r e d.chilipepper

a moment of silence

i found out two days ago that a good friend of mine from middle school passed away in a car accident. he had a wife and a young daughter. more than that, he was just a good person. i'm not in the practice of saying posthumously that someone is a good person or was wise or kind or whatever just to sound affected or to say someone is nice just because you should. he was a really good person, very funny and kind, and i spent a lot of time with him during the summer evenings, playing tennis for 2 or 3 hours each day and during school.

we lost touch during college, but i think about him every now and then because he was just one of those people you don't forget. so i was really sad to hear the news. there is no sense to be made of it, though i try to. to top it off, he was the second in our class. another passed last year in august, after a 4 year battle with cancer. ironically, the two of them were extremely close.

so it left me a little morose this weekend. i just wonder what i'm doing and how i'm approaching my life. the way i think about things, the grudges people hold, what i allow to stress me out and upset me, and whether all these things really, really matter. because you see, i can still remember what it felt like when i was 13, hanging out with ben on the tennis courts till the bugs came out, and even what it smelled like on the courts on the hottest days. all those memories seem so close and so vivid to me, and even more importantly, he seems vivid to me, and our interactions seem vivid, and i can't just possible imagine that those interactions to another person have ended and will no longer be, especially when there was no warning or direction or sign or indication that such an ending might come. and if you had told the 13-year-old me that such an end might be in sight, i don't think i possibly could have fathomed in any state of being this outcome as being remotely likely to occur or that he would, in some fashion, cease to exist at a point where i would have expected him to exist infinitely long beyond that, or at least until some point of ending that was so far beyond any conceivable extent.

this is my stream of consciousness about something so incredibly tragic, i can't possible explain how angry i am about it.

i've tried to veer away in my blog in recent months from being too personal, the way i used to. but honestly, i was jostled from my conservatism by the need to just talk about this. and honestly, if you are being a stupid and foolish and petty in who you are and how you live your life, please stop. it's just not worth it.