Jay Sparling was a guy I shouldn't have been friends with but was friends with anyway. He was a cool kid with kind of a mean sense of humour sometimes, but straddled the two worlds between the smokers and the artsy kids effortlessly. He was the first real drug user I ever knew -- just pot, but lots of it. Jay used to claim that he got stoned so he could understand what the hell I was talking about.

Looking back, Jay was a really great guy. He was more Ron's friend than my friend, though, and we didn't "get" each other a lot of the time. He moved to a town called Tweed a long time ago and we totally lost track of each other. I think he works as a male nurse or something now. We had a lot of great times in high school, most involving Jay getting pretty high. Heh.