I know I’ve addressed this before, but today’s date reminded me that there are a few people whose birthdays I can remember even though I haven’t seen them in years, dates sunk into my brain far deeper than the birthdays of more recent, closer friends—my brain was younger and therefore more plastic when I learned them, I suppose. At some point in 1987, not long after becoming friends with him, I committed to memory the fact that April 11 is Michael Mutti’s birthday.

Starting in fifth grade and continuing more or less all the way until high school, Michael and I informed each other’s troubled, surreal preadolescent sensibilities. We were similarly introverted and socially awkward and had a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the institutional and social vagaries of Grinnell Middle School. We drew bizarre cartoons and science-fiction tableaux in our notebooks that might get today’s eleven-year-olds sent to a child psychologist. We made up cruel nicknames for the popular kids in our class, and crueler nicknames for our teachers. We staged epic schoolyard battles where the playground equipment became spacecraft and the grass and gravel became—of course—either hot lava, flesh-dissolving acid, or deep space.

I now realize that in these idiosyncrasies, we were profoundly normal boys.

And like most young American people our age, we negotiated the pop-culture landscape far more adroitly than we did the social rituals of our peer group. Frequently assisted by Chuck Munyon (9/6/77), we became highly discriminating connoisseurs of Duck Tales, Ghostbusters (the film), The Real Ghostbusters (the animated series), Weird Al, Airwolf, the 1988 Olympic Games, Police Academy, Future Problem Solving, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Laser Tag, Dragonlance, Legos, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Odyssey of the Mind, Foxtrot, the NES, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Headbanger’s Ball, Michael Jackson’s Bad, Weird Al’s Even Worse, and—last but certainly the hell not least—Def Leppard.

Michael actually ended up going to undergrad at Lawrence, just like me; by then, however, we had fallen out of touch, which is weird, and which I’ve always regretted. I haven’t seen him in a long time and probably won’t hear from him until he finds out about this post and emails me to request I remove it because he doesn’t want prospective employers to Google his name and see this.

Until then, happy birthday, Michael.