Now what?

Today I went to Santa Cruz. I know, there are worse things than to have to drive through the redwoods and go to the ocean. But I can feel the closeness to Halloween now. By going back to where most of my ghosts remain, I can feel their presence and remember their lives.

I drove by the cemetery where Carmella's ashes lay. I went to the ocean where we threw Jay's ashes in between bouts of sea sickness. I drove by the old Santa Cruz AIDS Project office and remembered how many times I had been there, when so many of my friends were still alive. I heard their laughs and felt my sorrow.

It was not a pleasant stroll down memory lane. That lane is too filled with seeing pain and death, seeing and smelling bodies covered in cancer, bodies too weak to continue, no laughs left. They were all too young, we were all too young to see them die.

On the way out of town, I drove by the Denny's. Back in the day, Denny's would give people a free meal on their birthday. Since Gary and I had the same birthday, we would go over there in the afternoon and talk shit about everybody. We would laugh, tell dirty jokes and enjoy our day together. I can't do that anymore. Denny's doesn't offer a free meal and Gary left to be with Chet. And Jay, Gary, the Pineapple Princess, Margaret, Vickie, Randy.

To make it an even better day, I was given the "thanks but no thanks" response to a job I had really hoped to get. I now had a perfect climate for weeping and cleaning, a Mexican holiday.

Tomorrow I will try again on the job market. This sucks. But the Sharks won and Jeffrey Skilling got sentenced to 24 years for his part in Enron. I still have a place to live, everyone is healthy and eventually someone will give me a job. Time to light another candle.