This morning I checked my email and found out that Eric was struck and killed by a drunk driver on that bike path by the West Side Highway on Friday night. Just like that. He was 22 years old and was working as a schoolteacher in Brooklyn. Some drunk asshole in a BMW took our friend's life on that same bike path we all ride on all the time. It could have been any of us riding our bicycle on a Friday night.

hey i'm sitting next to ashley and we just watched this crazy purple and pink sunset from her bedroom window and i'm taking the plunge andposting on this new fangled blog software.

It's always so strange when our friends die, how they get frozen in time while the rest of us keep moving and getting older. For the rest of my life Brad is always going to be that scruffy-faced, fire-breathing rebel taunting the cops on the streets of the Lower East Side; that madman on the roof of 5th Street Squat getting right in the way of the wrecking ball on a cold February morning cause he was determined to keep them from demolishing his home; that badass motherfucker who wasn't scared to be right on the front lines and scream in the face of authority. Brad was always tempting fate and putting himself in the line of fire, in a way where it was never clear if he was heroicly brave, a raving lunatic, or some complex interplay between the two.

I used to travel all over the country meeting new people wherever I went. Part of me always figured that if I made enough friends then I'd never get into too much trouble because I'd always have a bunch of folks to look after me through the rough times. A big anarchist family of freaks and rebels. But too many times I learned the hard way that things don't really work like that.

Sometimes I wander around my hometown all lonely and lovesick and surrounded by ghosts, stuck with this awful longing in my gut and my broken heart beating out of its chest. There are ghosts everywhere on these streets, I think they’re always there but I see them clearly when I don’t get enough sleep and I’m walking the bleed in time between late night and early morning – the edge time when everything’s creeping under my skin and my eyes are all glassy and fragile but the most incredible things make themselves painfully clear. I see ghosts everywhere then: ghosts in the buildings, ghosts in the flickering subway station lights, ghosts in the cracks in the sidewalk, ghosts in the names of streets, ghosts in the clouds in the sky, ghosts in the faces of the other people walking by me. Layers of ghosts like crystal onions or the cracked and peeling paint walls of abandoned apartment buildings telling stories in their colored lead rubble dust.

Human beings are so obsessed with permanence, of holding on to the past. Its definitely part of the attraction of tattoos. We all so badly want to hold onto our memories and make them important because thats what gives us a solid foundation to build on when were trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in this crazy world. So I guess Seras suicide just rubbed it in her face that no matter how many friendships you build and stories you write and photos you take and tattoos you get --youre still going to fucking die, and thatll be the end of that.

These days the government and corporations seem to be able to program us like computers: trigger our emotions with slick video clips and rewrite their new versions of the Truth every couple months -- feed it to us like those mass produced AOL free minutes disks that magically show up in the mail all over the place. The TV these days looks to me like some deranged Hollywood war movie I watched when I was a kid, Im so desensitized to the reality that theyre actually dropping real bombs on the other side of the world and people like me with flesh and blood and families are dying horrible deaths.