It’s a beautiful day. I just took a walk during lunch and stopped in at a few stores. I’m not even going to pretend to be angry about the fact that they were all playing Christmas music over their speakers and had decorations up on November 10th. Yes, it’s all so commercial and begins earlier every year. But I love it.

Not trying to jinx it, but for no particular reason, I’ve been feeling better lately than in have in a long time.

Enough of that though. What I want to talk about today is my friend Mikey. Actually, he’s not really a friend of mine. I’d say he’s more of a friend of friends of mine, but my friends don’t really like him either. Which is one of the many good things about the fact that he’s leaving town next week and heading back to home, for good.

Mikey entered our lives a couple years ago, on his way back from serving as a marine in Iraq. Naturally, he decided the best place to start his civilian life would be in a large, harsh city that mostly disagrees with the war he just got done fighting, offered no concrete leads for his employment, and where he knew very few people. What is here, however, is our friend Kevin. Mikey is in love with Kevin.

I should say right now that Mikey is completely straight, despite quite a lot of evidence that might suggest otherwise, such as his aforementioned man-crush on Kevin. During his first weekend here, he kissed a man. It was a cross-dressing man. You might think that’s hard to believe in a oh-sure-like-he-really-didn’t-know sort of way, but you have to remember that Mikey had just gotten back from serving in the military in the constant company of nothing but men, so his perception of what women look like was probably a little compromised anyway. And I’m here to tell you, that guy made one hell of a convincing woman. Not that I would have gone anywhere near his/her face with mine, but when you add in the fact that Mikey just really isn’t all that smart, what you’ve got is a lot of factors leading up to a perfect storm of an accidental homosexual incident.

Over the past couple years, Mikey has supplied as us all with a lot of entertainment, most of it at his expense. It’s a tradeoff really, as laughing at him is really the only thing that eases the difficulty of being around him. I don’t like to sound mean, but Mikey is, well...an idiot. He says a lot of inappropriate things at the worst times, he’s completely lacking in basic social skills, and he’s unable to understand how everyone else in the world isn’t as obsessed as he is with sports and the whole going-overseas-and-bombing-the-hell-out-of-a-whole country thing. Frankly, we all felt too bad for him to completely nix him from our lives. Besides, he kept getting our new phone numbers. But now that he’s leaving, we can all just sort of sit back and remember the good times without the accompanying bringdown of knowing we’ll have any more of the bad.

Number one on the list of all-time great Mikey moments is when he was brutally attacked for absolutely no reason by my friend Desiree’s cat. Buffy simply scurried across the room, claws extended, tail swollen and back arched, and swatted at Mikey repeatedly like he was a living, walking, screaming scratching post. That was also the night Mikey later single-handedly caused my friend Keith, one of the sweetest, calmest people I’ve ever known, to stand up and threaten Mikey’s life during a hand of Texas Hold ‘em Poker. Was Mikey cheating, you ask? Hell no. We’d been spending the previous hour trying to explain to Mikey how to play. That was one of many times at least one of us had to leave the room or run the risk of strangling him.

In his time here, he was banned from three bars. He fell in love with one bartender at a local bar, who, as Keith once put it, might very well be the ugliest woman on the planet. She refused to go out with him. As his grand finale, and serving as the reason why he’s leaving town a couple months earlier than he had planned, Mikey got fired last week from the packing company he had worked at for two months. The reason? Wait for it: stealing bubble wrap. Except he didn’t even steal it. The security cameras clearly show him walking out to his car with a wad of bubble wrap in his hand, opening the car, throwing his sweatshirt in, and then returning to work with the bubble wrap still in his hand. So conspiring to steal bubble wrap then.

This Sunday night is the Farewell Mikey party. Because, after all is said and done, he’s someone that was part of our lives for at least a small part of it, and we all wish him well. And just to show our good will, we’re all pitching in for a gift card for free gas.

That way, if he runs out of money on the trip, by that point he’ll probably be far, far away.