I don't know if it was the Sprite, the sweet potato fries or the ranch dressing, but I didn't sleep so well Tuesday night and dreamed a lot of jumbled dreams.
I did a lot of wandering. I'm pretty sure I had the "family reunion in a large confusing house" dream (featuring a conversation with my Dad and Aunt Margot about something--hmm, usually it's my Mom's side of the family...), and I did a lot of walking around the mid Willamette Valley.
Near the end of the dream, I walked to a party being held in an old barn. The paint had long ago flaked off and the wood was weathered to a silver-grey. It was close to sunset. I want to say the party was hosted by some Albany friends, but what really struck me was that Jay Lake had come back from the dead and was at the party.
I was really glad to see him. He looked pretty good; he was restored to how I remembered him from 2007. I very much wanted to ask him what it had been like being dead because, Writing Research! But I didn't want to be all awkward with the sorts of "so, what was it like being dead?" questions he probably got all the time.
It turned out he was entertaining everyone with post-mortem stories. "So I walk into the DMV to get a driver's license, and they ask me for some ID, so I pull out my death certificate...." I got the sense that Jay was driving without a license, but that there was this whole, "So what are you going to do, officer? I'm dead." vibe.
Then the party was over and everyone was leaving. Jay gave me a ride in the GENRE mobile (which was painted red) and we traveled along a curving mid-Willamette Valley off-shoot of highway 99. I discovered that I hadn't put on my seat-belt and fixed that. At some point in our conversation, I said, "Wow, I can hardly wait to see the look on my kid's face when I tell him I got a car ride from a formerly dead man."
There were flares along the side of the road, and the landscape was suddenly under construction, and then the dream went on its wandering-dream way, and I wandered into a battle with devils and angles who were dressed as 1980 New-Wave rockers (slacks, lose blouses, narrow neckties, retro-fifties' buzz cuts). Everyone was walking around in a dimly-lit, orthogonal, blocky kind of indoor mall. The devils wore red and grey and had electric torches that shot flames; the angels wore white and grey and I had to help them by invoking The Power of Christ's name, and as the flames whooshed around us and the devils were cringing back I was thinking, "Wait, how does it even work that a NeoPagan like me can do this ... ?"
Showing posts with label Jay Lake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jay Lake. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Friday, January 02, 2015
Decade in Review: 2014
Sometimes I notice the beginnings of fat and loose skin flirting with making a fold under my chin, and I try to laugh it off by saying "Gobble-gobble-gobble." It doesn't always work.
January 2014. I'm not sure when, but Ronald Hutton replaced Starhawk as my go-to source on NeoPaganism. I spent most of the Winter going through Hutton's "Pagan Britain," which wasn't as much of a source of of schadenfreude in terms of debunking various Neopagan origin stories as I had hoped, but was still an informative (if sometimes dry) read. "Pagan Britain" was a recapitulation of an earlier work, which said "there's not much of an archaeological record of ancient or pre-historic Paganism; the record might support some ideas about worship and ritual, but there's little proof one way or the other -- so everyone's free to imagine whatever they'd like based on the artifacts we do have (and your theories are just as valid as your weird neighbor's)."
The first quarter of 2014, I took a sabbatical from the Wordos table. I spent the Tuesday nights writing. I'd visited Fort Vancouver, and used what I learned about the forge there to write a story for Sword and Sorceress. Which...got rejected.
March 2014. Turning Fifty officially began to bug me. I felt like there was something I was doing wrong, or was forgetting to do, or needed to do. Especially when my friends seemed to be getting published all over the place.
May 2014. I discovered the painting of Wes Hemple. Hempel manages to paint beefcake that's more than beefcake. The nude or semi-nude male body is a powerful and subversive image, and he manages to make his paintings subversive with erotic overtones, while managing to not stray into explicit or gratuitous images. Well, maybe a little gratuitous.
When I think about images of NeoPagan Deity I usually run across, the gods imagined are oiled up with a strategically placed vines or wolf pelts draped across their loins as they gaze out of the picture with smoldering bedroom eyes. Or they're body builders, tattooed or artfully dirty, holding up animal horns to their brows and pouting like underwear models. Or else they're about to perform The Great Rite with a buxom, blonde, blue-eyed goddess. And actually, I don't need to see depictions of two men performing The Great Rite because my spirituality is more than just a queer retelling of Heiros Gamos. Hempel's paintings have embodied men navigating questions, they are working through something instead of being merely pleasing objects.
