Just Some Stuff

I'll start with an update to The Latest in that the brand name pills appear to be working.  After the first couple of days there have been no symptoms over nearly a month, a longer period than leading up to this change.  Still, the whole thing is unpredictable, nobody really knows why the disease happens, how it works, or why some drugs seem to help.  Who knows what things may come?

We went on holiday to Cahuita in Costa Rica, our favorite place to be.  This wasn't a risky decision, we had been there before and loved it, but we hadn't gone somewhere together with the sole purpose being to have a nice time.  Previously we had been seeing family, or friends, or a side effect of a business trip, so we hadn't gone on a proper holiday in several years.  My only concern is that we had previously left the darkness of winter in the north for the warm sun of the tropics, while this time we were leaving from essentially the same weather to where we were arriving.

It was simply delightful.  So beautiful, so calm, so friendly.  We had our honeymoon suite, a wooden room with corrugated iron roof and a tiled bathroom, and a balcony with a view over the bay.  We saw amazing natural sights, from a lion fish on a coral reef to pelicans diving for fish, to a sloth ten feet away, to the herding of bait fish into a ball by tarpon, and more and more and more....

The driving was a different matter.

Finally, someone who I had known, someone who was in a band with me for a few months, someone I would see very intermittently, who I was friends with on facebook, blew his brains out.  As soon as I heard he was dead suicide was my first thought.  Over the last year he had got married and divorced, he had apologized to people in general for his behavior, he suffered from bad migraines.  He worked for the TSA and was one of the people furloughed during the government shutdown and was pawning his stuff to pay his mortgage.  I imagine him that last night, worried about losing his house, unable to sleep from the pain of a migraine, depressed and alone, where there was no hope he could find.  He had always been kind to me.

Perhaps I'm just not someone for weeping about death.  Perhaps I have been around enough tragedy.  Perhaps I have reached somewhere secure enough that sad things can happen and I can accept them.  This is the second person I have known to kill themselves in the last three years and I take it as a new fact of life and keep going, although just as with everything, I think about it.