That Feeling

Sometimes I dream about that place where reality consists of an abstract feeling tthat describes things, such as family and friends and home and weather and seasons and love and happiness and disappointment and sadness and despair and hope and longing and utter destruction. Don't we all have those dreams? The ones that seem more real than actually being awake... the ones that we long for, that should contain us forever in a shroud of comfort, immune to logic and math, and events and the passage of time? The ones which consist of that pinnacle of perfect sadness that we would die for? A comforting blanket of grief that lasts forever. Murky and warm and deadening, like an eternal dose of novocaine. Does anyone else know about this, or is it just me?

How I turned a million in real estate into 25 dollars cash

It's about... 2:00 am, and I'm just leaving CVS. I have some crap that I need to throw away, so I head for the trash, over there to the right, and... good grief, it's practically overflowing. Doesn't anyone here ever empty the trash on their smoke breaks? Unacceptable.

Anywho. So I walk over to this volatile midden heap to dispose of my receipt and some other crap. I toss it all in, oblivious to the danger... but as I turn to leave, I have to do a double take. What did I just see in there? In the trash? Was that money? I shoved my flashlight in there and shone it around, and by golly, there was a dollar bill! I wasted no time extricating it from the surrounding crap, after which I continued to excavate vigorously with both hands.

As I was thusly engaged, I looked over to my left and froze. There sat a cop in his cop car, about ten feet away, just a-watching me as I enthusiastically strip mined the garbage. Without really being consciously aware of it, I immediately... bounced, I guess, is the best word to describe it... away from the garbage can, as if I had been shocked right off of it with high voltage. I looked around for a strategic exit, but the cop was parked right there at the curb. There was nothing for it except to just walk right on past, holding up that dollar bill and sort of smiling and wiping the invisible schmutz off it, hoping that the cop understood that it was okay, and not at all retarded, or illegal, to go dumpster diving for dollar bills.

Alone and stuck in a bear trap with a bad banana on broadway

Why does it feel this way?

I do this walking around at night thing a lot, and every single time I do it, I'm alone - an isolated thing; a self contained window on the universe. So I ask myself for the umpteenth time - is everyone alone inside themselves, or is it just me? It's how I've felt for my entire life, since I was old enough to remember being alive. It feels natural... this cut-off, isolated feeling. The way cancer feels natural. That's the way I've always thought of it.

Allow me to elucidate. Firstly, we have selfish to the second power - that is, the object of our discussion - multiplied by selfish. Or selfish squared, or the opposite of the square root of selfish. Anyway. Then you multiply all of that crap by altruism, and then divide it all by patience. Then, after all that, the only thing left is to plug in the value of the specific triomial nomenclature pertaining to whatever it was that the poem was about, which is, in this case... the deus ex machina, and you wind up with what seems like a lot of pretentious bullshit. Ha ha ha! But seriously though. Right? Yeah! Hee hee hee. So. Yeah. But seriously. Right? Will you go with me? Yes - No - circle one?

So anywho.

Here I am, and it feels to me like life is an immense bear trap; the dimensions of which aren't measured in space, but in duration... always only a day or two away from its purpose, which happens to be adjacent to, parallel to, perpendicular to, and opposite of mine.

A big dumb truck and a stupid fraidy cat monster

I'm walking down Windsor, going east past the rec center.  There is some kind of waste management truck, driving on the sidewalk, of all places.  There are little mini-manholes along the sidewalk every now and then, which I assume are accessible for some civil engineering purpose, so I guess that truck is doing the mini man-hole thing at 4:00 am. I don't like it - he's in my way.  I have to cross the street and tread on grass to avoid the truck, which displeases me.  It is an inconvenience.  I pass by the truck as it inches forward, and think to myself... supid truck, don't you know that at night, all of this belongs to me?  Yeesh.

