While catching up on all the commentary and tons of great photos following the Nashville blogging community’s Holiday Blogger Meat-Up at the Mothership last weekend, it quickly became obvious to this reader that one young man had definitely made a big impression on the ladies. So much so, in fact, that his mom was later seen apologizing him getting, shall we say, a little handy in the boob department with some of those smitten females, heh. He really is one of the most adorable little round headed babies ever.

Anyhow, all that hangin’ out with precious little babies stirred up a little motherly instinct and baby lust in some who attended, discussed earlier this week (I’ll not repeat where since she was having second thoughts about posting such stuff as it was :) - which I should probably be having second thoughts about right about now myself). But I can’t really say that I didn’t get a little of that myself just looking at pictures of all the cuteness. Babies and children are adorable, no doubt.

And in recent weeks elsewhere at another spot I hang out a lot, there had been some questions posed about one’s reasons to have kids or not, which I didn’t really get involved in at the time. But I’d been thinking about that stuff anyway - and listening to the biological clock I used to be pretty sure was broken ticking - for a while now.

ne important thing about all this is that originally, kids were never NOT supposed to be in the picture. I grew up fully expecting I’d have kids someday and never thinking anything different. Arguing with my mom on dozens of occasions when there was resistance to whatever teenage scheme I was trying to push and get permission for, I got told time and time again that I’d understand when I had kids of my own.

But that day never came, even though at one time, it was most definitely supposed to.

Though I have not lived in a small town in over 20 years, somewhere deep down in this jaded city dweller’s heart, I am still a small town girl. There was a small number of us that left for college elsewhere after high school, though several of those that left did eventually return. Most of my friends and acquaintances, however, are still there and never left.

Consequently, when I find myself back home, two things always happen: one, I’m reminded that they all think I’m crazy to have stayed in Memphis. I think this is just me, rather than others who left town years ago - if I’d remained in Murfreesboro/Nashville instead or gone permanently to Knoxville/Maryville, I don’t think the issue would be quite the same. Memphis, however, is like the big bad awful city of crime and other negative things to most of them, and I just won’t even go further into that right now or this post would be 50 miles longer and go off on a whole other secondary subject. Let’s just say Memphis is bad and scary to them, OK to visit but they wouldn’t wanna live here, and leave it at that. So therefore, I’m crazy for staying here, especially for 20 years.

The other thing that inevitably happens - and I don’t even have to be there in town, if there’s someone here in Memphis or anywhere else that I went to high school with, it always comes up - is that my high school sweetheart’s name comes up in conversation. Sometimes it’s directly asking where he is and what he’s doing these days (I do know, although there’s no logical reason anyone should expect that I would know that). Sometimes it’s just brought up as an offhand comment or remembrance that has nothing to do with me; sometimes it’s a little more involved with me, like, “Remember when y’all went to (wherever) with us?” That kind of thing.

It’s like this parallel universe there, where my name and his will always be inextricably linked. They see me, they think of him too. I wonder if they do the same thing when they see him (which is much less than they see me, in general - he’s been several states away for many years now). I am guessing that most of them do, if not all. I think they probably don’t ask him about me nor mention me at all though. Probably mainly because so many of them wanted to string him up and tar and feather him when we split up, and after all these years, they’ll be pleasant to him, no doubt, but they’re still holding a grudge. They’ve got my back, even though I never asked for it nor expected it, nor have felt it even necessary for a couple of decades.

It’s a little bit odd that this word/name-association continues after all these years if you look at those still in my hometown, mainly because many of them are on their second and third, and even a few on their fourth, marriages. And some of them have married folks that I never in a million years would have guessed they’d have wound up together. Those people have become mentally disassociated with their past lives and past relationships, in the minds of others around them. This type thing doesn’t generally happen with them. At least I think so. But all of them see each other all the time; I think that’s the difference.

The difference with me is they don’t see me but maybe once, twice a year if even that much. And actually, admittedly, I’m kind of guilty of the same thing - even if I don’t say anything about that person from the past, I see so-and-so and I immediately think of whoever it was they were with way back when.

