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The bastard shot himself.

I enjoyed his work, I enjoyed living vicariously through him. I enjoyed seeing him the single time I had a chance. In fact since high school I have asked that my Epitaph be from one of the movies about him (I don't know if he ever said it or not):

"We had fun back then, but it never got weird enough for me"

He lived a pretty involved life, and took more drugs than 1/2 a dozen junkies. A week before John Belushi died he was picked up hitchhiking on the road near Hunter S Thompson’s house. Belushi is quoted as remarking that he couldn't hang with Thompson, and that he [Thompson] just did too many drugs.

Who knows what kind of weird trip he was on at the time. He will be missed.

-Jason

My Son turned one last weekend. It is just now that I can type that without crying. Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my life changing so abruptly, so completely that I couldn't comprehend it at the time, and by the time I could comprehend it life prior to that was a distant haze.

My wife and I tried to have children for 6 years. poking, prodding, dixie cups, the whole 9 yards. Infertility sucks.

We spent almost a year researching agencies, saving money, getting prepared (Mentally, physically, etc) as well as preparing our friends and families. In september 2004 we chose and signed up with an adoption agency 20 miles away (after looking at 100+ agencies across the country).

For 4+ months we waited. the adoption opportunities that came our way just wern't right for us (or we wern't right for them), and we were both getting discouraged. I distinctly remember crying on my way to work every morning for 2 weeks straight.

On February 19th, 2004 at 10am, we got an email from our agency. It was a short "we have a healthy male baby..." email, asking to reply if we wanted more information. I called my wife, as I always did when we got an "opportunity".

"we have email" I said simply. It was our euphemism for email from the agency. She read it while I was on the phone. We decided, pretty easily, to go ahead and email the agency back and get more info. We also decided to meet for lunch, not expecting the
agency would get back to us by then (they generally moved painfully slow).

I got an email back from the agency about 5 minutes before Cheryl arrived for lunch. I read it, and got more and more excited as I did. By the time cheryl arrived, I was literally bouncing. It felt right.. Perfect actually. As soon as I got in the car I started reading it to her. 10 minutes into lunch, as we discussed every little detail, my cell phone rang. The agency wanted to know if we had any questions. We asked the ones we had, asked if we could see a picture (we had already made up our minds, but for some reason we both needed to "see" the baby to make it real in our minds), and told them we'd
call them back in 30 minutes.

We raced back to my office, and had email waiting for us.. A picture of a tiny, healthy, baby. 30 seconds later we called the agency and made arrangements to pick him up the next day.

That evening we shopped. Everything we "thought" we needed for a baby.

26 hours later he was in our arms. An hour after that, me, and my family were home.

What a year it's been.

-Jason