June 2014. Everything seemed to happen in June. The month opened with the death of Jay Lake -- all of my social media networks turned into a memorial for him. Jay was prolific, funny, crude, irreverent, erudite, and only six months older than I was. I would have never thought when he appeared at my fortieth birthday party in 2004 that he would be dead ten years later.
I had a handful of crazy dreams afterward: I had my feet whipped as penance for something, I lived in cardboard houses that were melting, I was battling a monster called "Pink Skull," and I woke up with the words, "I'm a fake," ringing in my ears.
I grumped about not having a mentor, and concluded that I'm semi-pro writer who writes lyrically, mythologically, queerly, deistically, sensually, imaginatively, romantically, and visually. As much as I want my writing to live forever in letters of fire and to be the bane of English Graduates everywhere, I'm satisfied when the images in my head get into the reader's head.
And then I wandered into the Joanna Russ Archive. Suddenly, I could listen in on a conversation about gender, orientation, wishes, desire and exploring character that Ms. Russ was having thirty years ago. And it was exhilarating. She had linked Kirk and Spock as gay gods in the early 1980's. She was reading and writing and thinking about essentialism and sex and everything. Out of all of her writings, I added wishes, Fears, Knowledge, Experiences, and Desires as a useful lens for crafting stories.
My entry in the Penn Cove Literary Contest, "Before the Last Bloom Falls," was chosen as the winner for June.
In other writing news, I teamed up with a photographer friend of mine and we switched prompts: she'd post a photo and I'd write a story to it; I'd post a story or vignette and she'd compose a photo with it. At first we were doing a weekly cycle, but we switched to a month cycle. It was a low pressure way to create about eleven rough drafts (two went through the Wordo's table) by the end of the year.
July 2014: During a discussion of testosterone in older men, Mark essentially pointed at my sagging pectoral muscles and laughed. In a fit of Capricorn pique, I joined a gym and started chanting explicit oaths under my breath as I worked out on various exercise machines.
I also designed and had 3-D printed two mugs -- er, sake cups -- er, jiggers -- out of ceramic material. They are very cool, but they're Barbie sized.
August 2014. Mark and I got legally married in a small courthouse marriage on top of the Lane County Courthouse roof. We kept it small; my immediate family took pictures. And nobody cried. It marks how attitudes towards same-sex marriage have progressed, from Oregonian's amending the state constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman to the US Supreme Court striking down discrimination. And now I can say "Mark is my husband," and it has a clear meaning. I can't tell you how much of a relief it is to simply and clearly say to someone, "Mark is my husband."
September 2014. In an effort to improve my performance, I got serious about blogging my progress writing and working out, and began posting word counts and work-out routines. I got a simple word-count tracker, and was promptly appalled at how much I don't write; unfortunately, there's no good way to track editing manuscripts other than the amount of time I spend on them. I managed to keep tracking up until about the first week of December.
As a result of keeping records, I sort of learned what I already knew: going to bed late makes it harder to get up at 4:45 to write; changes in my routine make it harder to write; holidays make it harder to write; getting the Eugene crud (which the University and elementary students toss around) makes it harder to write.
Our friends, the Wylds, became the latest friends to move to the Portland area. It's going to be strange without them, because they are one of the few folks Mark, The Child and I like to spend time with.
November 2014. Maybe it was the post-Halloween sugar crash. Maybe it was switching from Daylight Savings Time. Maybe it was the reduction of light, but the first weeks of November were filled with Ennui. Working out seems to help, and I seem to have shaken it off by the middle of the month.
December 2014. I wrote and submitted some erotica; I was slightly relieved when it was rejected. (Spell check had changed that to "slightly revealed," and writing and submitting erotica did feel like I was revealing a little too much. I'm glad I wrote the piece, because it was good practice for revealing character ... oh dear, that's not coming out right at all... without getting distracted by all the eye-candy.)
I identified several dream images I've had, exploring the intersection of maleness, desire, and spirituality. I want to work with them and see if writing them into story helps me to discover anything. About the same time, I tried meditating on the dream images as I work out on the rowing machine; I'm at the beginning stage, but I think once I get used to holding images in my head (while maintaining a 750 calories per hour rowing rate or better), I should be able to use the fifteen minutes as a kind of work-out vision quest. Or something.
We celebrated my fiftieth birthday with a dance party. Mark arranged it all, and I collected four hours' worth of (mostly) 1980's dance music. And danced all of it. My back and abdomen are still sore a week later.