I don’t know, maybe we ALL do it, and I just don’t know this. Maybe everyone, in the back of everyone else’s mind, is inextricably linked with whoever from their past, in some weird small town way. I just know I’m the one, and seemingly about the only one, who always gets asked about him, or he’s mentioned when I’m around. At least I never hear anyone else get asked some of the things I do, or hear their high school sweetheart’s name dropped every single time like always happens to me.

But that might be, I’m going to guess again, because I am just about the only one left who has never gotten married or had kids. There might be one or two others left, but I’m probably the only one who actually is seen at some hometown functions from time to time.

And that’s the other thing about this whole dynamic. Besides thinking I’m crazy (maybe the better word here is “eccentric”, heh) for never leaving Memphis in all these years, it’s that it really, really kinda bugs them that I’ve never gotten married and/or had kids. In fact, I’d go so far to say that it has often been thought, and also probably verbalized, that I “ain’t been right” since aforementioned HS sweetheart and I split up - solely because I have never gotten married and had kids, and exacerbated by the fact that I have chosen to remain in, god forbid, Memphis for so very long.

Has this ever actually been verbalized to me? Nope. But I know it’s true, and furthermore, the bottom line here really is the fact that they blame HIM for me having never gotten married, not having children, and not living happily ever after.

I suppose there is some logic there because, at one time, that was exactly what was SUPPOSED to happen. It was not only all practically planned down to some of the smallest details, but we came dangerously close to blowing off all the traditional and formal plans and running off to elope, get married a few years before planned. Somewhat fortunately in retrospect, we were both too drunk to drive - the discussion taking place at a college football game between his school and my school - and upon sobering up the next morning, the immediate urgency of the nuptials from the night before was all but forgotten. And can I just add - whew.

Because while I appreciate the friends I have who would not only fight to the death for me but hold that grudge for me for all these many years, I know that marriage would have been a mistake. Granted, it took me a few years to come to terms with that conclusion, but I know that relationship would not have survived intact to today. We’d have been divorced before either of us turned 30, no doubt. In fact, the person he did end up marrying, he divorced, though they later remarried (and are married still, far as I know).

Like I said, though, when we were still planning to get married eventually, we had everything planned out right down to various wedding details, the cars we would drive (he was a car nut, so that was muy important to him), and had picked out names of at least firstborn male and female children. (I know, it’s sickeningly sweet, ugh.)

He has a son. It just so happened that his wife’s maiden name is the same as the name we had picked out for the firstborn male child. It threw me for a moment when I’d first heard, yeah, but I had to get over it pretty quick. Under the circumstances, it’s not like I could be really angry about THAT.

For many years after, I kind of took some pride in the fact that I had gone on to have a life that had a few adventures and such, and certainly doing and seeing things and going places that someone in his position couldn’t really do. He was one of those people so bright he could have gone to college anywhere, and ended up giving up the college education he was in the middle of, and a doubtless promising career after graduation, in order to work full-time to support the family he had within barely a year of our split. I can’t say I fared much better with college seeing as how I kept dropping out, but for a long time I was still in and out of school, and certainly doing things and going places that I couldn’t have if I’d been a working mom with a baby to raise and a husband at home in my twenties.

For a long time, I thought, well, I wound up having a life, and he didn’t have one. That was, of course, coming from a still pretty bitter and resentful, and still fairly young girl in her twenties who maybe needed to feel that way for a while to be able to move on to something else where things like that didn’t matter. I’m not particularly proud of all that residual bitterness and resentment, but things between us ended on a pretty ugly note, and that’s probably really kind of an understatement. All of my friends wanted to kill him at the time; some of our mutual friends were pretty angry with him at the time, though maybe not quite as homicidal. The last time we were both in the same room 20 years ago, he himself admitted to one of my friends he was scared to death to try and talk to me - which, if you know me, that’s pretty laughable, I’m the easiest person in the world to talk to.

