An Unfenced Existence

Today I buried an old friend that I had long since lost touch with. I saw him occasionally at parties and such the like, but me being a loner by trade meant that I didn't rub elbows with him often. That being said, I felt it important to attend, because we used to be friends way back in high school.

My memory is slowly, but surely, deteriorating. Most of my childhood is a blur with only a few really traumatic times remaining. Elementary school? We moved so much I can't even keep them straight. Middle school? Almost completely gone. And now high school is slowly slipping away into the haze.

I don't have very many memories where Griff plays a significant role. I remember we used to share a table at lunch. I can remember his laugh. I remember his smile. I remember him in the play he, Christian and Adam put on - The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) as their senior production. I can remember graduation. I vaguely remember him in middle school because his mom would come in every year and educate everyone on Hanukkah and Jewish traditions. I can remember him playing basketball. More recently I remember him at Christian's wedding. I remember seeing him at a couple of random parties. I remember him talking with Mike Pennington, whose own funeral I was unable to attend, the year before I went to England. I remember saying, "Hi." I remember seeing him at Christian and Jackie's anniversary/baby shower. So many random moments that would have been seemingly of very little significance in the long run, but will now be the sum total of all of my memories of this person who was taken from us all to soon.

And now, of course, his funeral. It didn't really hit me that I would never see him again until I sat down in the pew at the sanctuary waiting for his service to start. Instead of sitting with my brothers, I saw with another old high school friend, Annie. And while I probably won't remember what the rabbi said or contents of his mom's or Robert's speeches were, I will remember being amazed at how many people were there and thinking, God, if only he knew how many people would come to his funeral, about how many lives he had touched in some way, however small, maybe, and were honored to be there and were honored to know him however briefly, just maybe he would have reached out to one of them, instead of his gun. I don't think I'll ever forget his mother's anguish and fury at her son's death.

I hate the fact that my last real memory of him, the one that I'll remember ten, twenty, thirty years from now, is of me pouring a shovel of dirt onto the lid of his coffin.

Goodbye, Griffin. May we meet again in the next life.

Just got back from Pender - Baby's back in overnight care at the recommendation of my regular vet at SEAVS.

This morning was awful. I went to visit before work and he just laid in my lap, breathing hard, occasionally grunting in pain, very limp. Even his whiskers were droopy. The good news was that he was no longer stiff limbed, but the bad news was that they couldn't seem to manage his pain levels. If I moved him too much his back legs would stiffen up and he would grunt, so I'm thinking it's more of a pain reaction then anything else. He didn't seem to recognize me when I was there. I pretty much cried the entire time I was there (I don't deal with trauma stress well. Like, at all. I cry. A lot.) so I didn't talk to him much, but I did hold him and pet him and tried to hum at him a bit. He likes it when I sing.

But eventually I had to leave to go to work. So I placed him back in the cage, said my goodbyes, washed my face and ran out the door. I was running late, so I had to skip breakfast (my plan was to get Starbucks). As I was coming in, I met up with my new boss, Bob, was going in too, so I told him what had happened and he said, "If you need to go do something with your ferret, just go, no worries."

I get a call at 8:30 to come pick him up to be taken back to SEAVS as it would be best for them to give daily care since they know what went wrong. That was a verrrrry long trip. I didn't get back to the office until 10. At that point Baby had perked up a smidge and since I was driving him, I could sing to him. I looked over a couple of times, and sang to him and he would look at me intently with his head up. Once I stopped, he would put his head back down and close his eyes.

And of course I had fucking Our Lady Peace on and I was choking out lyrics like, "You are my life" and "Mother will you think of me in your prayers/This 21st century is a mess/Oh you can try to fix it/But it breaks..." and even "Might not make it home/Can't leave here tonight/Not afraid to live/Not afraid to die/And hey, leave a light on for me." Pretty shitty time for the MP3 player to stop working without any other CDs in the car. Singing about cheerful butterflies riding on sparkling winds would have been waaaaaaay preferable.

So I go about my day not doing a whole hell of a lot because there's NOTHING TO DO but surf the web, thinking everything is fine. Around 2:30 I start getting a funny feeling that something is not quite right in the world. I started feeling slightly suffocated, my left arm went numb, and my heart started to pound (it was the same feeling I got right before I was laid off). I ignored it successfully for about thirty minutes and then I just couldn't take it anymore - I had to call SEAVS. I just knew something was wrong with Bear.

So I call and yup, something is wrong with Bear. He still has all of the same problems he had when I took him back over but now he had blood in his pee and what sounded like fluid in his lungs/chest cavity. And then the vet said the dreaded words no one wants to hear about a loved one: there's a good chance he's going to pass on. There were a whole bunch of qualifiers and caveats to that, but the moment she said that it was all I could think about.

There is one thing I've learned this summer that I don't think I'll ever forget - it's fucking hard to drive while you're crying. This was the second time in two months that I found myself driving home in tears.

So I made it home in record time AND in one piece (a minor miracle considering I was bawling almost the entire time) and got ready to go back out again. Before I left I made sure to play with Vincent who has been vacillating between "'Hi, my name is Cloud Stife' depressed" and "'My teeth, let me show you them' anger". He really, really misses Baby. In the interim Dad came home so I told him what was going on and he offered to drive me to SEAVS so I can visit with Baby and take him to Pender.

