Words are inadequate

As distinct from my semi-estranged friend Abby (2016). Via Cooperjohn on FB, I see that Kory Heath has taken his own life. Fuck.

I met Kory in, god, I don't know. I know I predated him in hanging out with the Looneys, and I'm pretty sure he showed up after plastic Icehouse pieces. Call it 2000? He and Coop and Jake and toK ("the other Kristin" as distinct from Kristin Looney) comprised a sort of game design syndicate in the 2000s, focused mostly but not exclusively on Icehouse games. Their designs tended to be a bit spartan and soulless for my taste but they were eminently playable. One of Kory's, Uptown (reprinted as Blockers) is an elegant and vicious abstract game of tile-placement that I am terrible at and will happily break out when I've got three or four people and half an hour to kill.

His magnum opus, though, was Zendo, a beautiful game of induction. The original used Icehouse pyramids; it looks like there's a new one that just uses weird plastic shapes. I was lucky enough to playtest Zendo for what I remember as several years but couldn't have been more than a few months, and both played in and Mastered a couple of Zendo tournaments at Origins. (I still have one of Zarf's Zendo lounge panels. Mine is in the top picture, second from the right.) Zendo is one of those games that feels like it wasn't designed so much as discovered, and it feels like that despite my clear memory of the volume of development and changes it went through.

Kory stopped coming to Origins some years before I did, so I have no idea when the last time I saw him was. I kept hoping he'd turn up at the Gathering: Coop and Jake and toK all did, after all. But no dice. Maybe he would have been there this spring, with the publication of his and Coop's "cooperative deductive Texas Hold'em" The Gang this past summer, and I could have told him how great it was.

Kory was brilliant and quiet and funny and kind. One night in the early 2000s I played board games with him and other folks at a townhouse up near Baltimore until four in the morning, and then drove back to my parents' place in Burke. I startled the crap out of him when I gave him a hug for winning an Origins award for Zendo. I'm so grateful I got to know him.

Fuck depression.

So it goes.

There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself: not just sometimes, but all the time.

I adored The Phantom Tollbooth from the first time I read it, sometime in elementary school. Jules Feiffer's pen-scratch illustrations were the perfect complement to Juster's ridiculous wordplay ("I come from a place called Context, but I spend all my time out of it"), and the sheer ... directed coherent chaos of it all made me happy every time I picked it up.

(I saw the animated movie at some point and thought it was only okay. These days I'm inclined to agree with Juster, who said "When you transform a book into a film, there have to be changes.")

The documentary Beyond Expectations came out some years back, and it's such a delight all the way through. They got Juster and Feiffer together for lunch at some fancy restaurant and the two of them are clearly just having a great time. There's a trailer, which I recommend, below.

Onward.

I have been to Niagara, I have been sick, and Gene Wolfe has died.

I tried to read the Book of the New Sun in the late nineties and bounced off it hard. I don't actually remember this but I remember a conversation in an elevator at I think Balticon 2001, with Eeyore and Dan Efran and others, where I said that and they nodded sympathetically.

(I have very vague memories of Balticon 2001, including of why I went in the first place. I'm fairly certain it was with the Looneys, and I know Emily was there and I'm pretty sure Adam K-- was as well. And there were Pop-tarts.)

Then I tried Wolfe again a few years later, while I was working at Waldenbooks, and it all clicked a lot better. I started with There Are Doors and went on to the Solar Cycle, and enjoyed the New Sun and absolutely adored Long Sun, and on and on.

I met him once, at Balticon 2006, with Neil Gaiman and Peter Beagle. He and Neil signed my copy of their collaboration A Walking Tour Of The Shambles (Gene wrote "Beware of the alligator!"), and when I asked what he was working on after the Egyptian Latro book, he said "a book about pirates!" I half thought he was kidding me but no: Pirate Freedom came out next year.

He wrote brilliantly, dense and multilayered and complex and still fun to read. His last few have been less good, for me, so I don't so much mourn the books we might have had. But still. Maybe.

Some articles: Tor.com's obituary. Sci-Fi's Difficult Genius from 2015. Jeet Heer: Gene Wolf Was the Proust of Science Fiction. And rushthatspeaks has a remembrance as well.

In pace requiescat.

