I had a great post for you which will have to wait. Wait until I can get past the tragic news I heard yesterday. My high school classmate Jim Butwin and his family are dead.
Jim and I were classmates. In our senior year we dueled each week for the Wordly Wise spelling test. Each week one of us would outscore the other by a point. I would get a 99% and he 100% and then next it would be reversed. When I won at the end of the school year, Jim, who always sat right behind me (of course I was in the front row) kicked the back of my chair so hard I fell out my seat. "Fuck you," he said.
Jim and I were voted Funniest and Most Demented Sense of Humor for our senior class. We posed for some dumb picture in a trash can of something. While my "demented" sense of humor leaned towards the make-you-blush kind, Jim's was a bit more cruel and sarcastic and I remember more than one girl welling up with tears over his fat or ugly comments.
Flash forward twenty nine years. I have not seen or heard of Jim in these many years. Yesterday a fellow classmate emailed a news article from Tempe, Arizona that Jim, suffering from a recurrence of a brain tumor, pending divorce and $18 million in debt, killed his wife and three kids, then lit his truck on fire with their bodies and his in desert.
I can only imagine what hell he must have been living to do such a thing. I can only think Jim lost the only thing that ever kept him going, his incredible sense of humor.
Dear God, don't let me ever lose mine.
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