Anyway, so I keep walking and finally pass that truck and I am able to regain my rightful place on the sidewalk.  You hear that, truck?  Roads are for trucks, like the one two feet to your right that you can't seem to get a bead on.  And sidewalks are for people.  You know, the guys who invented your stupid self with your too big to be practical tires and your huge storage tank full of whatever and your big, dumb empty brain case that requires somebody to be sitting inside it just so you can decide whether or not you need to take a dump.

Okay, that made no sense, which I now realize.  Whatever.  Who cares.

Now comes the point of all this rambling rigmarole.  So I pass by that big, dumb brainless truck, and after about half a mile of blessed silence and peace, here comes this wolf, just trotting along in the opposite direction on the other side of the road, as if he had every right to.  Wait just a second... was that a wolf?  Let's see.. it definitely wasn't a coyote, because I've seen plenty of those late at night, roaming the streets of Denton.  City coyotes, I guess they are, like in those old cartoons where the city varmint visits the country varmint and hilarity ensues.  You know, city coyotes.  Like these ones; that is, if there were any here.

Anywho, this weren't no coyote, because coyotes are little scraps of fur and bones, and this thing was huge.  Way bigger.  I suppose it could have been a German Shepard, but how many huge, stray German Shepards do you see wandering the country part of Denton at 4:00 am?  It was big, and I think it was a wolf.  Right?  Ok then, it's decided.  It was a wolf.

So this huge wolf monster goes trotting by, and I have no choice but to ready my double-laser club-whip and prepare for battle.  The wolf monster turns its head toward me in mid-stride, and as he sees me, his eyes instantly ignite into two glowing blue balls of super hot plasma, and I mentally prepare myself for the twin beams of million degree energy which will instantly render my atoms into their constituent quarks, thereby returning me to the quagma state; that frothing stew of potential from which all matter is formed and all phenomena occur.

Well, that didn't happen obviously, because that wolf just kept on going and hightailed it like a big stupid fraidy cat.  Stupid fraidy cat wolf monster.

Anywho.

Killed by beauty

I, as a pinpoint of awareness in all of this infinite shmagaluphness, am walking at night with the whole of existence all around me, in every direction, everywhere.  It's night, or what I observe as night.  I am this thing which absorbs the ceaseless input of information from just... everything, is all.  I direct my sight up, and see a thing which astounds me.  Just flat out blows me away.  It always does, I guess.  Clouds are forming a bright fish-bone type of pattern against a darker background of sky... and the reason is - get this - because of the moon, which is half full.  It's over to the left of where I'm looking; where I'm directing my information absorbing attention, for those brief moments of eternity.  The clouds are a kind of gray-blue color, against another gray-blue color.  The sky.  Which is about, oh say... a hundred times darker than the clouds.  Wild guess.  They show up pretty well against it.  The moon is there, about a thousand times brighter than the clouds.  Half of it.  The moon.  Half of the moon, as it's only half full.  And there's this thing around it, a band of dim colors that fade into the background of sky, because of quadzillions of atoms what are scattering the light just so... red and blue and purple, and purple-black, and red-black, and blue-silver, and just so many colors.  I never have noticed before that so many colors can exist between gray blue black and white blue light.  I never knew that before. 

I continue walking, and the stuff around me continues to change as my position changes.  All kinds of stuff.  Lit by moon-light and man-light.  Trees, branches, leaves, man-made stuff, dirt, puddles of water, reflections of trees and branches and leaves and man-made stuff and dirt in the puddles of water.  For a few moments I wonder about the resolution of the universe, and how far down it goes, and how much processing power it takes to continue rendering it into existence, and then I imagine the mind of God, or try to... the mind of God, constantly rendering the universe into existence, and I am afraid, deeply afraid that I'm incapable of ever understanding, and that I'll be afraid for a brief piece of eternity.

