People I've known

Have you ever been walking home and were almost just about within sight of your doorway, but it was taking you way too long to get there by just walking? And then you said to yourself:

'F walking speed, this sucks!'

And so you went into full sprint mode to get there sooner? Anybody else ever done that?

It's kinda like when you're downloading an app, or just trying to read an article on Cracked.com, but it's taking forever just to get the dadgum part of the page with the actual words on it to load because of all the extraneous bullshit and the slow, walking speed connect.

So you gotta deal with shit like absurdly large PNG format illustrations, and sidebars camouflaged with sneaky HTML tags that match the background color of the page  hidden link to spam, and also the big loud virtual java tumors with no volume controls that indiscriminately spring their cancerous wares upon the unsuspecting surfer, with all of it relegated to a kind of 'side of the road garbage', and all of it just a part of the unstoppable collection of crap which eventually fossilizes into the gooey black stuff which comprises the surface of the internet oil road.

What was I talking about again? I totally forgot.

Who cares.

Oh wait, I remember. So eventually you just get fed up with the whole busload of bullshit and shell out the money for the fast connection. They win.

Isn't it weird how people do that? How we will shell out money just to get a slight Improvement to an online product -  an improvement which equals speed of access, and speed of data flow? Are all of those things really important? Truthfully, and in all honesty, those things are extremely important to me. It's just a sign, a symptom, of something inherently wrong with me. With my priorities.

What do I do about this street?  This memory lane... I mean, when I was a kid, I used to hear my dad play songs on piano with these chord progressions which were just haunting to my adolescent mind. I've even figured out where some of them came from. There are songs that I know my dad loves, and I grew up with them because my dad played them, and I can hear pieces of those songs in the songs that he plays. The ones that he's written are like battles. The aftermath of battles, the violent continuity rips that haunt me. Like the memories of those dead people.

I often wonder how I will be whenever I'm in my sixties and seventies, if I don't keel over in a couple of years. Will I still be tortured by the deaths of those people -  those deaths in which I had a direct participating hand?

Oh my God... there was a roommate I had in Austin back in April of 94. He was Clint's cousin. At that time, Clint myself Cheyenne and Scott were letting everybody and anybody live in our apartment with us. There was Willie, Trish, Trish's two sisters, and Clint's cousin. I can't remember his name. I do remember that he was extremely friendly and likeable, and I felt comfortable around him pretty much immediately. I liked hanging out with him.

Then one day, out of the blue, we'd heard secondhand that he and Trish had been out all night doing cocaine. This wouldn't have normally been any kind of big deal to us, because we were all young and really really stupid. However, a lot of our things were missing after that night. In particular, my Jim Morrison boots, and some of Cheyennes clothes. That was the only thing I was really pissed off about though... my Jim Morrison boots. Oh, and my poet shirt that Mom gave me for my birthday whenever I turned 25. Trish also went missing, as did her sisters, and Willie, and Clint's cousin. Everybody disappeared.

Well, we never heard from Trish or Willie or Trish's two sisters ever again. And we never heard from Clint's cousin again either.  Later we came upon the knowledge that his cousin had hung himself, just about 60 miles north of  Austin, in Temple. In a barn, in Temple. There was a 12-pack of beer on the ground next to where he was hanging, from a rafter in a barn. There was also a note, but I don't know what it said, because he wasn't my family. I wasn't privy to it, and I didn't want to intrude to ask about it. It was bad enough just knowing the circumstances.

I liked this guy. I didn't know anything was wrong in his life. He never gave any outward indications of any problems. He seemed happy and we'll adjusted. It was just another violent dickpunch in my life, regarding someone I'd known personally, who had intentionally ended his own life. I don't know why he did it. I'll never know why.

It happens over and over in my life. I get suicides put in front of me, left and right, of people I've known or had some hope of knowing, and giving a little bit to, from my private hoard of what's real inside of me. And so many times in my life, someone whom I've decided to trust with my real self have killed themselves.

There are more of these, but I don't wanna do it right now.