In any case, yes, it was ugly when it ended, and may be the only ended relationship of my life that I ever truly walked away with this huge upper hand, even though my failure to marry and have children later has rendered me “irreparably damaged” by well-meaning friends who I love very dearly. So for a long time I was happy I’d had this “big life” while he’d had “no life”. And then I got over myself after a while, and grew up, and none of that mattered anymore and was all but forgotten.

Well, obviously - my allegedly grown up self can now recognize - he probably had the life he wanted. And he certainly has something I’ve never had, like a family of his own. A child of his own.

In that regard, I’ve got to wonder - sometimes - who really missed out.

When pondering such issues (which I really don’t do often - nay, I mostly try to avoid this direction of philosophy!)… well, it probably doesn’t help matters, in my mind anyway, to have to remember that I pretty much wasted my twenties, and most of my thirties. It was sort of an accident, almost as if one day I was 21 or 22 with alllllllllllll this time ahead of me to do whatever, and then all of a sudden, I’m pushing 40. And where did all that time go?

Well, a good nearly seven years of it was spent with the Freeloader Ex, who I moved down here to Memphis with in the first place. Well, seven years if you count the four years we were actually a real couple, plus the next three years we spent as roommates with occasional delusions that everything might be all right and we’d be okay as a couple again. His extreme drug and alcohol problems kind of kept taking care of those delusions time and time again, which was certainly all for best, all things considered.

But the first couple of years we were together, it wasn’t like that yet. His problems had not evolved to what they eventually became. I don’t know that at the time I was really active thinking marriage and children at that point, with him anyway, but I still always figured that eventually I would, indeed, one day have kids.

Before I ever even got to the point where I was thinking in that direction, though, something came up that forced the issue. We had been together probably less than six months at that point, when we learned that he might indeed already be a father. The child was already born and the mother was requesting a paternity test. Stress, stress, stress.

In the course of a conversation about it all one afternoon, that’s when I learned that it was his intention to never bring any children into this world - or at least not any more children, if this child turned out to be his. He didn’t want to be a father, didn’t want to have children. Not with me; not with anyone.

Well, okay. I spent the next several days being bothered about that, as well as being kind of puzzled that it was bugging me so much since it hadn’t really been an issue or even a thought at that point. And it wasn’t so much that I desperately wanted to have children and soon. And at that point in time in my early twenties, I didn’t really feel like I was ready to make that jump yet anyway. But it had never ever occurred to me that I wouldn’t ever have children of my own, someday. And at the time, having just started a new life in a new city with someone I was really in love with at the time, I certainly hadn’t been looking to leave that relationship anytime soon.

I struggled with it for a while until it got to the point where I knew the decision was going to have to be made. Should I stay or should I go? If I stayed, then I was settling for never having children. Should I stay, or should I walk and possibly have children and a family of my own someday?

You know how that turned out - I stayed. And eventually, I actually convinced myself that I really didn’t want kids anyway.

And I love kids, I enjoy them. I spent years being “favorite aunt” and godmother type to dozens of my friends’ kids, some of whom are almost grownups themselves now, and that’s always been really cool.

And yes, at that point of my life it probably would have been a bad idea. We had a few really good years, and then a few years that were a complete and utter nightmare as his substance abuse problems escalated. When we finally made the mutual decision that he was moving out (albeit before I was going to have to just kick him out) - once he was gone, I felt like I’d been run over by a few dozen trains. Putting my life back together again wasn’t easy, but god, it was such a relief to be rid of all that craziness and negativity.

But you just don’t expect that what starts out as a fairly normal relationship and a pretty good thing is going to turn into something as horrific as that did. I get angry with myself sometimes for not having been able to predict what would happen. But in reality, I couldn’t have.

I dated a while, even ended up in another long-term relationship that wasn’t bad at all; we just never really belonged together in the first place. Some more shorter relationships after that, none of which ever really stuck, save for one; and in that one, had things gone in that direction, I would have ended up being a stepmom, which I would have been pretty cool with had that worked out.

