Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

[almost all start with ten or more seconds of silence as i re-gathered my thoughts]

if drugs were legal, my friend would be alive today. I don't know how many times that sentence has been said or written, but it could have been said or written hundreds of thousands of times in the last ... several years alone. I don't know the statistics. My friend Andrew would have known the statistics, and the extent to which overdoses are due to impurities, lack of regulation of course, inconsistency of access.

Andrew had moved to Ohio, where i'm sure he had less access. He traveled to New York, it was sort of evident [in] how he would disappear for a day, and a lot of his money would disappear
that he was ... doing something.

I'm going to rewrite this entirely before putting it on the daily kos and every goddamn news site i can.

Of course i want to kill whoever sold him the heroin. But Andrew would correctly want a more useful response.

***
0004

Andrew was a user. An abuser if we must state the obvious. People do things that other people make moral judgements about all the time. But they don't die for it. They continue their lives as nationally syndicated

smarter, funnier, learn much more, and give you more goddamn meaning in your life without ever being sanctimonious or boring
than the lies, the hate .... and dripping cruelty that you receive today

The fact that Andrew is not on radio
being unable to keep a job canvassing for Greenpeace means there's a lot more wrong with the world than was ever wrong with Andrew

I helped Andrew move four times, depending on how you keep track. And i helped him move someone else for a little cash

into my mother's house for [3] months. I still have one of his fantastic cast iron pots.

frustrated with my lack of facility of words, not with the story that goes nowhere about helping him move, that cannot be helped, my inability to tell a story. Andrew could tell any story so well.
but trying to make the bigger points. he totally would have recorded, or written his own obituary if he took a notion too. And it would have been better.

***

He knew so much about everything. Politics, history, popular culture, music, even a little science. And he could talk about it all so well. You all don't know what you've missed.

I wish i had called him on Sunday to let him know about his first hangover, and to be very straightforward that we didn't know where we were staying

unconditional love, the family you choose, but that once you choose, you cannot unchoose, you would not unchoose, it is not even a concept you would consider. Family.

never about reciprocity, getting anything back
though he was a very genrerous person

just love.

............

He's the best storyteller i've known. The world d
make this,

I want to upend the world, and shake everything into place.

[other topics he knew about: religion]

***

I haven't even mentioned his drawing, his painting. He was getting damn good.

***
[Voice0009andrew.amr]

You worry that some people are just too good for this world. You didn't so much with Andrew just because he could be so at ease, so funny, so able to be aware of so many things and still be OK. But i'm sure people felt the same about Phil Ochs. Some people may be just too good for this world.