Archive for Death

Alex and testosterone

At some point in the early 1990s, I spoke with my college friend Alex on the phone, and was surprised that his voice had dropped in pitch by at least an octave since I had last talked with him. I think he told me something about having belatedly gone through puberty. It turned out that […]

The anniversary that I missed

(Content warning for discussion of a suicide.) A little under two weeks ago, around the start of Labor Day Weekend, I had an anxiety spike, which was made worse a couple days later by various things around the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard about the award’s name. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why […]

14 years

Today is the 14th anniversary of my father’s death. I’ve been mostly okay the past few days, but kind of fragile and mood-swingy. Have gotten some important overdue stuff done at work this week, but have also had multiple instances of getting too anxious to read specific emails and thus ending up being later than […]

More on Ellison

Some thoughts and notes about Harlan Ellison, in no particular order, on the occasion of his death. Content warning: I’m going to say some positive things about him as well as some critical things; if either of those will distress you, then you may not want to read this post right now. He was capable […]

Ellison’s Angry Candy introduction

One of the first things I thought of on learning that Harlan Ellison died this morning was the introduction he wrote to his 1988 short-story collection Angry Candy. It’s a powerful piece about the deaths of forty-plus people who he cared about and admired, over the course of a couple of years in the mid-1980s. […]

RIP, Bernie DeKoven

I just learned that Bernie DeKoven, a.k.a. “Blue,” has died, of cancer. Bernie was my high school friend Elyon’s father. In high school and college, I had a hard time interacting with most of my friends’ parents, but Bernie was different. He was one of the leaders of the New Games movement. I had grown […]

RIP, Mary Rosenblum

I’m sad to learn that Mary Rosenblum has died. I think she was recently best-known as a mystery writer, under the name Mary Freeman, but I was most familiar with her Drylands series, about a future Pacific Northwest with very little water. I particularly liked the first story in that series, “Water Bringer.” The whole […]

Cyclical stuff

Last night, in a successful effort to procrastinate on some overdue work tasks, I looked up how much a nearby house recently sold for, which indirectly led me to update the list of assets in my will. (My will, such as it is, is currently just a text file in the Documents folder of my […]

Thirteen years

Today is the thirteenth anniversary of the day my father was killed. A lot of years, I get tense and irritable in the couple of weeks leading up to the anniversary. This year, I’ve been pretty much fine. A little sad, and a little scattered (have had a hard time focusing and a hard time […]