Awareness continues and changes as the scenery changes, and the mood changes too, and I understand for a second... I am aware of how it's all attacking me from everywhere at once, all of this beauty, and that it's relentless, and without mercy.  It will never stop being beautiful, and my only defense is to ignore it, which is impossible.  I am being battered with beauty, and I start to cry, and to weep, and tears pour out of my eye holes, but I try to do it silently so as to not contaminate or offend or anger all of that everythingness around me.  I try to weep with a tiny bit of humility, but I know I'm not.  I know that I'm only weeping for myself, and because of my fear, but I don't know how else to be.  I don't know how to weep purely. 

I endure this kind of strange mixture of heaven and hell for as long as it takes for me to realize that this beauty is terminal.  It's killing me.  I'm being constantly killed by beauty, and I don't know if I'm crying with tears of joy or tears of sadness.  I don't know whether to be comforted or terrified.  I truly don't know.  I'm just overwhelmingly overcome with this thing, a feeling or something.  This thing that invades my now-ness and forces my acknowledgement of it.  I'm suddenly aware that I'm alive, so very much alive.  Ah, God.  I don't know.  I don't know what sadness is or happiness is.  I don't know.  I'm feeling very very much, and I don't know.  I'm aware of dying.  That I'm living, and that every moment of living is dying.  That the point of living is dying, and that the reason to live is to die.  To be killed by the experience of life; the beauty of it.  Beauty is killing me, and it always has been, and I only notice it now and then.  It's too much.

Life is but a dream

Sometimes when it's late and it's dark and I'm out walking, and when there are trees... especially when there are trees, I get an almost indescribable feeling of nostalgia for a youth which consists only of insubstantial experiences - as if I've slept through my entire childhood, and all of my memories from that time are just the memories of dreams.

These dreams that I remember consist of summer evening sunlight shining through the tree branches of a particularly dense copse of woodsy pines, leaving dappled shadows on the loamy, needle strewn ground. Always in these dream memories there is a feeling of ignorant, naive comfort. It's a reflection of a child's mindset - my mindset as a child.

When I was about 4 years old, my granddaddy built a fort of tree branches for me and my brother in the woods behind our trailer and called it Kalamazoo. The details of this memory are more like a smudge of the senses than an accurate record of events, so what I'm left with is more of a feeling than an actual play by play of these particular moments which transpired when I was all of four years old. 

These memories are well on their way to becoming nothing more than the remembrance of dreams.  Row, row, row your boat.

God's Own Fingernail

As I was walking back to my sisters house tonight, I followed the moon.  It is almost a perfect half moon tonight, casting just enough light every now and then to lend a dream-like quality to the moment, when it happened to be just right.  I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing - the experience I have every now and then when I'm out late at night and walking, when a few elements of thought and observation line up just-so that they twist reality into more of an abstract feeling, rather than this physical matrix in which I normally perceive myself as imbedded within.  These moments occur and I always experience them with a part of myself which is detached.  I don't know what it's detached from... just that it's detached, and not part of the majority for a little while.  For a few moments.  And sometimes this scares the ever loving crap out of me.

There's no such thing as a moment, by the way.  I'm certain that I'm not the first somebody to realize this, but it still seems kind of profound to me, that the thought coursed through my brain and stimulated my awareness.  Kind of like... say, the way a retarded, malformed appendix cell languishing amongst a culture of Isle of Langerhans, with a virus clinging to its nucleus and inserting alien RNA into its genome, causing it to digest its own mitochondria, may realize at some level resembling a few bits of information, that this situation is certainly unique to its existence which, up to that point, might have otherwise been fairly normal... that is, if it had been a regular, non-retarded appendix cell, existing in an appendix, doing whatever it is that appendix cells are supposed to do, as they occupy a series of connected moments, with one moving seamlessly into the next.  Except that there aren't any individual moments.  There is only the one long moment of the present, inside which we are all trapped and imprisoned and enslaved, like a gear in a machine... a gear which has to have THIS many teeth, and which has to interface specifically with THAT gear, and which must turn at a CERTAIN speed, so that its momentum can be transferred to the NEXT MOMENT... so that existence can continue to be.  So we divide up life into little segments called moments, which don't even exist.  It's exactly like pointing to an empty field and saying, "Hey, check out that fire breathing, 20 thousand ton mayfly dancing on the head of that tiny shard of degenerate matter, defecating rainbows and singing a different kind of math."  It's exactly like that.

