I don't post often these days, but sometimes you don't know where else to turn, and cougarboard is the biggest online brotherhood I can think of. I have a friend, or rather had a friend. to protect his identity (I think he has posted on here before), let's call him big T. big T was one of my closest and best friends. we grew up together on the edges of the american fork mud flats, playing baseball, hucking rocks at chuds, the regular kind of all american childhood stuff. after our missions, despite looking like richard nixon's biggest hemorrhoid, big T married a beautiful softball player, went to a C-grade law school, worked in insurance for a while as a kind of perpetual failure, and then eventually got a job at a regional law firm doing contracts for optometrists, some law firm run by a mexican psychopath lawyer known in the law community el dentist. I don't know why they call him that. I head it's because he knocked a rival lawyer's teeth out with an aluminum tee ball bat but that probably isn't true. maybe it's true.

anyway, big T lived in vegas for a while where as far as I can tell he caught a pretty terrible trio of addictions to vicodin, over the counter smut, and nacho cheese. his life kind of started to spiral and he ballooned to the point where he looked kind of like...I want to say the most apt comparison would be a molding human sized red grape in stained sweat shorts (he calls them dorm shorts). he even got gout, which I thought was a disease that had been eradicated with the fall of the habsburgs, but he really had it. every time he sucked down another can of ez cheese he'd get what he called "the gout shakes" and if you touched any of his pustulent diseased extremities during the gout shakes he'd scream like piglet in a paper shredder. he hit rock bottom when he was walking down the street one night looking for a vicocheese fix (that's when you crush up a handful of vicodin into a jar of full fat queso, microwave it, and drink it with a straw) and an urban teenager rolled down the window as he drove by and called him a "fat [redacted]."

I think he tried to changes his for a little while after that. moved to portland to try to get away from drug culture and start getting more active. but after he moved to portland we also started drifting a part as he got caught up more in more in his work ambitions at el dentist's law firm, which as far as I can tell is largely staffed by deviants and unlovable miscreants on the verge of committing the kind of felonies that you put you on a permanent register. he used to be a great participant in our boyhood group chat, sending hilarious memes like strips from the comic "garfield without garfield," which mostly just kind of shows you that jon might be clinically insane.

like I said, he's grown more and more distant over the past few years and I get the sense that he might be slipping back to his old ways, melting bricks of velveeta and blending it with prescription cough syrup to make what they call on the streets "the devils slurpee," that kind of thing. he never posts in the group chat and his wife keeps calling me late at night and telling me she's scared for him because he sweats profusely at night from the enormous effort of pushing air into and out of his lungs while lying prostrate on the kind sized dog bed he's been sleeping on (they can't make a bed frame that will hold his weight). she said he constantly smells like a combination of rollmops (a dutch dish of pickled herring and raw onion) and blue cheese, even after he bathes.

anyway, sorry if I'm rambling I guess I'm just a little distraught. if you've ever dealt with something like this, I'd love to get some advice, or if you're a doctor who can advise on the medical side of things. I don't want to lose big T forever because I think there's still some hope for him and he's a childhood friend, which is a rare and irreplaceable thing. thank you and god bless.