A post long overdue...Riley V. Whitehead in my memory

I know that just about...nobody...reads this blog.

I'm okay with that.

Still, I feel like I owe it to myself now to at least attempt to start writing again. Otherwise I might explode.

So.

A little over a week ago, a dear, dear friend of mine commited suicide.
Riley Vernon Whitehead took all of his dear friends by surprise and jumped of the 9-floor balcony of his Madison apartment. Riley passed away at the hospital.
That's a brief overveiw. I'm not going to explain why he did this, and I'm not going into any more detail about this event.
Really, what I think I will write about, even if it's only for a little while, is what an enigma Riley was to me.

This is one of my absolute favorite pictures of Riley.
Can you guess that book?
I did: Fahrenheit 451

That kid...you could never tell if his stories were real, or if they were stolen, or just made up. I swear, sometimes, I wanted them to be real just because that made him into a super-hero. A flawed super-hero, yes...but a hero none-the-less.

One of the best things about Riley was that he knew when he'd really screwed something up. and he knew his faults. He made fun of his faults, turned them into faults I wanted to have, even though it wouldn't be the same, and I'd just be a huge mess.
I think that God graces every (or at least most) humans with a certain amount of charm. A teaspoon of wit and magic mixed into the rest of our genetics. Well, God must have been distracted, and put in about 4 times as much charm into that kid as he did for the rest of us. Now that chemical imbalance had to be fixed, and I think the only way to set it off was to give him the most creative and inventive brain since that of Da Vinci.
Well, actually...he'd laugh at me if I said that, so maybe not Da Vinci. Still, you get the point. He was an amazing liar, but I miss the lies.
I also really miss him.