Do it, I’ll Love You Anyway

A dirtbag hippy once told my high school best friend and me that life was like a slot canyon–it narrows and widens, and the whole time all you can do is keep pushing forward because there’s no other way out. My friend found those words to be incredibly insightful, and in that moment he gained a newfound resolve to push through the painful issues of his life. The resolve eventually faded. That’s just the way things were with him. He was an avid climber, artist, and drug experimenter. Those three things have more in common than they might appear or maybe less, but I can tell you with absolute certainty my friend was in a constant search to fill an empty portion of his spirit. He sought the most intense emotions he could find, and then pushed them further. He reveled in the sheer terror of climbing a crane in the night to tag it with graffiti and basked in the relaxation of a Xanax bar with equal enthusiasm. He fell in love more deeply than anyone I know and fell out of it as quickly as he fell into it. Our brief friendship together was as Dickens would say, “The best of times. The worst of times.”