reminder 29.07.06 4:36 p.m.
Wake up and go out for breakfast. We live in our minds. We exist in world we create with our conciousness out of what we can see and touch, and then we read the news. Go shopping for groceries; as the bagger stuffs a can of chick peas into a sack, the phone rings. Until this second, your world, your day, was made up of your partner, your food, the sun and a crooked shopping cart wheel. Remember the real world, all those other people? Remember people you haven't seen in a while? Remember how cool each individual you've ever known was? Think. Think hard, and do something worthwhile with it, because the phone call might be about death.
I knew this guy. He was sweet and funny - freaking hilarious, in fact - and he got it. He just got it, that thing that not everyone gets, and we each knew the other got it too when we'd talk, and that's a part of why he was so cool.
I knew Jason in CEGEP, and he was so cheerful and optimistic and quirky. I didn't see him again for a year or two when he moved to Quebec City, but when he came back I got to share fried chicken and forties in the park with him. He joined the Black Watch Reserves, and he then wasn't around so much anymore. Sometimes there'd be months between visits, then years. The last time I saw him was a long time ago, but like always, he was grinning, showing off his latest ink work, and making me laugh.
We kept saying we'd hook up for a beer when he was in town proper. But you know how it is, you take that sort of thing for granted. You don't really expect someone you know, someone who's cool and loves life to get killed before his thirtieth birthday by a suicide bomber.
I'm not in hysterics; I didn't know him inside-out, I didn't stay in touch with him much, and we were never best friends. He was just a cool guy I knew who deserved to go out in a better way, at another time.
I recently finished reading a Douglas Coupland novel before loaning it to a friend, who said she found the characters "too self-involved." I always wondered what that meant, and why it was a bad thing. Not everyone is a philanthropist, right? At the end of the day, do we really have more than the thoughts in our individual minds? But it hits me now: this isn't happening to me. It happened to a cool guy I knew. It happened to his family, his best friends (one of whom I know, and feel for). What happened to me is that I took it for granted. What happened to me is that I got a wake up call to appreciate more than the world I compose of the tangible, immediate, each day.
Reminder: people die, things get blown up. Do more than soak them in, soak them up. Be something to be soaked up. Do not take things for granted.
Jason is dead now, but he was someone to be remembered by a girl he hasn't heard from in about two years or more. Be as cool as that. Everyone, be that cool, contribute that much. This is more than a world of squeaky shopping carts; things blow up.
listening:
reading:
ingesting:
(see entries before 20.11.05)
previously on Smothered Hope:
unreal - 20.05.08
in which our narrator kinda just babbles on a bit - 15.05.08
drank several margaritas last night. they were great. - 04.05.08
spacey - 29.04.08
i will most definitely regret posting this in public - 28.04.08