Again, and again, and again

The thing about being a precocious child, is that you turn into a precocious teenager. And a precocious teenager doesn't really want to hang out with other teenagers, and makes friends with older and more mature fellows.

This leads to heartbreak and being left behind. 

First memorably, by a group of women I admired and counted myself a friend among for a decade, and who forcibly removed me from their circle - uninvited, explicitly, to my face - because I was "too young" and they didn't want to admit in my hearing what it was like to be aging. (Years later I have not yet recovered from that shock fully, and I don't think I'll ever trust a group of women as unguardedly as I had.)

And now, as I'm at the dreaded "middle age", I am getting my heart broken over and over as the older people who I am still friends with all these years later, go on before me. My final grandmother passed. Friends from high school, and college, and after college. The work colleagues who I hear about passing months- or years-belatedly, of some ailment, of some disaster. The number of live-hard die-hard Burning Man folks who've passed due to illness, accident, or by their own hands. The unending march of the Skyfaire list, of all the Rennies who've passed on to wave banners and eat turkey legs at a perfect-temperature dustless faire in the sky. The Odd Salon fixtures who seemed an unending well of stories, suddenly capped and inaccessible.

The more interesting people I meet in my many lives and many travels, the more it seems I am just going to eventually lose. 

Tonda, Teflon, my amazing goth friend, old school St Maxian, Burning Man Cafe shift lead, historical costume stitch-counter, Georgian romance writer, mastiff enthusiast, historian spitfire Juno of a woman, is dying. The brain cancer we thought was in remission is no longer, and they've reached point where nothing they can do for her will extend her life more than a month or so at most. And so, on reflection, she has decided she's done. I haven't heard her voice in ages, but I can hear it in my head - loud, firm, brash. She is DONE. I immediately got a mental image of her in her Germans, tellerbarret cocked at a jaunty angle, kirtling up her skirts and kicking Charon off the boat and into the Styx, poling herself across the river on her own time thankyouverymuch. 

But it's hard to remember her howling with laughter with a cocktail in her hand, watching Duel at Blood Creek at 1am at Costume College, when confronted with her dozing unconscious form, the hovering hospice care workers, the resigned quiet of the room. Her hands are still soft, but cool, and held them while I told her about all the people who were shocked to hear about her going, and how much she is adored, how much she will be missed. There will never be another like her. And we all know that and are bracing ourselves for impact. 

There is a sickening symmetry with last October, leaving with a few hours notice to visit another friend, insensible and dying in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones. This is too soon. Too much death. Too SOON.  

There's a comfort in the fact, once again, that my friend has made a choice, and is leaving with dignity and agency intact. And in this case at least, comfort in the fact that she's not in any pain. (I only recently learned that brain cancer apparently doesn't hurt because your brain doesn't have pain receptors. I can't tell if I'm relieved or horrified.)

I love you Tonda. May you pass gently into the next world, your work here being so well discharged. May we meet again in joy and light, far far from this earthly plane. 

The things you leave behind

 I don't like to talk about where I'm from much. There are a lot of reasons and it's hard to put a finger on why I shy away - I'll tell you I'm from the blue end of the BART line. I'll tell you that it was a great place to grow up, but terrible after you turned 18. I'll tell you that you can categorize my graduating class into two groups: those who got out, and those who didn't. Most of those who didn't, didn't because they already live incredibly privileged lives, and they had nothing to seek. I was obviously not one of those people.

I looked further afield for happiness, for love. I had to because home held little for me. I ended up at an internet cafe in Livermore, where all the other weird kids (and former kids) hung out. Several social circles converged, and I took joyful part in most of them. While there was a great deal of friendship and camaraderie, there was also a great deal of immaturity, abuse, casual sexual assault, and a certain amount of what I have to admit now was grooming. But there were safe parties and dancing and dressing up, hanging out and singing and playing games. But then again there were also the darker moments like waking at 3am at a sleepover LAN party because one of the hosts threatened their spouse that they'd commit suicide, and were being taken away in an ambulance. 

I don't like to talk about where I've been. I've lived so many lives, left so many people and things behind when they hurt me. I think many of us do.

My first "boyfriend" was a boy I kissed at 4H summer camp. My second was a boy from the cafe who also went to my same high school. The third one died on Wednesday. Her name was Chayna.

It's hard to look back at a picture from January 12, 2001 and think about where I was and what I was doing. The world was completely different - you could meet your loved ones at the airport arrival gate. Gas was a buck something a gallon. I was waiting to see what college(s) might accept me. I had a free FortuneCity webpage where I put my pictures from 4H camp (laboriously scanned, cropped, and converted). Webvan still delivered, and the Dot Bomb was two months away. I carried The Leash, my name for the navy blue Nokia candybar phone I was obliged to carry (in the first stages of what I realize now was a troubling crackdown on my burgeoning independence). The iPhone would not be released for another five years. And we went, of course, like the nerd kids we were, to MacWorld.

