RIP -- BC
Today was a quiet day for the most part. Then, a little while ago, I got an email from GK letting me know that this morning, her brother BC passed away in his sleep. Exact cause unknown; because it occured at his home, there will be an autopsy, but he was morbidly obese, had sleep apnea and heart attacks run in his family. He was 51--would've been 52 next week.
I feel really unsettled by this. I don't know that I would go so far as to call it grief, because it's years since we've been close, but there is definitely a hole in my universe. We go clear back to our mutual senior year of high school. He took me to senior prom, with NJ's (his then-girlfriend-now-widow's) permission.
We hung out; we saw a lot of movies, often with NJ, and the only drive-in movie I ever went to was with BC. (It was a double feature of High-Ballin' and Smokey and the Bandit.) It was always platonic, because I wouldn't do that shit to a girlfriend---but his family became my family as mine disappeared. He's the one who introduced me to S, and through her, to J.
In a daisy-chain of events, my friendship with BC has led me to where I am now. It was baby-sitting his kids that got me into comics, gaming and LARPing, which is how I met Mb. My phone career was initiated when S's SIL told me they were hiring at the answering service she worked for. Mb and I met through gaming, and realized that we both worked at the directory assistance call center. Then it was her who told me about the opening at the medical billing service.
I have so many memories of BC over the years, good and bad. The way he lived on peanut butter sandwiches and root beer the time his parents left him alone one weekend. His first computer, one of those cheapo Texas Instruments jobbies that you had to hook up to a TV for a monitor and a tape recorder as a hard-drive. His passion for Star Trek: TOS (Spock was his high school nickname), and how his dream job for a few years was at the local planetarium. Being at KSC to watch the first shuttle launch.
The less pleasant memories...I don't have the original Latin version, but there's a saying: Of the dead, say only what is good. He had his faults, but they're moot now.
He wasn't religious in the least, but I'm pretty sure he leaned toward agnostic rather than atheist. I don't know how he imagined the Hereafter, but I seriously doubt harps and halos figured into it. I think, if the "many mansions" of Heaven are reflections of our ambitions, that he coalesced in a cloud of sparkles onto a teleporter pad, ready to go on to some great adventure in a distant galaxy.
Good-bye, Bryan. Rest in Peace.
.
I feel really unsettled by this. I don't know that I would go so far as to call it grief, because it's years since we've been close, but there is definitely a hole in my universe. We go clear back to our mutual senior year of high school. He took me to senior prom, with NJ's (his then-girlfriend-now-widow's) permission.
We hung out; we saw a lot of movies, often with NJ, and the only drive-in movie I ever went to was with BC. (It was a double feature of High-Ballin' and Smokey and the Bandit.) It was always platonic, because I wouldn't do that shit to a girlfriend---but his family became my family as mine disappeared. He's the one who introduced me to S, and through her, to J.
In a daisy-chain of events, my friendship with BC has led me to where I am now. It was baby-sitting his kids that got me into comics, gaming and LARPing, which is how I met Mb. My phone career was initiated when S's SIL told me they were hiring at the answering service she worked for. Mb and I met through gaming, and realized that we both worked at the directory assistance call center. Then it was her who told me about the opening at the medical billing service.
I have so many memories of BC over the years, good and bad. The way he lived on peanut butter sandwiches and root beer the time his parents left him alone one weekend. His first computer, one of those cheapo Texas Instruments jobbies that you had to hook up to a TV for a monitor and a tape recorder as a hard-drive. His passion for Star Trek: TOS (Spock was his high school nickname), and how his dream job for a few years was at the local planetarium. Being at KSC to watch the first shuttle launch.
The less pleasant memories...I don't have the original Latin version, but there's a saying: Of the dead, say only what is good. He had his faults, but they're moot now.
He wasn't religious in the least, but I'm pretty sure he leaned toward agnostic rather than atheist. I don't know how he imagined the Hereafter, but I seriously doubt harps and halos figured into it. I think, if the "many mansions" of Heaven are reflections of our ambitions, that he coalesced in a cloud of sparkles onto a teleporter pad, ready to go on to some great adventure in a distant galaxy.
Good-bye, Bryan. Rest in Peace.
.