a 40 for me and one for my homie
One downside to daily blog writing, well Monday through Thursday blog writing in my case… is that you write as you need to, I set aside time write, comeback, write, comeback edit. Generally speaking that works. My schedule is more like a task list then a concrete structure, that works fine for me, that is unless you have a day like today. Those are the days that you get thrown a curve ball. Today I got a curve ball.
I found out that a old friend died, now if you have been reading this site with the slightest of regularity you can tell i am sentimental, overly so. Friends that I haven’t seen in years I think of , wondering what they went on to do with their lives. friends from grade school, people from temp jobs. Now. please realize oh dear and gentle reader that i have a near legendary level of forgetfulness as well. I can forget almost anything with ease; I once pulled over to the side of the road to hear a song on a staticy college radio station, telling my wife I had to find out what this song playing was. She looked at me weirdly and said Ok. I said I wanted to immediately go and purchase said record, again she just looked at me like I was crazy and nodded. Of course the announcer came on and I realized it was a song I had put out on my label.
Like I said forgetful, I did say that didn’t I… but then wicked deep of weird and arcane knowledge, its how my head is wired, different then factory specs, but I am not complaining.
The hardest things are people that you have difficult or unresolved issues with, like all humans I have a few. Today i decided I was going to resolve one. If not resolve it, make some sort of effort, i had tried before but that was a decade ago. Harold was a friend of mine 18 years ago, we were club kids back in the day, going to First Avenue, hanging out, chasing girls, wearing skirts, and talking about film. In my late teens and early twenties we were close. Until the time that we weren’t. Thats what happens when youre 21 you have moments good bad, and you grow. Of course what came between us ultimately was a girl, but then isn’t it always. Without getting into details Harold and I never spoke again, the girl broke my heart so severely It was in a cast for some time after. life went on, my heart survived to be broken again, the next time not so easily though.
Whenever I saw him, he avoided me, I would wave or say hi- and he would just stare past me like an executive avoiding panhandlers. He would walk to the other side of the street rather then be on the same side as me. Its like he just couldn’t ever let go of the past, personally I ‘d long since forgiven any past wrongdoings, because you sort of have to. To some extent life is like a bookshelf, you only have so much room and if you want to keep the good books you have to dodge the bad ones.
When I got sick, (see post below) I decided that I needed to put it in human terms, so I named my disease Harold, after someone that I had a good relationship with that went bad, but I hoped to someday repair. what really gets me is that he had passed away a month before I named it, but right around when i was diagnosed, The timing of that is just a little too eerie.
He and I had made a film in 1991 about Lillian Colton, a Seed art pioneer, and a woman who i just truly adored. She passed away earlier this year, and several people had asked about this film which I never had a copy of. I had given his name to various people but none felt like doing the effort to find him. So today, I tried- the first web page that came up for him was his obituary. No information other then who had survived him. So his death, like most of his life save that period of time when we ruled a small corner of small night club, in a small city, in a small country, in a very big universe, was a mystery. Now there will never be that resolution that I always hoped would come. So I sit in my basement and listen to David Sylvian, and type it to people that didn’t know him, in fairness maybe I didn’t know him either. But, we did spend some time together a long time ago.