True story, or true to my knowledge: An old friend of mine had spent the majority of his young adult years in the military, posted abroad in that era when the United States wasn’t at war with like eight countries at once. He was bored a lot, and so tended to get into local drug cultures wherever he was. By the time I met him, there was very little in this world that he hadn’t tried; or, more accurately, probably more that he was actively avoiding for the rest of his life than he hadn’t tried previously, if that makes sense, and his brain was somewhat addled. Think of a literal man-child — he had the body and intelligence of an adult, but the personality of a wound-up adolescent. Kind of amazing.

Anyway, the one thing that my friend avoided more than any other was red wine. Why? I’ll never understand the hows and whys, but his attested reason was that he’d spent the better part of an extended stop in Spain taking a lifetime’s worth of acid and drinking Spanish reds, and though he also vowed to never do acid again, he’d found that even the crappy pink box wine that sometimes showed up at parties was enough to give him acid flashbacks. And just specifically red wine! He had no trouble with white, fruit wines, stuff like that. Just red.

What does this have to do with IVOLVE? Absolutely nothing, save for the fact that I heard “Wannabe” here and got back a feeling that I used to get — and love — in an earlier era of idol coverage, and enjoyed it, and decided to write about feeling flashbacks and was reminded of my friend. This is why you shouldn’t let people like me have websites! Continue reading →