I’ll make the excuse that it’s due to my attempts to fend off the flu, or COVID, or whatever it is that accurately describes this horrific respiratory infestation to which I am currently subject, but I’ve been struggling for most of the week to come up with something intelligent to say upon the passing of Mike Bayham. Robert Wright did manage that feat yesterday here at The Hayride, for which I am thankful.

But I owe Mike something more than just to run Robert’s piece, fine as it is. And it grieves me that I’m at such a loss.

The thing is, I hate writing obituaries. I especially hate writing one of them when the deceased in question is a friend.

Perhaps it’s a function of age that your understanding of the end of a friendship changes from that of your youth. I’m in my mid-fifties and I’m now understanding that you don’t just lose friends because one of you says or does something to sever the relationship. That’s how friendships end when you’re in school and in the first half of adulthood.

And then they start ending because friends pass on.

I met Mike when I started The Hayride. I was a few years ahead of him in school, so I didn’t know him at LSU, and I wasn’t really involved in GOP politics while he was rising through the ranks of the Young Republicans. Mike was running a little conservative blog when I got The Hayride started, and I invited him to post here. So he did, and he was terrific, and the partnership was productive – as this site grew, Mike’s name ID grew and he got a little outside recognition beyond just inside the state GOP circles. Most of what Mike posted here wasn’t even about politics. He’d do Saints stuff, or entertainment, or just fun topics. But once in a while he’d write about politics here and when he did, you could tell he knew his stuff.

And eventually, Mike’s political star rose and he got elected to the state legislature, where he was a damned good state rep. That constitutional amendment which just passed banning somebody from running for third terms as governor after sitting out four years after their first two terms? That was Mike’s bill. He had lots of good bills.

The funny thing is, I don’t have a lot I can say about Mike that would be different from what lots of other people can. He wasn’t a celebrity, but he did manage some notoriety. He was a funny-looking guy – short and heavyset, gap-toothed, with a permanent sarcastic grin etched on his face, and he carried himself as the classic New Orleans Yat from St. Bernard Parish. And though Mike was 100 percent that guy from St. Bernard, there was far more to him than just where he was from.

In fact, where he went was more important in describing him than where he came from, at least in my eyes.

When I say that Mike was a world traveler, I’m not kidding. He put his feet down in every single country in Europe. I remember when he bragged to me that he’d just been in the train station in Minsk; my reaction was, “Why?” His answer wasn’t quite “Because it’s there,” but it might as well have been. Then there was the fly-in, fly-out trip he took to Havana when the Obama administration opened the place up to Americans, and the classic Bayham judgement: “it sucks.”

Mike always caught people unawares. He was constantly being underrated. Mike taught lots of the folks he met not to judge a book by its cover. He was whip-smart, and dogged. He loved to argue; sometimes too much. He was irascible, but that wasn’t what defined him. What defined him was passion; when you found yourself in an argument with Mike you had to realize he was digging in his heels because something important was at stake.

And that made him different from most of the other politicos out there, men and women who at the end of the day really just want invitations to the crawfish boils and cocktail parties with the smart set.

The funny thing was that Mike ended up at all of those functions anyway, because somebody always brought him along. Or if they didn’t, Mike would harangue the host until he got an invite. It was hilarious, and classically New Orleans, to watch him work in that way.

He was infuriating, mostly in a good way. He was full of surprises. Mike was fierce, in all the ways fierce can be good.

I knew he was in poor health, but when it went sharply downhill for him I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. For which I’m sorry. This is, I guess, the best I can do.

And I hate it.

I hate writing these damned obituaries.

And I absolutely hate losing friends this way.