i don't even know how to begin this...

i learned this evening of the death of an old high school classmate of mine. i hadn't seen him in maybe 15 years or so. the friend who related his death said he'd died of the neglect--self neglect--that a dope fiend dies of when they get too far into the drug. he said they'd seen each other regularly, once a week, for lunch for a few years, but that had stopped, sometime before the gradual and inevitably fatal course of self-neglect had set in. he also told me that it was this dead friend's daughter who has been charged with a recent, rather sordid, drug-drenched murder in boone county.

it would be nicer--perhaps easier to deal with--if this was the first dead druggie classmate, but sadly, it's not--far from it. out of a class of say 110, at least ten, and probably more like 15, have died a dope fiend's death, and more than a handful are on death's waiting list. i'm neither blaming nor exonerating them. i'm just saying it's sad.

it's just not what any of us expected.

for jim, jake, and all the others: it was fun, at times.