Buzz around here is work.  Tough to keep engaging this blog when the work schedule is on fire.  My mom’s nickname was Buzz.  Dad, probably buzzed, dreamt up that little tart.  My mom is gone, and my dad has long refrained from any sort of buzz.  I’m sure my mom’s vanishing act (I still think I’m going to run into her and do often when I’m asleep) and my dad’s sobriety define some sort of cosmic equation that only I can solve.  Both vanishing acts are meaningful (her variable carrying quite a bit more value of course) and really sad.  Life can get away from us quick.  There’s a big difference (a realization made clearer this past month) between celebrating and medicating. I haven’t had a beer since Dec. 31.  I like the look of 2014 a lot, so far.  It’s perfectly okay to contradict myself now and then (whole nother thing to contradict others).  It’s healthy.  You discover a different shade of addiction, figure-out another way to solve those nagging riddles in one’s life.  We recently buried a friend of mine who depended on his buzz.  Really sad.  He was a great athlete (incredible waterman).  But he was in a lot of pain.  The riddle IS dealing with the loss.  There’s so much, too much to account for: we have to expand to cushion the seeming nothingness that becomes huge and burdensome and fucked-up and nostalgic.  I will continue to write about the loss, which I want to become an important theme in my life.  I want for nothing.  The minutes on my 5K/10k PR, get lost.  I don’t need you.  As we get older, we will continue to lose.  And we will continue to do things to ourselves to postpone the realization that we’re being abandoned.