barbecued yesterday. i'm starting to get tired of grilling the same old burgers and chicken. it isn't that they aren't good, it's just the experimental cook in me wanting to do more. these may well have been the most unimportant two opening sentences of any post to date.
i realized yesterday that i can't actually make the claim that no one i know (approximately my age) is dead. there was a guy i knew in tennessee, ben (his last name eludes me at the moment). ben was an interesting guy. i can't say he was my friend, but he was something more than an aquaintance. i met my best friend back home in high school, but we weren't really that tight in high school. i started hanging out with her when i started going to rocky horror, and it was through this group of people that i got to know ben. ben never cleaned up the cat boxes, so his apartment was a little bit frightening. it was the sort of thing you could get used to, remarkably enough, but god forbid you ever had to much to drink or smoke or some such and had to sleep there. ben had a fucked up past by the time i got to kow him. his mom died of cancer over the course of several years, and i know that he was already depressed before that. because his mom was a nurse, she had access to all kinds of pills and such for her pain, and in the years after her death, ben became a fairly avid pill popper, (as far as i know) out of the stocks that she had in reserve. i tried some pretty freaky drugs over at ben's; when he was in a generous mood, he would lay out a veritable buffet of intoxicants for all of his approved guests. he also had a large collection of swords, which we would occasionally break out and fight with when we weren't too messed up, and a few times when we were. he was able to afford all this stuff partly on the insurance money, and partly on an advance that he had received for a sci-fi/fantasy novel he had written. he worked for only about a year of the four or five i knew him. the publisher for his novel sent his manuscript back and asked him to make a few changes, which he absolutely refused to do. he ended up keeping the several grand in advance money, and never did anything else on the novel.
ben hung himself a year or two ago. his depression had gotten worse, and i think there was som romantic entanglement involved. i remembered ben yesterday because i got a "red dwarf" disc from netflix; ben had the entire run of the series on vhs. i can't say that i miss ben, we just weren't that close. it was quite a sobering thought, however, when i realized i had forgotten him when i wrote the last long venture into the past.
sorry this was such a depressing post.
bush is a fucker, cheney's a monster, and diggity-don rumsfeld needs to be poisoned. (note: secret service, i won't be poisoning anyone anytime soon, even if they deserve it.)