Billy Joel Sucks

About a month ago a local high school football coach, J.D. Hall, dropped dead from a heart attack. Normally I wouldn’t think twice about it but I went to school with him. He was a year behind me at Robert E. Lee Senior High School (Go Generals!). I was class of ’88; he was class of '89 . He wasn’t a close friend. He was barely more than an acquaintance, but sitting here at 3:30 in the morning reading a crappy Times-Union column about him, his death is hitting me kind of hard. Maybe it’s because I remember the columnist occasionally lifting with us in the afternoon of my senior and J.D.’s junior year. I was the hard case knucklehead counting down the last 180 days of my sentence. J.D. was the star quarterback. The only way to describe him is he was a hell of a nice guy, which is a consensus. The next guy with a bad word about J.D. will be the first guy with a bad word about J.D. We all encounter a few people like this in our lives, people you just hope good things for. The anecdotal/speculative cause of death was that he worked himself to death. What the hell for? He was thirty-five years old. Maybe we just had different perspectives. I grew up the petulant middle class kid whom the world owed things. J.D. was a poor kid who had to be focused from day one just to escape the ghetto. Right now as my life is beginning to take form and I can see the real possibility of a near fairy tale existence my worst fear is that I die at work when I could have been spending time with my family and friends. Nobody in the history of the world has ever been on their death bed wishing they had spent more time at the office. I don’t know if only the good die young, but sadly J.D. Hall sure did.