Every time I think to write something here I consider that my time might be better spent working on something for school - I have so much reading to do and papers to write. Why spend time writing something for the blog? No one reads this stuff anyway - then I inevitably lose focus and do something completely unrelated, like play scrabble on facebook or tool around some unmentionable website or other.
What comes to my mind when I do feel like sharing my thoughts here lately is transiency: the passing of time, aging, impermanence, change, death, and people who are no longer here. I know that this recurring theme puts me at risk of sounding like an octogenarian, a morose introspective one at that, but perhaps all of these recent celebrity deaths have something to do with it. Iconic figures from my childhood have been jumping off the edge of existence and into the mysterious dominion of the hereafter. This seems to have been the summer of celebrity casualties – Farrah, Michael, Senator Ted Kennedy, Bea Arthur - just this week we said goodbye to Patrick Swayze and Mary Travers. I’m flooded with remembrances and recollections.
This is morbid, I know, but sometimes I google people from my past and see what I can find. More than a few times I’ve discovered obituaries of people I didn’t know had joined the ranks of the ever after.
Recently I did a google image search and found a couple of pictures of my friend Noel Craig (see above). He was a Broadway actor and was featured in a few issues of After Dark magazine, an arts and theater magazine from the 70’s with a heavy gay leaning. Noel died in the spring of 2002, the same time that I relocated back to New York from California. I didn’t know that he had died and only found out when I tried repeatedly to contact him after my return. Noel was a mentor, a playmate, and a friend. He helped guide me, usually inappropriately, into my adult sexuality. We had a long history as running buddies and though he was just about crazy as they get, one of the many holes in my heart has his name on it.
