Gone Too Soon: Michael LaFever (1974-2010)

Michael LaFever

"Regrets. I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention."

That was the line from "My Way," by Frank Sinatra. It's that line I have been thinking most about this week. If there is one real regret I got right now, it is that I didn’t take the time to get to know certain people I have crossed paths with throughout my life, especially with some of those from my previous IT helpdesk job that I left in August 2008.

The recent email I received from a former colleague through Facebook Monday night letting me know that a co-worker I knew named Michael LaFever passed away Feb. 21, 2010, brought up that lingering regret.

I spoke to Michael off and on at my previous IT job. It was, however, most always when I was on the phone troubleshooting hardware or software issues and needed an immediate answer in a quick attempt to get the caller off my phone.

Though I didn’t attempt to get to know him on a more personal level, I was able, seeing since my cubicle was right near his, to make a good enough assessment that Michael was a Hell of a nice guy.

He was always smiling and upbeat and never lost his patience with anyone no matter how moronic the idiot on the other end of the phone was.

I got to know Michael more this past year by connecting with him on Facebook. Actually, he connected with me sometime last year.

Michael was always posting things on Facebook. When he one day wrote on his page how his girlfriend said yes when he proposed to her, I was happy for him, if not a little jealous and envious because I have yet to find a significant other.

Perhaps in my case, that’s all my fault because I haven’t bothered to go looking and the times I have searched, I have found they were already attached to someone else. That’s what makes the Oscar nominated film, "Up in the Air" (2009), in particular, the ending when George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham learns the real truth about the woman he falls in love with all the more depressing, if you’ve seen it.

As I browsed through Michael’s Facebook page the past few days, which sadly now resembles a memorial guestbook people sign at wakes with comments of condolences from friends and family members, I took note of one comment Michael said on his page back in late December last year.

“If you ever get bored just go out in public and make small talk with a stranger. You just might get a kick out of it. I know I do sometimes. People are amazing!!”

I don’t believe for one minute Michael was lying. That’s just the type of person he was. He had that kind of friendly, easygoing personality who wasn’t afraid to talk to anyone, even if he just met them.

It’s that kind of magnetic personality that would have made Michael a perfect candidate if he planned on going into journalism.

It was by mere accident when I spoke with him briefly online through AOL’s instant messaging back in November 2009. We briefly argued politics, Obama, "Dubya," and catching each other up on our latest jobs. I was about to sign off AOL when Michael suddenly asked me for advice on how to get into writing and getting himself published. He said he had a knack for writing opinionated political type columns.

I thought to myself, all this time I thought he was going for a corporate career working for some company's Information Technologies department either doing troubleshooting or training. I even gave him the Dallas County Community College District's website to check for I.T. job postings which are listed every Friday.

I told him thanks to the Internet; anyone can write their own blog. If he was, however, looking to actually get himself published, then he’d have to go back to school, major in journalism, and write for the college newspaper.

Michael said he had been considering going to back to school. I told him about how I write brief film reviews and sometimes columns for the "Blitz Weekly," a local publication in the Dallas area and gave him the editor’s contact information. I told him they are always looking for stuff to publish and the possibility existed that if he has anything he’s written in regard to sports, food, entertainment, politics, or anything pertaining to “male only” issues, the editor might consider running them in a future issue.

Michael never contacted them.

A couple months later, I got an invite from him on Facebook letting me know he was having a get together on a Saturday, a few days after his 36th birthday Jan. 14 and invited all the former employees and managers. Unfortunately, the invite was too short notice for me to get the day off work. Like most everyone who knew him, especially those who knew him better than I did, the thought never crossed my mind that if I had gone, that that would have been the last time I had seen him.

Now that he is gone in what is a life unfinished, I am left wondering what kind of promising future Michael might have had if he had chosen writing.

What kinds of opinionated columns would he have published?

In his instant message to me back in November last year before signing off, Michael wrote if he gets let go from his current I.T. job, “Maybe I can take up writing... but I would just piss off everyone and have no readers by the time my 1st article was done…lol.”

©2/25/10

Edwards latest tell-all nothing more than tabloid trash

When former Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards admitted to his having an affair three years ago with his campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, yet denying the child she had was his, I was disgusted at hearing the news as anyone else.

