richard_laviolette raze i was listening to dave and adam on cjam last night. a repeat of saturday's show, since i don't catch them live anymore. dave started talking about a writer who died young. for a second i thought it was me. i thought i was dead and i just didn't know it. that would explain some things. maybe for some of us there's no heaven or hell. nothing changes. you just go on as you were before, still alive in some stranger's dream. but it wasn't me who was gone. it was you. when a voice on the fm dial tells me someone's dead, it doesn't do a thing to me. sometimes i already know. sometimes i don't. i shrug without moving my shoulders. a sort of sad internal slouch. that's all. this time it was different. i started walking toward the radio before i knew what i was doing. like it was a person. like i thought it could tell me more than it had to give. "what the fuck?" i said. the same neurological disorder that took your mother away seven years ago did its work on you until you decided to die on your own terms. you were one year older than me. you grew up north of where you landed, in a yellow house with bats in the attic. you ran around and fished in rivers and planted potatoes. you played in a cover band called the crappy roommate for a year before finding your own voices. you had two of them. one was soft and sweet and a little rough around the edges. the other was a paper-ripping scream. you left the louder sound behind in search of something crawling toward the country music you learned to love as a child. but that was the voice that spoke to me the most. the song of yours i always sing in my head when i think of you is a wall of electric guitars and leather-lunged howls. every drum hit a fist pounding on my chest hard enough to bruise my heart. the lyrics are a series of questions: "do all the words that leave my mouth disappear soon after? has anything i've ever said stayed around to mean it? do sentences that i make up make up their own meaning? do all the people i talk to use the same thesaurus? if no one in the world can share thoughts of how we're feeling, then what on earth are we to do? what is there to live for?" i reached out once to let you know what your music meant to me. you never reached back. i loved you anyway. 230918 what's it to you? who go blather from