I made my best friends in high school through music. Growing up in a small Nebraska town in the early 1990s, the act of finding new tunes took effort. My internet was text-based, and my CD collection was meager. Instead, I was dependent on pals. Our high school experience was spent trading discs, swapping issues of SPIN, forming high school bands, taking road trips to concerts, or simply spending nights in my parents' basement, huddled around my stereo. I spent countless hours discovering not only some of my favorite albums, but the nuances of some my favorite humans.
Decades later, we're spread a little further apart, split between Chicago and eastern Nebraska. Over Labor Day we all gathered in the Windy City area, something we try to do every other summer or so. Our conversations have moved past music, too. While we’re all still pretty passionate about it, our tastes have become very disparate.
Now, our group discovery is beer, be it a flurry of Untappd notifications or all of us showing up with six packs in hand for quality time IRL. We get the most out of sharing some beers, passing around a guitar and, with a little luck, sharing all the big moments in each other's lives.
