I Hear the Noise about Thy Keel*

Apologies for the silence, but it's been a long, very long, year capped off by a tragedy, and I've had difficulty getting the motor going again.  The words burn to write them, but about a month ago my friend Alan died.  This is him, at a party, wearing a stupid shirt back in 1992:

When a friend posted this photograph on Facebook, I joked that I remembered that party—and I do—but that I must've been fourteen when it was taken, and turns out I was a year off:

Because there's Alan shooting me a dirty look for some wise-ass comment I must've just made and I didn't have a beard until I was fifteen.  The thing of it is, I knew Alan primarily online: we met on a BBS, corresponded through early iterations of the Internet, and reconnected on Facebook a few years back.  Much has been written about online culture and the nature of "friendships" that're maintained solely online, but none of them quite get what it was like in those first days. 

I've been trying for more than a month now to find some way to capture just that, and have failed miserably, miserably, and miserably again.  Nor will I find success here.  But that look on Alan's face and that shot from across the room as I cover my mouth to hide whatever words just escaped it, that's a bit of it.

I'm not the best at being human—by all conventional standards, I'm an abject failure—but I always could find a place with words, and that place has been, for most of my life, online.  I ended up teaching literature for much the same reason, obviously, but I wanted, and have wanted, to acknowledge this debt to our shared pioneer frivolity for some time now.

And now, maybe, just maybe, I'll find my words again, because as anyone who knew him knows, the last thing Alan would've wanted was for his death to shut me up.

*Alan would've smacked me for titling this post thus—or for even using the word "thus," or perhaps for not using "thusly"—but this time, I get the last words.  (Even if they're not my own.)

Comments

[Rick]

Heh. Alan would appreciate the arguing. :)