Category: ranting

Two hours to get here. Two hours in a car, in traffic to stare at a grave. An unmarked one at that. No real headstone, just a flat gray square with some dates on it, sunk down in the grass. If you didn’t know it was here you’d miss it. Joe wanted to be cremated, but his mother decided she wanted to be able to visit him. She moved across the country a few years ago. I wonder if anyone else visits.

I don’t know why I come here. I wasn’t going to come this year. I’ve been here every year since ’97. I just stand here. I don’t believe in the afterlife so it’s not for Joes sake that I come here. So it must be for my sake. But all I do is stand here. I look down at the marker for a while and stare out across the other graves, marked by tombstones, across to the woods in the distance. I usually stand here about 40 minutes.

I stand here and I remember the influence Joe had on my life. Joe pulled me out of my shell. When I met him I was the quiet introverted kid who sat in the corner of the room. I didn’t have many friends, I was always reading some fantasy book trying to escape reality. I met Joe because I sat in the back of the class, right by the windows. Joe was chronically late to class. When he did show up he would stand outside and tap on the window behind me till I opened the latch. Then he push it up and try to crawl in while the teacher had her back to us. Sometimes he got away with it—most times he didn’t. He’d take too long and she would turn around or he’d bump his guitar on the windowsill and the loud hollow thud would alert the teacher that Joe was here. Then when she tried to scold Joe he would ask if he could recite a poem for the class. No, Joe did not have his homework but could he sing a song?

Joe was full of life. Sitting in the grass out in front of the school at lunch time, with a dandy lion in his curly hair playing his guitar. There where always four or five other people around him, listening, talking, playing games or eating lunch. People just gravitated to Joe.

I spent most of my junior year’s lunches with Joe and met a lot of people I became good friends with; F█████, D█████, C██████, A█████, T███, and many other. We did stuff in the mornings, after school and on the weekends. We went to coffee shops and talked, we saw movies, we went on trips. It was the first time since elementary school I had a real group of friends that I saw outside of school.

Our senior year Joe played Macbeth in the school play. He floored the crowed. The theater crackled with his personality and the power of his performance. Every soliloquy ended with a standing ovation. All of Joe’s friends asked him for a signed play bill—he signed them ‘just your average Joe.’ We all joked about the Scottish play and it’s curse. A month later Joe was dead. No one talked about the Scottish play and it’s curse then

It happened in January. On the twelfth. It was a Friday but there was no school. It had snowed on Tuesday night and we had not been to school since. I talked to Joe at noon. He said he was going crazy, not being able to get out. He talked about planing a ‘battle of the bands’ at school. Everything seamed normal when I hung up.

The next morning my mom asked me if I know a Joshua. I said no, why? Her friend Doug, who worked for the police had told her at a student from my high school had hung himself the afternoon before. She did not know how old he was, but I did not worry too much—I did not know a Joshua. But the name was not Joshua, it was Yoseph which was Joe’s real name. I found out when F█████ called me. The drama teacher had called him. Joe had hung himself in his closet sometime before five on Friday. No one ever figured out why.

By the time Joe left my life I was no longer the shy introvert. I was, am, not the most outgoing person. I still talk a long time to meet and make friends but now I push my friends into living. I Tell stories, take them places. I have experienced so much more of life since I met Joe. Every time someone quotes the old saying; ‘the candle that burns brightest burns fastest,” I think of Joe. Joe wasn’t just a brightly burning candle, he was a bonfire that everyone else gathered around to be warm and to see the world in his light.

I guess this is why I come here. Joe’s grave reminds me what life is. It puts it all back into perspective. How fleeting everything in our lives is. Here now, gone now. We just travel from one fleeting encounter to another. Every encounter with Joe stands out in my memory because, to Joe, every encounter was precious. He poured his soul into every moment of life.

Yea me!

While I was at work today I ran across a website of pictures of London. Places I had been and places I did not get to. I realized, for the first time, that I miss London. Not only because I miss C███████ and that is where she is, but I miss the city itself.

While I was in London I did not really miss the US, I missed people that where here, but not being here. Now that I am home I miss London. Strange, I bitched about London while I was there. To the quote by Samuel Johnson:

“A man who is tired of London is tired of Life.”

I used to add, ‘yes, but Sam Johnson had money—if you don’t have money you can’t do anything in London.’ And I did not have much money while I was there, in fact I left early because I ran out of money.

I also looked at pictures of other places, Germany, Italy and France mostly. I realized that I would love to live in any of these places—ex-patriot syndrome I guess, but I would love to live there (thought Italy has to be on the top. Umbria or Tuscany!) Thinking about it, I realized that one of the things that makes London special is that it was the first time I lived ‘in’ a city, where I could walk or take public transportation anywhere I needed to go—and most places I wanted to go. Another thing that makes London stand out is that no matter how long I could live there it would never lose it’s foreignness for me. Cities in the US will always be more familiar than London, even if I have never been there.

I live in DC now, but I don’t know anyone in DC, and there is so much to do around me—but nothing to do alone. It’s hard to meet people, I have never met people well. I will talk your ear off if I know you but I won’t say hello unless you approach me if I don’t. The extrovert hiding behind the shy, embarrassed introvert. Most of the people I know either live outside the city and never come it, or don’t live anywhere near DC. I need to meet more people here, but have not figured out how to do it. I don’t even know anyone in my apartment building.

Anyway, I am going to stop ranting now… this whole thing is somewhere short of intelligible, but not quite a stream of consciousness.

Last night I went out with some friends and one of them posed a question, one he had been asked at an entrance interview for medical school: ‘if you where throwing a dinner party and could invite one living person and three dead people who would you invite?’

Humm… that’s a very hard question. For the three dead people I would invite the Buddha, Socraties and my great-grandfather who I never met. There are so many people I would like to have know; Marcus Tullus Cicero, Lucius Sulla, Julius Caesar, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Levi, Peter, Francis of Asissi, Ghangis Kahn, Charlemagne, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Bolivar, Lincoln, Tolkien, Oh there are so many, the list goes on and one… one day I should write it down.

As for the living person… most likely the Dali Lama, although Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, the Pope, Che Guivara (he’s still alive isn’t he?) and a number of other people would be just as good.

So, who would you invite?

We should change the order of the English alphabet. ‘Q’ should be the first letter. Why? Because thats the way the key board is. ‘W’ should be second, then ‘E’ and so on. This will, of course, only work for the English alphabet and the English key board. Other languages will have to modify their alphabet accordingly.

Really this makes a lot of sense. I mean, if children are tought the alphabet in the same order as the key board they will be able to type faster. It used to be that all the keys on you key board, with the exception of a few like ‘enter’ and ‘space,’ where the same size and you could rearange the keys into alphabetical order—then, once you got used to it, you could type faster, because that is how your mind learned the alphabet.

I mean the only real reason of the whole alphabet thing is putting words in order, and how often do you do that by hand any more? Just selcect the right button on your computer and it does it for you. Now for those of us who learned the alphabet already this will be a little disconserting at first. But kids learning the alphabet now will have no problems, to them ‘Q’ will be the natural start of the alphabet—the rest of us will have to look at our key board when we need to order things by hand.

Phones will have to change too, but that won’t be so bad—everyone gets a now cell phone every year. So in a few years it won’t matter. This really is a good idea, I mean the arbitrary ordering of the alphabet makes now sense—just because the Greeks and Romans did it that way does not mean we need to!

So, tonight you should begin learning your ‘new’ alphabet, qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm and to help you should practice by going and putting all the hanging folders in your file cabnets in the ‘correct’ order —and the spices on the spice rack!