To a great man.

So, this isn't what I am very good at.  I think, if you'll permit me, I am good at a few things.  I think I can lighten the mood at a gathering with a relatively well time jab at someone (oftentimes myself).  I think I can offer advice in the standard situations, the absent boyfriend, the judgmental girlfriend, the overbearing parents, and maybe even as we get older, the rambunctious children.  I think I, as a reasonable man (get off my case), am a decent dispenser of half decent advice.  But in situations like this, I find myself out of sorts.  How does an otherwise healthy, lively, and genuinely nice guy, of 40 years, find himself dead?  The short answer is: I don't know.  Well, I suppose I know what happened...after spending the evening with one of my best friends, Ryan, I have been filled in on the details.  But HOW does is happen?  Let's start off by saying: It shouldn't, and I need to change the subject.

Roy was a real nice guy, and that's not a title I just throw around.  There are a lot of friends I have that are decent human beings, but not too many of them are real nice guys (sorry dudes, but yo now it's true).  I got to know Roy while I was working at a place uptown.  He was like a surrogate family member to a family I happened to hold in (the highest) high regard, and I got to know him through them.  Over the years this fine gentleman charmed me, not only through treating me to drinks, but also through treating me to his outlooks on life.  As an avid reader I connected with him right away; there are very few bartenders in town who can debate the finer points of Kilgour Trout's philosophy, while also discussing Ignatius J. Reilly's popcorn consumption - Roy was one of those few and he took the time, regardless of how packed his bar was, or how packed my section was, to discuss it in detail, always with a luminescent smile.

We spent times in various bars in north york with friends discussing literature and travel, and while admittedly, I wasn't his best friend - there were many who spent more time with him than me, or had known him longer - I aways felt a warm spot for this guy.  He was 40, very well read and very well travelled and 100% enjoyed the life he had carved out for himself (how many among us can say the same?).

Ryan and I talked about Roy tonight, for most of the night.  We talked about what it was that people took pride in, where their life was concerned.  What was it that really drove us?  For some it's an afterlife, for some it is living life to fullest, and for some it's about leaving behind children who carry on one's legacy.  But as we talked, it felt like to me, that in the last seconds of my life, I would like to look back on it, and say "Yup, that'll do!".  Not that I hope to have the greatest life ever lived, but that I hope to have a a life that I was proud to have lived.  In my world view you only get a second to reflect before it is all in the past (becoming a was instead of an is), but if I was him, in that last second, as it slipped away, I would have looked back and said: "Yup, that'll do!".

I hope Roy found peace in the end.  And I hope that my good friends who are going to miss him take a bit of solace in that peace.  And at the end of the day they remember a gentleman who took life seriously enough to make the most of it, but never too seriously that he got bogged down in it.  I look forward to raising a glass with you all this week to a good, scratch that, a great man.  See you soon.

On Going Batshit Crazy

I recently went to a performance of The Double by Dostoevsky at a theatre in Toronto.  I'm not a huge theatre fan, it isn't normally something I would spend my time/money on, but since I am a big Dostoevsky fan and my wife and I happened to see an ad while exiting a local bar, I thought, what the hell.  We got to the theatre separately, I was a few minutes earlier because I had to pick up the tickets and me wife needed to walk my parents back to their car.  My parents aren't invalids or anything but it seems nice to make sure they make it back to their car when they come down to the city to spend time with us.  Once I had picked up our tickets and used the restroom my wife walked in and we got settled in our seats to what was a very unique and entertaining take on The Double.

For those of you not familiar with the story you can check here or you can take my word for it that the story is about a man, Golyadkin, who while going crazy, sees a double of himself outperforming him in society and generally making his own life miserable.  The hero spirals into madness and eventually is carted away by his doctor.  The original is quite dark with glimpses of humour, but the performance was quite humorous with glimpses of darkness.  We both enjoyed the performance thoroughly and spent much of the next day recounting it's finer points and chuckling about poor Golyadkin's reaction to his situation.

Cut to this evening and I was at a party for one of my good friend's birthdays.  He is 33 today and seems to be having a great time of it.  I reconnected with another friend of mine that I haven't see in a few months and we started catching up.  She informed me about her Grandmother who is in the process of losing her mind.  Now, I likely could have been more sympathetic; in fact I think I may have downplayed it too much, and subsequently acted a bit like an ass - I do that sometimes.  This aside, it got me thinking about a topic that I often find myself pondering: what is it like to go crazy?  And is it even possible to have an anser to that question?

I've thought on more than one occasion, often prompted by literature and movies about the prospect of losing my faculties.  What would it be like?  If it like being really drunk?  Does one have moments of clarity in one's madness?  Is it frightening?  Is one able to distinguish when they are "snapping out of it" as one can when truly waking up from a bad dream?  These are all questions that I really don't know the answer to, but am endlessly fascinated by.

I'm going to put forward a thought that I think will be unpopular, maybe even more so than my usual thoughts that land me in hot water with friends and family, and that thought is this: if I was given the opportunity, I would like to go stark raving mad for a few years.  Now, I am 100% sure that one can't choose to go crazy, in fact the very thought may be a contradiction in terms, but if it weren't a logical impossibility I think it would very interesting to - temporarily - go crazy.

The experience of it happening may be completely lost on the sufferer while experiencing it, but it seems to me those moments of clarity would be so rich, and shocking, when they came that there wouldn't be another experience to parallel it.  Also, the matter of "being taken care of" for a few years at an asylum, with only books and one's thoughts to keep you company could be a very interesting proposition as well.  With any luck one wouldn't land at a Cuckoo's Nest like facility but would spend time in a safe environment where the staff cared for them.  Given this condition I think it would be a very interesting experience.  And given the famous people who have ended up this way, it seems that I would be in good company.