In any case, for that entire time I was still pretty certain I really didn’t want to have kids of my own anyway. And as a family member or two or three made a point of pointing out, I was getting a little bit old for that kind of thing anyway (oh, yes, thanks for reminding me).

Then around my mid-thirties - 34, 35, 36 - three things happened. First, I had a routine test turn up bad, and spent the next eight months under a cancer scare and dealing with the possibility that I might well be having a hysterectomy before it was all over with. Fortunately, at the end of those eight months, all was well and I got a clean bill of health.

But it’s one thing to think you probably don’t want to or are not going to have kids. It’s a whole other thing to deal with when that choice is potentially about to get taken away from you without you having any say in the matter.

Second, I fell in love with my best friend, someone who had been pretty much right under my nose for well over a decade anyway. In the old days, I had been with Freeloader Ex, and his significant other at the time was one of my best, longtime girlfriends - and, in turn, he and the Ex had been close pals. NOW, it’s as obvious as the nose on my face that the wrong two couples were together at the time, and it’s obvious that there were already some pretty deep feelings there on both sides. But the timing would have been bad; and chances are, had a relationship evolved at the time, it never would have lasted. When the time was right, the time was just right. Four years later, we’ve had ups and downs like everyone else - some of them maybe a little more extreme than a lot of people - but we’re solid.

So there was that, and I guess anybody out there who did find the right and perfect person for them knows that when that happens, strange things happen. Like, even though you may have just felt absolutely certain for the last 15 years that you just really didn’t want to have kids, have a family - that hmm, maybe it would kind of be nice to have those things after all, maybe.

Though in our case, it really is starting to get kind of late. His mom had his youngest brother when she was in her forties, and older than I am now. And he loves kids, is great with them, would be a terrific dad. It’s still a possibility, certainly, and not only that but there’s the adoption and foster options too, especially older kids that they have such a hard time finding adoptive or foster homes for. But we’ll be okay, too, if it winds up just being us.

The third thing that happened around the same time as the other two, though, was undeniably the most bittersweet and the hardest to swallow.

I wrote (joked) about the detox effort with my ex a few weeks ago, in a short post That was close to seven years ago, and the next chapter of that little story is that we came very close, once he started getting clean and sober again, to getting back together again. Prior to his going into rehab, we talked about it some, and basically mutually agreed to talk about it again later on down the line, once he had gotten through rehab and gotten his shit together again. It was not the time to be discussing such things when he needed to focus on getting straight. I had made the arrangements for him to get into residential treatment, with some financial help from a family member, and drove him down there, a few hundred miles away, and let go, for the time being.

That future planned talk never happened. In the end, when it came down to it - when the answer was going to have to be either yes or no - I’m 99% certain my final answer would have had to have been no. The water that was under that bridge seemed way too deep, and I guess the feeling was mutual. It just wasn’t supposed to happen.

I wasn’t prepared at all for what did, though. He went back to college while still in rehab. Eventually, he graduated, and even went on to get his master’s. Which was great, fabulous, of course.

He also got married, and had a child.

Yeah, well, it took Mr. Edge (Not of U2) about a month to talk me down from the cloud of anger and venom and bitterness and resentment and all manner of rather violent wanting to go kick his ass to Timbuktu and back, or worse, over that little bit of news. I was so mad for weeks I was practically spitting not only proverbial nails but proverbial poison darts, dammit. My outrage got crazy and twisted enough that Edge - who dislikes him intensely and for reasons that mostly have little to do with me and are more about leftover garbage from what was their friendship of the past - was almost taking up for the ex, in the face of all my venom-spewing. I was picking apart every little incident and occurrence from that past relationship and tossing all kinds of evil theories out there, and poor Edge would be saying things like, “Look, I know you’re angry, and you have a good reason to be, but I was there, remember, and I really don’t think it was that way,” or “I really don’t think he meant it like that.”

