I Love You Tom

Sam never met Tom. I wish Tom had met Sam, Tom would have liked Sam. (Bruno has just got out of bed and he is trying to nuzzle up to me as I write)

I've been re-writing my old blogs. I've written up a couple of previous years of journals just as a love letter to Tom. You see Tom and I used to email each other every day, for years. So, setting out years of that, those emails, I can read one long conversation with Tom, again. I can even hear his voice again.

Tom and I were never lovers, no, nothing like that, but we were best friends, and sometimes I think it is harder to loose a best friend than a lover. Lovers are easy to come by, a wink, a nudge, drop your pants and you've got a lover. Best friends are so much harder to come by. You have to give them something real of yourself to get them to hang around, to get them to like you.

Ah, all those friends with whom I no longer keep in contact. I haven't really lost contact, I could call anyone of them up. But, my really best mates are dead. Fergus, Simon, Tom, Anthony. I guess I told you Anthony died? Life got sad for him and he took to drinking big time. 

The problem was that he was a really nasty drunk, so he lost all his friends and life got sadder. I wish I'd done more, I wish I'd hung in there, you know, like a friend would. But his nastiness was too much for me too, brutal drunk nastiness, and we lost contact right at the end.

Excessive alcohol gave him cancer, I assume pancreatic cancer, as he was suffering from pancreatitis when I last saw him.

Apparently, in the end, when it was too late, he gave up drinking and he tried to make amends by contacting everyone who, I can only presume, meant something to him, in which I wasn't included.

I said that I could only assume that I didn't mean that much to him. David (Oh, David isn't dead, although she's half nuts.) tried to tell me that I couldn't assume that I didn't mean anything to Anthony, because that just wasn't true.

"Actions speak louder than words, David," I said.

David said it wasn't true.

I said it clearly was. "He never tried to make it right with me."

Shane isn't dead, but he's been in London for 10 year. Sebastian isn't dead, I saw him the other day, but it had been quite a while before that since I've seen him. Mark and Luke aren't dead, of course, but they live in northern NSW now. Jill, Rachel, although I never seem to see her, LouLou, Lolli, Adriana, I so should call her, all at the end of the phone. 

Anyway, it's nice spending time with Tom, again. I miss him to this day. Fucking Leukemia.

David is always asking when I am going to publish my journals, he calls them the Reno Files, because they chronicle all of our relationship bust ups. None of my friends know I write a blog. Sam knows, but he doesn't care. Mark and Luke knew, but they couldn't have cared less either. Maybe, I'll tell David one day. 

"Maybe I have already published them," I will say to him, mysteriously, one day, just to see the look on his face. Of course, there is only part of them here. I've written them ever since I was a kid. Every day. Nearly everyday. I can't help it, writing. I've never been able to help it. I've always had to write, it is just something in me.

And maybe I won't tell David, either. There is a certain freedom in nobody knowing, it gives me much more freedom to write what I like, I imagine, than if they all knew.

If I ever published my journals, I think I'd call them, I Love You Tom.

I listen to The Rolling Stones from Sticky Fingers backwards to Between The Buttons all day.

The new Stones album is out in the next few months and still no details about it yet.

Come on, it has been at least 8 years you guys have been recording it, we're getting impatient now. Where is it?