Twitter Jail

Yesterday I had two laptops open during the Soyuz capsule journey back into our atmosphere, bringing the two astronauts and one cosmonaut of Expedition 35 back to Earth. One laptop had the NASA stream open. On the other, I had open

double laptops

  • My main Twitter feed
  • My interactions
  • Canadian Space Agency Twitter
  • 3+ NASA Twitter accounts
  • Twitter searches for: ISS, Soyuz, Exp35

In addition to miscellaneous news websites, a world time map, a world map, and a number of different Twitters for space tweeps around the globe. I tweet a lot during big events like yesterday because a lot of people on my Twitter feed don’t have the time or mental bandwidth to be newsies. They want good, solid news, heart warming tweets, Twitter-sized wisdom, and bites of science.

So I landed in Twitter jail (exceeding the Twitter API limit) while tweeting

  • What I could see/observe on the NASA live feed
  • Answering questions
  • Retweeting  information
  • Doing my very best to be a useful, entertaining science nerd

Turns out that 1000 tweets a day/100 tweets an hour is really easy to hit. Thankfully, my sojourn in Twitter jail was short. I was able to return to tweeting in the final 10 minutes or so before the Soyuz capsule landed, but every time I go to Twitter jail I think about what and how I’ve tweeted. I’m learning to be judicious, and prioritize information, which is fabulous. But I still wish Twitter jail, like Monopoly, had a get out free card. Till then, I continue to try  learning how to live tweet without exceeding the limit. If you too land in Twitter jail someday: ease your finger off the send button for a bit. Get a drink, and ask a friend or two to tweet dependable alternative feeds for people to follow for continued coverage. Keep on reading as things unfold, and test the door on Twitter jail after some time has passed. If you’re sprung, try to keep the volume of tweets down, lest you return to the electronic cell you so recently vacated.

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Twine and Failure

I made a Twine in April. If you don’t know, Twine is a neat little program that helps you snap a story together in a frame that closely resembles the Choose Your Own Adventure books of my (and many of your own) childhood(s). I want to start with things I fucked up.

 

  1.  There are more than 12 entries that end in “dead ends,” and I didn’t link back to earlier parts of their respective plot trees (the path of pages to hit the dead end) and left no sign that these dead ends were indeed deliberate.
  2.  I broke the Rewind function on my Twine.
  3. I managed to somehow orphan a crucial page from the rest of the Twine. This means that when people playtested it for me, they were missing a vital statement to understand the end of that plot line.

 

I’ll probably post it up at some point so others can poke around, but it is about my past mental health and rather lacking in the sugar coating department. So, it’s not a Twine to play when you want to feel good. I keep resisting saying “I made a game” and saying “I made a Twine,” because I’m still not sure how I feel about having the ability to make a game for others to explore things like my mental health.

Things I didn’t fuck up:

I built a Twine. My initial thoughts about that:

  • It may not work well, it may have narrative/artistic issues that can be debated, but I built the damn thing. And that’s a start to making more.
  • I couldn’t run Twine on my main laptop (in a bit of a hurry right now, will try and drop specs back in later) but it could run well on my other laptop. It’s a very simple visual interface, and the Help file isn’t too opaque in terms of usefulness. Since there are so many people using Twine, it was also fairly easy to Google things I needed to know that weren’t in the Help file. It was my first time making something with so many interlinking pages (well over 60) and the way Twine tracks those connections visually as well as showing all outgoing/incoming links for each page was a huge help to keeping track.
  • I did the entire thing in Twine, no other programs, over the course of a few hours. When I build my next Twine I may see about doing the bulk of the writing before hand. I don’t know if there’s any way to do it that isn’t as equally messy as writing it all in Twine was. But when I experiment again, I’ll have hopefully found out.
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Convention Book: Progenitors

Can you guess what today is?

Today is release day! Convention Book: Progenitors is for use with Mage: The Ascension. It’s an updated look at the Progenitors Convention, the brave souls of the Technocratic Union that administer to humankind and Earth alike. You can get the book at DriveThruRPG in print or .pdf. I had an amazing time working alongside Ryan Macklin, David A. Hill Jr, Josh Roby and Jeremy Tidwell. It’s a strange new world these days for the healers of the Union, and I hope you enjoy exploring it with them.

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4/15

I’m a journalist, and I do my best to explain why and how things are happening to friends during times of crisis. When to be patient. Who to call. Out of yesterday’s horror, the bombing of the Boston Marathon, the injury and death of so many, I wanted to say something. Not off-list, as is often my way. But something that could maybe ripple out a little by being unrestricted to email, to share my thoughts, to hopefully in some way provide information or food for thought. Selfishly, this is also a way to process my feelings, and quell the residual panic left from last night, panic from waiting for the Twitters of my Boston friends to say “I’m okay.”

