Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Just one damn thing after another

Finally catching up on email after being away for the weekend and finishing up a chapter of my paper, I found myself reading through news briefs ... Indymedia reporter shot dead in Oaxaca ... thinking "shit, that's awful" and then "wait, Brad Will...is that..." yeah. it was. Brad from New York, the lunatic who stayed inside his Lower East Side squat and tried to face down a wrecking ball. Brad who I used to sleep next to in Seattle. Just one more person I let slip away over the years. I never even knew his real name till I read about him lying on the sidewalk with a bullet in his chest.
I wish I could say that it just inspires me, makes me more determined to keep walking the path I'm on, keep telling the truth about the bastards, but it doesn't. It just makes feel sad, and tired, and old. Wishing that, just once, I could get through this time of year without having to deal with the horrible death of someone I care about.
I've been thinking though, about this conversation we had the first time I met Brad, in Minneapolis in 1999, talking about planting flowers at squats, sowing seeds you'll never see bloom, just because it's a good thing to do, putting a little more beauty in this world.
So I'm just going to try and think about that for a while.
More about Brad: http://www.narconews.com/Issue43/article2223.html
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/bradleywill/archive.html

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