Talk about the Circle of Life

I think there is a good reason why "crazy" is such a common adjective, response, random utterance in the world (or at least my part of the world) today. It is fairly often the only way to describe and or react to a great number of things.

On Sunday, I had a run in around 2 in the afternoon with some random dog walking guy. Actually, Perren , his mom and our dogs had the initial run in with him, in which our dogs startled him and his little dog coming out of Caroles garage. Our dogs were excited by the presence of this little dog on a leash and ran right up, I didn't see it but imagine all the dogs startled each other. The guy saw our 2 dogs and COMPLETELY lost his shit. I heard his screams of "NOOOOOOOO, NOOOOOOOOO!!" and wondered if my dogs were ripping the flesh off of his right before his eyes. No, indeed they were not. His little dog managed to slip out of its collar, and he scooped it up and really, other than everyone being startled, nothing happened. Certainly no dogs were hurt or anything close. This guy refused to acknowledge any of us 3 people apologizing and making sure all was ok, when he was maybe 10 feet away he angrily said "fuck you" without even turning around to direct it at anyone. When we went and got in our car, the guy was down the block and I simply could not let it go, fuck him, was all i kept thinking, and i really wanted to let him know that, so I chased him down and I did. After an obscenity filled exchange, I got back in the car shaking, hating people like that guy (miserable fuckheads), and wishing i had said even more than i did.

We were on our way to stop by a cook out at a friends new place, a group of perrens friends he has known his whole life. We stayed for a bit watching the browns lose and then went home in time for me to get to yoga. At the cook out was a woman I had met once before at a pool party in June, her name is Sylvie and she had moved to cleveland in june working via Americorps. Her best friend is the girlfriend of one of perrens friend and Sylvie had begun dating his brother upon relocating to ohio city. At the pool party in June , Sylvie walked away from the camp fire in the pitch dark and whacked her leg on this metal grate in the yard. She walked back to the house and maybe 10 mins later I went into the house for something to find her crying in the kitchen - her leg had an awful looking wound on it that looked like it hurt like hell, no one realized how bad it was. I went into total mom/ massage therapist mode, felt so bad for her, and told her to elevate her leg while i got an ice pack, then a bunch of stuff from the bathroom to clean it up and compress. Her best friend was out by the fire and came in shortly there after, and save for her i knew sylvie had just met all the rest of us so felt very sympathetic towards her injury and having to deal with it in that social context.

So she was at this cook out Sunday, and then she was at the yoga class I went to, we said hello and kind of laughed as we had just been at the same cook out an hour earlier.

I'm getting things all intertwined here but my first point was to illustrate the extremes of going, on Sunday from cursing at a man on the street in front of johnny mangos patio patrons to my first yoga class in over 3 weeks, trying to let go of all the anger and rage of the first incident.

Then getting home from yoga sunday, I got word that Jho was having her baby and soon. Then , come Monday I had the privilage of being present while baby merugu entered the world - the miracle of child birth.

This afternoon, perren and i ran into a friend while taking a walk, he told us that Sylvie was killed this morning on her way to work in downtown. She was on her bicycle and was hit by a truck. She was 22, had graduated from Yale earlier this year. I was of course shocked and saddened to hear this as was Perren. I did not know her at all having only met her twice. I found myself wishing I'd been friendlier at yoga on sunday. Of course, thinking a lot about the people here who did get to know her well, and her best friend here, all people perren knows better than I. I am glad that they are a tight knit group of such close friends to deal with this experience together, and while I am not inclined to seek anybody out or interject myself they will continue to be in my thoughts. I expect something will occur in Cleveland in honor of Sylvie and I would certainly join in that.

There are a number of young people that I've known in some context who have died so young, and I think of them from time to time. I tend to think of them all as this group, and have even thought of writing something about them all, the very very little I knew of them. There is Mahdi Abdul Rashid, who was in many of my classes in middle school and my first year of high schoool, i had quite a crush on him, he was very handsome. At some point in high school he started selling weed, and when he was found murdered in the trunk of a car during senior year, I remember people who knew him better commenting that he may have been into things far more sinister than anyone was aware of. There is Mindy Biggins who I went through 3 years of high school with always pleasantly greeting each other but never much beyond that (i did really like her though, which is true of so few of the girls in my high school). She was engaged and working as a kindergarten teacher after college and took her own life by jumping off of the Fairview bridge that goes over the metroparks. There was another girl named Erin who transfered into my high school class for about a month and then hung herself in the attic of her home. I try to imagine both Mindy and Erin and what they were feeling when they decided what they did, and while I have had some glimpses of despair, depression and low lows, I am not able to imagine it, not quite. There was another girl in my HS class, Holly, who died a few years ago when she was in her early 20s. She was always sick, I think, I don't know what with, but she was a very nice sweet girl, and smart, and I don't think I ever spoke to her once.

In college, my roomate had a friend named Sri, they were from the same town in CA. Sri graduated one year before I did, and after her graduation day she went to a party on campus and left by herself to walk home and was hit and killed on an otherwise traffic less street by a speeding car that did not stop. I think about these people in this group in my mind, and i find it weird that i think of them at all, yet I'm glad that I do, and I did think many times about writing about them because then it feels like I am acknowledging them outside of just my weird brain, so maybe that is what I just did, remember them, just because I do, and I know they all left behind families and loved ones who remember them every day.

Of course I think of my friend Jessica, and my Mom, but in way very different to this group of people who were on the peripheral of my life in one way or another.

I understand completely that life is short, we have no idea what is ahead of us, and it's important to both enjoy our time here and to DO something good. I struggle with both of these mandates, as I imagine lots of people do. I can't enjoy every moment or every day for that matter because some of them just plain suck. Perhaps we set ourselves up for that, we don't live quite right - we've come a long way from the natural flow of things and a long way from what our priorities ought to be.

It's also hard to feel as though I am doing all the I can to contribute to the world and the whole human family, and sometimes it is hard to even try or give a fuck when I learn of all the crazy stupid right wing shit that is going down everyday. I suppose we all do what we can, try to do no harm, and chose our battles while remembering to focus on the joys of life - the big and the small, the on going and the short lived.

So Good Bye Sylvia Bingham,

Hello Kailash Merugu,

and we should all strive to be kind to every person we meet, including miserable fuck heads with little dogs, because you just never ever know what is ahead