JimS.- I realize you said take these facts with a grain, but just for interest's sake I believe the fourth closest star is Banard's Star and it's only about 6 light years away, meaning you would only see 6 years into Earth's past. I think. I love the facts spread though. I've always wanted to know the speed stuff, but never got around to looking it up. Cool. I love that shit.

John - What can I say? I think of you often. Happy Birhtday, my friend!!! Let's see here, I've already told the story about how we met in the restroom at highschool and you introduced yourself by playing your drumsticks on the urinal while I was taking a pee and you asked me to join your band with Dale Bryant. I thought you were a freak then, and I still do now. I should be able to come up with some John story I haven't told a million times.

There's a bunch of police stories I know, like drunkenly falling down the escalator in front of the policeman, and drunk driving a van across a golf course with a bunch of police cars chasing you at an amazing 15 mph until you drove into a sand trap, and losing your job at the carwash when you forgot to lift a lever and knocked the cherries of a police car... Well, I digress. There are too many of those kind of stories to tell and besides, that's all behind you.

There's plenty of drunken stories like, Fat city brawls, the gay nightclub in West Palm, the hot tub incident in Carmel... nevermind... I can't do that to you. ...and you might resort to an eye for an eye.

How about a few good locational memories? The kitchen in Fat City where The Great Condiment War started, where the linoleum drunken water slide was created, where we hung all of our cool artwork.
The band room in Muncie, where you slept with your head on the pillow in your bass drum, where we finally realized the extent of Jimmy's morning grumpiness when he visited once, where we played Revolution for Lisa McMullen, where we had countless parties and wrote many songs.

O.K. all that was just for John's memory, but here's a story about John. Don't worry John it's not about the cancer/jockitch mix-up that you went to the hospital for either.

Actually it's not a ha ha story. It's not even a single event story. It's kinda sappy sentiment. It's an observation about John that changed my life completely. I was always concerned throughout my young adulthood about whether I was good enough to be friends with this or that person or were they good enough to be hanging around me. I had this whole level system going through my head. I used to watch John hang around and have serious discussions with people I considered trash. I saw it as a huge flaw of John's. I didn't realize what emotion I was perpetuating constantly about these people. It was hate. I never bothered actually talking to people to find out about their true character. As time went on and I had more and more life lessons of my own, I discovered that John had always been a saint with strangers. He just seemed to learn that hate wasn't worth it very early on in his life. My level system has almost, but not completely, dissolved by now and it's been a liberating concept for me. I have to say that observing John's empathetic behavior towards others throughout my lifetime has made me a much better person. Thank you John.

P.S. If any gorgeous women got all choked up about that last paragraph, my e-mail is mindevol@hotmail.com. I would love to get together and discuss it in person.