Neeley

My grad school buddy Neeley recently died at age 52 likely from either an intended or miscalculated mixture of booze and xanax. He got his JD and then quickly concluded that lawyers were assholes and so returned to school to get his PhD in Philosophy where our paths crossed. We spent 3 years together. He studied and wrote alot . I pretty much just got high, read and then got high some more. We shared a few common pursuits: love of the absurd, getting drunk, laughing, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, thinking, and chasing girls until they spent the night in our great (but sparsely outfitted) condo. A twin mattress layed directly on the floor without boxsprings or a frame does have certain advantages when you are drunk and amorous and spatial boundaries and physics tend to only get in the way. The loves of Stacy Squirrel, Amy BearKitten, The Wilson Sisters, Tina Tank, Cathy Cream Pie et. al. were true and deep if rather short lived and fuzzy.

Neeley once told me he read a comic book about a WWII fighter Ace who would display his trophies, certificates, awards and other memorabilia on the wall. He said that's what he thought life was pretty much about. We just collect symbols of our experiences, hang them on the wall and periodically look at them or show them off to others. No more, no less.... Kids, jobs, vacation pictures, degrees- all the bullshit nuts and bolts of life- are really just trophies that remind us of what we did to get them. He perservered and collected plenty of those. No master plan or deity, just determination and distraction. I'm not sure he was ever happy but he was driven.

He always got really depressed around Christmas and would hope to catch some disease or other debilitating illness for the entire Holiday Season. He liked fast cars, collecting and shooting AK 47's and lifting weights religiously. I don't know what those mean.

He wrote two very scholarly books: "The Constitutional Right to Suicide" and "Schopenhauer: A Consistent Reading" ....You can Google them and buy them but I'm not sure why you would. They are pretty hard to read and follow. He liked to use an average of like 26 footnotes per page. He won lots of student awards at his college for being a great teacher. He took extra time to talk to the kids outside of class about "life things". They weren't an inconvenience but really the reason why he was there. He felt obliged and honored to return the favor that some professor had previously done for him. He liked to drink with them too. And still gave them funny names like Daisy, Katrina by the Marina and Rhonda Rat.

I found out he died by a message left by his "fiancee" who said he had been so happy lately. Usually when he called me and was drunk he just called her a fucking bitch and would then break out into some Country Western tune--slurred and off key by more than an octave. He always called her his girlfriend and I tend to think she was a bit of whack job. I could be wrong, but Neeley was never ever happy. Not now, not then , not ever. If she didn't know that then she wasn't a fucking bitch but would be better described as a fucking idiot.

He and I could be content for a second, satisfied for a bit longer, entertained, distracted, temporarily free through substances ( or girls) , pleased, excited, and proud but, ....happy? Probably not. But it was ok because the other stuff was enough. The collection of life trophies, a good drink, a cold beer, a contemplative walk, a rigorous drive in an old IROC, the intimacy from a woman and most of all a hearty laugh at ourselves, you, our lives and yours.

I hadn't seen him in a while and his recent pictures were that of an overweight, bloated, greying, tired man who looked older than his early fifties. Nothing like the grad school picture you see above. I don't know if that means anything except that the human aging process is not kind.

I'm not sure if it matters to me whether he actively set out to off himself or if it was an "accidental overdose". I guess I'd like to know. Hell, maybe he was really happy for the past month and figured that now may be as good a time as any to make it the last word of the last sentence of the last chapter. But I don't think so. He had just started a new term and above all, Neeley met his obligations--especially to his students. He was like a Philosophy Professor and Navy SEAL combined. He wouldn't have left anybody behind. Plus he would have left a note as his last writing effort.... and it would have had at least 50-75 footnotes in it. And he would have called one more time and sang Merle Haggard drunk and eagerly reminisce about the perfume that Amy BearKitten wore to class and how he fully understood Kierkegaard through her pheromones. And how my long hair looked like a horsetail when it was pulled back and that Stacy Squirrel would braid it in class--- not needing to take notes as there was an implicit, intended contract that a student who sleeps with their TA does not need to stress about tests.

And so I'm pretty sure he wanted to stick around. And that's why I'm sad. "Gone forever" is a fucking bitch too.