So this is life

Every once in a while I start to think about all the crap that I learn every day, and wonder when it will all end. If my theories on life are right then that time will truthfully never come, still sometimes it sems like sensory overload. At times it's nice to just shut down for awhile and retreat into something a little simpler. I was talking to some friends the other day and we began talking about life and all its complexities. We had spent the day putting some hardwood floor into my friend's house. We went to (insert national pizza chain here) for dinner. One of the pizzas ordered was canadian bacon and pinapple. I'm not sure why canadians call it bacon, and apparently neither was the waitress, becuase when she brought it back it had "bacon" bacon on it. Easily understood, anyone could have made the same mistake. Well, my friends wife looked at it and said "are you guys really going to eat that?" It was at this point that I got to expound one of the truisms of the universe. First I said "Ya, it's got bacon on it doesn't it?" She replied, "yes but that's not what we ordered." then she went on about how guys are weird, because we are "simple". I agree. We are simple. We generally like three things. 1-Bacon, which you already knew, 2- Friends, 3- Trucks with flames on them. Look at the next little boy you see and you should notice that we really haven't changed that much. We can't eat as much bacon for fear of the coronary, our friends are still convincing us to do stupid things, and we still love big trucks with flame jobs.

One of my good friends here commited suicide over the thanksgiving weekend. It was on a sunday. I was out of town. The last time I saw him he had invited us over to his house for a fish fry. It was Alaskan Halibut that he had brought back from a recent trip. He was always inviting us over for dumb stuff, and we all loved to go. He had 4 little girls and a wife. He was the nicest peron that I knew. When I moved here we weren't great friends. He thought that I was a cocky punk, which although true isn't the whole picture. Later he figured out that we were alot alike. Two kids who liked bacon, friends, and cars with flames on them. Our whole group of friends here (a bunch of youg married dopes) is pretty much like that.

On that sunday night I got the call from a friend, a Mormon bishop, who thought that I needed to know so I could help his family. I guess I started to think that maybe it was past the time for helping. My friend was addicted to prescription pain killers, and augmented them with some non-prescription pot smooking. We all knew, but we all avoided this subject. Over time, we spent less time with him because of it. It was a cold afternoon after church in Buffalo, Wyoming. His wife had just had a fight with him about his issues. He went out and sat in the bed of his pickup. I gues he was sitting on the tailgate, just like when we were kids. I still remmember how cool it was when dad would let you sit on the tailgate. He just took as many pills as he could, laid back and watched the sky for awhile.

I don't remmeber when I stopped being a little kid, or when my friends were more important than the balance in a bank acount. I don't remmeber the last time I had a fight with my wife, if I started it or if she did. I don't remmeber the last time that I invited my friend over to my house, but I wish I wouldn't have waited till Sunday.