Posts Tagged ‘Death

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01
May
07

What? No, really… what?

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Dreams
Tags: ,
archaeopteryx    
Mad, crazy turkey, or the link between dinosaurs and birds?

Last night I had a dream that I was stalking an archaeopteryx. This would be the long-extinct link between reptiles and birds. The “first bird,” if you will.

I was crawling on my belly on a forest floor. After waiting for who knows how long, I looked up and saw it through a gap in the leafy canopy. Its flight followed a graceful arc, its wings beating effortlessly. I don’t think an archaeopteryx actually flew this way. It was not a bird as we know it. It was a reptile, much heavier than a bird. Its bones were not hollow. It glided, and it flew short distances like a bird, but it was not like an albatross or an eagle or a sparrow.

The creature in my dream was beautiful, with a spectrum of feathers splayed out along its wings like a multicolored poker hand. It had fins of feathers on its head, too, like a gryphon. They looked like horns or ears. The head in real life would actually probably have been covered with something more like scales than feathers. And it would not have had horns. I remembered this after I woke, but during the dream I saw the creature as a normal specimen.

It soon spotted me and began to approach. I remembered it was a carnivore and that I probably looked pretty tasty, but I didn’t know where I could run to avoid it. And anyway, this being a dream, I couldn’t move. The closer it got, the uglier it looked and the slower it moved. Soon it was just floating down, like the petal of a blossom or a piece of fluff from the laundry.

When it reached the ground with a soft bounce, the creature looked nothing like it did when it was in the sky. It was brown, gray, withered, shabby. It looked like pieces were missing — its eyes, for one thing. It had no feathers. It was dried up. It was dead. But it was still moving.

It was trying to communicate with me, but it made no sound. It just hopped and flapped impotently, thrashing around through the dead leaves. I had the impression that these movements were meant in a menacing way. It wanted to hurt me, but it was harmless.

Then I became aware that there was someone else on the ground next to me. He or she was a companion. I knew that much, but I didn’t know who it was. This person was similarly dead and dried up in a gray, intact, zombie sort of way, able to move arms and legs but not apparently able to stand or walk or talk. Then I realized the archaeopteryx was communicating with — threatening, in fact — this dead friend. The corpse was scared of this creature, I could tell. And I realized that I was not. Rather than being startled by a partially mobile dead person, I was mainly annoyed that I couldn’t tell who it was.

I stood up and ran away. I tore through the brush, forgetting where I had just come from.

03
Apr
07

Everything is Cuter When it’s Smaller

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Animals and Video
Tags: , , , ,

(Almost everything.)

The most adorable man-eating killing machine I’ve seen in a long time:

08
Mar
07

Glass of Water for Mr Grainger!

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Anglophilia, Funny, Gay, My Favorite Things, People We Like, Sad, TV and Video
Tags: , , ,

Rest in peace, John Inman. Now you’re free.

20
Feb
07

Death and … (Well, You Know…)

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , ,

Three things are inevitable in this world. In order of difficulty: Death, taxes and the propensity for party guests to stain one’s rugs. (This, among other reasons, is why white carpet is a cardinal sin.)

Death… well, let’s not get into that right now.

And I am coping rather well, I think, with the recent news that I owe thousands of dollars to the governments of the United States and the state of New York. That’s the big news in my life, at present. I just did my taxes last night and accidentally opened an artery. Those paper cuts can be a bitch.

At this rate I’ll be serving government cheese and generic brand soda crackers at the Oscar Night gathering we’re planning for Sunday. It’s not a party, I hasten to clarify. It’s a very small gathering.

At an Easter party we threw last year — bloody marys and mimosas; boiled eggs, kielbasa and saurkraut — a few of our thirstier guests wreaked unintentional (i.e., drunken) havoc on our floors, spilling red wine or cranberry juice (or both — who brought the wine anyway?) on literally every rug in our apartment. The colors in our rugs run from beige to gold, gray to brown. Mostly neutral tones, except for a blue, white and gray rug in the bedroom. You don’t exactly need a map to hit the lighter, easy-to-stain areas, but our guests were a consistent lucky shot.