When I think about 2014, it feels like the year where I'm trying to stay focused. If I can stay focused, I'll be -- OH! Squirrel!
January 2014. I'm not sure when, but Ronald Hutton replaced Starhawk as my go-to source on NeoPaganism. I spent most of the Winter going through Hutton's "Pagan Britain," which wasn't as much of a source of of schadenfreude in terms of debunking various Neopagan origin stories as I had hoped, but was still an informative (if sometimes dry) read. "Pagan Britain" was a recapitulation of an earlier work, which said "there's not much of an archaeological record of ancient or pre-historic Paganism; the record might support some ideas about worship and ritual, but there's little proof one way or the other -- so everyone's free to imagine whatever they'd like based on the artifacts we do have (and your theories are just as valid as your weird neighbor's)."
The first quarter of 2014, I took a sabbatical from the Wordos table. I spent the Tuesday nights writing. I'd visited Fort Vancouver, and used what I learned about the forge there to write a story for Sword and Sorceress. Which...got rejected.
March 2014. Turning Fifty officially began to bug me. I felt like there was something I was doing wrong, or was forgetting to do, or needed to do. Especially when my friends seemed to be getting published all over the place.
May 2014. I discovered the painting of Wes Hemple. Hempel manages to paint beefcake that's more than beefcake. The nude or semi-nude male body is a powerful and subversive image, and he manages to make his paintings subversive with erotic overtones, while managing to not stray into explicit or gratuitous images. Well, maybe a little gratuitous.
When I think about images of NeoPagan Deity I usually run across, the gods imagined are oiled up with a strategically placed vines or wolf pelts draped across their loins as they gaze out of the picture with smoldering bedroom eyes. Or they're body builders, tattooed or artfully dirty, holding up animal horns to their brows and pouting like underwear models. Or else they're about to perform The Great Rite with a buxom, blonde, blue-eyed goddess. And actually, I don't need to see depictions of two men performing The Great Rite because my spirituality is more than just a queer retelling of Heiros Gamos. Hempel's paintings have embodied men navigating questions, they are working through something instead of being merely pleasing objects.
June 2014. Everything seemed to happen in June. The month opened with the death of Jay Lake -- all of my social media networks turned into a memorial for him. Jay was prolific, funny, crude, irreverent, erudite, and only six months older than I was. I would have never thought when he appeared at my fortieth birthday party in 2004 that he would be dead ten years later.
I had a handful of crazy dreams afterward: I had my feet whipped as penance for something, I lived in cardboard houses that were melting, I was battling a monster called "Pink Skull," and I woke up with the words, "I'm a fake," ringing in my ears.
I grumped about not having a mentor, and concluded that I'm semi-pro writer who writes lyrically, mythologically, queerly, deistically, sensually, imaginatively, romantically, and visually. As much as I want my writing to live forever in letters of fire and to be the bane of English Graduates everywhere, I'm satisfied when the images in my head get into the reader's head.
It would be nice and would save time if I had a guide for those instances when it feels like I'm lost in the woods at night and babbling to myself. However, no mentor has materialized, so in the meantime it's up to me to prod myself into action, to track authors I admire and try to follow their path, and to initiate myself into my own voice.
And then I wandered into the Joanna Russ Archive. Suddenly, I could listen in on a conversation about gender, orientation, wishes, desire and exploring character that Ms. Russ was having thirty years ago. And it was exhilarating. She had linked Kirk and Spock as gay gods in the early 1980's. She was reading and writing and thinking about essentialism and sex and everything. Out of all of her writings, I added wishes, Fears, Knowledge, Experiences, and Desires as a useful lens for crafting stories.
My entry in the Penn Cove Literary Contest, "Before the Last Bloom Falls," was chosen as the winner for June.
In other writing news, I teamed up with a photographer friend of mine and we switched prompts: she'd post a photo and I'd write a story to it; I'd post a story or vignette and she'd compose a photo with it. At first we were doing a weekly cycle, but we switched to a month cycle. It was a low pressure way to create about eleven rough drafts (two went through the Wordo's table) by the end of the year.
July 2014: During a discussion of testosterone in older men, Mark essentially pointed at my sagging pectoral muscles and laughed. In a fit of Capricorn pique, I joined a gym and started chanting explicit oaths under my breath as I worked out on various exercise machines.
I also designed and had 3-D printed two mugs -- er, sake cups -- er, jiggers -- out of ceramic material. They are very cool, but they're Barbie sized.
