Well... that didn't take long...

Stubie's brother? Gone... I had known him since high school, too... they were the same age difference as me and my brother... but I sure didn't see that coming less than a month later... or maybe I did... I don't know...

And then (oh, no, it's not over)... ANOTHER former student... gone (I was not quite as "close" to him as the other former student, but we were always friendly and would sometimes gather with a group of friends for lunch, etc.). This guy committed suicide and would not be found for eleven days. After speaking with some people about it, yesterday, it turns out that he was suffering from drug-induced schizophrenia/psychosis. Near the end, it seems he was reaching out to a lot of people for help, but apparently wasn't getting what he was needing from them...

I'm not unfamiliar with drug-induced schizophrenic behavior... on a rather personal level. I grew up with a girl... we had literally known each other since birth. Our fathers played music together for decades. At one point in her life, her and her mother moved into the house next door to mine. Within a few years, she began to show a marked change in her behavior... it would take miles of text to explain how, but needless to say, she had become a very different person as a young adult than she was as a teenager. At one point, she began calling my house about once a week and talking about how she "knew I was using my computer to put messages into her brain..." which, y'know, if I could have done stuff like that, back then... wuh-hoooooooah nellie! I was seeing a girl that had been friends with her for years, also, and one night she came over, having just been next door, and was clearly distraught. Turns out, my neighbor had taken her into a closet with a flashlight and was writing her notes on paper and passing them to her, to avoid speaking... because she "knew I was listening." She went on to "talk" about how I was imprinting her with all these "thoughts" and I was working for the government (prophesy?) in order to... well, I'm not really sure what I would have needed to use her for, really... and I guess that my motive was never really made quite so clear... but... yeah. I was a CIA operative using a Mac Quadra to turn young twenty-something women into zombies for... well, who knows what... I sure didn't. The actual problem? LOTS of cocaine mixed with LOTS of shit like fentanyl and the like... a glorious combination. The girl ran off with an equally-strange man to another state and started working as an operator at one of those big centers that handled infomercials and all kinds of stuff... and weird shit started showing up at my door. Like, products that I hadn't ordered, literature I hadn't requested... all kinds of things. She called at one point and told me that she was the one doing it... although she never really got around to telling me why... ended up moving back in next door... the strangeness ensued, once more, with phone calls and her sitting in her bedroom window watching me working on my computer, playing guitar, whatever... It was... strange, to say the least. I was later told by one of my bosses to "stay as far away from her as you possibly can" (which, having her living next door, was not the easiest thing to do), because people with psychosis can get suddenly, irrationally violent - not exactly new news, but nonetheless, my boss knew what he was saying (I would come to fully realize that hard lesson (in an entirely different situation), a few years later). The last I heard, she was "doing okay..." which has to be better than how she was doing back then, anyway.

But... like... this shit needs to stop... because it's not cool. I've already said I'm tired of hearing about people I know dying because of drugs... what the fuck was unclear about that?