Thursday, March 29, 2007

Who Doesn't Love a Happy Ending?

I wrote about my old friend Eric here: Spending Warm Sunny Days Indoors
In short, after the demise of his band Life Sentence Eric was living on the streets of Chicago and struggling with a heroin addiction. I found this out in the summer of 2005 and every time I made a trip home to Chicago I spent some time trying to find him, searching the halfway houses and places he'd been spotted panhandling. Trying to find him seemed hopeless and I had no idea how I was going to help him if I did find him but still I couldn't bear the thought of not trying.

As it turns out, Eric has cleaned himself up, gotten off the streets and is doing well. I don't have any more details but for now that's good enough news for me.

One interesting thing I found out about Eric is that he was an excellent swimmer, swam competitively for some team (I think college) and was good enough to consider qualifying for the Olympics. As I was dragging my ass through the pool at masters tonight I was thinking what a great swim coach he'd be. If anyone was capable of teaching me how to do a freakin' flip turn it'd be Eric.

And lord love the internet, here are some videos of Life Sentence from 1986 (Eric is the guitar player with the blond spiky hair):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjPpgMaOWGA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTY3nWVMIrI

The quality is appallingly bad but hey, that's punk rock.

2 comments:

  1. Good for you for trying. It's hard to climb out of one's comfortable world and risk inserting one's self into something much more scary.

    -ellen

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  2. Well, Eric was a great friend to me back in the day, it was the least I could do to try to find him.

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