I'm tellin' you, I've spent a hell of a lot more time and energy thinking about and writing these last two entries than it will take anybody to read them.

Tucker's death was totally unexpected; even though everyone who knew him seems to be aware he was not - physically or mentoemotionally - 100 percent since the lingering terminal illness of his father, I don't think anyone saw this coming so abruptly.

Guy and I never personally met. He was pointed to my blog by our mutual friend Jon (the third character in that personal essay I mentioned in the previous post), left some comments which led to a lively e-mail correspondence and a peripatetic telephone relationship. Lately, his e-mailing capabilities had been on the fritz and I really barely have time to use the phone for actual grown-up stuff (doctors appointments and freelance work and stuff like that...) so we hadn't really chatted each other up for quite a while, but through those mutual pals, we kept our antennae out for each other.

By accident, while I was fiddling with trying to recover the older entries from this here joint, I stumbled across a comment he'd left. Of course, I've lost it now, but it said something along the lines of "Now I'm waiting for your book. I did it. So can you!"

He did that; he's disappear for a while, then pop up to compliment me on some offhanded throwaway entry I had made, discovering some magical deep meaning that I could never have seen until he pointed it out, then could never believe I hadn't intended that all the time. I'm really sad now that I never stopped to explicity thank him for that.

A big part of the reason this is/has taken such a long time to compose is this:

Part of me is tortured to try and write something just right, something that will elicit that kind of singing kudos from, well, from Guy.

So there's some weird-ass kind of magical thinking going on here. I'm procrastinating not so much because I'm just plain lazy but because I'm afraid in the back of my mind that if I don't write this well enough, then that will be it, and Guy will still be dead.

How's that for some fucked-up thinking?

Oh well, whatever, never mind. So long, Prince.