Prince's Death

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The news broke at around noon yesterday.

Like for a whole bunch of people my age there was a real sense of disbelief.

Prince died.

Now I'm not going to pretend that I was fanatical about his music, but I certainly knew all the hits and I immediately thought about seeing Purple Rain back when I was in college.

It was a great movie.

But he put out 38 records and I don't know more than 20 songs by name.

So, I wasn't a super fan by any stretch of the imagination, but it shook me quite a bit.

Perhaps because he was a star of my late childhood.

More likely it's because a sudden death of a young man is scary for all of us.

Did he really die of the flu?

Are our lives really that fragile?

Perhaps his death won't be all that mysterious when it all shakes out.

And yea, our lives are that fragile.

That is a little of what truly brought me down.

There is so much wasted energy in all of our lives.

We worry about so many little things that aren't really worthy of our time.

I was driving a long way and I listened to hours of the coverage of his death.

(I must've heard Purple Rain 70 times).

Every program summarized Prince's life's work.

There was speculation about his death.

And it continued to shake me.

It ends. That's it.

And we all face that fate.

When you straight up give death a lot of time in the thought of just a normal day, you don't dwell on some of those mundane, ridiculous aspects of life.

I thought about my life's work and how I am happy with how it has all played out for me on a personal and professional level.

Not a lot of regret.

I thought of those I have lost and how five more minutes of time would be worth every single dime I could make from here on out.

I considered my family... knowing that I've given them all the best parts of me (and some of the other parts)...

...again, no regrets.

And I've had fun.

Life has not always been easy, but there has been a lot of fun.

There is fear when you consider that a 57-year old man can just drop.

But it happens every day.

Just open the local newspaper.

And the fear comes from the fact that it's out there for all of us.

So live.

Laugh and love.

Cliché, I know.

But that's all there is.

R.I.P. Purple Dude.

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