So, like I was saying.  I was walking back to my sisters house tonight, following the moon.  And while I was doing this, walking along and looking at the moon, marveling at the pure fact that it was right there, shining this silver white light down onto the ground, onto a field of grass which fairly glowed with this blue-green sheen... as if the very atoms which comprised its being were each individually painted over with a physical manifestation of the ether through which dreams flow... anyway, so while I was doing this, the walking and looking thing, with the moon and the grass and all, I suddenly realized something.  I had an epiphany, if you will.  A grand moment of clarity.  That the moon, in its waning gibbous state, was God's Own Fingernail, hovering up there, right in front of me, right at that moment.  And that since there is no ONE single moment, that must mean that it (God's Own Fingernail, that is) is always there, has always been there, will always be there, and won't ever not be there.  God's Own Fingernail, that is.  And then I kind of got scared shitless and hurried up and got here so I could type up this absurdity, rendering the abstract thought of the insane into a few harmless, logical words which fairly obeyed the rules of grammar.

Yeah, I guess that kinda sums me up, if I lived in fantasyland.

You Are A:

Neutral Good Human Cleric (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength- 11
Dexterity- 12
Constitution- 13
Intelligence- 11
Wisdom- 13
Charisma- 12
Alignment:
Neutral Good- A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Clerics- Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron's vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity's domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric's Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

The 'Oh Crap' Effect

A few minutes ago as I was walking south on Bonnie Brae, I had just passed the new electrical substation when a coyote ran across the road in front of me. I immediately whipped up my flashlight and followed it as it crossed. It was looking at me the whole time it was running, and it's eyes glowed blue.

Once on the other side of the road, it disappeared into the underbrush, and I thought that I had lost it. I poked around in the bracken from a distance with the flashlight beam for a while, using it as an appendage to stir up the detritus and to sweep away the shadows. As I approached the copse where the coyote had disappeared, sweeping my light back and forth, I briefly illuminated a pair of bright blue pinpricks. I quickly swept the beam back again, but before I could completely change direction, another pair of disembodied sparks was revealed floating in the darkness... and then another, and another, and another, one right after the other, as if a stage-hand was illuminating them on cue for maximum dramatic effect.

In all, four pairs of eyes regarded me from the bushes. None of them moved for the entire time I had them in my flashlight beam, which was for at least thirty seconds, and nary a sound was emitted. Then I realized that four coyotes could probably have me for dinner, so I high tailed it.

A friend of mine, after reading this, referred to my experience as the 'Oh Crap' effect:

"You find something that seems pretty cool or cute, and you think, 'Oh how cute' or 'Oh how cool'.  Then your brain kicks you mentally in your face going, "Hey you stupid muppet, this is dangerous."  Only then does it dawn on you, that feeling of  Oh crap..." 

Although I think that in order to get the full 'Oh Crap...' effect, you need to crap your pants too.

Help my sister Michele win VIP tickets to see Heart! Pretty Please :)

My sister, Michele, who is the biggest Heart fan ever to exist in all of the UNIVERSE, is entered into a contest to win VIP concert tickets to see them! And not only that, but if she wins, she would actually get to MEET THEM! And on top of THAT, she'd receive an autographed guitar!

So please, please, PRETTY PLEASE help my sister! To vote, all you have to do is click on the link. That's it!! The website keeps a tally and right now she's in 11th place!!

This is for my sister, Michelle, whom I love very much! Please help make this most wonderfulest and awesomest and spectacularest thing happen for her! Thanks so very very much!

Go Michele!!!!

(clicky clicky the linky linky, right there underneathy neathy!)

