tom raze i thought i was your only son. but you have a child who's more than a joke built on a bed of bad intentions. he drew his first breath the year you died. he's as old now as you were then. did you live long enough to see him born? or was he still growing in his mother's womb when you were choking on your own blood in a rented room? everyone who loved you when you were more than a memory loves you still. i don't know what i felt for you. i tried to be your friend. you saw me as an easy mark. someone you could use up and throw away. all i knew of your life were the drugs and the job we shared, the boast about doing time that was probably a lie, and the oil you scraped from your face with your fingertips and held up for me to see. you fashioned grotesque men out of chewing gum and wrote verses between calls. you wanted to flame out like the rappers you idolized. i still have every slip of paper that sailed from your cubicle to mine: forty games of hangman, twenty-three themed word exercises, two collaborative comic strips, twelve you made yourself, and a few random sketches and notes. you never said a thing to me about your father. i don't think you knew him. your uncle's face carried the marks of the man you might have been. my gut tells me he was the closest thing you had to a dad. i can't imagine what your death did to him. after vascular dementia ravaged his mind, they kept him in the secure wing of a nursing home so he wouldn't wander. they took his brushes and paints away when he tried to blur the door of his prison cell into something beautiful. he was gone within a year of being diagnosed. before the end came, when he still had enough strength and guile to engineer those long walks to nowhere, i know it was you he was looking for. 240323 ... Soma you were my first friend and I only wanted to unfriend you. 240324 what's it to you? who go blather from