September 2014. In an effort to improve my performance, I got serious about blogging my progress writing and working out, and began posting word counts and work-out routines. I got a simple word-count tracker, and was promptly appalled at how much I don't write; unfortunately, there's no good way to track editing manuscripts other than the amount of time I spend on them. I managed to keep tracking up until about the first week of December.
As a result of keeping records, I sort of learned what I already knew: going to bed late makes it harder to get up at 4:45 to write; changes in my routine make it harder to write; holidays make it harder to write; getting the Eugene crud (which the University and elementary students toss around) makes it harder to write.
Our friends, the Wylds, became the latest friends to move to the Portland area. It's going to be strange without them, because they are one of the few folks Mark, The Child and I like to spend time with.
November 2014. Maybe it was the post-Halloween sugar crash. Maybe it was switching from Daylight Savings Time. Maybe it was the reduction of light, but the first weeks of November were filled with Ennui. Working out seems to help, and I seem to have shaken it off by the middle of the month.
December 2014. I wrote and submitted some erotica; I was slightly relieved when it was rejected. (Spell check had changed that to "slightly revealed," and writing and submitting erotica did feel like I was revealing a little too much. I'm glad I wrote the piece, because it was good practice for revealing character ... oh dear, that's not coming out right at all... without getting distracted by all the eye-candy.)
I identified several dream images I've had, exploring the intersection of maleness, desire, and spirituality. I want to work with them and see if writing them into story helps me to discover anything. About the same time, I tried meditating on the dream images as I work out on the rowing machine; I'm at the beginning stage, but I think once I get used to holding images in my head (while maintaining a 750 calories per hour rowing rate or better), I should be able to use the fifteen minutes as a kind of work-out vision quest. Or something.
We celebrated my fiftieth birthday with a dance party. Mark arranged it all, and I collected four hours' worth of (mostly) 1980's dance music. And danced all of it. My back and abdomen are still sore a week later.
When I think about 2014, it feels like the year where I'm trying to stay focused. If I can stay focused, I'll be -- OH! Squirrel!
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Decade in Review: 2011
January 2011: After some deliberations, I decided to write on a train from Eugene to Portland. So I dressed up as a Pegasus Ranger! The train ride was fun. I discovered the Crumpacker Family Library (The Temple of Books!) and I had a lovely pizza dinner with Jay Lake. The summary of my Adventures of a Pegasus Ranger follows:
February 2011: The grey days of Winter were officially getting to me. To combat them I would use a halogen torchiere and fill the house with Summer-like light. The Winter Light never used to bother me (that I'd been aware) and I attributed my sluggishness and despair to (undiagnosed) seasonal depression. But some days not eve the torchiere would help, and I'd have to take a picture of myself wearing a turban made out of a starry polar fleece blanket.
March 2011: We went skiing, where I had the pleasure of admiring a stranger's skiing moves, and discovered I was looking at Mark. Going home, we got trapped on the highway about twenty miles out of Eugene by a a windstorm which blew a tree over a road and knocked electricity out of the McKenzie River corridor. Mark drove us to Belnap Hotsprings and discovered a lovely outdoor temple folly. I was glad I was with him, because I would have pulled the car over at the side of the highway and froze.
April 2011: I officially began fiddling around with zellij tile design and launched a fascination with producing ten five-pointed stars whirling around each other. I'd already played with Penrose Tiles, so it was an easy jump. I find that constructing geometric forms calms me down and is rewarding; I'm not sure if it's the process, of using a compass or the pleasure of creating an ordered design, or the challenge of fitting different things together.
On the writing front, I tried to create an e-book and got stalled.
May 2011: After watching University of Oregon want ads for about a year and applying for a few jobs, a writer friend from the Wordos clued me in to an IT job opening in the UO Psychology Department. I got hired as a temporary part-time worker. This was a good thing; and the extra income made a lot of things a whole lot easier.
June 2011: We visited Mark's family on the east coast. It's always fun to visit them because they are New York Direct, which is a refreshing change from Corvallis Nice. We usually do some site-seeing, and I often visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- this visit included a reminder to finish projects. One day, Mark and I made a pilgrimage to Olana -- we dressed up, and got to be fabulous gays touring an architectural palace (with sketching and a picnic afterward).
September 2011: My micro fiction, "The Book Deal" was purchased for "Twisted Tales," a micro fiction anthology by Delving Press. "The Book Deal" was a fun, 66 word horror story. Alethea Kontis and Damon Kaswell were also in it.
