There was a photo that was widely circulated around 2005 of an American soldier in Iraq. It was in a country music video at the beginning and end, but I can’t remember the artist or the song. In the photo, he’s in the desert, by a tank, and he’s sniffing an envelope his wife had sprayed with perfume.

It’s not me, but growing up, I spent almost every holiday, weekend, summer, and school vacation with him and his younger brother, and I was a groomsman at his wedding. Things at my place were pretty bad, so their parents kind of took me in whenever it was possible.

We haven’t spoken in over a decade now, but at the time, it was kind of surreal. His wife was on standby for a satellite interview on Good Morning America one day, but as I recall, that segment got bumped, and never happened.

Also, in the summer of 2014, I was living in Berlin, and my girlfriend and I were behind a car being towed and filmed with actors in it, who pretending to drive - that’s how they film driving scenes, it turns out.

Anyway, we couldn’t make out who the actors were, and we never figured out what was being filmed, but we were behind them for awhile, so there’s likely a scene in something somewhere, where I’m riding shotgun and smoking a cigarette in a small, black hatchback, at a stoplight. It was either in Mitte or Friedrichshain.