And eventually he said, “You’ve just got to let this go.” And he was right. No matter how angry I was at this person who’d insisted he was never having children, we were never having children - and no matter how much a part of me really wanted to just pick up the phone and scream that he’d “robbed” me of my twenties and any dream I’d ever had of a family and children, and how dare he have a child of his own after that - no matter all that.

He might have been the catalyst, but it was ultimately MY decision. I made the choice to stay, knowing what I knew, and I stayed for years. It was on me, totally.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have the potential to still sting a little. If my mind goes wandering in that direction, which it doesn’t often, I very quickly remind myself it was my choice. End of story, fini.

I regret some things I didn’t used to, I guess. One thing I DON’T regret is having helped him get clean and get his life back together and back on track when I did. He hit bottom a bunch of times in many years, some of which I witnessed and some of which I wasn’t around to, but that last time - which was the first I had heard from him in over five years - I knew if I didn’t do something, he probably wasn’t going to make it. So I did what I felt I had to do. Presumably, he’s still alive, safe, well, and these days pretty successful. No regrets.

And me, the whole kid thing’s not much in the forefront of my mind, if at all. Something, like some of the discussions and questions posed in recent weeks, I’ll get to thinking things like, “Well, you know, I don’t know.” Deeper than that I suppose, in truth, but that’s the Cliffs Notes version.

Or I’ll be talking to or hanging out with my mom, who is, like, the coolest. With the exception of the teenage years, which were kinda tough on both of us, we’ve had this really great relationship, and especially so since I’ve been an adult. We don’t see each other in person as often as we once did, but whenever we do get to hang out, we have a great time. And we’re really, really close.

And I guess that’s when it occurs to me most, to think - well, maybe I HAVE missed out on something here after all. What my mom has with me is something I’m quite probably not going to have the opportunity to have.

Not going to lose a whole lot of sleep over it, no. But yeah, it’s there. At least a little.

So, obviously the latter part of this week has been kind of uncharacteristically deep in thought and serious, ugh. But like I said, sometimes I write just to get it out of my head and be somewhere else. And now it is. At least, until and unless writer’s remorse gets the best of me. Then again, I’ve always been pretty much an open book and could care less.

So I’m done with the deep and serious this week, everyone will doubtless be glad of that. Blondes shouldn’t ever, ever think this much, it makes our head hurt, heh heh.

Deep thought moratorium officially begins. Now, pardon me while I go see what Britney Spears has been up to for the last 24 hours.

Warning - rocky road ahead, so to speak. You don’t have to stick around and read for this one. It’s probably really just for me, and someone else who might never read it. But it’s okay if you do. Doesn’t matter to me.

Sometimes I write because if I don’t, it’ll nag and nag and nag at me until I finally just do it and get it all out and be finished with it. I would say I make a habit of that, but there’s boxes of notebooks and typewriter-typed pages and all kinds of other such stuff tucked away in a box in the back of my bedroom closet that would prove that to be the contrary; that I always finish it, that I always get it out and over and done with. Which, actually, probably explains a lot about, oh, everything. I think I’ve come to terms with the fact, lately, that after 20 and 15 and 10 years, none of that stuff in those boxes is ever getting finished.

And sometimes it’s just the stuff that has no potential entertainment or literary value whatsoever - it just needs to get out of my head and be somewhere else.

So, here.

Having written about Nashville, non-country, music past this week and reading a bit about the same genre in the present - and having been involved in a couple of long conversations that included a lot discussion about Nashville past and present this week - I find myself over here at the sorry, flat, ugly southwest end of the state a little preoccupied, both with past memories and a few present troubles. And also a little homesick, I suppose.

It’s never been any secret among my friends and family that I never really wanted to leave Middle Tennessee. I basically moved to Memphis because I was young, stupid, and in love, and thus I convinced myself that moving here was the right decision to make.

Actually, if I’d HAD to move somewhere and had no choice at all about staying in Middle Tennessee at the time, I would have rather gone to East Tennessee. That was where the object of my affection was at the time and had been for a while, and where I was quite a bit of the time anyway at that point. But he decided he wanted to go westward for school. I came with him, and here we ended up in Memphis.