Through the late summer and throughout autumn, I worked on writer craft. I read Dracula, and I couldn't understand what was so horrible about the vampire until someone explained to me at OryCon that the count was operating outside the circle of Christian Grace. I read some dreadful steampunk genre stories (one kept flipping back and forth between a romance and something else), and apparently zombies (er, revenants) must be included. I wrote my first steampunk story, and then another, to mixed reactions at the Wordos table.
And I thought about masculinity, and gay male desire, and story, and what is it that I want to explore as a man who is gay and who is a writer.
If there was a theme for 2011, it was the geometry of life cycles. I wanted things to be pretty and ordered, but it seems that having a pretty and ordered life takes a lot of practice -- and in the end, the geometry is left open by Death.
In the manuscript of Pegasus Ranger in Portland, I see someone using artifice as a tool to search for an axis mundi. He dons a costume and begins his search with a train ride; he discovers that the meridians and parallels of the world are blurred. He thinks he's discovered an axis mundi in a temple of art, but his vision of artistic logos overwhelms him and he retreats. A fellow writer, a kind of shadow-shelf of the searcher, turns his attention to Death. Each of the searcher's encounters contrasts and compares chaos and order; control and surrender; expectations, fantasy, and reality. At the end, he tries to connect the dots into a paradigm, but they don't mesh perfectly. The story ends with the searcher almost home, passing a shadowed milestone. As he recalls life, art and Georges-Pierre Seurat, who painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the Pegasus Ranger concludes that the Geometry of Life is always Deconstructed by Entropy. But Life -- which includes its terminus, Death -- is not about seeing, it's about how one looks. The act of observation not only changes the observed, it changes the observer. Look well. Bring outfits. Look good.
February 2011: The grey days of Winter were officially getting to me. To combat them I would use a halogen torchiere and fill the house with Summer-like light. The Winter Light never used to bother me (that I'd been aware) and I attributed my sluggishness and despair to (undiagnosed) seasonal depression. But some days not eve the torchiere would help, and I'd have to take a picture of myself wearing a turban made out of a starry polar fleece blanket.
March 2011: We went skiing, where I had the pleasure of admiring a stranger's skiing moves, and discovered I was looking at Mark. Going home, we got trapped on the highway about twenty miles out of Eugene by a a windstorm which blew a tree over a road and knocked electricity out of the McKenzie River corridor. Mark drove us to Belnap Hotsprings and discovered a lovely outdoor temple folly. I was glad I was with him, because I would have pulled the car over at the side of the highway and froze.
April 2011: I officially began fiddling around with zellij tile design and launched a fascination with producing ten five-pointed stars whirling around each other. I'd already played with Penrose Tiles, so it was an easy jump. I find that constructing geometric forms calms me down and is rewarding; I'm not sure if it's the process, of using a compass or the pleasure of creating an ordered design, or the challenge of fitting different things together.
On the writing front, I tried to create an e-book and got stalled.
May 2011: After watching University of Oregon want ads for about a year and applying for a few jobs, a writer friend from the Wordos clued me in to an IT job opening in the UO Psychology Department. I got hired as a temporary part-time worker. This was a good thing; and the extra income made a lot of things a whole lot easier.
June 2011: We visited Mark's family on the east coast. It's always fun to visit them because they are New York Direct, which is a refreshing change from Corvallis Nice. We usually do some site-seeing, and I often visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- this visit included a reminder to finish projects. One day, Mark and I made a pilgrimage to Olana -- we dressed up, and got to be fabulous gays touring an architectural palace (with sketching and a picnic afterward).
September 2011: My micro fiction, "The Book Deal" was purchased for "Twisted Tales," a micro fiction anthology by Delving Press. "The Book Deal" was a fun, 66 word horror story. Alethea Kontis and Damon Kaswell were also in it.
Through the late summer and throughout autumn, I worked on writer craft. I read Dracula, and I couldn't understand what was so horrible about the vampire until someone explained to me at OryCon that the count was operating outside the circle of Christian Grace. I read some dreadful steampunk genre stories (one kept flipping back and forth between a romance and something else), and apparently zombies (er, revenants) must be included. I wrote my first steampunk story, and then another, to mixed reactions at the Wordos table.
And I thought about masculinity, and gay male desire, and story, and what is it that I want to explore as a man who is gay and who is a writer.
If there was a theme for 2011, it was the geometry of life cycles. I wanted things to be pretty and ordered, but it seems that having a pretty and ordered life takes a lot of practice -- and in the end, the geometry is left open by Death.