This link is, in fact, a virtual naked singularity, and is inexorably pulling your mouse to it, spaghettifying it in the process, and crunching the signals sent from your mouse clicks into an infinitely dense mass of clickified cyperspacetime!

A dream - back together

This dream-city was divided up into districts.  Some were nice, some were so-so, some were slums, and some were just death zones.  I needed to get into the death zone for some reason, and I had met this girl, this really cute, young wisp of a girl, and we were trying to figure out how to get into the death zone district.  We made our way over to it, and I opened the gate.  From inside we could hear guns and shouts and all kinds of violent noise.  I had heard that the life expectancy of anyone just walking straight into this district was less than a minute.  The girl and I looked at each other, and she said that we could either go right in and most likely get killed immediately, or she could go in the back way through this drainage pipe that she knew of and come get me once she'd cleared a path.  That way made more sense, so before she left, I embraced her very closely and we just held each other like that for a long time, wondering if we'd see each other again.  I was thinking to myself, "Do I really care for this girl in this way, or am I just being selfish by trying to, and making myself feel this way?"  Then we separated and she was gone.

Then I was wandering the streets with this piece of poster board, and attached to it in rows were these little bags of screws and nails.  I was trying to get back to my own district to do something important with all of it, and on the way I dropped it as I was crossing a street and the wind blew it several feet away from me.  I ran back for it, and I passed somebody who remarked that I looked like I was in a real hurry, and not to be so hurried that I make some kind of mistake, and he referred to this news item from several years ago, in which these archeologists ruined this expensive dig by trying to speed through it.  He asked me if I remembered which dig he was talking about.  I thought about it, and was about to say King Tut, but then I remembered that it wasn't a ruined dig, it was a curse or something.  Then I remembered, it was this dig in Iraq back in 2003, and they were trying to bring this broken piece of a statue back to the surface, this statue leg, and in their haste had destroyed it.  I called to the guy, who was walking away, and said, "It was this statue leg, right?  Some kind of leg they were digging up in Iraq?"  He stopped and looked back at me.  "You got it!" he said, surprised and smiling, and he walked away.

I turned my attention back to the poster board and screws, and began picking up the little baggies, which had become detached.  They were all dirty, and the poster board had folded over and dirt had gotten into the crease.  I spent a fair amount of time gathering it all up and cussing and just being irritated, and a car pulled up and stopped on the other side of the street.  I didn't look up, but then I noticed somebody standing over me, very close to me.  I stopped what I was doing and looked up, and it was Leah.  She was smiling down at me.  I just continued to look up at her, stunned and immobile.  She knelt down and gave me a kiss and said, "I couldn't stay away.  I tried, for a long time I tried.  I tried, and I couldn't.  I just couldn't." And then she embraced me.  I couldn't believe it.  Here she was, and I couldn't believe it.  A surge of happiness washed through me, and then the dream began to fade, and as it did, I thought about the other girl I'd just met, and I hoped she wouldn't be hurt, that she hadn't begun to develop feelings for me.