Sort of eerie and what may have been a portent of things to come - fortunately he was driving - I became violently ill, sick to my stomach, before we even left Rutherford County on the day we moved, and stayed sick for a couple of days after. I couldn’t even drink a couple of sips of water without it coming back up.

In retrospect, it was yet another really bad decision to go right along with all the other thousands of bad decisions I have made in life. Still and all, I was a pretty big fan of Memphis for a while, and there were some good years here with him, and still some more good years here after him and without him. It wasn’t all bad. Sometimes I think I just outgrew this city. I don’t think there was any one thing or one event that soured me so, such as I am. I think I just stayed too long.

And again, the longer I’m here and not that happy about it, the more I regret ever leaving Middle Tennessee in the first place. The last year I was there was the best ever. I had finally moved into an apartment that I absolutely loved, after years of bouncing from place to place every six months or less, on a quiet street a few blocks from the MTSU campus. I was taking classes again, at night. My job at the time, I worked with people I genuinely liked a great deal. Three very distinctly different groups of friends to hang out that were all great fun - friends from school, some of which were also from my hometown; friends from a former job to party with in Murfreesboro; friends I hung out with, most of the time, in the clubs and indie music scene in Nashville, a couple of whom I had actually known since childhood via church camp and other Episcopal youth statewide stuff throughout childhood and teen years.

It was that last group I was closest to, always have been, all these years still. What’s left of us anyway. Kind of like everything else I had, all those great things I was so happy with at the time in Middle Tennessee that I left behind. They’re just gone, mostly.

Many of my friends from that time are gone, not only from Nashville and that old scene, but gone from this world altogether. Accidents, drugs, a murder, illness - you name it, most of the usual culprits have whittled down what was a very close-knit group of twelve or thirteen-odd or so people down to a meager group of six. The oldest one is only 42 years old.

I know, “only” 42. Maybe that sounds old to some people. 40 sounds old to me lots of days. But it’s really not, not in the grand scheme of things. No, it’s not.

Anyway, that - coupled with many more friends I have lost from my hometown crowd, and some other friends - it’s just stunning. You’re not supposed to be 40 years old and have lost count of how many people are irretrievably missing from your life. You’re not supposed to be 40 years old and have outlived so many of your peers.

I’m kind of afraid though, lately, I’m losing another one. I’ve been down this road before - and with the same person, no less, as well as others - to know you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Or find someone who doesn’t want to be found.

Way back in those old days, technically I lived in Murfreesboro at the time, but most of my friends and my boyfriend for a good bit of that period were in Nashville. Throughout much of the last half of 1986 and almost all of 1987, I was really pretty much living in Nashville, even though my mail was still being delivered to Rutherford County and I was still paying rent there.

One of our gang had this little apartment that’s no longer there, almost within spitting distance of the good old Exit/In. Even though there was, like, NO room - it was a tiny place, really small - the core group of a dozen of us were living there almost ’round the clock. Between all of us, plus all the people that were always coming home with us from the clubs as well as some of the bands from out of town, there was hardly room for that many bodies. Somehow we managed, as long as you didn’t mind getting stepped on in the dark in the middle of the night sometimes.

I wrote about that time earlier this year here in the blog (at the time, my intentions being to poke fun at my good and old friend Josie Walker’s gigantic boat feet, which really are huge, you wouldn’t believe):

“…way back in the old days when everybody used to flop at Scott’s old apartment in West End, which was small to begin with, sometimes it was even harder to find sleeping space because not only the twelve or thirteen of us in our little group, as well as any assortment of dates and girlfriends and boyfriends, would be crashing there as well as, sometimes, most of whomever had been at whichever club that night. As well as, sometimes, whatever band from out of town had been playing at whichever club that night. Sometimes it would just be wall to wall people crashed in every available chair (not many) and the couch (only one) and the floor and you’d have to watch where you stepped if you had to make one of those middle of the night sneaks to the bathroom. This was always especially fun if you’d had too much to drink that night and were, indeed, trying to get to the bathroom to throw up or something.”