A tempest in my head roiled and sent electricity coursing up my spine every time I saw someone teetering this way and that, red wine or a strong cape cod sloshing dangerously close to the edge of his or her plastic cup.

I had been told that cold water and salt will usually lift the color out of a wine stain. So I got all Martha Stewart and managed get the stains out. I kept calm and maintained a good host’s smile — and, to a degree, conversation — while I flitted from spot to spot all night, liberally sprinkling Morton’s. (When it rains, it does indeed pour.) The rugs remained largely unspoiled, and I felt spiritually and emotionally purged. It was a triumph.

After that trauma, however, I think we’ll have white wine this time on Sunday. And white cranberry juice. (But I’ll have my spot remover, my yellow rubber gloves and a salt shaker at the ready, stashed behind the couch, anyway — just in case!)

29
Aug
06

Alarm

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food, Gross, Health and Me
Tags: , , ,

There are plenty of unpleasant ways to wake up, nevermind that most of the time waking up is unpleasant on its face.

One can be shaken awake or startled into consciousness by an alarm or a bell or a loud clock or a gunshot — depending on one’s neighborhood. One can be temporarily blinded by the sun through a drawn curtain. One can fall out of bed to a hard, cold floor below. One can be aurally assaulted by barnyard creatures. One can be woken by a restless bed partner or a carelessly noisy roommate.

Or, one can be woken up as I was today.

I was wrenched to sudden, desperate consciousness at 5:40 a.m. when I threw up in my mouth and began to choke. Huck! Gasp! Kack!, I said — Huck! Gasp! Kack! — Huck! Gasp! Kack! Seriously, I could not catch my breath. I was scared awake more than anything else. Could I have suffocated on my own vomit? What a crappy way to go. I had exactly two thoughts at that moment: 1.) This is like the first five minutes of a Six Feet Under episode; and 2.) Don’t wake Jeff!

When I could finally breathe, I realized how gross it all was and spent the next few minutes desperately trying to clean my mouth out.

Then I enjoyed a delightful assortment of chewable, fruit-flavored antacid tablets for breakfast before retiring to the couch.

No more pizza at 1 a.m.

05
Jun
06

So Long, and Thanks for all the Wiki

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Anglophilia, Books, Funny, Sad and Technology
Tags: , ,

Douglas Adams was nothing if not a visionary. Of course, he was much more than that, but the thing about him that impresses me most is his concept of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I can’t say he predicted the Internet — any more than Jules Verne predicted space travel — but I think we can certainly say that he saw the potential of the Web technology we are now settling into.

The fictional Guide was written by intergalactic traveling researchers — hitchhikers — who sent their entries back to editors at the publishing houses of Ursa Minor who red-penned them (One of the major jokes in the Hitchhiker’s books is that the entry for Earth was boiled down to the diminutive and somewhat insulting “Mostly harmless”), compiled them and sent them back through the sub-ether to all the copies of the electronic book, the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Simple collaborative publishing. The convergence of laptops and WiFi made the Web into the embodiment of Adams’ vision.

This was not lost on Adams. For a while there was a site called H2G2. I think he started it, in fact. “Researchers” made entries about whatever they liked, or proposed additions to existing entries. A team of editors would review the work and publish the entries. A whole community of nerds came together over the project, including myself. I had readt the Hitchhiker’s books in elementary school, and have always felt them to be among the major influences of my life — how I talk, how I write, how I think. Adams himself made appearances on the site. I remember in particular his entry on tea, which taught me the invaluable lesson that it is not enough to merely pour hot water on a tea bag. Rather, he opined, the tea must be met with boiling water — not water that had just been boiling, but water that was at that moment boiling. In other words, one must briefly boil the tea leaves.

I wrote an entry on the OED, which to my delight was published. And then the BBC bought and absorbed the site. And after I got into an argument with someone over the shape of Michigan (He adamantly denied that it was the shape of a mitten and a rabbit. Idiot.), I realized I had little to no interest in maintaining a presence in an online community. I wasn’t ready to live online yet. A late adopter, me. So I gave it up. Someone else would have to write about Dolly Parton, I reasoned, and Michigan (uhm, check out the shapes) and Madonna.

