This time I'm honestly going to try and stop procrastinating. Putting off things that I have the time to do, or could make just a little bit more effort and get done.I drove to LA on Tuesday to see Billy Connolly's stand-up show. I was going to write about that, and I'll mention it briefly here because it was a good time. My face hurt by the end of the show from laughing too much, and my first time to Hollywood, although grey and damp, was good. But because I didn't write about it when it happened, I have to write about something else instead. A friend of mine died earlier today (thursday). He wasn't a close friend, but he was a fantastic bloke, the sort of guy who would do just about anything for just about anyone. I knew him through work, and while we only saw each other a few times on social occasions, one of those was when he had a bunch of us over to his place for Thanksgiving. He would organise people to get together just because it was about time, Things would come up, so I'd tell myself I'll do it next week. I went to see Billy Connolly in LA on Tuesday, so instead of going to see Michael on Wednesday, I stayed in bed most of the day because driving there and back was pretty tiring. So I told myself I'd go on Saturday, because my EMT class is at the hospital for a practical that day. He won't be there on Saturday. When my parents left England, I stayed behind for a year to finish school. I'd also go, every fortnight, to play chess with an elderly swiss gentleman called Mr Krapft. My mother used to see him, have him over for cards, go to his place. I'd go over to his place and make pound cakes (that were somehow the best cakes ever. In theory every pound cake should taste the same, cos the ingredients don't change. But his were the best). One week, I didn't go- I forget the reason, I think I may have gone in to work on the set for the panto I was doing at the time- but the following week, when I went in, it was to be told that he had died the night before. So maybe I'm writing this to assuage a bit of the guilt I feel, not once but twice, for not making the effort to see someone who matters to me. Maybe I'm lucky because when my grandparents died I was too young to be really affected by it. Maybe I'm unlucky because I'm twenty-seven, and this is the first time that someone has died whom I would see most days, who was a friend rather than a relation I would see every could of months or years. Whether lucky or unlucky, I remeber being beaten at chess by an old man with glasses so thick they would have withstood a nuclear explosion, and wondering how he managed it every time. I remember the impression Michael would do of Siegfred when he told Siegfred and Roy he was leaving the show to work on Zumanity 'You vould leefe us?'. I remember everyone who has shared a part of their life with me, and I thank them.