Another dead drunk.

Dog darts out in front of me, thick black hair flying as he intently chases a truck heading down Lake Shore Drive. It's a hopeless pursuit for the pup. I look around but find no owner in sight. But dogs are sprinting animals and it darted in front of me with no notice and poor calculation. Only a quick squeeze of the breaks saved it.

Further down the line I negotiate the turns at Fullerton and start down the long, flat stretch by North Avenue beach. It's a golden morning and the lake is as calm as bathwater. Up ahead there's something on the trail, a truck of sorts. Getting closer I see it's an ambulance. While a woman holds her bicycle up for inspection another figure, strapped to a gurney, head and neck in supports, little running shoes poking out the end, is lifted into the back of the waiting vehicle of mercy. It could have been one of those chance encounters - a tiny mistake which normally falls well within the margin of forgivability. But this time the math didn't add up together so well. Tiny mistakes, miscalculations of motion or distance at exactly the moment when the jogger tries to move abruptly without looking. There's no malice. Just... bam.

Bam! "Hey Caroline, congratulations - a few days late. In other news our friend Mario - one of our class of '98 group - OD'ed on Monday. Went to the wake tonight and the funeral is tomorrow".

Mario... He wasn't just on the perimeter of people I got sober with. He was a force. He piled us into his beat up car to drive to & from commitments. He showed up at my house every Sunday for 3 months in that big crown vic & by the end I had a driver's license. Then, one day, a different light appeared in his eyes. Rather, it was a sudden lack of light. Wasn't anything alarming, at first. He started chasing tail, doing guy stuff. Soon enough he just didn't seem as interested in people. He didn't talk or engage in conversation but his eyes made furtive movements as if looking around for something not offered by current company.

Last year when I visited Boston I asked after him and was told that he was "out there". He'd relapsed into his old life. And now? Another body dead. Dead in the dumbest of ways. Perhaps that body had more sense than his mind and knew that the only way cease the chemical abuse was to simply STOP. He over dosed. Sought pleasure until it killed him. Maybe it was planned. Maybe he wanted off the roller coaster and deliberately...

I don't know. I just know that the glint of clever blue eyes and that grin on a dimpled face are gone. Gravelly bass voice, gone. Why him? Why not me? I've made my share of bad decisions in sobriety. I've gone off the deep end with 'problems other than alcohol'. Why him, not me?

Bam! It all seems such a roll of hypersensitive cosmic dice. Maybe not me because it's not me, with my failings, that keeps me clean after all. Today it adds up. Just for today...