My roommate, Courtney, and I had a poker face competition.

She won.

I've heard that one of peoples' greatest fears is the fear of dying alone. What a stupid fear. Of course we are going to die alone. Everyone dies alone.

Perhaps that is cynical, but it's the truth. Even if I were to die with 50 other people on a tour bus, the experience of death and dying is all mine: I am dying. I am dead.

The transition from life to death is perhaps quite scary. What happens next? What about my friends? My family? My obligations? One might lie there on his deathbed, proclaiming in soliloquy, a story of woe to himself, and despite his pleas and the count of his audience, he alone will die; he will die alone.

He lived alone, in fact.

Regardless of his ability to multiply, or the number of his children, grand children, wives or friends, he lived alone. When he smelled flowers, or sang songs or cried for joy or sadness, he alone did those things. Though his choices affected many, none of them affected anyone as much as him. They were his choices alone.

When he spoke precious words to one or to thousands, it was he that spoke the words. When he told her of the love he had for her, he to her of his love, and he loved.

All men live and die and act alone. Every man's life is a soliloquy.

The fear is not that he die alone; but rather, that he die unnoticed.

Though I never knew him, my grandfather, Jack Parks Ensor, was a military man. He retired from Her Majesty's service a light colonel, and he himself orchestrated many campaigns and played a very important role in the second world war. My dad has all the history books, and has told me all the stories about the man for whom I am a namesake.

Every November 11, Rememberance day, was a big day for my dad. We'd go to the community centre or the Catholic Church or some other venue and watch as the Legionaires would march in slowly with reefs of poppies, and crosses of rememberance. Some of the retired men carried their colours, others just carried tears for men they'd lost in Italy, Poland, Germany and other stages where we fought. We fought.

It seems easy for historians to say that "we" fought a war. I suppose that identifying ourselves as one of them is the only way to preserve our history as a country. But every year that my dad took me to a Rememberance day service, the numbers of veterans was smaller. They fought the war. The war ended in 1945, and I reckon that the oldest to survive couldn't have been much younger than twenty, being replacements for those who fell ahead of them. Survivors now are pushing ninety, and surely many of their minds and memories are waning, just as their bodies are failing. In just a decade, all those who fought in the last world war will be gone, and we will remain.

I've never fought in a war and I don't know many people who have. A handful of my friends are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I'm sitting in a hotel in Fresno, complaining because there's no grocery store close by.

No one knows for sure how many people died in WWII. Conservative estimates range from 50 million to other guesses upwards of 70 million. Million. If you think about that, that's the current population of Canada wiped out twice over. That's one quarter of the US population. Those were all people with hearts, and dreams, and fears and girlfriends, and love, and tears. Each one of them had a mother who birthed them, and loved them and prayed for them. Each one hoped they'd live. They didn't.

I never fought, and I hope I never have to; and as for you, I wish the same. Remember the wars gone by. Remember the hearts broken as telegraphs came in saying that our loved ones were killed in action or missing or taken prisoner.

They fought the war. We remember.

I'm having strange dreams lately. Every morning for the last week, I wake up in the shadow of an ambiguous dream, dripping with beads of cold sweat, curled up in the centre of my thrashed bed. Yesterday I awoke crying; and to think, it may have been avoided if I could have just saved the drowning poet. Last night, I watched a friend, whom I don't know, get sucked into a swirling, violent chasm of quicksand, whislt I watched helplessly from the side. My basketball coach, with a gigantic nasal piercing, patted me on the shoulder, encouraging me, "go Tigers."

My whole life I have dreamed vividly. Not every night, but nearly every night, I lie down and watch a production in technicolor. Most mornings, or mid-nights, I awake and try to piece together what I can from the dream before it vanishes, never to be seen or remembered again. I sometimes marvel at the spin my brain puts on the previous day's conversations and incidents. I have never parked my car on the roof of the house, for instance. I have yet to walk into a group of my peers in nothing but my underwear and tell them to "suck it." No wait. Yeah, that one did happen, I think.

When I was younger, my dreams were more lucid and I could control my them almost as if I were God himself. "You," I'd say. "Get naked," though I'm sure that God doesn't need to command anyone to get naked, I imagine, he has quite a brilliant imagination. Clearly he must, look at the platypus, the camel and Ryan Seacrest. The point is, anyway, that I was in charge of my dreams when I was a kid, and if I didn't like what was going on, or if I suspected I was going to piss all over myself, I'd just politely excuse myself from tea with the Mad Hatter and Alice, and wake myself up. It's was good to be king.

Now, I'm stuck with dreams that make me fear I'm going mental. Not really, of course, because everyone is allowed to have crazy dreams, that's why we call them, "your wildest dreams." Just once though, I'd like to make friends with a friendly, brown monster, or play paintball with the late Queen Mother, or talk women with a eunuch. I just need some reprieve. I'm not having nightmares or anything, but close to it: I was a basketball player.

My shoes are done.

Today my trusty, dirty, scuffed up, Brooks shoes will be sent away to some landfill somewhere in the South Valley. I'm not a very sentimental guy, despite being a hopeless romantic. I don't keep things like ticket stubs, or matchbooks or old love letters. I didn't even keep the gum wrapper from the piece of gum I gave Jessica Simpson in the Charlotte airport--she wanted my number, but she had to settle for some peppermint Trident. Things are things, they don't last forever, and sentimentality to me is just another form of denial. Move on.

With all that said, I do feel a slight attachment to my old running shoes. They have seen me through a lot and followed me all over the continent and never complained once along the 400+ miles they've run. I haven't been all that nice to these shoes either. I have mashed them into mud and poop all over the place. They've been on pavement that was way too hot, and on ice that was way to cold. They've splashed puddles and paint and have seen their share of blood and vomit too.

One night in El Paso, my shoes ended up wearing most of my stomach contents when I ran the ten miles to Juárez in a little over an hour. They didn't complain when I wore them in the shower with me to clean them off, though I'm sure the maid at the Hyatt wasn't impressed. There was a midnight run in Columbia where my shoes and me ran from a drunkard and dodged empty beer bottles flung from a redneck in a truck. Later that night, we were picked up by the police because I was lost and had run to the far side of the airport. We were on the "wrong side of the tracks," by the officer's own reckoning.

We ran away from Blood's or Crypts or both one night when I took a left instead of a right and ran through the heart of Compton around one in the morning. I know the difference between the sound of firecrackers and 9mm now; so do my shoes.

My shoes and I took leisurely jogs along the both coasts. Their favorite was Myrtle Beach I think, though I prefer Santa Barbara. We've seen much of Canada, including Nanaimo in the winter. We also spent a great deal of time in the high altitudes of Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. We've sped along the rivers in Austin, Calgary, and Wichita. We ran from dogs, and hoodlums in Huston and San Antonio. We sat inside on cold days in Des Moines when it wasn't smart to run. We crashed into a car in Charlotte. We saw the ships in the harbor in Norfolk, and we've checked out our fair share of women Burbank. When we did see a pretty gal, my shoes always gave me an extra bound and I squared off my shoulders just a little more than normal.

We ran three mountains in San Luis Obispo, stopping by Cal Poly to check out the sights there. We ran Roanoke too and saw the sights at Virginia Tech. We ran the river with my dad and his shoes too once or twice when I took them to visit in Canada.

When I was injured, my shoes and I ran slowly on the treadmill at the gym. My shoes were just as bored.

My shoes have taken a beating many times when I just didn't know how to deal with what was going on in my life. They stayed right there for me, under my feet. We sure have seen a lot, my shoes and I, and now, they've reached the end of their road. So long shoes.