The Oxman is heavy set, a chain smoker, and in critical condition. He's a musician and a friend, and in his own words...he's not 'effin around'.

And As I write this, he's still unconscious, his insides mashed up and lumpy and torn, as if they had been pressed through a cheese grater. His bones have been pulverized and it seems his brain is nothing more than mindless gray matter.

Needless to say, I am not in a good mood night. God and I are not on great terms, if we ever were.

It's sick, but can't help to think that the Oxman has been reduced to ground beef, his fleshy body no match for twisted steel and glass and gravitational forces.

It's time like these that I remember that no one's body really is. And that's a thought just trite enough to be meaningless and on the inside right of a Hallmark Card.

But strangely, it's not a thought inconsequential enough to ignore right now, even though a month from today I'll forget about this brief scrap between mortality and youth. I'll plod forward because that's what we do. Life, after all, is just a string of fires that we ignite and extinguish.

In the best of circumstances, the wood burns and embers hold themselves in the air with an erratic buoyancy. They bounce about and everything seems to glow, and you are warm. In the worse of circumstances, the flames are anemic and the wood is wet and rotten. The smoke gets in your eyes and that acrid smell settles uncomfortably in your nose and hair. When this happens, everything seems dark and gray and cold and alone.

In either case, you'll always arrive to the same decision; feed the flames or let them die and start the next one.

Life, like fires, is all about balance. Sometimes you'll have to the use rotten, wet wood out of necessity while other times it will seem as if Hephaestus himself blessed your bonfire. It will erupt light, burning and smoldering on giant coals. It will seem endless.

Those are the times when words just fall from your mouth but they're always the perfect thing to say and everyone knows it. Those are the times when you aren't fighting with your parents and your boss is thinking about promoting you and you just got a scholarship and don't have to take out loans for school and you just ate a really really good batch of blueberries so tart so sweet and you just got a new haircut and you love it and you just found a twenty in your dryer and the guy you wanted to be president got elected and BP's CEO resigned and you just saved a kitten in a burning building and you made out with Natalie Portman and your memoir just got featured in Oprah's book club and Wes Anderson just bought the rights to it and you're pretty sure that Ryan Gosling is going play you in a feature film and you've harnessed a latent ability to control kinetic energy and next week you're visiting your best friend in the city and seeing your favorite band for free and you can't wait to tell him all the crazy good luck you've been having and to show him your newly discovered super powers and then after that...well you haven't thought about after that because you haven't had to. You're basking in the glow of it all. You can only see as far as the light reaches, but for you, it reaches far enough.

And then one Monday you'll sit down at the computer and surreptitiously check facebook (you're at work!) because your Mom just posted pictures of when you visited her at the beach. Which was a big deal, because you two were never close and it seems like now things can be okay. And it's right after you click the 'like button' under a delightfully candid shot of your mother you see on your stalker feed that a musician you thought was brilliant, that a human you thought was unassailable, is now cruelly bruised and broken. Unconscious and hopefully unfeeling, more connected to needles and pumps and IV's than the real world, you can't help but think to yourself that even if the Oxman gets better and heals, his fire will never be as bright as it once was. Robbed of the deftness necessary to manipulate those black and white keys, the same keys he's been pressing his whole life, your friend will never be the same. And all of our lives, especially those of us that shared the same music school with him, will never ever burn with the same intensity. Oxman was the lighter, the musical flint we all collided with and made our fires brighter. He wasn't effin around. He was goovin' baby, right on through that Twelve Tone Tango. Ain't no stopping the Oxman.

And after thinking through all of this, the icey feeling in the pit of your stomach and the clammy chill of your palms will be more than enough to quell any warmth you may have felt thirty seconds ago. The coals are damp and the steam is thick.

Oxman, we're all making a new, warm fire for you. Hope you can feel it. Much, Much love and adoration.