And then when the dream re-formed, Leah and I and my sister Cheyenne and my brother Matt were all at Leah's apartment.  I was sitting at her table, and she was milling around, picking up dishes and whatnot, just straightening up some.  She was explaining to me how she had finally come to the decision that she couldn't stay away anymore, and that she didn't care about all of the problems and reasons for why she left in the first place, and that she was tired of Nick's shenanigans, and that she realized that she loved me, that it was like a thunderbolt when the truth of it hit, that she'd loved me all along and that everything had been a distraction to keep that knowledge from her.  She came around and sat across the table from me and pulled my hands onto the table and held them there, with our arms lying on the table, sitting across from each other.  She looked directly into my eyes and said, "We need to talk to Fr. Justin about this.  About where we left off."  I looked at my sister, and then at my brother, and they were both smiling, and I thought, I can't believe this.  I can't believe it, I just can't believe it, and I began to smile, and my heart began to soar, and I got up and Leah got up, and we held each other and I kissed her, and then held her close, and I began crying into her hair, getting her hair wet with my tears.  She started crying too, and she said, "Why is it that we cry when we're so happy?"  I thought about it and realized that joy and pain came from the same place, deep in your heart, and I looked into my heart right then, as I was holding Leah and crying tears of joy, and saw how similar the two feelings were.  How the joy in my heart I was feeling right then actually hurt a little.  How it was rubbing up against all kinds of damage and scarring and wounded places in my heart, like when you irritated a wound before it's fully healed by bumping it against something, but that it felt good instead of bad... but it still hurt.  I tried to express this to Leah as I held her, but my voice cracked and I was choked up, and I couldn't get any coherent words out right then because my nose was stopped up from crying and I had swallowed a bunch of tears and I had to clear my throat first, but then I didn't care about saying anything anymore.  So I just remained like I was instead, holding her close, feeling her arms around me and her chin on my shoulder and our heads touching and our hair mingling, holding her so close that I could touch my elbows, and thinking that it was the happiest moment of my life.

Hurts

What is it about pain that makes me want to share it?  Why would I want to burden anyone else with the awfulness?  I never understood that there was so much pain available.  I guess I thought it was for everybody else, and not me.  I've thought that I've been in pain before, sure.  It hurts all the time, just being alive, and the years add up.  I guess you can get used to anything though.  But who can get used to an artillery barrage?  That's what it feels like now, all the time.

Jerral is dead.  How can that be?  All I had to do was just say one word to him, just one word, and he'd still be alive.  One word.  Any word.  He'd still be alive.  I wasn't there when he needed to live.  Everybody tells me that it's not my fault, I can't blame myself.  Oh yes I can, because this isn't just any situation.  I knew Jerral.  I KNOW that if I'd just called him once he'd be alive right now.  It would have set a different sequence of events into motion, and he wouldn't be dead.  I wouldn't have let him die.

My brother... I'm so tired.  I can't.  There's too much grief, and it costs too much.  I don't have the energy to feed this pain continuously, and still breathe and eat and go to work and sleep and walk and look at things and hear and smell and live and type this.  I'll never have another conversation with my brother again.  My relationship with him is diminished.  My life is diminished.  The last coherent words we exchanged were words filled with anger.  I have nightmares about my brother every night now, that he's dying the saddest death imaginable.  I wake up boo-hooing and getting my pillow all messy, and my ears all plugged up, and that's the worst time to feel sad, is right after you wake up from a dream.  All of my dreams are linked together by an unbroken sadness now.

And Leah.  If ever there was a dead horse that just kept getting beat over and over and over again, it's this heartache bullshit.  I'm so sick of being heartsick.  Fuck this, I hate it.  It's a part of the new pain conglomeration now... Leah, Jerral and Matt.  I feel like crying all the time now, all the time I'm holding back tears.  If I let my mind indulge in any kind of memory or thought concerning these people I love and whom I've lost, then the tears start and I have to spend a hundred calories trying to suppress them, and that sucks.

How did this happen?  I thought it used to hurt.  What an idiot I am.  Now I know that it can keep hurting worse and worse and worse, and that there will always be a new level of pain to explore.  It all sucks now.  It hurts,

I think I'm gonna throw up now. Isn't that funny?

I think I figured out something about art tonight. I was walking home from work and listening to some music that I really love - a band called Pinback - and as I was listening, I saw my shadow marching before me, in step with the song. It's a dark no-moon night, so the available light was coming mostly from street lamps. The lights which were casting my shadow were about 100 yards behind me, and at the top of a hill. I was in this little valley with trees all around, and my shadow was long and surreal... like a caricature of me.

I began to feel separated from my shadow, as if I wasn't associated with it, but just watching it perform this marching step in time with the music, a rigid step-dance, independent from me. I saw it as this black description of an animated piece of negative space, forever marching away from me. Purposefully moving away from me, trying to get away from me, to disassociate itself from me.