Some of the best and funnest (sic) times of my life were spent in that little hole of an apartment. As long as you had no immediate need for the restroom facilities - since there was ALWAYS someone else in there - it was actually a pretty cool little place to be, at that age anyway.

Also in that apartment, so were some of the worst times. One of the worst days of my life was the morning I had to drive down there after working the graveyard shift at the ER at Southern Hills, having had the misfortune of being the one on the front desk that night when the ambulance brought one of our group in following a wreck on Harding Place. The only explanation for why he was down that far south in the first place, and at that time of night, was that he must have been coming to visit and hang out with me at work. And instead, I had to be the one to go tell everyone the next morning, everyone crashed and hungover in that little apartment, what had happened and that he was gone.

But there were probably many more good times than bad back then, and if not good memories, extraordinary ones. It was a pretty wild time, crazy time. When the party ended at whichever club, the party relocated to that teeny apartment most nights. You never knew who you might find worshiping the porcelain god in the bathroom, since that door would never lock. There’s a few secrets I can never tell.

All of the great bands that came through town at the time, I had the privilege of getting to meet almost everyone I could have ever possibly wanted to back then - with the exception of Paul Westerberg and the rest of The Replacements, which is a humongous thorn in my side to this day. Every single time The Replacements ever came to Nashville then, I had to be somewhere else, one time back home for a funeral. I never got to see them play live until the last tour before they broke up, seeing them here in Memphis.

The only person whose name was actually ON the lease of the apartment - well, if it was three in the morning and we weren’t bailing him out of jail or picking him up from night court, he was frequently found hanging upside down off the balcony half-naked (or sometimes all naked) singing at the top of his lungs, sometimes with guitar in hand, sometimes not. Several in that core group of people living/slash/squatting there had serious drug and alcohol problems, but that one - he was completely out of control. So much so that people all over town were taking bets on how long he’d last, when he was gonna pull the ultimate Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix and, you know - ::poof:: - be gone, just like that.

And then he shocked the hell out of everyone by cleaning up, getting straight. Going back to and finishing college. Went out west for a while. Made a shitload of money, enough that he could pretty much retire before he was 40 years old, though he still kept working when he felt like it.

Fifteen or so really good years, and then in a flash, it was like all that good stuff never happened. He was using again. Things got ugly. There was a horrific argument between four of us - three against one. He told us all to go to hell, especially me. All of the addicts and alcoholics I have known except for a couple, it’s either my “fault” or I’m the first and foremost target when they’re lashing out. I’m used to it, I know how to stand my ground with them, they hate me for it, big deal. I’m only 5′2″, but I somehow become like the biggest threat to them being able to poison themselves with whatever they’re on at the time, like I’m someone who will take their drugs or their booze away from them. Not that it ever stopped any of them.

But then he got clean again, shocking what few of us are left to be shocked once again. And was doing so, so great.

And then he split town to go work on a big project, presumably for a few weeks. That was late August, or maybe early September. Supposed to be back long before Thanksgiving.

The cell phone’s still on, though goes to voice mail every time. Credit cards are still being used, and with the proper signature (very helpful when the best friend is also one’s accountant). MySpace profile has been logged into a couple of times. Shrug.

Back in the old days when we were all living/squatting/crashing in that little place in West End, young Greg, who was like my baby brother and was the only one of the whole group younger than me - he was 17, 18 at the time - had these delusions that we would just all be together forever. That we’d like all just go off and set up some bohemian commune somewhere. Since everyone there was either a musician or artist or writer, or a wannabe of any of the three (except Stevie Kane, who rather inexplicably went into accounting and will, by god, tell you himself that accounting is an art in itself - yeah, OK, Steve)… well, Greg just had these stars in his eyes about all this hippie dippie shit. Let’s all just go off and start our own little artists’ colony or whatever and just live there forever, happily ever after. I think it broke his heart when everyone started graduating, moving away and moving on, scattering as people do. Growing up, supposedly.

