Well, it's been a hell of a week. My friend passed away two days ago. And this isn't the only friend I've lost in the last few months. Another one died after getting an infection while undergoing cancer treatments. Shit. This life thing is difficult and hard. His wife has asked me if I would officiate the funeral. Why not? He was a good friend and he never judged me by what I did.

Actually, we met a long time ago as he was one of my clients at a club I was working at. I never did lap dances for him or anything...he was older than me too. But after he'd been in a few times, I met him outside of work for a drink and we really connected. As friends. I mean I was married at the time. This was when I used to live in Miami (another long story). Anyway, he taught me how to handicap horses (this was his job at the time...a handicapper with the track before he retired). Anyway, we used to go down to the track and it was so much fun to see how he did it. We often won too. It was a looong ass time before he finally got around to telling his wife he'd befriended a stripper. And she wasn't exactly thrilled about our friendship either. But we continued being friends, I even met his daughter (who became a friend too). Some years went by, I lost my husband, moved to Panama City and his family moved to North Carolina... But we kept in touch.

So I'm going back at the end of the week to officiate his funeral. My first one. I'm super nervous and now I'm going to sit down with Jimmy and figure out how to do this. Maybe there are tutorials on line? So yeah, my first debut as a Universal Life Minister...and it's a funeral of one of my best friends.

Any suggestions? He wasn't strictly Christian, but he did believe in God and an afterlife.... Which is something I'm starting to question.