I took this picture in 1997, when stopping off to visit Brian and Kara on my way to California. Brian and I and a handful of others -- Josh Scott (who called this morning with the news) and Josh Thomson, later Eric Trager, a bunch of others -- we were a very close-knit group all through junior high and high school and for many years after. We played D&D, drove around (Brian was the first of us to have a car, a 1970 Dodge Charger), ate junk food, watched trains, got into trouble and kept each other out of worse trouble. In high school our teachers cheated so that Brian, Josh and I wouldn't have all our classes together. Brian, the other Josh and I wrote a game that's now (somewhat to my surprise) for sale on Amazon. We've been friends for nearly twenty years.

Brian died in a car crash last night, near his home in West Virginia.

It's going to take a while to put more coherent words together.

I went to a poetry workshop today. Good stuff. Here's the first of three poems I wrote in class, and I'm sure more will come soon.

It was all green when we arrived,
a musty green transformed by dust
into the kind of green we wanted to forget,
instead filling the house with a late eighties beige, and
hand-stained cherry wood,
and the Pfaltzgraff blue of the yellow kitchen
my mother always dreamed of.