#the returnables

"Springtime is for the losers

who couldn't handle winter" 🎵

Ten years ago today I lost my dear friend John Glick.

A year ago, as I often have, I attempted to musically eulogize him. These will always remain feeble and unworthy stabs in the dark.

John died stupidly. A young woman in throes of some kind of a state I find hard to dignify, no matter how miserable, drove her car 100 mph into a car containing John and his two close friends, Michael Dahlquiston and Douglas Meis, on  a lunch break from where they worked at Shure microphones,  each of them embedded deeply in the Chicago music scene. A tree of misery was born from their death, its branches extending far beyond their immediate friends and family. Their car was  stopped at a red light.

John was my roommate at college, the one and only year it could barely manage to contain me (I tried to drop out after one semester). I was suffering from horrible, debilitating anxiety. And John was never not there for me and it, this thing that was suffocating me there. John and I sang together, got drunk together, made little films together, along with our other pal James Leaver. We videotaped entire dinners we made for each other, the stars of our own My Dinner With Andes. The pasta we threw to the ceiling to see if it was al dente, remained throughout our brief tenure there. We glued the chairs in the kitchen to the ceiling in the middle of the night. We smoked awful ineffectual pot, then smoked Earl Grey tea through a Vitamin C bong that James made for us. We were both a little hooked on Nyquil I might have got him on that kick. Mostly we played each other music we loved, a disproportionate amount played for me -- as he introduced me to the likes of Brian Eno, X, The Minutemen, Roxy Music, on and on. I know when he walked in the door, that first day in 1988, and saw his crates of vinyl, and Elvis Costello’s “Armed Forces” peaking through, we were gonna be okay. Somehow, all off this light, in the shadow of all this anxiety that was so badly afflicting me. All this, with John.

John and I probably saw each other a total of maybe 20 times since college, but our friendship endured and transcended the distance between us. He'd always call from Chicago or Wisconsin or Maine on New Years and tell me, in Los Angeles, how the world looked in the future. After he died I couldn’t help but be sadly struck by the irony that he came to know such an unknowable future, far too soon.

This here is bullshit, this attempt at  due diligence to honor the memory of a man whose spirit and contribution to the lives of others is ineffable.

In searching my inbox I found an email John wrote me in 2005, a condolence regarding the passing of my dog Jack,  eerily only 6 months before we lost John. It’s something of John. And it’s much better than anything I can muster…because it’s John.

Oh Adam. I'm so sorry. He was way too young. It doesn't matter how or when it happens -- it's still the same -- but hopefully there can be some solace in, as Rio brings to mind, he didn't experience the kind of prolonged pain that some of us will always associate with the passing of our pets. Can there be solace in that? I don't know; probably not now, right?

Becky and I are thinking of you guys. I still owe you a response from a month ago, I think. Leave it to fucking grief to bring us out from under our rocks. Where we've pretty much been since September. Now's not the time for an update though. Suffice to say we went to St. Martin last month for our belated honeymoon...but enough about us. All our thoughts and love to you, C.  and the Sherriff.