DEATH IS FOR REAL. I don't usually title these things but this one seemed so appropriate. I may have mentioned (how many times do I have to say  I do not read these entries, not even for continuity or repetition, which is  a particularly disgusting kind of laziness. It is like throwing my fingernail clippings out at an audience and waiting for applause. His death came as a shock (you can always count on death for that, it's had centuries to perfect the act) and he was two years younger than me. I've always had two fantasies about death. 1) It often gives no warning whatsoever--you're alive/you're dead. Or your drugged/you're dead. But sometimes, for example when you're driving along and you see a giant crane falling and heading straight for your car and you figure you've got 30 seconds or a minute if you're lucky of life left. What do you think of in that last minute. Is it anything beyond, "Shit, this is going to hurt" or "This is going to set the building of the new library back at least six months." Do the laws of physics allow death to spread its tentacles into the land of the living when there is no hope whatsoever of the living surviving beyond a minute. My last thought, such thoughts being permitted would probably be something like, "Shit. I forgot to pick up the Frito. Marge will be pissed." I do not think we are built for profound thoughts. I am not even sure we are built for pounds. But maybe that's just me in my typical depressive state. Maybe there are people who think, "Shit, this is going to be so much fun. I've always wondered what death is like and now I'm going to find out! Hooray!
2)I abhor perfection in anything. Partially, no doubt, because it emphasizes my imperfection in everything. And what is "perfect" anyway? Doing things according to the way "The Perfect Handbook" says they should be done. Give me inspired sloppiness every time. Anyway, when I was about 8, confronting for the first time the reality that I was going to die some day ("but not for a long, long time," as Mother would console), it occurred to me that everyone who came before me and was no longer around had died. So in this sense, death was perfect. I couldn't believe that somewhere in a cave in the Rockies there wasn't a guy who had never gotten a social security card or given any evidence of his existence to anyone beyond his parents at this birth and they were killed two minutes later in an explosion in the hospital and his bassinet rolled down the corridor into this cave which was populated by friendly wolves and gulls who raised him. But he was off the charts. Even Facebook didn't have a clue. Could he not elude death? How could death be so "perfect" in nailing every one of us. Has there never in history been one person who outsmarted it. Aside from the generally disgusting parts of death, it strikes me that it must have a Dick Cheney sort of personality or Goebels. If anybody could have  struck out death it was probably the Nazis because they operated according to the same "perfect" methods. All this by way of saying I miss my friend terribly, find the whole thing unbelievable as everyone has to because how can you believe in the existence of something that ends your existence. It's beyond existential.
Assuming I do't go back to the novel or the 700 pound monster, I will peck at this until Keri yells 'STOP. ENOUGH ALREADY." And electrons can neither be created nor destroyed, so these letters, possibly in completely jumbled up order, which may make less of a difference with my prose than with anybody others will float around the galaxy long after my death offering clues, to those who care (and why should they?) about who I was and what I thought. This fucked up electronic immortality does not defy death, but it would not surprise me if at this moment Dick Cheney were not having a meeting with the forces of evil, saying, "We cannot allow this to go on. We are abandoning our mandate. Allowing those electrons to exist beyond a person's death is precisely the kind of immortality that clause 23.1xr prohibits. So Einstein be damned-- he is already anyway-- we must be allowed to destroy matter--those electrons--even though we still can't create it, which we couldn't do anyway because creation is in another department. All in favor, raise your hands, "Ay."