The Twenty-Sixth Year - 2005

Turning twenty-five was bitter sweet for me... but mostly just bitter. According to the culture I was living in at the time I had become a "menace to society." Personally, I don't think it was an accurate descriptive title - I was working full time and enrolled in school at UVSC working on my business management degree. Hardly a menace.

I think this was the summer I went to the Jack Johnson concert with G Love and Special Sauce. It was a good concert - held somewhere out in West Jordan I think. I can't remember who I even went with but our seats were pretty good. I also went to a Tim McGraw concert at that same venue. One of my co-workers used to call in to local radio stations and she seemed to always get through and win free stuff. Once she won Howie Day concert tickets; she had already bought tickets too so she gave me the ones she won. I took a friend from FoxWood. It was a great concert, Anna Nalick opened. Speaking of concerts, I think it was in 2006, I went to the Fall Out Boy concert (with All American Rejects and Hawthorne Heights) at the McKay Events Center at UVSC - NOT a good venue, in fact the WORST sound quality ever... but it was still fun to go.

The year was not all fun though. September. Shane Sirois was killed September, 2005. Back then I used to write all my blogs on the All That Is Wall blog (Bret's blog). I recorded my thoughts shortly after getting the news of Shane's death here: All That is Wall: Farewell to a friend. I just finished reading it for the first time since I wrote it. It's interesting how many of the stories I shared there are the same as I've written in these past few blogs here.

Shane was working as a stunt man for a touring show of Pirates of The Caribbean in China at the time; he came home (to Tucson) for a week or so to visit his grandparents for his birthday (September 11). On the 17th Shane and some friends put on a benefit car wash to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. After helping at the car wash he went with some friends to a gas station where one of his friends was getting a cell phone he had loaned to another friend (or something like that). While they were there a young male in a car started arguing with one of Shane's friends over who knows what. The guy in the car drove off, only to return a moment later showing a gun. Shane and his friends took off running on foot. One shot was fired hitting Shane in the back. The bullet bounced around the inside of his thoracic cavity until coming to rest lodged in his heart. One of his friends ran to him and held him - Shane knew he was gone.

Shortly after my dad called me with the news I got a call from Shane's younger brother Eric. Eric asked me to be a pole bearer at the funeral in Tucson - of course I agreed. I cried good and hard that week. Only a week or two before his death I tried to email him. He must have changed his address because it came back undeliverable. Words can't describe how much I regret procrastinating tracking down his new address - or some other means of getting in touch with him. I just wanted to catch up with him, say hi, and see how things were going for him. The last time I had seen him before the funeral was at Chris and Marie Cool's house in Show Low, the same one Shane and I helped paint. Shane was there finishing up some odd job for the Cools - it must have been a year or so earlier (2004).

I helped track down a few of Shane's childhood friends to give them the news and invite them to the funeral - including a girl he and I both dated in high school (at the same time - yes all three of us knew about it, but we didn't care). I felt a little out of place there, most (okay, all) of the people (friends from high school) I hadn't spoken to since graduation - except for Kelly, she and I actually rode down to Tucson together. The funeral was all wrong. His mom had it in an LDS church building and all the songs and even the eulogy were things Shane was probably rolling his eyes about. The guy that gave the eulogy was probably the bishop in his grandparent's ward... I'm pretty sure he never met Shane and who knows where he got his words from. The best thing said was by his mom, "if Shane were here right now, he would be wondering why we're all a bunch of 'sad sacks,' cheer up, you'd think someone died or something." His life ended far too soon, but, ironically enough, Shane did (accomplished) everything he ever set out to do.

At the graveside ceremony one of Shane's friends sparked up a joint and blew a last puff into the grave... the rest of us just shared a memory and tossed in a handful of dirt.

I spent the rest of the year listening to Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" song - over and over and over again.