Healing Through Absurdity

A dominatrix, a lesbian, and myself go to a funeral.

There's no punchline here, this just happened the other week.

The funeral was for a close friend of ours, a father figure of sorts to the restless youth of Columbus. He gave us advice and drinks and the often-needed verbal evisceration, angry-but-compassionate speeches composed of a unique juxtaposition of swear words and wisdom from experience.

He grew dark hair and mixed clear drinks.

He discovered the secret to trusting people while being acutely aware of exactly how they behave in the dark. He was teaching me the same, but I'm a slow learner.

He was entering his fifties, but all of us, including him, were too young to be prepared for his departure.

He did it to himself, clogging his lungs with tar and nicotine since his adolescence. His expiration date was in June, but he held out until August to make it as inconvenient as possible for all of us. In June we had clear schedules, we had prepared ourselves for the inevitable emptiness. By August we were exhausted, busy with relocating and work and other responsibilities, wondering why he found it necessary to drag it out. During our visits we'd tell him to "just die already," attempting to make a joke out of what we honestly wanted and needed.

Making us wait is something he's always done. He'd show up to the bar late, prepare dinner late, watch and wait for us to fuck up before explaining what we were doing wrong. It was his way of garnering our attention.

Even in death, he's still an inconsiderate ass.

He's lucky his husband didn't put R.I.P. ASS on the tombstone.

Actually there wasn't a tombstone, because as a couple they didn't believe in partitioning that much public space for a memorial when it could be put to better use and something about the thought of their bodies getting all gross in a box being too much to handle.

So we wrote R.I.P. ASS in every bar bathroom we could find. We dug into the walls of stalls with keys and wrote across tile with markers, leaving scars and tattoos on every clean space we could find. We vandalized the city in his memory.

But the vomiting? The vomiting was all for Amy.