So we leave about 5:15ish and get there around 6:00ish and go to see him. He looked much better. He was still have the same problem, but he looked more alert and his whiskers were no longer droopy. I brought an old t-shirt with me from the cage so that he could smell Vincent and hopefully be comforted by that. He still wasn't moving much, but he did respond to my voice and petting. In fact, when I left the room, he tried to crawl over to my dad when he couldn't find me anymore. He also eventually curled up as much as he could into the shirt.

And he peed on me. A lot. Which was actually good, because we could see that the blood in his urine was no longer there. He's still breathing hard and he seems to be in a lot of pain, but we're very cautiously optimistic that he's on the mend. I'm hoping and praying that it's not one of those last moments of feeling as normal as possible before dying as some pets do. So, yeah, very very cautiously optimistic. It's now a waiting game.

What the vet is thinking it was was that he had a delayed allergic reaction to the anesthesia, which caused his body to overheat (over 107 degrees) yesterday which sparked his laundry list of problems. We're still concerned that there might be neurological problems.

Anyway, guys, thanks so much for your support and thoughts. I really appreciate it.

The person I'm replacing encouraged me today to bring stuff to do. Like...books or my PSP or something. I'm beginning to dread this assignment. I hate, I absolutely hate, being bored at work.

...the people are friendly, at least? I guess?

It's only four months, it's only four months, it's only four months...(rinse, repeat, ad nauseum)

Since I've been here (here being R-MWC), I've been asked by my various friends to update my livejournal. Well, I wondered what I should say that would be profound and something that they haven't heard yet. I mean, do they really need to relearn about my course changes and scheduling issues and loan problems? No, not really. Most of the people that care I talk to everyday. And it occured to me while I was laying in bed with a vicious headache that most of them don't really know my philosophy on life and what I think about people in generally.

What I think about people, in general, is actually not very nice, pretty, or sugar coated. Now, I'm not thinking of a specific person or persons when I say this, but my idea of people and humanity on the whole. I first formed this idea when I lived in Fort Belvoir, a military base in Northern Viriginia. We had just moved there from Pennsylvania where we were staying with my mother's parents for a few months after we left New York. Fort Belvoir was not a good place to live. My fther was the highest ranking officer in the neighborhood, so my brothers and I were picked on a lot. Teased, ignored, slandered, and just all around fucked over by our peers.

If any of you who know me now knew me then, you probably wouldn't recognize me at all. I used to be a very different person, very outgoing, gregarious, and happy. A little reserved perhaps, but that just happens when you move around all the time. I was a lover of the outdoors, of sports, and of people. I used to have actual ideals about humanity in general. Hah. I'm none of those things anymore. Any of them. They were beaten out of me when I lived in Fort Belvoir, literally, emotionally, and almost physically. And at this hellhole is when I formed all of my opions about people in general.

1. People are not to be trusted in any way, shape or form. There will always be someone to fuck you over in the end. And that someone will most likely be your closest "friend" and/or confidant. This was the hardest lesson for me to learn, for I used to be a very trusting soul. I was always taught that people were trustworthy and all that rot. No. They're not, most of them don't even come close. Whether it is telling the truth or lieing or being scheming sons of bitches, they're not trustworthy. You can't put an ounce of trust in anything they say, do, or say they do becuase you'll never know. You never know when you run into that one person who made some kid's life hell back in the grade school years. About the only people you could trust were priests and nuns (or various other religious types). But suddenly, they couldn't be trusted anymore. Suddenly there's priests touching little boys in the "briefs" area. No, people are not to be trusted.

2. In the end, all people want to do is use you for something. This should have been an easy lesson to learn, but oddly enough, it wasn't. Or more acurrately, it was learned, but never heeded, really. And it is something I still struggle with today. I tend to give way more of myself than is strictly necessary to my friends. It's my way of showing my trust to those people I deign to know something about them. I also tend to give and give and give and never receive anything in return. Any fucking thing. And I know some people are reading this thinking, "It's a friendship, it'll come back to you in the end." Yeah, fucking, right. This happened far more in high school than it does now, but I still do it now. Last semester (hell, last year) was a stunning example of this. God.

3. People tend towards the cruel. Whether it's by "accident" or not, they have the tendency to turn into this horrible monsters that no one really likes. I'm not excluding myself out of this rule either. Children are quite possibly some of the cruelest creatures on the face of this planet, and what's so cruel about it is it's either completely thoughtless or meticulously planned to hurt or kill. It stands to reason that I harbor an intense disliking for anyone over the age of a year and under the age of 18. But cruelty still runs rampant in everyone, whether they realize it or not. Thoughtless cruelty is one of the worst offences a person can make in my book. Snapping at people without thinking about what you're saying...those are the ones can cut the deepest.

4. Well there was a fourth point but I can't think of it at the moment.

Ok, so you've learned what I learned about people in general. Now imagine that you learned this when you were about six or seven. Before fourth grade. Hell, I wasn't even thinking about puberty at this point. I've learned that angst about the world and people and "why the hell don't they like me?" tends to be a teenage thing. I went through all of that before I was ten. Now, admittedly, my view of the world and people has changed over time, but not by much. I'm no more trusting of strangers now than I was before. I'm still a very hard person to get to know (much less like...), in fact as I get older, the harder it gets.

Gah, now this really does sound like teenage angst. Oh well.I never said that my mind was pretty.