It is one thing to commit adultery. It’s another when the husband commits adultery at the time his wife is battling terminal cancer.

That’s all, however, between John Edwards and God. It’s not my place to point out what he did was morally reprehensible. We all have our flaws. Nor was I, despite my intense dislike for the Democratic Party, going to use Edwards’ downfall to do a little Mexican hat dance on his political tombstone.

That is no doubt something conservative talk show hosts do, and they have been joined in the past two weeks by another Andrew Young with the release of his new book, “The Politician”, which reportedly goes into far greater detail about the Edwards’ affair.

I have heard the hard right citing the usual double standard whenever a Democrat gets caught literally with his pants down, the drive-by media attempt to shovel the scandal under the rug. When a Republican, however, gets caught, the exact opposite happens. Their name and reputation get dragged through the mud and many times they are forced to resign.

This is nothing new.

What bothers me, with the release of Young’s book, is it’s not newsworthy. OK, it’s newsworthy from a trashy standpoint. That’s something the conservative talk show circuit has no problem discussing when a liberal Democrat’s infidelities take center stage.

Edwards’ admittance of the three-year-old affair is not getting to the point of being like the Tiger Woods scandal. If there was anything funny about it about it, David Letterman would have a Top 10 list of reasons why John Edwards cheated on his wife and Saturday Night Live would do a controversial weekend skit.

Like the Tiger Woods scandal, Edwards’ downfall has gotten worse if you believe the allegations written in Young’s book. You, who was Edwards’ former aide during the 2008 presidential campaign, said in an article in People, the reason he authored the book was “so the truth can be told.”

Among the allegations briefly covered in Us Weekly, Edwards supposedly made a sex tape between he and Hunter in 2007. The tape is reportedly in Young’s safety deposit box should it be needed to corroborate his story in future investigations.

There is the story that Hunter told Young how she spent the night at the Edwards’ home while Elizabeth was out promoting her book back in 2006.

“The next morning, Hunter “slept while the senator made breakfast for the kids and then drove to school,” Young was quoted as saying in Us Weekly. That same year, Edwards told his wife that Hunter was a “one-night stand.” Of course, everyone now knows otherwise.

In 2007, when Edwards learned of Hunter’s pregnancy, he asked Young to persuade her to get an abortion, which the author refused.

When Hunter went into labor Feb. 26, 2008, she asked Young to call Edwards, who in turn refused to speak to her. A month later Edwards asked Young to get one of the baby’s dirty diapers so a DNA test could be done to prove whether or not he was the father. Edwards also wanted a fabricated DNA test in case it turned out he was the father.

“I was the guy to put out the fires,” Young said in People of his days working for Edwards’ campaign. “The guy he counted on.”

Elizabeth Edwards, on the other hand, was no angel either according to the Us Weekly article. She reportedly saw cancer diagnosis as a means to boost Edwards’ poll numbers, encouraging him to seek the presidency. This, despite the fact she knew of the affair and chances of the scandal sinking the entire campaign.

New comes the torrid news, from the National Enquirer, that Edwards beat his wife during a marital spat.

There are only two things that are true now. Edwards finally admitted on Jan. 21 that he is the father of 23-month-old Frances Quinn Hunter. “It was wrong for me…to deny she was my daughter,” Edwards said.

The other is that Edwards’ 32-year marriage is now over, with Elizabeth calling it quits.

“She (Elizabeth) said I’ve had it. I can’t do this. I want my life back,” said Elizabeth’s sister Nancy Anania in People. “A long marriage is a tough habit to break, and you throw in incurable cancer and young children, it makes you waiver. But I heard peace in her voice that I haven’t heard in a long time.”

I have seen "The Politician" displayed at bookstores, and I do not intend to waste money on it. I also have no intention of even browsing through it out of sheer curiosity.

Young’s book is tabloid trash. I equate with the that of The Starr Report: The Findings of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr on President Clinton and the Lewinsky Affair” published back in 1998.

Edwards’ scandal may not be equal to the sperm-stained blue dress that almost sunk a presidency. However, all the tawdry little tidbits we’ve heard about since then are enough to make sleazy comparisons to that huge piece of evidence that plagued President Clinton.

©2/16/10