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Yesterday my wife, my friend and I went to the memorial to a person we had all lived with at one point or another, Jim Smith.

All of us had seen him last at the same event May 21st, 2005.
Starting in 1983 and until that date, our group of friends had a spring cook out each year. My wife did most of the work keeping that going and she decided that running our sword troupe was more important that that cookout.

Jim was 2 years older than me and when we first met we were both working in the dish room at the engineering school I went to. Jim had been kicked out of the school for bad grades half way through his second year and was working hard to get back in. The were letting him take a few classes to see if he did OK and he was keeping up with them.
(Half way through the second year was when a LOT of people got kicked out of the school. The policy of removing people with bad grades was on a 3 semester cycle, so no matter how badly you did, you could stay in school that long. Once that cycle started, it was always the last three semesters, so you never got a break again…)

For the spring he did get back in full time, but didn’t keep up with the full course load. He got kicked out again in June.
He tried one more time a year later, and at the end of that the school told him “we don’t care how much money you give us, we will never let you back in again.”

I knew a few other folks this happened to. Most transferred to one of the other schools in the same city, one of which also gave out engineering degrees. I work with someone now who did that.
But, Jim gave up.
And, it changed him.

He was a smart enough guy, but like many at that engineering school, he really thought he was better than the other folks around him.
I’m not sure why that school was so prone to that attitude. But, I know a LOT of folks who had it.
Jim had always had a sarcastic side. He was funny, but there was an edge to it.

After he got kicked out of school, that edge sharpened a lot.
He didn’t try at one of the other schools as he clearly thought it beneath him.
And, he started picking folks to blame for his life not being the way he wanted it to be.

To him, it wasn’t that he went on a road trip out of state with people the weekend before he had a big project due and missed the deadline, it was that people had stopped him from working on it when he should have.
And he would just dump that, very smart, sarcasm on the person he decided was to blame.
We lived in a big apartment complex with 5-7 people in each of the 4 apartments our group of friends had in the building. There was a lot of going back and forth between the different places and it was more like one big apartment than a bunch of smaller ones.
That gave Jim plenty of folks to target.

My wife was one of the people he chose to target. She didn’t play his game at all and basically paid him to go away. And, everyone knew when he took that money and moved out that she was the person who had won. He claimed it was his choice to move in with some other folks, but no one bought that.

After my wife and I got married and moved in without roommates, we still saw him fairly often for another decade.
He and his roommate at the time would come over every Thursday and we’d play games. He wasn’t too bad with us then as we were living different lives and he had his new roommate to blame for things. That roommate cared about that as much as the bedrock of the state, not at all.
That went on until his roommate got married and moved off with his wife.
It wasn’t long after that his father recalled him to Maine.

So, my feelings about his death are complex.
There was a time he was one of my very best friends. But, that ended almost 40 years ago.
Then there was a time when he was a major asshole, mean to people I cared about, and a general pain to everyone. (And, even with all that, he was not one of my top 3 bad roommates…)
Then he was a guy I hung out with fairly often but had increasingly less and less in common with.
And, then for most of the last 20 years, I didn’t see him at all. I sent birthday wishes on facebook and received his in turn.

The very good friend? I lost him in the 80’s. Any missing of him is long over.
The guy who came over regularly for game night? Haven’t seen him in 20 years. (My wife hadn’t even remembered those game nights, so it shows you the impact they had on us.)
The asshole? I don’t mourn him at all. I’m glad he’s gone.
The ghost of the last 20 years? I’ll hardly notice he’s gone. His birthday wasn’t even in my calendar, only a facebook reminder.

Yeah, I remember when he saved our friend Alan’s life.
I also remember when he drove with an expired license, no registration, no insurance and ran a red light to hit a cab and got into a screaming match with the cab driver because the cab driver had called the police about the accident. (His fines we so large the state of Massachusetts let him do a payment plan…) It’s good he didn’t go to jail for assault.

I honestly don’t know how to balance those things when remembering him.
The good things are good, but don’t excuse the bad.

I’m not exactly glad he’s gone.
But, I didn’t notice when he stopped posting on facebook. And, it is only when someone else asked me if I’d heard from him I checked and found he had died the day before.
I knew he had been having heart surgery in September, and didn’t even think to send him a get well card, much less visit him.

Of course, at the memorial, I found out he had regularly been driving to the town where I work to play a game with some other person he’d met and never tried to get in touch with us.
So, it went both ways.

Another person there was saying how sarcastic Jim could be. Some of the things he mentioned sounded outright mean. So, some things hadn’t changed.

I don’t feel a lot of loss for him having died.
The friend from 1981, it would have been nice to see him again.
But, until I get that Tardis working, it isn’t going to happen.