My friend Scott G. called me at work yesterday with news I was expecting, but not so soon.  On Sunday night, my neighbor (and our mutual friend) Craig--who was released from prison this fall--died of AIDS.  He had been HIV-positive for 12+ years, but developed full-blown AIDS while in prison.  (He was in there for aggravated arson, after he burned down the strip club where he had worked.)

It is a little sobering when I've walked past his house.  His Christmas tree is still lit, and electric candles still burn in each window.  The memorial service will be at the Unitarian Church after the first of the year.

Susie was especially saddened.  She had written to him in prison, and she fondly remembers the Christmas banquet at his house when she danced with him--a moment that, thank God, was immortalized in a picture she plans to hang in her bedroom.

Steph's jaw is much better.  It's aching, but the pain is nowhere near what she experienced last week.

My current composition book diary is down to the final five pages.  The new composition book awaits my pen and purple prose here in my office.  But I keep thinking of the diary of Philip Hone, who was the mayor of New York briefly in the 1820s.  On April 30, 1851, he wrote:

This volume of my journal, which has only four vacant leaves to be completed, has been suspended during nearly the whole month by continued unmitigated illness.  Tomorrow will be the first of May.  Volume 29 lies ready on my desk.  Shall it go on?

Six days later, he was dead.

And so to CSI:New York.