My friend Doug

This is a story about a friend of mine from college named "Doug." The story has no moral, but I've always found it kind of interesting and somehow it seems relevant right now. (Some of the details have been changed.)

At one point, I considered Doug one of my very good friends. He was a really cool, fun, funny guy. He always made me laugh. One night when he was drunk, he peed in the sink of our dorm common room on a dare (or maybe there wasn't a dare and he just had to pee). We weren't the kind of friends who used to have deep discussions about our feelings, mostly just bitching about classes or talking about our crushes, plus we hung out in the same Circle of Nerds.

During our sophomore year, one of our beloved professors died. He was fairly young and it was sudden and tragic. Doug sent out the following email to all our friends:

I know it's tragic that Dr. Goldberg died, but what's even more tragic is that because he's Jewish, he'll be going to hell.

This was not a joke. He really meant it. This was pretty much the opposite of what a bunch of grieving students wanted to hear. We were pretty pissed off, but eventually, it was forgotten.

A year later, Doug abruptly decided he didn't want to be part of our circle of friends anymore due to our excessive partying. (We did party, but not that hard. Believe me. I mean, we were a bunch of geeks.) He joined a Christian group at our school. He called me one day and said he wanted to get together and I agreed:

Doug: "Fizzy, I'm worried about you. It seems like you drink a lot of alcohol, go to a lot of parties, and hook up with a lot of guys."

Me: "Yeah, I wish."

Doug: "I'm serious. You need to change your life and stop partying so much."

Ah college, how I miss you.

In any case, I didn't really have much contact with Doug after that, for obvious reasons.

I heard these crazy rumors about Doug after college. Like that someone ran into him and his hair was dyed pink. But I never actually talked to him directly.

A few years ago, Doug friended me on Facebook. At first, I thought it was a joke profile someone had made to mock him, because it said he was in a committed relationship with another man. But it turned out to be him. And his profile picture is now a photo of him posing with Barack Obama.