Dear Brendan, Sorry I'm Late...

but it's been a busy few months.

Hey, mate. Missed your death day tribute this year, and though I’d love to say it was deliberate as some sort of ode to your perpetual lateness and missing big events, it wasn’t. The truth is, it’s been a pretty tough ride since your last death day tribute, and it totally slipped my mind. Anyway, enough of the groveling. Here’s a bit of a life update.

The Bucks traded Giannis to Miami, which is probably tempting you to return to life just to protest, but I think it’s cool. I still live in Miami (Beach), and believe it or not, my Mom lives here now too. My Dad died last November somewhat unexpectedly, and though I thought I was prepared for it, it hit me much harder than I was willing to admit. But I’ll get back to that later.

Booze, drugs, and self-destruction are fading memories at this point

I still talk about you all the time in a sort of canonical form when dissecting the madness of humans, eccentricity of artists, and pain of addictions. Speaking of addictions, I’m in year two of sobriety and have no plans on stopping. It’s been an uphill battle to undo a lot of the deep psychological and physical damage that substance reliance did to me, but it’s worth it, and it’s hopefully inspiring to others, although I try to keep from proselytizing or brow beating it into others.

It’s wild to think that at age 44 I’ve lost about two dozen friends and acquaintances to alcohol and drug abuse. There’s a guilt I carry because of that, and I still feel angry that addictions both ruined your life, and then took it. I still talk to some friends from the BA days but none of the old Kilca crew. Guido sold the hostel a while ago, Daniela unfollowed me on social media, but I often wonder how Dan the Man and Joe the performative guitar hipster are doing.

Yes, the country’s still a mess, but I love being back here

I’d like to think that if you had come back to Wisconsin to get help and build a stable life it would have saved you, but that’s no guarantee and parsing through past hypotheticals is a fool’s errand. Needless to say, I love being back in the United States, or at least adjacent to the United States in the wild world of Miami Beach. My career is on a good path here. I’m no longer running from Argentine drug dealers or Panamanian police, or violent girlfriends.

I can’t bring myself to go visit your grave site in Guatemala, mostly because I resent the enablers in Antigua, and the arrogant and pathetic ideologues who call themselves “expats” instead of immigrants and poison themselves while holding local economies hostage with their foreign spending power and cultural ignorance. I’m a bit angry at myself for running from reality for so many years, so a bit of that resentment is rooted in my own past in Latin America. Hope you understand.

Politics are as batshit crazy as always in the US. Trump is senile and his movement has lost the plot even more than it had when you were alive. I tapped out of caring at this point though, because I think the obsession over politics and the culture war is pointless, faux catharsis, and mentally unhealthy. It’s become our most popular sport when the NFL isn’t playing, and I think it’s a distraction from the existential crisis we all have about losing our own humanity, but I’ll leave it at that.

I’m connecting positively with people and places again, and it feels great

I’m not going to sugar coat it, mate, I’ve had a pretty rough year mentally. I went into action mode after my father died to take care of my Mom and help move our family in the right direction, and tried to postpone grief to soften the blow. The result was about six months of stale, apathetic living, highlighted by small glimpses of light through good friendships and growing emotionally closer to a woman I thought and think the world of.

Needless to say, those glimpses of light were more ephemeral than real, and the external validations never came, so reality had to return at some point. These were ultimately distractions that my mind created to soften the blow. At some point I had to face the reality of grief without feeding myself distractions from it. It’s funny because when you’re a drinker like us, you learn how to use booze, and all the excessive dopamine-driving things that come with heavy drinking to fill the pain gaps. When you’re sober, your subconscious reaches for other things in the same way, but it’s hard to spot.

For me it was the impending move of my Mom, new projects in AI to jump the line in my career, and the illusion (delusion) of feeling wanted or chosen, and a subconscious need for external validation. But none of that was a tangible fix to the pain of grief. So, when it all fell apart at once, my grief came back like a sledgehammer and nearly took me out. I think I needed it though. I didn’t stay on the ground for long, mate. I got up, I made a plan to see the places and people I needed to, and I took a 4-week trip by land throughout the entire eastern US.

I got out of the part of my head that runs from difficult things and instead ran towards them. I visited my father’s boy’s school (orphanage) in Philadelphia and broke bread with musicians in Savannah. I walked the streets of Georgetown in DC where he once lived. I spent the weekend with a friend in New York and went to my old schools and our old buildings and Central Park in the summer sun. I hung out at Harvard, and then helped my Mom move from Massachusetts to here. It was great, it was real, and it changed me.

You can’t always get what you want

I still talk about you all the time with friends, most of whom never even met you. I think your story is ultimately a tragedy, but that shouldn’t and doesn’t impede on the brilliance of how you thought and how you impacted people in such a good way. Life is a beautiful torture in that sense. We go through experiences, phases, people, and places that leave indelible marks on our soul in both good and bad ways, and that’s what gives us character. It’s what makes us human.

In a perfect world all of my friends would still be alive. My Dad would live forever, as would my Mom, and my brother, and my cats, and me. All the women I cared about over the years would care about me back. I’d be a millionaire writing my 7th book in the South of France arguing with my friend Brendan about sports and gut laughing over our latest foibles with eccentric women, while threatening the muppets who pissed us off at the local pub.

Life, however, doesn’t work that way, and that’s why life is so beautiful. You can’t value things fully unless you understand the pain of their absence. This is the real core of life and I’m learning to not only accept it, but love it. People come and go, we all die, and we’re all shaped by the hard moments in between. It’s been six years and a few weeks since you were found dead, slumped over a toilet in Antigua, Guatemala. I’ve lost five more friends and a father to death since that day, two of whom you knew.

I’m choosing to live in a way that keeps me sane, alive, and prosperous for many years to come. But I’m also aware that life and death comes through in violent, painful ways at will sometimes, and I’m prepared for whatever happens. Just know that your mark on me, your family, and your many friends all over the world is still shining through us. So, mate, as the cliche goes, you only truly die when people stop talking about you, and as long as I’m alive, that day will never come.

Your Friend,

Andy.