“Most of us will be tempted to treat each new fact as evidence for a particular conclusion. But there will be many facts, and different facts will point in different directions — all at the same time.” -Jim Walsh

Boston Marathon Bombings: They Picked On The Wrong City  is for me, in some ways reminiscent of a much older piece. Walsh, who teaches at MIT, gives an honest assessment as someone who works with international security. That things will be confusing and difficult, that information will rapidly populate and refine in a simultaneous fashion. He says Boston will endure, and survive, and that its spirit will continue. But he says we need to think about what we’re hearing, particularly about how we cannot interpret new information as evidentiary support for our own theories. It’s worth a read. Promise.

“Because they found the bomb in time, the event is not laden with horror and sorrow. It denies us the spectacle of Kabuki mourning and vicarious grief. There will not be a president, head bowed at the memorial service, reassuring us that we are a great people and a great nation. There will be no statue at which people can stare and wonder how it could have possibly come to this.” -Charles P. Pierce

That’s from the piece I’m pairing with Walsh’s, and it’s about peace and hate and prepardness and the world we live in. It is about events here in Washington, my home state. It’s also about the events that didn’t happen that day. It is about the power of hate and the force of reason and acceptance. Homegrown Terrorism: The Bomb That Didn’t Go Off, is by Charles P. Pierce. It is worth reading.

3 killed, at least 144 injured in Boston Marathon blasts.

Just one of the headlines in The Boston Globe this week. Of all the newsies in the world I send up a prayer for daily, they shot up the top last night. Their city, their streets, their friends and neighbors and the tourists who had been there, who love Boston and love to run. They have a special section right now, devoted to their coverage of the bombing and all that comes after.

Boston Globe photographer John Tlumacki took many of the photos we saw on Monday, photos that will become heart breaking icons of this year’s marathon. He spoke to LightBox within hours of the bombs going off. This is the news asking someone else who works in the media, who has witnessed a traumatic event, to tell them what he saw. The essential lesson of news is someone saying “I was there. Let me tell you what I saw.” What he says will be difficult for some to read, as his descriptions are neither sugar-coated nor softened.

Please exercise emotional caution if descriptions or depictions of the events in Boston are upsetting. Some of these images may disturb you.

Tragedy in Boston: One Photographer’s Eyewitness Account.

Even in the narrative of an event, there are simultaneous stories occurring.

Alexander Brian Arredondo, also known to the world before his name change (in honor of his deceased sons) as Carlos Arredondo, is a peace activist. He was there to hand out flags, and wound up saving the life of Jeff Bauman. Jeff was there to cheer for his girlfriend Erin.

The graphic photo of Arrendondo, rushing alongside Bauman, was everywhere on Monday. That photo was how his step-sister learned her sibling had been injured, and prompted her to call their father.

Jeff Bauman’s father saw that photo on Facebook.
In Grisly Image, a Father Sees His Son is as simple and accurate as a headline can get. This is Tim Rohan’s article on what happened to Jeff Bauman, and how his family learned of his injury, and about the man who saved his life. The image is quite graphic, so again, please exercise caution.

People debate the ethics of photos whenever news coverage is deemed by the public to be too graphic, insensitive, or overly intrusive. One of 2012′s exemplars of such photographic coverage was debated and quickly forgotten by the public. It was scrutinized by the press as journalists, photographers and editors discussed if it was ethical to have even taken the photo. Jeff Bercovici’s “New York Post’s Subway Death Photo: Was It Ethical Photojournalism?” and Cord Jefferson’s exceptionally and thorough “Would You Have Taken the Post Subway Photo?: Pulitzer-Winning Photographers Respond” are about a specific photo, run by a particular publication.

But the underlying debate on ethics, on duty as a human being versus responsibilities as a member of media, those things are vital parts of the conversation we are having. If you are not media, you need to be reading what the media says about itself, to each other, about ethics. Without that, you miss having a fully informed idea of the climate of news right now. I might call people who read news “readers,” but we’ve gone far past a passive top-down news delivery. You’re all a part of it now, whether you like it or not.

Erik Wemple at the Washington Post had a few words about the place we get so much news. “Boston explosions: Twitter acts as journalism’s ombudsman.” I’m serious about the “few words,”it’s a short piece. But he highlights things people keep saying. Why do we keep breaking all those guidelines, as a nation, that seem intuitive? To verify, to vet, to exercise caution? Because so much of our ethics are informed by social contracts. The social contracts of the internet and social media are changing, rapidly. We have new ways to fuck up, and we’re still learning. Doesn’t excuse anyone from fucking up, or being obligated to issue corrections and apologies. But that’s a bit of why. We’re living in “the future” as so many like to say, and ethics is still catching up.

Breaking News, a blog run by journalists all over the world, highly literate in social media and a paragon (bias mine, I’m a happy reader) of how to, well: break news. Their staff have touchstones of the breaking news experiences that follow them still. They did a piece about how they navigated the deafening chaos of the news surrounding the bombing at the marathon. It’s a layperson-friendly read. No jargon, no lexicon, just a clear explanation of how they tracked, reported and evaluated the news that day.  There’s a saying about news, that you can be first, or you can do it right. They walk the line as well as anyone I can think of. Inside Breaking News: How we balance speed with rumor control.