It was a group of us from the Hotline server where we'd built a weird sort of outsider hackerish aesthetic community. We all cut school that Friday - they were giving out free tickets for the last day - and took BART into the City, walked to Moscone Center unsupervised, and were juuust mature enough to not be a nuisance worth the effort of kicking out. And most of what I remember was seeing the Mac G4 Cube for the first time, and that I was in the end stages of a debate about if we could be polyamorous with another boy from the server we all shared. (Spoilers: we could not.) I don't even remember the other guy's last name anymore, but it's weird to see that one detail with a twinge of guilt, still, a quarter of a century later.

I lost all of the emails and conversation logs from this period of my life to Hotmail wiping my account for inactivity, some time in the spring of 2002. Thankfully I had at least saved some of the oh so gothy photos we took together. They're very very small files, in retrospect.

The person I dated was not great. Quick witted, playful, passionately caring about friendships and community, a giver of thoughtful gifts and care, I could even say loving (such as it was at that age); but also mercurial, temperamental, simmering with sarcastic anger that sometimes boiled up into rage, inflexible to downright bullying when opposed, and unwilling to admit when they were wrong. And damningly, pushy about wanting to make certain um, sexual milestones, together. We were young and we were exploring, but I knew that was happening on my terms or not at all.

In the lee of the breakup my old alias was banned from the server, so I made a fake one unbeknownst to her, so I could keep talking to the rest of my friends. When staring at the blank "new handle" field my mind went blank as well and my attempt to make my handle `ConcretePretext` (as a nod to my excuse for being there) became `ConcreteContext`. I do think in retrospect I would've been found out and booted the second time a lot faster without the error.

Later, when I decided in my second year at Burning Man that "Hestia" was giving the wrong idea as a playa name, I fell back to Context, and thus has it been ever since. When I had to give up my old alias that had become inextricably linked to naked pictures of me, I added a second syllable, making it a bad three-part pun on Comic Sans, the Japanese honorific, and honestly at 1 in the morning with a glass of whisky I can't remember the third.

So she's been a subtle part of the history of my online identity - nearly from the start of having an online identity - as well as of my individuated identity from so many other things.

I got into UCSC. I did ren faire as much as humanly possible as an undergrad, and still hung out with the crowd from the internet cafe, so I saw glimmers around the edges of the social media sphere. She was frequently at the costumed events I went to, honing her already formidable photography skills. At some point I think she made a point to tell me she wasn't mad anymore, but we didn't really hang out at all until the cocktail hours at Bandersnatch. And even then not that much because of work and the long drive. 

We reconnected at a funeral. The one I went to because I needed, in that dark moment, to remember what suicide does to your friends. She was, weirdly, there for me, and I later spent some fun time haunting thrift stores for aesthetic components for her home. Our text messages were mostly about Edwardian silverplate and gold-rimmed cocktail glasses from the 50s, all going cheap at the Menlo Park Goodwill. But I was living in the South Bay and having My Own Shit Going On™️, and mostly we traded notes about the silly-valley from afar.

...

The goth scene is not without drama. Some of it I am ashamed to say, goes beyond mere "drama" and into more serious problems, and I admit some of my distance was intentional. I was busy trying to make a living, and having been badly burnt in both love and friendship at ren faire, distancing myself from that whole world as much as possible while I plunged into hashtag startuplife. It was easy to stay uninvolved and remote. 

At some point she went to Asia and came back with beautifully tailored gentlemen's suits. Then she disappeared again as if into a cocoon. And she reemerged as Chayna. 

My impression, which I will never get to ask her about now, is that transitioning was as much about finding peace within her being, as bundling up and putting behind her all the toxic traits associated with her fragile masculinity. A repudiation of what had been. I didn't speak much to her post-transition because I'm not part of that scene anymore - definitely not cool enough to hang with these folks, and certainly not putting out any art at all, much less of the quality that would attract notice. I'd been more distant recently because there were some parts of her I didn't want or need to see, and boy howdy were they on display. Forced intimacy is still a hard line for me.

On my first date with Martin we went to Wicked Grounds, who were for some odd reason having a cookie-painting event. I painted (a very bad from-memory version of) Chayna's iconic picture from her trek in Namibia on the cookie. Partly because it was fresh in my mind, partly because it was easy shapes to paint, and partly because they happened to have (mosst of) the right colors. It now pops up on the anniversary of our first date each year.

My first thought on hearing the news this morning was thank god it was an accident, and that she hadn't picked a fight with someone. Then anger that she had been working in the vehicle alone. Then grief, because it was so senseless, and so early. 

People are complicated. I am having complicated feelings.