I won’t go so far to say everyone in the bunch was hugely talented in their respective art, but we did have a few that were simply amazing. Watching and listening to Joey or Greg or Scott play guitar; Joey crafting a new song from start to finish; watching Scot the Happy Italian draw or paint and his keen eye for capturing everything perfectly; reading anything Ev wrote - all experiences I was fortunate to be able to witness, day after day.

But the most prolific and constantly evolving piece of art in the house (and I use the term “art” here loosely) was one big giant long poem (also using the term “poetry” loosely) that was scribbled in black Sharpie, in the handwriting of a dozen or so different people, on this beat up old bulletin board that was hanging down almost the entire side of the refrigerator. That bulletin board was Communication Central for the house for about two years, and the rule was everything written there had to keep the poem going, no matter what it was about. Grocery lists, reminders, arguments and calling someone out on their shit, whatever - it had to be part of the poem.

A few I remember -

Paper towels, milk, and please some Cap’n Crunch?
Pork chops and applesauce - The Brady Bunch!

Can someone pick me up after work today?
That all depends, Miss Jo, how much you willing to pay?

Looks like someone forgot to pay the electric bill.
Oh, you’ll learn to love the dark, quit bitching and take another happy pill.

You fucking asshole, Scott! Where the hell is my money??
Ummmmmm probably in his dealer’s pocket, honey.

Nope, no stellar poetic talent there, but at least it was kind of entertaining most days. Two, two and a half years’ worth of it. Probably mostly arguing about money, since nobody ever had any, something always needed to be paid or someone needed to be paid back, and whenever the boys had any money anyway, it almost all went to colossal amounts of booze, weed, other party favors. If not for Jo and me, we’d have never had electricity.

I’ve no idea what happened to it after everyone finally moved out and left for good, it’s probably a shame no one kept it. I called Josie Thursday morning to ask about it. She remembered how it was about to fall apart to begin with when the boys slapped it up there on the fridge, so she figures it probably fell apart when anyone tried to remove it.

This below lives elsewhere on the ‘Net, posted late this past summer:

Photos scattered all around my floor
Twelve souls plus a couple or three more
But only a handful of souls outside 900 Broadway
Bitter gray cold February day
Walking along Church Street, pausing at a stop sign
“When there are two or three of us, it’s fine”
“When we’re all together, it’s toxic and sick”
And with that the wise little one stopped traffic
Don’t tell me you’ve never been able to see
The common denominator was always me?

I didn’t write that, you see.
But you who did, I think you’re reading here still - please, just call me.
Or Stevie Kane or Jo or Jay.
We just want to know that you’re okay.

On my reading rounds this morning, I saw this link to Deathforecast.com on another blog and checked it out, just to see. I’ve done this at another similar site before, with basically the same general questions, and got a much better result somewhere in the 70s, but, whatever.

According to this one, if The Edge (Not of U2) and I get married, he dies at 73 years old and I die at 68.

If we don’t get married, he kicks it at 71. Moi, 66.

Actually, the results ballpark-wise might not be all that far off for real, as we both have heart disease galore in our families, and many of those in my family died around the 70-ish mark and a couple earlier than that. Of course, one can do plenty of things preventative measure-wise to better those chances.

But I’m a little bit miffed about those results, seeing as how one of us is a former drug addict in recovery and has literally baked in the sun every day for a lifetime pretty much, and here’s a hint - it’s not me.

Apparently if I had been eating more balanced meals and regularly instead of being pseudoanorexic and skipping meals for a day or two at a time, and working out a little more often, I could have been getting a tan all the time and shooting up heroin* all along!

And, obviously, this marriage is going to have to happen sometime within the next 25 years, though the way we’ve both been about finalizing plans and making concrete and definite decisions like that, it might well take us that long anyway…

* (Yes, just kidding, Mom… it’s a joke!)

Reason #1,274 that I am probably going to Hell for my smart mouth…

Year: 1999

On my couch: Freeloader Ex, for the first time in five