When I was 14, almost 15, I had a .22 rifle I had gotten for the previous Christmas. Super cool present, you know, holds like seven bullets in the clip or whatever. Little .22. And I went out with my buddy in the woods and, you know, with his dad and mess around shooting and stuff. But last day in ninth grade. It's one of them half days, right? The last day of school. Come home with my buddy Doug, and we're messing around the house, and turning on the radios. You know, it’s in the 80s, so, that's all anybody, you know. Nobody's home, and we’re smoking our Marlboros and whatever, being the cool teenagers we think we are.

And we get out the gun and start messing with the gun, fooling around with it this way, fooling around with it hat way. And at some point there I was like, all right, put the gun away. But as I was going to do that, as I'm holding the gun, it fired and shot my friend in the chest. And he stumbled around for a few, and fell with his torso kind of right inside my front door, legs outside the front door. So I freaked out, and called 911. And he died that day, And, that was bad. It messed me up quite a bit. Quite a bit. I was just a regular kid. Last day in ninth grade. It’s a glorious summer. Supposed to be happening. And, they buried him in a cemetery only, like, a block away from where I lived. And me and my other buddy used to go there and smoke cigarettes and just talk it through and stuff. You know?

The guy's name was Douglas Workman, and it happened on June 6th, 1986, in Loveland, Colorado. And, that ain’t supposed to be how life goes, man. Something like that. I’m 14 years old, man. You know?

And, one thing I'll tell you, I wish that I had understood better was how to grieve stuff. You know what I mean? There's a process, there's a function, there's a way that you can grieve things in a normal manner. And if you do it that way, at some point or another, the grieving is done, right? You've cried all the tears you can cry. You've kind of made peace in your heart or whatever, and you can get up and say, all right. I, I mean, I'm still alive. I got to, you know, get back on the road and get back to going wherever I'm going to go.

It sure was a screwed up way to go from being a kid to being a grownup.