Erebus

My friend whom I shall call Erebus for our purposes here so as to keep his identity private is dying of pancreatic cancer. I love him and I think he loves me as much as he can love anybody or anything. I do think he loves his wife and daughter and brother more than me as well as his two dogs but I still rank fairly high on his incredibly short list of people whom he loves. I suppose I should feel honored. I don't. He loves little and hates much and is defined by his hatreds and not by his loves. Indeed, his greatest passions are his hatreds. He is for "against". To use a Star Wars analogy: he has been deceived and consumed by the Dark Side of The Force.

I first met Erebus at rock shows in the early 2000's and then throughout the rest of that decade. He always seemed a charming mix of Charming Older Gentleman and and Curmudgeonly Old Fart. As my financial situation continued to circle the drain throughout 2009 leading up to the failure of my business later that year he offered me work on his property primarily splitting wood but also planting trees and doing other manual labor which was what both my body and mind and soul needed at that time not to mention the money I honorably earned. I worked for him for over a year although it seemed much longer.

Over the course of that 14 to 15 months working together I came to understand Erebus rather well and made a number of startling observations and conclusions. He is manic-depressive which explains his mood swings and periods of frenetic productivity interspersed with periods of paralyzing malaise. He has been smoking pot for years as a means of helping him sleep and to calm his mood swings all the while taking prescription anti-depressants. Smoking pot multiple times a day over the course of decades is not going to be good for the mind bi-polar or not. Continually smoking pot mixed with taking prescription anti-depressants is a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. As if that weren't enough he self-medicates with a daily dose of wine and/or beer which I can attest to given all the glass I have recycled for him that contained his alcohol. Needless to way, his mind does not track in a linear fashion.

Erebus is gifted with an incredibly high I.Q. and an amazing command of a broad range of trivia and minutia along with street smarts second to none. As if these gifts weren't enough he also has an amazing God-given ability to wheel and deal and seal the deal. He was a born negotiator and salesman and broker. Despite these gifts he s tortured with feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem and when added to his manic-depressive personality and the influence of all those chemicals his mind does not perceive reality like you and I do and does not process information in a fashion that serves him well. He is always trying to come up with some grandiose scheme to make a huge payday all the while failing to take care of the little business today that will help pay his bills in the meantime until his bigger schemes can be enacted if ever. His grandiose schemes invariably are fraught with a failure to be realistic and follow the advice of his friends and confidantes when they point out to him the obvious problems with his plans.

In spite of Erebus' incredibly high intelligence he is the consummate anti-intellectual who takes great pleasure in attacking academia and those whom populate that foundation of civilization. In spite of his vast volume of and interest in American music and pop cultural history he despises the art crowd. In spite of his connectedness earlier in his life to important people of means with whom he rubbed shoulders with in the music business or to whom he sold jewelry display items to he goes out of his way to abhor the finer things in life dismissively preferring Motel 6 and Denny's to any nicer alternatives. In spite of his affinity for Fox News and it's over-the-top patriotism he has always sought to swing a deal with the Chinese and his attitude about it when asked why he would help a competitor nation was "screw them" (America) and "gotta take care of me". In spite of his affinity for Fox News and it's fire-brand conservatism and celebration of capitalism and individuality and personal responsibility he has never earned much of his own money having mostly been handed the money he has possessed or swung some sort of scheme that avoided him having to front much money that didn't originate with somebody else. In spite of his outspoken hatred of the Welfare State he has always worked the system no less effectively than the worst Welfare Queen. In fact, his is getting a divorce now so that he can be legally determined "indigent" so he and his wife don't have to pay his medical bills.

Erebus passed out while on the phone with my friend Dave last year and we called 911 from the Las Vegas area from where we were on the road headed to Salt Lake City. At about the same time his dutiful and longsuffering wife had just come home from work and found him on the floor and she also called 911. As it turns out he merely fainted from exhaustion and dehydation. However, none of could have known that and given his years we all had to assume it was something more serious. He fought the medics tooth and nail the entire way to the hospital and then treated the hospital staff as ugly as one could imagine. He even talked to his attorney about suing the hospital and medics and henceforth likened them to Nazis. While visiting him in the hospital over the weekend I was appalled at the horrible things he was saying about the staff and the way he was talking about the medics who would be transporting him to Stanford medical center via ground ambulance. He had little if anything nice to say about anything or anybody in spite of facing his death sooner or later.

I could go on and on but my point should be now be obvious: Erebus is both a hypocrite incapable of perceiving irony and one of the few genuine misanthropes I've encountered.

One anecdote about Erebus that perfectly demonstrates the bizarre amalgam of internal contradictions that is so perfectly him is the fact that back in the 1960's he was a long-haired Barry Goldwater acolyte who liked to smoke weed and one time got picked up by local cops and had his hair forcibly cut and was then kicked out of town.

Fini