And, as if by magic, someone else did.

What has been catching my attention lately is the phenomenon of wiki, from the Hawaiian word meaning “quick.” The collaborative writing of Wikipedia — no official editors; anyone can log in, create a presence in the wiki community and edit — is a step beyond the Guide. But rather than chaos, what seems to happen is that the people with good reputations are trusted, and their work sticks, and Wikipedia seems to take on some coherence.

Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of wiki. Meta-wiki. Yay! Fun with prefixes.

27
Dec
05

Metropolitan

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Bar Stories, Gay, People We Like and Sad
Tags: , ,

About a month ago, Jeff and I went to the Metropolitan, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nothing interesting happened. We met a friend from Park Slope there. Had some beers. Went back home. But it was a personal triumph for me and Jeff. An exorcism of sorts. We had been avoiding the place for over a year because of what we remembered about the last time we were there. Last fall, somewhere in the early days of November 2004, we met a friend there who would be found in his apartment a couple of weeks later dead from a heroin overdose.

We called him and persuaded him to meet us at the Metropolitan one night. He just wanted to stay for one drink. He had to get away for a little bit because he was having an argument with his roommate. We persuaded him to stay a little longer. He told about the argument. A plate was thrown and broken. It was something stupid. We told him we wanted him to come over for Thanksgiving, and we made tentative plans. Jeff and I were still new to the city, he having been here five months and I having been here just over one, and we were both hungry for friends. This guy was brand-new to us, but we felt like we were on a path toward something real. He was full of stories and jokes. He was comfortable and familiar after very little time. He had not the easiest life, but he wasn’t full of blame. He was just making do like anyone else. And he seemed so directed and in charge of himself.

The way he told it, he was at a point in his life where he was trying to ease into his 30s and settle himself a bit, to shed some drama and the people who bring trouble down on him. He was no stranger to drugs. He was known at at certain East Village connection points. But but he wasn’t irresponsible. He always took care of himself. And he wasn’t stupid. I remember he made a point of telling us once that he never touched heroin. He’d seen too many horror stories. And we believed him.

Jeff and I hadn’t heard from him since the Metropolitan a couple of weeks later. We knew he’d had some recent trouble with his phone, so we didn’t necessarily expect a call. We just didn’t know how to get a hold of him. So we walked into an East Village bar where we often hung out with him, half expecting to run into him. And we did, in a manner of speaking.

After a few minutes there, I noticed a tall candle burning in a glass enclosure with a note on it. I didn’t pay attention at first. Just some bar room bric-a-brac. But Jeff saw it, too, and we soon realized the note read: “For F____.”

You wonder sometimes when you don’t hear from someone for a while: Man, what if he’s dead. What would I do? How sad and weird! What’s the last thing we did together? When’s the last time we spoke? Wow, just imagine. Heh — I shouldn’t think like that. He’s fine. I should really call him one of these days.

We called the bartender over. Is that the same F____ we think you’re talking about? The bartender lowered his eyes. Yes, it was. And he told us the story: He had been found dead a fews days ago in bed in his apartment. He had been dead three days. It was a heroin overdose. There was a note next to him: “You looked so peaceful sleeping there, I didn’t want to wake you. —Ricky.” No one knows who this guy Ricky was. We think he’s the one who sold it to him. Either it was some bad shit or just a bad decision. Really loved that guy, you know. Everyone knew him. He was a real good guy. The funeral is this weekend in New Jersey. I can get you the information if you want.

Sure, thanks, we said.

We just sat there, silent, sort of stunned. Neither of us could imagine what to say next, except, occasionally, “I just can’t believe it.”

We left the bar without collecting the funeral information. I don’t think either of us wanted to go. He had far closer friends who should be there instead of us. It was a difficult night for us. We went for a good long walk and stayed up late talking about it and getting angry and sad and crying at times. The things you have seem so much more precious when you realize that someone you know has lost them forever. Forever. And what a waste to lose so much — all that goes into 34 years of life — and suddenly, it’s wiped out. Jeff and I had each other, so we held tight and remembered and cried for all of the things that would never be.

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the untallied hours