Al Tompkins has a piece over at Poynter, “Covering what comes next in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon explosions.” It’s written for journalists, from someone else in the field. Even if you’re not a journalist, if you are convinced every journalist out there is Bad News, you can see the advice being given in the field. Good, solid advice. If you see news that follows it, boost it for all you’re worth. Good news won’t get made if no one sees it, recognizes it, and boosts the signal.

Josh Stearns ran some info over at his site in his piece “Verifying Social Media Content: The Best Links, Case Studies and Discussion.” It’s from last month, still plenty applicable. The tools in this list may seem like something for journalists, but this is usable and pertinent to the experiences of anyone with internet access and an interest in news. It doesn’t matter what your job is, you play a part in the ecosystem of media now. To navigate it with less frustration, and greater digital and media literacy, it’s a good start.

Anette Novak put in some short, powerful words of her own at her site, under “#82 – ethics codes.” Something she said I feel an intense need to highlight.

“It becomes blatantly clear that many people who publish themselves lack basic knowledge on media ethics. And yes, when you tweet you are a potential massmedia. As such you have power. But this must be followed by a responsibility.” -Annette Novak

You are all potential mass media. All of you.

Please let that sink in.

You are a part of journalism. You and you and you and you. I think objectivity is a myth. Impartiality, all but impossible. Judgement, too easy to pass. Whatever you take from this, from my thoughts, from your own. You are a part of journalism, and if a single thing about reporting has upset you this week, the week before, in months and decades past. We live in an age where you are a part of this strange and sometimes beautiful ecosystem. If you use the tools of journalists, and if we can share our language, our methodology, then you can exercise your power in this place with truthfulness, intelligence, compassion and tact.

You can help change the things that distress you, as a human being, as a reader, as a micro/macro facet of the very field I so love.

You are a part of journalism.

 

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breathe

Last year, an allergy specialist asked me why I’d never written about my asthma before. My memories of it inside hospital settings are, at best, fragmentary. The majority of my emergency room encounters I’ve been in grave respiratory distress. This is one of those piecemeal memories. I was 21.

I had to be carried into the ER. I remember someone running toward us, along with a security guard, that the sounds of urgent voices were mixing with the strobe of hospital lights passing quickly overhead.

We skipped triage.

I don’t remember how many of them were working on me when I came to again, only remember different hands and their still too-urgent voices. They unwrapped me from the long wool coat I had been carried within, and one of my shoes fell off. My foot dangled there in the air as they continued to peel me out of layers, scarf unknotted and blouse buttons undone. Star of David and bra exposed, necklace unhooked as one set of hands held my head up. I tried to object, but could remember no words.

Someone had put a mask over my face. The hiss of oxygen sounded like a roar, drowning their voices. My eyes fluttered as they attached monitors to my body, the sharp pain of needles dancing in my flesh. More urgent words. I could barely hold my eyes open. There was a nurse with him, asking him questions as a doctor asked me the same ones, my chest barely raising, falling abruptly. My skin was ghastly under the circle of light that shone down from the ceiling. Dimly, past the pain, I could remember collapsing after we’d left the restaurant. The cap to my inhaler was still in the parking lot.

He knew the shape and sizes of pills and bottles, but not their names. He could only be of marginally more use than I was.

“Lillian, can you hear me?” The doctor leaned over me as the disembodied hands labored away, turning my body into a spool for wires and tubes. “Lillian, we’re having a very hard time stabilizing you. Have you ever been intubated before?”

The monitors, reaching upward like spires in the dark, were dancing out an uneasy, skipping rhythm of beeps. Intubation. My specialist had something, it was a warning, but I couldn’t remember

“She hasn’t.”

 I had to think about keeping my eyes open

“Lillian, if we can’t get you stabilized, we need to put you on a ventilator. I need you to keep breathing.”

something should have helped already

“Lillian, stay with us.”

the monitors were so loud

“Should we start?”

they were shrieking

“Get him out of here.”

my eyes closed

and the monitors whined.

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Brain Candy

I may be moderating some of the whip-smart and fabulous attending pros at NWC all weekend, but I ran into some really great links the other day that I didn’t want lost in the Twitter-ether.

 

12 Dozen Places to Educate Yourself Online For Free Useful collection of online learning portals, could be great for authors looking for in-depth research material that they want to acquire in-depth.

I Read Comics Too Fast
Fabulous post on reading graphic novels, both the written dialogue and silent visual communication taking place.

A Reader’s Responsibility
I loathe using the words “must read,” but this makes me want to use them. The responsibilities of readers is to read, and what others think is the responsibility of readers is explored with tact and wit here.

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Creativity and Disabilities

I’m moderating a number of panels at Norwescon next weekend, but I wanted to talk about one of them now. