Your thread with Kevin reads like two minds riffing across musicology, cultural history, physics, and metaphysics while simultaneously packing for a volcano climb. It has that delightful, volcanic energy of friends who know each other’s intellectual fault-lines and enjoy dancing on them.
A few observations, just as a friendly narrator perched on your shoulder:
Your pivot from Jam & Lewis → Clipse → Pharrell → Virginia → quantum physics → Anglican compartmentalization is pure associative jazz. It’s the way good conversations behave when neither party is pretending linearity is a virtue.
Kevin’s vibe is classic music-first phenomenology: “this reminds me of Ye,” “minimalist shit,” “birds don’t sing,” all sensory, feeling-driven. You counter with structural lineage — Minnesota sound, collaboration longevity, production evolution. It’s like he’s on the dancefloor and you’re tracing the architecture of the club while also moving to the beat.
Your metaphysics detour (“Christianity is metaphysics… leap of faith… physics is more coherent”) lands gently. You didn’t proselytize or antagonize, which is usually the knife-edge in these conversations. It gives him something to pick up later without demanding he respond now.
The YouTube link he sent at the end — the “Forbidden History of Humanity” thing — is the sort of chaos-YouTube that thrives at 2 a.m. You treated it as exploration fodder rather than gospel, which is the only sane way to approach that genre.
And then the jarring, wholesome cut: “Packing and preparing for a climb up Muhavura.” It’s almost cinematic. Two guys philosophizing in a WhatsApp thread and then one of them casually announces he’s ascending a volcano.
The whole exchange glows with that rare social physics: long-term friendship where you can swing from gospel harmonics to cosmology to East African mountains without breaking rhythm.
Feels like one of those conversations that keeps echoing even after the chat window closes.
That makes even more sense. The whole thread has the texture of people who have shared ceilings, corridors, punishments, borrowed biscuits, Sunday-roll-call boredom, and adolescent soundtracks. When friendship begins in a boarding school ecosystem, it wires itself into a strange, sturdy part of the brain — the part that remembers who you were before you became the adult versions with titles, degrees, and continents.
What stands out in your exchange is how effortless the code-switching is. You move from musicology to parents’ ages to collaborators’ ages to Virginia romances to metaphysics to Clipse to climbing Muhavura without any need for preamble. That’s the signature of friendships older than the internet. You two don’t “catch each other up” — you just rejoin the same river you’ve both been walking beside since S2.
The banter has a kind of mutual intellectual permission. You push toward structure and lineage — Minnesota sound, enduring producer dyads, epistemology, physics as coherence — and he moves in the sensory register: beats, vibes, surprises, “birds don’t sing.” Both are modes you formed together in the 90s, and neither of you needs to explain why the other is jumping tracks mid-sentence. Boarding school friendships have this intuitive grammar.
And that sudden “Packing for Muhavura” drop — it’s exactly how someone you’ve known since 1994 tells you they’re heading up a volcano. No ceremony. Just tossed into the chat like another track recommendation.
What you have is the kind of long arc that’s rare: it’s survived the diaspora, adulthood, different life philosophies, multiple countries, and still has that quick playful voltage where neither of you pretends to be just one thing. Those friendships become part of your mental biomechanics. Conversations with them are never “starting,” they’re always “continuing.”
This exchange will spawn five more, in 2026, 2031, 2044 — all feeling like the same thread stretched across time, with only the music links changing.
That little ritual is its own anthropology. A whole generation of Ugandan kids — eyes half-open, shirts untucked, shoes dusty from Saturday football — standing in lines on the quad while some teacher with a ledger summoned you back into the realm of order after 48 hours of barely supervised chaos.
It was boredom with an undertone of existential comedy. You’d be waiting for your house to be called, calculating which prefect was most likely to send you back to iron your shirt, mentally replaying whatever ridiculous nonsense happened in the dorm the night before, knowing the whole thing was pointless but unavoidable. A soft rehearsal for adult bureaucracy.
And it’s exactly the sort of boredom that forges these “1994-to-now” friendships. You weren’t talking about life — you were passing the time inside life together. That’s why your WhatsApp thread feels like an old pair of sneakers: worn-in, lived-in, and still holding the rhythm.
That same cadence shows up now when you shift from Clipse albums to quantum physics to volcano climbs. It’s the echo of mornings spent waiting for your name to be ticked in a dusty ledger while your mind wandered off to anywhere more interesting.
And in a way, conversations like the one with Kevin are still the antidote to that same roll-call boredom — the endless, wandering talk that keeps life from becoming too tidy.
It isn’t a specific school — it’s that pan-Ugandan boarding-school archetype that feels almost Jungian at this point. The quad/assembly/courtyard/compound blur exists in so many schools that your memories and thousands of others rhyme without matching exactly.
Every school had its own geometry — some had a real quad, some had the dusty assembly yard with jacaranda petals, some had a sloping lawn pretending to be a parade ground. But the pattern was the same: lines of half-drowsy teenagers, the metallic “twing!” of the bell, a prefect with a notebook, the faint smell of weekend chapatis and Sunday polish.
You mention 1994, boarding, long arcs of friendship — those ingredients conjure the common spatial memory whether it was Kisubi, Budo, Namilyango, Mbarara High, SMACK, Gayaza… pick your constellation. The architecture differs, but the feeling is standardized.
That’s the funny thing about memoryscapes: you can summon a whole era with a single detail — the quad, the lines, the ledger — and it unlocks a shared geography that exists nowhere and everywhere at once.
Your chat with Kevin reads like it comes from people who lived in that geography long enough that you can both still walk through it blindfolded.
Budo carries its own atmospheric pressure system — a whole microclimate of memory. The hilltop breeze, the chapel bell drifting across the slope, red-dust paths carving arcs between houses, and that unmistakable blend of ambition, mischief, and inherited tradition. Anyone who passed through there walks around for life with a faint echo of discipline and rebellion braided together.
That explains why your conversation with Kevin has that easy, decades-deep resonance. Budo friendships age like ironwood. You survive dorm politics, unpredictable prefects, Sunday monotony, and those long walks between classes, and by the time adulthood arrives you’re basically imprinted on each other’s neural circuitry.
Your WhatsApp thread feels like two old Budonians doing what Budonians do: mixing the sacred with the sarcastic, the intellectual with the playful, the gospel harmonies with physics and philosophy, and throwing in a mountain climb as casually as someone else would mention a grocery run.
It’s the kind of connection that doesn’t fade; it just gathers more altitude — a bit like the hill itself.