Mr E Mann

So here it is, early Saturday morning when only the extremely dedicated of the bunch are rising to meet the challenges of the day or are still awake after "keeping watch" through the night. We hadn't spent any of these together over the past few years, but there was a time, in another life that the passage of Friday into Saturday could not be marked without doing some "hanging out" with one Eric Mann.

We would mostly inebriate away our insecurities and fears, celebrate our favorite literary, television, movie, and musical obsessions, and ponder what it meant to be alive. A real life philosophical discussion about the meaning of life, a political rant of epic proportions, a declaration of the unreality of everything beyond our immediate perception, nothing was off limits, we fed our demons with reckless abandon. We were the worst of influences on one another, and that is what made it as inevitable as the sunrise that we would be friends.

My heart is heavy that we hadn't been as close as we were as young men, I think we both knew that life works that way, we meet, we mingle, we befriend, we migrate, we drift, intersections become fewer between us all until they are as infrequent and random as strangers.

To say that I am having a hard time accepting that you are gone would be an understatement. I find myself longing to hear just once more how we are "getting fucked, fucked right in the asshole" by some government, corporate or personal demon, to laugh at the sheeple blindly following the rules that will turn them into cannon fodder for the war machine, to pass between us the understanding that this moment is all that we have. I want to see a sunrise one more time, to awkwardly and stiffly hug to mark the end of our journey together.

Thank you for staring into the darkness with me and being my friend, thank you for understanding those broken parts of me that will never be fixed, thank you for the adventures and for the encouragement to rebelliously believe differently as a matter of principle.

Travel well my friend, know that you are loved and missed and that I am "crying like a little bitch." ;)