{"id":20870,"date":"2021-09-25T11:07:03","date_gmt":"2021-09-25T15:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=20870"},"modified":"2021-09-25T11:07:03","modified_gmt":"2021-09-25T15:07:03","slug":"gone-too-soon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=20870","title":{"rendered":"Gone Too Soon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>&#8220;Life it seems to fade way, drifting further every day&#8230;&#8221; Those are the first two lines of Metallica&#8217;s <em>Fade to Black<\/em>. I heard it on the car radio the other day, and it made me think of my old friend Phil. He&#8217;s been on my mind a lot lately, because I found out recently that he died from cancer earlier this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m struggling to process the news. I hadn&#8217;t seen him in a long time, but we were good friends as teenagers. Phil had a rare charisma. He&#8217;s the only person I&#8217;ve ever known who was Trouble but worth it. My mother even liked him. He was also the only person who ever called me Kare-Bear, and the only one who could use that nickname for me without it sounding ridiculous. He taught me how to play the drums. Our birthdays were close together, so I know that he just had one, too. His last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Facebook might be shit most of the time, but this is one case where I&#8217;m glad that it exists. It&#8217;s only because of Facebook that I know anything about Phil&#8217;s life after I left town. He was a special effects make-up artist, which was an excellent career choice for him, and he was successful at it. And though I&#8217;m sad to know that he&#8217;s gone, I thank Facebook for that knowledge, too. I just wish I&#8217;d known that he was dying. I can&#8217;t say whether or not I would have reached out, but I would have liked to have known that I was running out of time for it. But I guess that is the lesson we&#8217;re supposed to take from death&#8211;we&#8217;re always running out of time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>RIP, Phil. Gone too soon. Never forgotten.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Life it seems to fade way, drifting further every day&#8230;&#8221; Those are the first two lines of Metallica&#8217;s Fade to Black. I heard it on the car radio the other day, and it made me think of my old friend &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=20870\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20870"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20870"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20885,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20870\/revisions\/20885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}