IWBYJR available from Amazon early

On any other day I would have been overjoyed to open my email this morning and find out that preordered copies of I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE are shipping now. And that if you go to amazon.com now, it says in stock, not preorder anymore, meaning you can actually get the book now and not have to wait until July 8. I guess this happens sometimes. I don't know if it means it will be in other bookstores, too. Tell me if you see it, I guess. And please, be excited for me. I really can't be right now. It took a lot of effort just to tell you about this. Seems so unimportant right now. But I now I'll want to remember this later so I figured I better document it.

Thank you to everyone who has and continues to leave notes of sympathy. It really does mean a lot to me. I'm still buried under many thick blankets of grief and am finding it to difficult to do anything but take long walks and smoke cigarettes and listen to Automatic for the People and respond to emails on autopilot and even answering email is difficult. I walked roughly five miles yesterday and have smoked almost an entire pack of cigarettes, which I haven't done in years and I know is not good, but really, there are worse things I could do and it seems like there is this crushing weight on my heart and when that feeling gets intense, smoking works as a release valve. I'll stop soon, I promise.

I know people worry about me and I don't want them to. It's difficult because right now I feel like the only people I can talk to are Katie and Polly, who hurt definitely as bad and most likely even worse than I do. And even with them, it's not like we really talk much or know what to say. It's just the comfort of having them on the phone with me, knowing that they still exist in this world because the reminder that people that you thought would exist forever could be gone in a split second is so terrifying. I want to talk to and be around my other friends, too, but I don't know what to say about how I'm doing and I don't know how to make normal conversation and even listening to normal conversation for an extended period of time brings about the anxious crushing weight. I've been through this all too recently so I know I just have to take it an hour, a day at a time, but yeah....

I did write about Marcel and my memories of him and my reactions to this in my journal yesterday and I'll type that up at some point and tell you all about him because he deserves that kind of tribute. He deserves to live forever. I really always thought he would. That like I said yesterday, he'd be the old man in the park playing chess and Polly added, he would be wearing funny hats and telling great stories. There is really no way to put what kind of unique person he was into words. I can't do him justice, but I'll try at some point. For now I'll just say that he was the kind of guy that touched every person he met, made you want him as your best friend or as Polly put it, he was everyone's best man.

Ok this is all too raw right now and not a proper tribute. That will come later. And right now I need to try to figure out how to do normal things like take a shower and write a grocery list.