Tim's story-- his rise and fall

Something about recent threads has me fairly uncomfortable, and I think
I've pinned it down.

When I was a grad student in Cleveland, I used to spend time in a fairly
bohemian neighborhood. One of the Coventry locals was a man named Tim
Calhoun, and he became a friend.

Prior to my arrival in Cleveland, Tim went through a strange period of
rabid streetcorner preaching-- the fire, brimstone, and damnation stuff.
He had been married to a wonderful lady, and had a beautiful daughter,
but that situation didn't make it through his period of madness.

Around my first few years, Tim somehow managed to seek treatment or
something. Anyway, he calmed way down, stopped his streetcorner
preaching (but remained a man of faith), took up poetry, got a job as a
groundskeeper at Case, met his paternal obligations to his daughter, and
used his Case benefits to pursue a doctoral degree in Philosophy. Me,
Tim, and some others had some wonderful discussions and arguments, that
weren't too different from the last few days here (and there's the
link!). I have fond memories of a day where we were playing bridge, in
the back of Arabica coffee house, where they still let smokers smoke back
then, and I found some wonderful sacrifices that really destroyed some
very nice scores for him, and how ****ed off he was, in a good natured
way. He'd get ticked off during arguments. Once, I remember, I thought
he'd take off his shoe and start beating the table with it, like that
wonderful moment brought to us by the UN. He was a very bright man, who
was working very hard at a very physical job to try to get to where he
thought he wanted to be.

Tim eventually got his degree about six months before I got mine, and
things just went downhill for him from there. I guess he just lost
regulation of whatever his particular hell was, then shortly before my
time in Cleveland was up, he OD'ed big time on one of his psychiatric
drugs.

On my next-to-last day in Cleveland, right before I moved here, I spent a
half hour in "conversation" with Tim, as he layed in his intensive care
bed in University Hospitals in an induced coma. Visits in IC were quite
limited for non family, but I used my hospital ID to wangle an extended
visit from the nurse, who was flushing out his sinuses for some reason
while I was there with him. Tim was a big guy, about 6'6", but I'll
always remember how small he looked, just dwarfed by that bed and all the
monitors around him. He died a few days later.

If I can ever drag myself away from my desk tonight, I think I'll go
home, try to dig up some of Tim's poetry from where I think I might have
stashed it more than a decade ago, and raise a glass to Tim.

--
Scott
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