And that's when I realized what art really is. It's an expression of everything, represented as a caricature of the artist, but separated from the artist on a thousand superficial levels. If we just look at it and then look away, then we only see the most shallow part, the just under the surface information which is meant to lead into the heart of the artist, but only gives vague directions. This is the view that most of us perceive when someone presents us with a thing that they want us to appreciate. Usually we just glance at it, or listen to a few seconds of it with half an ear, and say, "Cool," when what we actually mean is, "I really don't give a shit because it isn't about me. Now, have I got something to show you..."

So that's art in a nutshell. Just a method for trying to get people to understand that thing about ourselves that even we don't understand. The problem with it is, most of us are so self absorbed that we never recognize what's being said. We want you to look at us, but we don't want to look at you. But then again, what makes art a 'thing' to begin with is that shared connection among people who understand a particular something. The concept exists as a phenomenon - but independent of logic.

Isn't that funny?

Things that happened recently

From April until now:  The sister of a friend of mine from East Texas committed suicide.  The father of a friend of mine in East Texas died.  My Aunt Mary Lou passed away.  My Aunt Judy died during routine back surgery.  My best friend from East Texas killed himself.

The dressing on all of that death salad is that my brother Matt had a stroke about a month ago.  His cognitive ability is diminished, as well as his speech.  He can't work anymore.  It's impossible for us to have a normal conversation now.  Nobody knows yet how much he will recover... he may never recover.  He'll probably get disability.

I'll never have another argument with my brother again.  Ever.

What can I say?  It all makes me very sad.

My friend Jerral

I learned this weekend that my dear friend, my dearest friend and brother in all but blood, my friend, my friend... my connection to mortality, my secret sibling - Jerral Wayne Johnson - committed suicide. I love you brother, I'm sorry it had to hurt so bad, I'm sorry I wasn't there. I love you Jerral, I love you, I miss you, I'm sorry, forgive me.

Jerral is the only friend I've ever had who I actually thought of as my brother.  We even wrote and signed a contract - making us brothers - with our own blood, and shook bloody hands over it.  Yeah.  We really did that.  And I honored that pact by completely ignoring it.

The last time I saw or spoke to Jerral we had been drinking and we had fought pretty severely.  I know Jerral - I know that he was a tortured soul; that he always was his own worst enemy, and that alcohol brought out his demons.  I know that he felt terrible about what happened between us, and that he was sorry.  I know that he agonized over the memories of our last encounter and endured extreme guilt because of it.  I know he was sorry... I know all of this; I knew all of this, but  I never contacted him again or told him how sorry I was, or asked his forgiveness, or gave him my own forgiveness.  I just left him there, mired in his own feelings of self hatred, and I never even tried to heal that breach between us.  I never even tried.

Never have I ever felt like this before.  Ever.  I can't help but think... if I'd contacted him, if I'd made some kind of effort to talk to him again, that he'd still be alive now.  But I never suspected... I never imagined... I never thought in a million years that he'd take his own life.  I was always sure there would be time to get together with him again.  I always assumed that I'd see him again, and that we'd talk about that fight we had when we last saw each other, and that we'd laugh about it and call each other idiots while remembering how drunk and stupid we had been at the time.

But that never happened... so here it is, continually before me... a moment which will always contain the death of my friend.  And there I am, forced to observe this truth as it just sits there... still and unchanging.  And somehow this never ending moment, this persistence of NOW, this terrible, happened thing, this moment which contains within it the first real description of suicide that I've actually known - all other descriptions before this one were in black and white and projected onto a broken wooden fence in broad daylight - all of this truth containing moment exists solely as a construction of the most terrible thing I've ever experienced in my life.  And there it is, continually before me, and here I am... forced to observe its persistence.

It's interesting, in a clinical, detached way... a new emotion, something new to feel.  A brand spanking new experience.  Interesting.