I should be better at keeping these up...

I should start recording the little events of life here again. That's what it's for, after all.

So, before I forget, as I look up at the date, it occurs to me that today is the anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffey, and Ed White in 1967, if I'm not mistaken.

Tuesday night, Larry came over. He brought loads of DVDs with him... the whole Johnny Quest collection, Invader Zim volumes I and II, a few others. A little after seven, the phone rang. Turned out it was Dave over in Dublin. Yeah, Ireland. He was soused, and had three euros left on his cell phone card, so while he stood at the edge of a field waiting for a cab, he just up and phoned me. The conversation was kind of disjointed, and given that we'd never spoken a word to each other before, it took me about 15 seconds just to figure out who it was. All in all, kind of weird, but funny. We're living in a remarkable age, when you think about it.

Larry stayed over, but we didn't get up to anything. We haven't for a long time now. That's cool; it's not the nature of our relationship anymore. Still, when we came out of the apartment in the morning while one of my Chinese neighbours was waiting for the elevator, I remember wondering what assumptions he was making. How ironic that where he once would have been right, he now would have been mistaken to assume it was what it looked like.

Today's Thursday and I mean to finish copying the John Weldon video I got out of the library (due back tomorrow). If I don't, I have to phone them up and renew, and to me, that's just admitting I was too lazy to manage it in a week. Tomorrow night I'm supposed to go out to the Monk and Firkin with P-Doug about 8:30. I like those times with P-Doug. I can talk about things I don't get to talk about with anyone else. The beer's not that great for my gut or my wallet, but it's kind of "our" place now. Be better in the summer when it's warmer, though. Still, I'd like to drop about twenty pounds by then. I'm working on it... I'm working on it. ;)

Saturday I'm going to down Parkdale to hang around at Tan's, likely with Roc. I'm looking forward to that too. We were talking about doing it last week but the weather didn't cooperate. I told Roc if we were getting 6" of snow during the day, I wasn't driving down there. He offered to pick Tan up and bring him to my place. I didn't want to say anything, but if I wasn't going to hit the roads, with 17 years of driving experience, what made him think it was such a hot idea with a little over a year's worth? I told him, nah, wait till next weekend. This weekend looks like better weather, if colder. It's been almost mercilessly cold the last couple of weeks around here. I sure hope we get a warm, early spring. We deserve it.

All the while in the background is the knowledge that Jody's dad, Jim, is undergoing treatment for cancer again. He has this interesting, often confounding outlook on it... at once, resigned to the desperation of it, and yet still determined to beat it. It's almost like talking to two different people at once. I'm scared for him, the same way I was for Jody... it's the same. I can't admit the likely eventuality. It feels like treason to do that, as though my hope and good intentions made some material difference in the world, and withdrawing them would make the events they supposedly guard against more likely. It's a strange, superstitious way to live your life; it defies the sort of logical outlook I like to imagine I have. Makes a lie of it. But there it is. That's who I am. I look at the picture of Jody I have here at my desk — something I never had while he was alive — and I'm more acutely aware of him now than I was all those years he was a young man in good health with decades ahead of him to share with me. And so now all that is transferred to Jim; it becomes his inheritance... a reversal of fate, something handed down from son to father... the aching regard of some distant, powerless little man. I can't stop imagining talking to him years from now, though he's the first to gently remind me that's unlikely. Isn't it odd that the one more immediately facing the darkness has more courage than the one for whom the end is still nebulous?

Simon sent around this list of goofy questions. You fill it out and send it out to friends, and they do the same. Supposedly you learn things about them by this. What you really learn is which questions evoke snappy answers in which person. But in the course of it, a few people teased Alan about his recent (i.e., married fatherhood) incommunicativity (is that even a word? Well, it is now...). This morning he sent me e-mail with his work phone number, so I called him when I got in and we talked for about fifteen minutes. We're supposed to link up Friday next week. I sure hope we do... it's been about a year, maybe more, since I've seen him. A far cry from 1999, when I saw him every workday and often on weekends.

Whew.