In the Beginning

The big deal today is Skaler's funeral. Actually, his funeral is Monday. Sal and I will be driving out to Sunwest for it. The obituary says Skaler had four good friends. I'm not listed as one of them. The church I go to isn't mentioned either, though Skaler had been attending it for two years before the afternoon a couple of months ago when he decided he had had enough, went AWOL from the hospital where he was a patient, and into the wind.

There are lots of parallels between my life and Skaler's. I should go into that. Not now.

Come Monday morning, as I say, Sal and I will be driving out to Sunwest. That's a five hour drive there and another five hours back. In the car we will listen to her music and my music. My music at the moment is the latest Bob Dylan CD--Together Through Lfe or whatever it is called--and a CD of Theme Time Radio 1 that Alvin burned for me. That's the radio program that Bob Dylan hosts. Alvin is my 13-year old son. I'm 63. Sal is 44. Skaler made it to 50 and then thought that was enough fighting for one lifetime. Bob Dylan is sixty-seven.

Sal thinks it was really clever of me to guess the method Skaler would use to do away with himself, how he would set himself up with enough provisions to walk into the woods, more or less comfortably. It was cold out there. There was still snow on the ground in March. When the provisions ran out, he might have turned around and started to trek back, but it would have been too far. He would have designed it that way. I was probably thinking of the kid in the what'cha'm'call it movie, the one that meant so much to Mick. Maybe Skaler saw that movie; he caught a lot of flicks. I wonder if Mick realizes Skaler was a kindred spirit, a fellow outdoorsman?

Come to think of it, Sal didn't say I had been clever; she said remarkable. She said it was remarkable that I would have got to know Skaler well enough to intuit the death he would choose for himself, considering how few our conversations had been over the couple of years he was coming to church. Sal wanted me to know she thought I was a sensitive guy.

I do indeed think of myself as intuitive. I can accept remarkable.

A downside of being nuts, nuts the way I am nuts anyway, is that you can't help other people who are distressed. You don't really believe in their pain anymore than the others believed in your pain. Or something. If I had it to do again, I'd dump this madness guise as fast as possible, never take it on as an identity, cut it at the root and dump all its crazy subdirectories too.

Well, "as fast as possible" means slow patient work. Maybe that's what I've been doing these last sixty years. As fast as I create, Mobojobo erases. As fast as Mobojobo erases...well, more on Mobojobo and me later perhaps. I don't mean to sound despairing though. It was Skaler who bumped himself off; I'm still here, friends.