There's a sense in which the idea of UKL being gone is just too much, like Bowie two years ago... and there's a sense in which it's inevitable and something I can accept. For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

I can't think of anyone who's had as much impact on the direction of my thoughts.

I read the first three Earthsea books in elementary school, and reread the first two over and over, enjoying the atmosphere and the saving-each-other aspect of Tombs of Atuan and, I think, trying to understand the ending of Wizard. Neither is precisely a heroic tale, though Tombs at least looks like one. Wizard isn't about growing stronger or overcoming evil, it's about growing wiser and accepting your own darkness. I stumbled on the occasional Le Guin short story and liked them alright; I read Tehanu a couple of years after it came out and was pretty unimpressed.

And there things sat until fall 2003, when I talked my advisor into letting me replace "American Lit Before 1900" in my degree requirements with a seminar on Le Guin. I had a fantastic teacher in Len Hatfield and a number of interesting and engaging classmates, including my then-girlfriend Kelly. We read ... not quite everything she'd written, but certainly a more than representative sample. I enjoyed her early novels, and flipped out over the chance to dig deep into Earthsea (including the two later books, which I liked much better than Tehanu), and thoroughly lost myself in her big two SF novels, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. And we did an in-depth analysis of her picture books, A Ride on the Red Mare's Back and the Catwings tetrology, and dug into her poetry, and of course bounced around her short stories, which I maintain are the form in which she did her best work.

But it was two nonfictionish pieces that stuck with me. Her essay "The Child and the Shadow" ... resonated, and I still can't talk about it, though I cited it quite a lot in my final paper. And her translation of the Tao Te Ching came to me at exactly the right time: I'd thrown my life into utter chaos and was desperately casting about for something to hold onto, something to make sense of it. And I got a simple, clear, poetic explication of the principle that things are, not for any reason but that they are, and that's enough.

That's not even getting into the ways that class accelerated my transition from technolibertarian to, maybe 'social justice cleric' is the best descriptor these days.

I never met Ursula Le Guin. Kelly did, and got her to sign a copy of the Tao Te Ching for me, which is part of why I have three copies. (Four if you count the ebook. Five if you count the CDs that came with the third copy.) I don't know what I could have said to her, anyway.

To live til you die
Is to live long enough.

I'm mostly adapted to being a one-cat household now. It feels like learning to live with and work around a missing tooth: it mostly doesn't matter, except when something slips and you realise that it's not quite right and hasn't been for awhile.

Kai is lonely, as expected. She's taken over the duty of sitting with anyone who's on the couch, and round midnight she complains that there's no one else in the cat-bed.

I don't know how I grieve, not really. I know how to hold together and I know how to be a sympathetic shoulder.

---

Other than that.

Viola: there is a marked difference between knowing what you're doing wrong, and knowing how to do it right. At my lesson on Tuesday I think (hope) that I've finally figured out how to hold my left hand properly and in a more natural / less tense position. Gonna have to drill that into me for actual playing of things other than scales, but it felt right enough that I couldn't go back to holding it the way I'd been at the start of the year. Progress, maybe. I'm also gonna have to learn how to play a close second finger: my hand doesn't seem to want to move like that in that angle. Carnegie Hall.

Also sometime in the last year I developed the ability to tune by fifths rather than by harmonics, which is neat. Harmonics: if you rest your finger halfway up one string, not pressing down to the fingerboard, you get a neat ringing tone that's an octave above the open string. If you rest your finger a quarter of the way up the next lower string, it makes the same tone. You can tune your instrument by making sure these tones are the same. Alternately, if you can hear perfect fifths, you can just play both open strings simultaneously and tune one until the chord sounds right. This is the 'normal' way to tune a stringed instrument, and I couldn't do it until recently. So that's neat.

Work: The act of deciding that I want to look for a new job has been remarkably freeing. Work is still stupid and slow but that bothers me way less. Partly that's because the awful IT guy is gone; partly it's because not caring and not feeling trapped makes the idiocies far more bearable. We're still not getting bonuses, we still haven't gotten raises in coming on two years, but, eh. Whatever. If it gets bad enough I can leave, and meanwhile there's breathing room here to work out some stuff.

Condo: Emily's put in a raised bed on the patio, using leftover 4x4s from when they redid the fencing in February. The kitchen cabinets are being put in late next week, and hopefully the counter will go in early the week after.

