Ultimately, not.

That’s the short answer. But here I sit, facing the death of one of my close friends, being crushed beneath a mountain of twelve hour days, ever-expanding ass planted firmly in chair, the days getting shorter.

How come it’s so hard to make the good things last?

Just weeks ago, I was saying to my wife, “we have a really good life.” And we do. But in the car on the way to work today, it was too much. Too many hours inside a soulless office. Too much distance between me and some good friends. Too many people wanting too much. Too much laziness to ever track down somebody’s email address after usa.net kicked the free account habit. And here I am: wishing I’d taken any opportunity to just say something nice to Kristi just one more time. Or even had one more conversation like back in the old days, one more e-mail exchange.

But it’s too late. She can’t talk. She can’t walk. She can’t even eat. Soon, she will cease to exist.

I can’t help but feel discouraged. I wish I could say that anything she had worked for was coming to fruition. She worked hard for women’s rights, only to live to see George Bush and his right wing cronies launch their attack. She wanted to finish more screenplays. She wanted to write more. She got to witness September 11th and the resulting, ever-escalating war afterwards. She’ll never know whether or not the third Star Wars movie was any good.

Sure, it’s unfair. So much potential is leaving. Most of her adult life was spent battling an internal parasite, devouring its host in a self-destructive frenzy. But I can’t dispair. For, in dispair, is death.

I remember our many late nights at my house in Colorado Springs, or Robin’s apartment, at Kristi’s hous or in the dorms, when we talked about how we were going to change the world. How Kristi was going to “start a movement.” In a funny, Gen-X moment, Kristi, when asked by a friend of her parents’ what she was planning to do with her life, informed them of the impending cultural current which she was going to thrust upon the world: her “movement.” The silence in the room was her reward.

I remember the movie she wrote, in which feminists cooked and ate evil men. I remember her rants about how the cigarette industry was keeping the sisters down!

I remember the shock of her first signs of illnes and the resulting treatments. In Colorado, I saw her for the first time since all the craziness began. Her hair was just a quarter inch long and uniform on her head. She brought out really wild polaroids she had taken during her treatment of her wearing suits of high tech armor, laser-aim-assisting alien technology helmets, medical mesh accoutrements of all varieties. It was just experience, to her. Something to reflect to the rest of us, rather than hide or shield us from.

That night, as one of the surprise guests at Asheton’s wedding, along with Val, Kristi was the star attraction. Unable to really party, and most certainly with a ton on her mind and no real dressy clothes to put on, she went to the reception. We were all so thrilled.

Kristi lived out in Los Angeles, a logical place for people who want to create films. I can’t, for the life of me, remember what she did for a job. Production Assistant? I’m not sure, because it didn’t define her. Kristi was a ball of energy, greater than, and impossible to describe, within the framework of her day-to-day labor.

A few weeks ago, I bitched to Val: you know, Kristi never writes e-mail anymore.

Val let me know that Kristi was having a serious relapse. I didn’t know at the time how serious.

The summer is here. Amidst all the life, Kristi is dying.