The Moose in the Closet: No Thing, My Job and On the Way Down: The Lack of Communication

I did not get to do a Here’s the Thing… for this week. I have skeletons for three articles but never fleshed them out. I was going to try to put it together but I was out drinking tonight and need to get up early tomorrow – it would be rushed. Quality, you know? Next week. I’m going to Myrtle Beach for the weekend and plan on getting some serious writing done. But, I do have…

A lot of people ask me what I do, as an editor. In an attempt to show you the superior quality of the Elk’s Run Bumper Edition I’m going to prove to you that my job is more than just proof-reading. I present my piece for the Bumper Edition, currently being solicited in previews (order #AUG053101 ). In addition to my piece the Bumper Edition also has the first three issue of Elk’s Run, a new Darwyn Cooke cover, original Noel sketches, a forward by Steve Niles, a Datsun Tran cover gallery and a piece on the coloring process by Keating. It’s basically packed with thirty-five metric tons of awesomeness. If you read the piece below (laid out by the always rocking Jason Hanley) and say to yourself “I can use something like that” feel free to contact me (for an editor) or Jason Hanley (for a letterer) and either of us would be glad to help you out.

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I’m hoping that by today you’ll see where this is going, or at least get an idea. I’ll be concluding this particular story sometime in the future, before the one year mark, obviously. Next week – back to the funny. I've decided on the theme: “A Decade of Dancing.” It will be fun.

This whole week is basically one big story that continues a longer story. You can click back if you want to catch-up. Monday has the whole collection of links. Not a great week for newbs, this is more of a pay-off week. This is like starting Watchmen at issue 11 minus Cold War fears and fake alien invasions (SPOILERS!). Feel free to check out the "Best of" to see if you like it here first. Yesterday’s story.

Uncle Alex was always a great man; he just didn’t always make the right decisions. He was a heroin addict back in the day that realized he wasn’t going to quit in New York, moved out to Arizona where his uncle straightened him out. He moved his girlfriend out to Arizona, got married and started a family. He did well for himself, cleaned up 100% and did the right thing. He was always funny, always compassionate and always there for me (he was my Godfather, by the way) – he just stumbled a little along the way.

To say that his past caught up with him is an understatement. His past ran right over him. I’ve talked before about him, about how only my father (and his immediate family, obviously) knew that he had HIV and how he always said that everyone knows what he’s done in the past - if they wanted to know if he had HIV they’d ask. It was partly his way of being strong, of not making people worry, but you have to wonder to what extent he wanted to us some type of lesson? Not a malicious one, but one that would wake us all up a little bit. Right up until the end I didn’t ask and my father respected Uncle Alex’s wishes until after he was dead. I think something needs to be said about communication and how our family always fights over stupid shit that can just be talked out. If anything, Uncle Alex proved to us that we don’t communicate at all.

I had no excuse not to ask him or my father. Especially not at the end, when everyone was going to Arizona. For the lot of you that’ve been with this blog from the beginning, you pretty much know that I’ve been through this already with my cousin Stephen. It fucked me up good and you’d think I’ve learned something from it but, apparently some lessons don’t keep the first time around.

For me, it threatened not to stick the second time around either.

Here I was. Two good friends no longer in BU (one of them finding God and calling me lost), girlfriend dumped me. The relationship between me and two of my best friends was strained because I was unable to handle a really bad situation they had to deal with. My t-shirt company failed. And a summer that started with a dream that I thought was going to come true, filling me with delusions of warped grandeur involving aliens, God and mystery girls, ended with my Godfather, uncle, roll model and great man dying while I opted to stay in Boston and blow it off as “only pneumonia”. If I was smart and learned my lesson I would have communicated. Found someone to talk to. Go home with my family that needed me. Just talked it out. But I was selfish, to say the least, and I tried to pass my problems onto everyone else.

I chomped a big bottle of Tylenol PM combined with my leftover doctor prescribed meds from my penis swelling incident, chased it down with a lot of alcohol and went to sleep.

I now know the medical reason as to why I’m here right now. The combination I took had less than a one percent chance of working (although I have a higher probability of suffering from kidney failure sometime down the line), it was such a Hollywood attempt. But that’s not the point.

The point is, when I woke up, everything changed.

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No Thing, My Job and On the Way Down: The Lack of Communication

Thursday, August 25, 2005

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