I am more and more convinced that this is an acceptable stop-gap place, and a fine place to make money on for no reason (we bought for $480 in October; a somewhat-nicer unit in this building sold in February for $600, and an only-slightly-nicer one in March for $570), and unsuitable long-term. I'd thought/hoped that it was just barely big enough; it turns out that it's a little too small. The lack of insuite laundry is getting to me, as expected. Etc. Oh well. Something else will turn up.

I'm also becoming less and less certain that I want to stay in Vancouver, but that's a whole different fishkettle.

Sometime last week I came across a passing link, probably somewhere in the Lawyers, Guns & Money comments, to All Birds Are Cats. I started off somewhat baffled, but by the end of the two-minute clip I couldn't stop giggling. "Well, look, if you're not prepared to do the research, Bryan, why make the statement in the first place?"

It seems that John Clarke and Bryan Dawe have made a career for the last thirty years of doing these little two-minute satirical interview sketches, one a week, for Australian television. Some of them are downright brilliant, for example, The Front Fell Off (I have not laughed so hard in ages). Many rely on a grasp of Australian politics that I just don't have, but are still delightful to watch.

Sadly John Clarke died early in April, while 'bushwalking' and birdwatching. On the bright side there's an awful lot of Clarke & Dawe on their Youtube channel, and more to come.

I'd been invited to an election-watching party but Erin was unexpectedly free, so I spent the evening at home with her instead. Then uilos came home too around nine-thirty, and a differently very nice evening transitioned into a few hours of sleepy snuggly domesticity. That, I am pretty sure, is why I'm on as even a keel as I am.

I remember the aftermath of 2004. I felt angry, betrayed, confused. Today I mostly feel numb. ("You can't /feel/ numb. You can only /be/ numb. Be numb. Be numb.")

---

My friend tam_nonlinear died last night.

I mean, I don't know how accurate those first two words are. We were friends and her friendship helped me through some very rough patches. She took me to Tribal Cafe, an amazing monthly belly dance show in DC, and introduced me to Avatar: The Last Airbender, and gave me "Thanks, Robert Frost" and "After the Pyre" when I needed them. She was also prickly, and I did a number of insensitive things that upset her, and I don't know if she ever accepted my last apology some years ago. For a year or two I've been torn between writing her to see where we're at, versus leaving her her space.

Her last writing, posted this morning: Sycamore. We do not always get to recover.

---

Today I pull into myself.

When I reemerge in a day, a week, next year, I want to forge a still safe space and open it to good people. I want to build a thing -- a community -- that increases the kindness in the world. Ideally I'd like for its seeds to spread in some fashion but I suppose that's not necessary. I have very little idea what it would look like; only a sense of ... atmosphere, I guess.

I've been chewing over this idea for months, if not years now. Too, it's perhaps something concrete and useful in a time when there's less hope to go around.

You can't save the world, here, says Erin, just contribute to a little corner of it.

I want to give other people a chance to recover. Maybe that's enough.

This is an old stupid story and I'm tired of living it:

At the age of twelve I'd been hearing for years that I could be anything I wanted to be, that I was smart enough to do anything at all. So I told my parents that I wanted to be a writer, and write F&SF novels.

My mother famously answered, "How are you going to put food on the table?"

Lesson learned: I could be anything I wanted to be as long as my parents were okay with it.

A stronger kid might have said "screw you guys" and kept writing anyway. I wasn't that kid: I still desperately needed my parents' approval, because being an army brat meant that I didn't have anyone else, at all. I spent the next N years trying to simultaneously fit my future into the box of Acceptable To My Parents, while making my present Acceptable To Me.

In hindsight, it's no wonder that I was depressed.

---

That's not the story I'm telling now but it's useful background. So, take it as told.

During my terrible terrible junior year of high school, my English teacher was Ms Bettie Stegall. I can only assume she didn't think much of me. I certainly didn't give her much reason to. My teenage rebellion mostly took the form of not showing up and not doing the work, and Ms Stegall's English class was not one where I could slide by. I got my shit sufficiently together to pass, somehow.

For senior year English we had a few choices. The only ones I can remember are AP Literature and Writing Seminar. Had I chosen AP Lit, I could have taken the English AP exam, and placed out of freshman English at Tech. (And likely not ever have read Borges, and my life would have been the poorer for it.) On the other hand, there was Writing Sem, advertised as being meant for creative writers.