Sunday, June 01, 2014
Requiescat in pace, Jay Lake
Sunday, June 1, Jay Lake died. It wasn't unexpected, as he had entered hospice care earlier after a long bout with cancer. Like many, I hoped there would be a remission. Or a magical DNA cure from NIH. Or at least mutant powers.
Jay was born six months before I was. He joined the Wordos about a year before I did. For a while we were part of the triumvir running Wordos. I have a curious mix of sadness that he's gone, anxiety about my own mortality, and a grab-bag wash of reactions while examining the parallels and diversions in our two lives.
I remember once in 2004 Jay came to the Wordos dressed as Zeppelin Man. Think Superman meets Steampunk as an extra at a Cher show: he wore purple tights and green undies and a purple cape. He had some kind of aviator's cap with goggles. He encouraged the Wordos to submit manuscripts to an anthology he was co-editing, "All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories".
Three months later, as the Wordos went around the table reporting manuscript rejections, and the inevitable ones from Zeppelin Stories came around, Jay would follow-up each announcement with "The bastards." Jay was like that.
Another time at Wordos, I'd submitted a manuscript for critique which had an idea in it that Jay wanted to use. He asked me if it would be OK, I said yes, and the next day he sent me a 4000 word manuscript. I was impressed with his professional courtesy, the speed with which he'd written something, and the writing.
Much later in 2011, after Jay had stopped coming to the Wordos table, I'd planned a train trip to Portland and told folks that I'd be at Old Towne Pizza. It turned into a pleasant Jay-Fest as he was the only person to show up. We talked about his cancer and his relationship with death.
The last time I saw Jay was at OryCon. He was wearing a knitted cap and rode an electric scooter. It was brief and I was struck with the sense that I must not wear him out.
We traded a few brief e-mails in the interim between then and now.
Today has been difficult. I needed to stay away from Facebook because I was compulsively scanning it for memorials about Jay. The virtual funeral on Facebook was draining, and I felt lucky to run into some Wordos later in the day so we could physically hug.
When I think about Jay's death, I think about a sculpture in the MET, "Death Staying the Hand of the Artist." Except, if it were about Jay, the artist would be wearing a Hawaiian shirt, he'd be carving a goat (with baroque excess) instead of a sphinx, and death would be a clown wielding a very phallic-looking bicycle horn.
Requiescat in pace.
May you continue to inspire.
Jay was born six months before I was. He joined the Wordos about a year before I did. For a while we were part of the triumvir running Wordos. I have a curious mix of sadness that he's gone, anxiety about my own mortality, and a grab-bag wash of reactions while examining the parallels and diversions in our two lives.
I remember once in 2004 Jay came to the Wordos dressed as Zeppelin Man. Think Superman meets Steampunk as an extra at a Cher show: he wore purple tights and green undies and a purple cape. He had some kind of aviator's cap with goggles. He encouraged the Wordos to submit manuscripts to an anthology he was co-editing, "All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories".
Three months later, as the Wordos went around the table reporting manuscript rejections, and the inevitable ones from Zeppelin Stories came around, Jay would follow-up each announcement with "The bastards." Jay was like that.
Another time at Wordos, I'd submitted a manuscript for critique which had an idea in it that Jay wanted to use. He asked me if it would be OK, I said yes, and the next day he sent me a 4000 word manuscript. I was impressed with his professional courtesy, the speed with which he'd written something, and the writing.
Much later in 2011, after Jay had stopped coming to the Wordos table, I'd planned a train trip to Portland and told folks that I'd be at Old Towne Pizza. It turned into a pleasant Jay-Fest as he was the only person to show up. We talked about his cancer and his relationship with death.
The last time I saw Jay was at OryCon. He was wearing a knitted cap and rode an electric scooter. It was brief and I was struck with the sense that I must not wear him out.
We traded a few brief e-mails in the interim between then and now.
Today has been difficult. I needed to stay away from Facebook because I was compulsively scanning it for memorials about Jay. The virtual funeral on Facebook was draining, and I felt lucky to run into some Wordos later in the day so we could physically hug.
When I think about Jay's death, I think about a sculpture in the MET, "Death Staying the Hand of the Artist." Except, if it were about Jay, the artist would be wearing a Hawaiian shirt, he'd be carving a goat (with baroque excess) instead of a sphinx, and death would be a clown wielding a very phallic-looking bicycle horn. Requiescat in pace.
May you continue to inspire.
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