Rest In Peace Gator

REPOST: This is a repost from June 2011.

July 16, 2021: A friend is attending a funeral today for her friend who "got a gun and took his life." I learned of this news while listening to an NPR interview from 2016 with Anthony Bourdain. Seems like a good time to repost this piece about our dear friend Randy.

                                                                   ~

2011: A good friend died this week. He took his own life. We are all shocked and saddened by his passing and we are all asking ourselves - why? Which is to say, we are having the normal human reaction to such an unnecessary loss.

I am not going to praise him here, most of you did not know him. For those who did, we will find the time and place to share our memories. Today I am going to do something in his honor.

This is for our lost friend.

If you read this blog and you have my phone number then I ask should you ever feel so lost, so alone that you consider leaving us, I beg you to use that number and call me. If you read this blog and you don't have my phone number then I ask that you call that person today, the one who you talk to when times are darkest. Call them today and agree that should you ever walk too close to the edge, you will reach out to them. You make that promise in the light of day; promise you will cry out past the darkness. Make the promise, make it today.

My friend called me at times when he brushed against his demons and we would look at the world in ways only two friends in conversation could, I believe it helped. This time he didn't call and all of us are left to ask - why.

Rest in Peace Randy, we will miss you for a long, long time.

Today's Numbers Revised

Stats as of 10:00 AM EDT or roughly midday worldwide.

 7,457,225,765 Current World Population  

    112,692,552 Births this year    

          168,774 Births today

47,192,694 Deaths this year     

       70,768 Deaths today

65,500,282 Net population growth this year

       98,354 Net population growth today

98,236,763,533 Emails sent today (half day)

        1,972,457 Blog posts written today

 2,119,928,993 Google searches so far today

169,981,107 Energy used today (MWh), of which:

137,839,640 - from non-renewable sources (MWh)

32,352,232 - from renewable sources (MWh)

for more minute-to-second stats worldometers.info

Some Days

Today is bright and sunny around San Francisco. A light marine haze lays over the coastal strip but it is unseasonably warm. I know this type of day gives many people a mood lift. Rain does that for me, but sun seems to be the go-to mother nature stimulant for most.

I took a long, walk this morning, sticking to the sunny sides of the streets. I'm usually a shade guy myself. But today, I hoped to wash away a bit of shadow that lingers in my soul.

This morning a friend of over 50 years has gone away. She was ill, so very ill. Others will say that passing was a blessing. It may have been, only she can know that now. For me, it's another lost friend.

When you say you have known someone for 50 or 60 years, it leads inevitably to the place where you no longer have them around, even if they were only an email or facebook post away. Slowly they aren't there anymore.

We knew each other in high school, afterwards our paths didn't cross for twenty years. When they did, it was hit and miss for awhile and suddenly a short, intense time for both of us. Then it was back to holiday letters and infrequent contact. Somehow another 25 years passed.

So, today is sunny. Remember on your next bright, clear day that for some the light is a little dimmer, doesn't penetrate as deeply. We all pulse with the fullness then the emptiness of life. Share your light while you may.

Some days are not like all the others.

Jerry Garcia

I was in San Francisco the other day, we stopped for lunch at Cha Cha Cha in my old neighborhood - the Upper Haight or as it is still called Haight-Ashbury. In the summer of 1995 I was living a couple of blocks from the corner of Haight & Ashbury in The City. On August 9th of that summer, Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia passed away of a heart attack while in a drug rehabilitation facility. He was 53.

Around 11 o'clock in the evening, I walked up to Haight Street to see what tributes there might be to the fallen leader of the Grateful Dead. The light poles at the corner of Haight and Ashbury were festooned with garlands. There were pictures of Jerry and the Dead on every stoop and curb. Candles glowed from windows. Lots of kids were sitting on the street listening to Dead tunes coming from a second story window.

Later that night I wrote an email to my friends who could not be there that night. Those words are now long lost but one thing I vividly remember. I painted the picture of Haight-Ashbury 1995, the four corners reflected the changing face of The Haight. Sure there was still the same vintage clothing store on one corner and a t-shirt shoppe full of tie-dye on another; but the other two corners were a brand new Gap and a Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Emporium.

I knew that ice cream shoppe or rather they knew me, I stopped there often enough that the evening crew recognized me. I had given a couple of the scoopers advice on community college classes. I poked my head in that night and one of them waved me over to the counter.

"I've worked here for two years," he said, "we've never run out of a flavor before."

I must have looked at him with a blank, unknowing expression because he continued: 

"Everybody's been buying Cherry Garcia, it's all gone."

There are tributes and there are tributes. I wonder do they still make Wavy Gravy?

Elixir of Nepenthe

Nepenthe (pronounced [nə-ˈpen(t)-thē]) is a medicine for sorrow, literally an anti-depressant – a "drug of forgetfulness" mentioned in literature and mythology. 


Imagine what that would be like, a drug of forgetfulness. My first thought was that it would inevitably be abused. Who would take it? How severe must the trauma be to demand forgetting? Would their be psychological gatekeepers of the nepenthe?

Would a bad break-up be sufficient distress to prescribe the drug? I think not.


The loss of a child. Perhaps, yes. Direct, immediate psychic trauma would meet my criteria. War experiences, torture, physical abuse. But "a medicine for sorrow," we learn so much from our experiences, particularly from death. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, an elderly neighbor; don't these losses prepare us for the truly painful losses. We all have different attachments to friends and relatives, but what if we never learned about death, about how it feels. Yes, we become callous; we call it experience, wisdom; we call it life, the measure of being human.


No, I think nepenthe would have to be saved for those really awful experiences, those that carry such sorrow, such trauma that forgetfulness would be the humane course to recovery.


Surely nepenthe would come in a gilded chalice and possess a bitter yet forgetful taste.