well, i'm sure you've all heard by now about the alaska airlines plane that crashed. that's so sad, i really hate watching the news and reading the paper because then you have to hear about this kind of stuff. however i had like 6 people call and tell me about the crash starting from right after it happened. and since bropo works for them, this is really close to home. also literally since alaska is based here and in fact about 4 miles from here. i am looking at the list of names of the people who died. whole families, couples, 3 babies. wow.

things like this really make you look at yourself and you realize how petty much of "life" is and how much you take things for granted.

it's just so sad when people die. i've never had to experience a close relative dying so i can't really say i know what it feels like but i do know when my friend eric died it was so horrible. i still remember that day so clearly, even though i try not to think about it. i don't think i'll ever forget. it's kind of strange because i remember bits and pieces of the funeral but i remember everything about the day he died.

that was way back when me and CJ were still going out...we had two cars, the CRX and rob's civic. we stopped at texaco by rob's house to fill gas. the attendants were talking to each other about HRP, about how they were gonna try to close it again and were probably going to suceed after what happened. rob asked them if they were talking about tracks...i wish he hadn't. they said they were and said that someone had just been killed, a guy on his motorcycle. really young, "our age" they said. some guy from mililani they said.

even then i wasn't especially worried, i didn't know too many guys with bikes and i only knew one from mililani and you know how it is, you never expect it to be someone you know. rob wanted to find a paper to see if there were anymore details. all we could find out was pretty much what we already knew, 20 year old, from mililani, also gave his place of employment. rob was getting worried, he knew 2 or 3 people who fit that description.

we went to cj's house. we were supposed to pick him up for something, back when he didn't have a car. we decided to use the phone and call will, a mutual friend. it was thru him that i met eric. we wanted him to tell us not to worry that it wasn't eric.

i paged him from cj's with a 911. rob answered the phone. he asked...he slumped to the floor and burst into tears. i grabbed the phone, even though i had my answer i needed to ask myself, just to be sure, maybe it was someone rob knew but not eric.

"was it eric?"
he was so quiet, so sad...
"yah, it was eric."

i thanked him and hung up.

after that i can't really remember. i know i had to tell everyone else who was there, cj, bropo. maybe i called sue too. she already knew.

turns out my mom knew too. back then she was a store manager at wal-mart in mililani where eric's dad worked. she said he came to see her, said he had to go home, there was an accident with his son. i can't remember if she heard he had died or not.

i was really mad at my mom for a long time because it was her hfault i hadn't seen eric for so long before he died. i came home late one night, like 30 minutes past curfew. she grounded me for 6 months "one month for every five minutes" i had happened to be out with will and eric that night. since i was 16 at the time, she said i was no longer allowed to have any friends out of high school, over the age of 18. she had found a letter i wrote to sue probably, about eric, about going somewhere with him, putting my head on his shoulder. i was forbidden that night to ever see eric again. i never did.