Learned the Truth from Lenny Bruce

I'm home for the next couple of days and have to stop drinking coffee. Actually, I have to stop drinking coffee with creamer in it and since I cannot drink coffee without a boxcar's worth of artificial sweetener and enough creamer to turn the coffee light brown I've stopped. I only drink coffee for the effect, anyway.

We have tea-and we have a variety of them, even Steffi Graf's favorite (says so right on the box). We don't have Tetley's tea bags. I can't remember if they're the folks that had the sayings on the labels attached to the strings on the bags, but whoever that was, they were good too. I'm sitting here at the monitor, paused, trying to remember what the tea bags looked like, as if that would change anything.

I can remember being a child and before going to sleep, finally, attempting to remember every night, every person I knew. Not just the people I had met that day, but all of the people in my entire life (when you're five, not a lot of effort; at fifty-nine maybe more than it's worth). I convinced myself no one ever really dies as long as someone, somewhere, remembered them. I took that job on.

Sitting here drinking my Lipton's Berry Tea, I remember Wednesday as part of my end of every month maintenance I do, going through my email address book and coming across the name of  Bob S, whom I never met but had known for over a decade and who died early last month. I hit the delete key and hurried along but as I sip my adult beverage now, I'm still that kid from then under the covers. What I don't (still) understand is the whole who gets to live and who doesn't part of the equation at the end of the day.

I know a dozen Right Bastards who are in perfect health and may live forever. Point in fact, we'll have to run them down with a truck to reduce them to deceased. And from one minute to the next, Bob's body betrayed him, trapping him for a few days before slowing, powering down and fading to black. He was a TV guy and would have appreciated that reference.

I'm probably on somebody else's RB list-or more than one (I've been busy) and am working very hard to make sure, since I have a ticket, that I get the whole ride. I watched the kids on the far end of the street gathering to catch the school bus-we were supposed to have a bad storm here Wednesday into Thursday and didn't so the kids have to go to school. They're all loud and laughing though when a grow-up walks by they quiet for a moment as they part to let him pass. There's just a tinge of envy in their eyes. They can't wait until they're big like we are. Trust me, you can; you really can.  
-bill kenny