grant, since essentially no subject was left untouched, as the way he changed the conversation, filling it with a hope and vitality I had never sensed before. Our conversations gave me the feeling that we were actually solving something, actually making some progress, though whether that was actually the case remains doubtful in my mind. But that’s the point: it didn’t matter, and still doesn’t matter, because the feeling was the important thing, the holy thing.

My experience with Grant reached its peak the night he, Ta, Adam, Pat, and myself stayed awake till almost 5 AM discussing human civilization, its origins and failures, and ways things could be better. It was such a thorough rearranging of everything I had taken for granted for so long that, in some ways, I still haven’t recovered my faith and pride in human civilization as it exists now. See, Grant was a big fan of a writer named Daniel Quinn, most famously the author of the book Ishmael, and our conversation was his first successful attempt at arguing civilization as it exists today, not western civilization but ALL human civilization, cannot hope to survive. Of course the argument has flaws in it, big ones actually, but again, it didn’t matter, because we were excited about trying to make this a better world.

There were a few other great times, like when Grant moved in to Ta and my room because he couldn’t stand his weirdo roommate any longer, but otherwise our friendship slowly deteriorated after that point. I tried as hard as I could to be friends with Grant, but for whatever reason, he just wasn’t in anymore, and that was kind of that. Sure I mildly resented it at first and there are times where I’m upset that he can’t be enough of a friend to at least call me back. But what I’ve come to understand is that he recognized life was carrying him down a road separate from mine and that, though it was it was upsetting and unfortunate, there was very little either of us could do to stop it. I’m sure he knew how I felt, that he was a flake and a poor friend, which undoubtedly upset him, but the fact remained that there was nothing to be done except move on to whatever was next.

Of all the people I met over my college career, Grant is the one I miss seeing the most. The man has a zest for life that would put Kerouac to the test and a sense of fun that makes zoo monkeys seem like dull layabouts. And yeah, I miss the intelligence, the laughs, the booze, and the video games. But what I miss most is the feeling that things can and will get better; that the world is a beautiful, wonderful place just waiting to be enjoyed. I miss feeling like we can make a difference and that if we believe in something strongly enough there isn’t anything capable of deterring us. There aren’t enough people with that kind of exuberance in the world and they’re hard to replace when they’re gone.