The point of the old story above: I never gave up wanting to be a writer. I just gave up on doing much about it, because no one cared.

I signed up for Writing Sem in the hope that it would make me into a writer. Ms Stegall taught Writing Sem; I took it anyway. I don't remember much of the class but then senior year was a depressive burnt-out blur for me. In Writing Sem I tutored a special-needs second-grader with Jen Larson, and read Catch-22 which was exactly the right book for me at that point, and taught Kafka's Metamorphosis to freshmen with the help of Brian Aldiss's parody "Better Morphosis". I'm sure there was writing, too: I recall terrible poetry, and a Finnegans-Wake-style stream-of-consciousness depiction of a high school class.

Throughout the year I'd hear whispers from other students about how they were working with Ms Stegall on ... things. A chapbook of poetry, a collection of monologues, whatever. Books. Actual books. (I only ever saw one, and that only because Nesa used a photograph I'd taken in photography class to go with one of her poems.) And I'd think "that would be kinda cool," and then I'd stop thinking about it, because I had no idea what I'd do other than "i want to write" and, well, I'd already nearly failed out of one of Stegall's classes for not caring.

And so I graduated from high school, and went off to college, and the rest, as they say, is history. Or silence. One of those.

---

My memories of Ms Stegall are of someone who contribued to making my life miserable junior year, and didn't much care about me during senior year.

Maybe six months ago I fell into a snarky Facebook group of alums from my high school. This weekend, someone reported that Ms. Stegall had died.

Immediate outpouring of grief and love and "she was my favourite teacher" and "she kicked my ass and really helped me get my writing in gear" and specific tangible things she'd done for people.

I had no such response. I got none of that from her.

Thing is, I'd really like to have. I wish I'd been someone that she saw enough potential in to encourage, to kick my ass and get me in gear.

But that would have required me to have gone through junior year differently, and for that to have happened, the changes keep going back until I'm not even recognisable to myself anymore.

And just showing up isn't enough for that. No mentor will come to me and say "yes, i will teach you, and help you, and guide you, and care about what you do." Most of the time I'm grown-up enough to know that.

Most of the time.

I make no promises as to whether I will reply to any comments here.

"... but behind me, my cats are doing a conga line." (Reference)

---

I've had a new chair at work for about two weeks now. The desks at work supposedly go up and down so they can double as standing desks, only mine doesn't go up high enough to be a comfortable height for standing. I could get risers for it, but then it won't go down low enough to trade off sitting & standing. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I finally got a tall chair and a set of risers for the desk, so I've been a stand-up guy off and on. It's good: standing up means I move around more often and don't get quite so stiff.

I've had this chair for less than two weeks, *at work*, and it's already got cat hair on it.

---

Posts what I have not written and would like to:

• Musicking
  
• Why Transistor (the video game) Doesn't Work, Narratively Speaking
  
• On the Impossibility of Finding an Apartment in This Town
  
• Harrison Hot Springs, Again
  
• Ask Me Where My Money Goes
  
• Burnout Or Just Tired?

Last week (from Monday) was just kinda unpleasantly grey and heavy. I started the morning spacey and forgetting things, and then Bowie.

(Interlude: the setlist from the 1997 concert, courtesy Megan H-- from high school who I met up with there. Holy cats that was an amazing show. Now that I see the list I remember "I'm Waiting for the Man" and "White Light / White Heat," plus "Scary Monsters" and his weird spoken intro to "Hallo Spaceboy" and "Earthlings on Fire" and and. Yowza. Interlude over.)

That pushed me down into a pretty blah place overall, with no real chance to recover during the week. News of Alan Rickman didn't help any but that was more numbing shock than an actual emotional blow: I don't have as much connection to Rickman's work. And then the weekend was decent: among other things we picked up the first three seasons of Futurama and are working through that. It's aged surprisingly well, and so far every episode has had multiple not-just-heh-but-genuinely-funny moments. Sold some games, had barbecue from the amazing barbecue joint across the tracks, mostly hung around the house and worked on getting back up to speed.

But for whatever reason I haven't been reading LJ/DW. (Or twitter, but no surprise there.) I'm slowly catching back up: I've started reading at work now, for one thing.

Anyway, if you're wondering: I'm doing alright, but I miss you.