I was going to delete everything. The entire site, kill all my email addys and go walk into the ocean to let the salt fill me and the fish eat me and the water dissolve my bones and let the ocean strip me down past memory and return me to the cycle of the world. And then I hear James in my head going Yes There's A Completely Rational Response with that tone he would call upon every once in a while to bring me back from the brink of idiocy.
So instead I've deleted all of the stupid posts that were scheduled to go up through Friday. Thursday I'm supposed to leave for the mountain top, then go off to Chicago for the holiday, then come back to trek deep into the desert to lay in a pit of warm mud for a couple of days, far away from computers, cells and everything that is not my manuscript. It's part of my end of year lazing ritual. Starting on the 22nd the site was going to go dark through Jan. 2 anyway. So it might as well go dark now.
James died very early this morning. Around here his codename was Jig, so named because of his tragically comical dancing skills. He loved to dance, and when eventually he couldn't do that anymore he would dance in his head.
We all knew this was going to happen eventually it's just that it was not supposed to be now out of the blue in the middle of the fucking night two days after we were on the phone. Nobody should be 47 and dead and the deal was he was not supposed to die before me anyway. Now I'm gonna have to find somebody who can do a seance so that I can yell at him for reneging on our agreement. It's gonna cost a fortune! (That's an inside joke he would get.)
In one of the boxes in the garage there is an envelope I'm supposed to open, read the letter inside and then burn it. He gave it to me nine years ago. Because he knows how I am, every year on my birthday since I have to take a picture of me with the envelope and that day's newspaper to prove the wax seal is unbroken. I'm like, a wax seal and I'M the overly dramatic one?! You are so full of shit! I think I will leave the envelope be until my birthday and decide then if I'll open it.
I was going to fly out to see him next July and we were going to go see the movie and I was making a new wrap for him. He has the very first pseudo-quilt I tried to make, what 15/16 years ago. It's crap and I've been trying to get it back from him for years because I'm better at making things now and I want him to have a nice one, but he won't give it back. He talked me through the trauma of every single one of my exes. He's the one who has been urging me to go ahead and keep trying to make the transition. He makes me laugh, he forces me to think beyond, and even though I'm not smart in the same way he is he doesn't think I'm stupid. Never thought I'd get a friend like him to begin with and I know I'm never going to find another one like him ever. In one of my inboxes his name is still sitting there but the dot is grey. It's going to be grey forever now. I have to figure out how to take a name off the siderail because I can't look at it.
Jig was the only person in the world I knew for sure loved me back.
I don't have anybody, now. I don't feel my heart anymore. I don't want to be all by myself in the world and he promised I wouldn't have to be but he lied.
Anyway. The blog's going dark until January sometime.
Dec. 20 update: Since I'm not leaving until tomorrow, decided to add this brief additional..
Our plan for today was as soon as I got into the office I would call him and we would watch the Transformers trailer together, after which I fully hoped to be able to tell him I Told You So You Elitist Bastard. He doesn't like the script. I keep telling him you cannot go by the script in blow shit up movies in general, and this movie in particular because this movie is about the robots. Until we see how that man is going to handle the robots you cannot sit there and proclaim that the movie is going to suck. The strength of the robots in action will make up for the deficiencies of the human characters on the page. His response to that is my opinion doesn't count because I think Armageddon is a masterpiece, an indicator of my extreme bias and lack of judgment. So we decided to call a detente until the first full trailer came out.
I wonder if he would have liked the trailer. I think he would have conceded that the robots look awesome, but I don't know if the whole would have been enough for him to come over to the side of the Just.
During those two days of fleeing from invisible robots downtown I sent a string of short text messages to a bunch of people, but I snuck calls to James several times. My phone is on a strap so all I had to do is open it, push his speed dial and let it run. Easy to do when you're in a herd of extras because for the most part the crew people don't pay any attention to extras. So I let him listen in a couple of times when we were running, for one or another of the explosions, and when I was at the light pole by the alley watching Bay work with LaBeouf for this bit where the kid gets hit by a car, falls, gets up and runs off. (James is the one who told me later that was LaBeouf. I had no idea who the people were due to not caring because I was there for the robots.) For the most part he said he couldn't make anything out clearly, just jumbles of noises. He said he did hear the explosion really clearly, though.
I really wish now I had called during the really cool big thing when I got to crawl on the ground and scream as exploded fake asphalt rained down. The thought to call didn't hit until after we were in position and waiting for the countdown, when it was too late. They only pulled three of us to do that scene. Bay, both of the Alphas, all those crew people and a couple of huge cameras were less than five feet away, staring at us. I wussed out, unable to figure out a way to sneak open the phone without getting busted. James said I should have done it if for no other reason that he would have gotten a big kick out of listening to me get yelled at by one of the Alphas and thrown off set.
Here's a pic of Bonecrusher I finally managed to snag from the trailer. I dunno if he would have liked the whole, but I know he would have loved loved how Bonecrusher turned out. That thing is not pretty/glossy at all he looks old school scary. Like the man said, Death!! 40 Feet Tall!! Run!
