Priorities
Well, I burned up a sick day this past Sunday night, out getting burned, scratched, frozen and drunk. All in all, the night was much better spent than it would have been contributing to Vertigo's SLAs for technical support. I had something a lot more important to do than technical support. I had a party to attend. Not just any party, either.

When I was growing up in the middle of nowhere, aka Clewiston, FL, the only thing to do for recreation was to head out to the middle of the everglades, build a bonfire, and get schnockerd. Then we'd do the things that schnockerd teenagers do in the middle of the woods. We'd play war games, armed with paintball guns, flaming oranges wrapped in kerosene-soaked rags, and the sticks. We went skiing, which basically meant wearing off the bottoms of our boots and shoes (and occasionally pants) hanging on to the back bumper of a car, being dragged along one of the dirt roads. Sometime's a game warden or sheriff's deputy would come out and "bust" us, but I don't recall them ever making us go home. They'd just tell us to keep it down, and then "confiscate" our booze. Sometimes they were cool and left us some. As we got older, the trips out to cannon hammock got fewer and further between, and they nearly stopped when we all graduated and moved on to bigger better things, and were too grown-up to go get drunk on cheap booze in the middle of nowhere, around a bonfire. I got married and moved to Minnesota (no, I don't know what the hell I was thinking.) Eric went on to do far too many cool things to be listed here. Kevin went to college, becoming a teacher. Ed became a PI, I became well ... a geek. There's other people, and other stories, but no one of those stories are my point, which I'll get to, promise. What matters is that our little group remained friends, although we fell out of touch for years at a time.

Then we started to die off. First Ard, who no-one really liked, went out like a hero, and surprised us all. When a power line fell on his cousin during the cleanup of Hurricane Andrew, he pulled if off without hesitation. Yeah, he was the one we just "let" tag along, but still... Then Eric went, a motorcycle accident on a rainy night. Fitting, if you knew him. It was a shock, but I don't really think that anyone expected Eric to live too long, least of all him. He had too much fun, and burned too bright to last long, you know? Eric's death taught us what Ard's should have, that we weren't immortal after all. So we started getting together again, in the middle of the woods, once a year, after Christmas with trees to burn and stories to tell. Wives have come and gone for some of us, jobs and homes likewise. But every year we get together, those of us that are in the state at the time, anyway. We're not old, but we've lost a few, and chance is sure to take more, sooner or later. Next year, I might be dead, run over by a drunk, or hit by lightning, or Kevin, or Stoker, or Dave, or Ed, or any of us. This world isn't getting any safer.

So it's important to me to see my friends when I can, because I know that it's not unlikely that one or more of them won't be able to make it next year, due to being dead. Let's say for instance that (god forbid) something happens to one of them, and I hadn't gone out there that night. Then I'd get to spend the rest of my life remembering that the last chance I had to see so-and-so, I decided that it was more important to go in to my job, ensuring the SLA of some big faceless foreign-owned corporation. heh, riiiight. I don't fucking think so.