It’s taken me almost two weeks to digest the news, deal with the grief, and process the situation before being able to write about the most recent upheaval in my life. Those of you who know me and read this page on a regular basis have probably been wondering when, or if, I was going to write about it at all.

On Saturday, June 9th, 2001, my long time friend Beau Blain was shot and killed by the Los Angeles Police Department.

I’m not going to go into the details surrounding his death or the events leading up to it here. It’s a long and sad story, and I really don’t have the energy to hash it out again. Suffice it to say that Beau was sick for a very long time, and he was not thinking clearly. He doesn’t have that problem anymore.

This last weekend we said goodbye to Beau. I have mixed feelings about that. It was a horrible thing to do. I didn’t want him to be dead. I didn’t want to be there talking about him in the past tense. It all seemed like some sort of out-of-body experience that if I tried very hard I could snap out of. I wanted so badly for him to walk into the room and laugh over how he had pulled one over on us yet again.

That didn’t happen, though, and like it or not I had to accept the fact that Beau had shuffled off his mortal coil.

At the same time, however, I had more fun that weekend than I have had in a long time. I saw people I haven’t seen in years. We reconnected. We shared old times. We hung out in my hot tub and drank too much and laughed at how stupid and silly life is. We reaffirmed how much we loved each other, and how wonderful it was to just be ALIVE. It was truly incredible, and something I’ve needed for a long time now.

For those of you who knew Beau, I’m going to reiterate something here that I said at his funeral. If you had told him 10 years ago that at the age of 28 he was going to die in a hail of bullets after leading the LAPD on a 40 mile car chase, he would have thought it was pretty fucking cool. As a matter of fact, when and if you meet him in the afterlife, I’m pretty sure those are going to be the first words out of his mouth.

If I take anything from this, it’s that our friends are more important to us than we can realize on a conscious level. Take a moment to reflect on your friends, and if there is someone who means something to you or has made an impact on your life, take a moment to let them know. They might need to hear it, and you never know if you’ll get another chance to tell them.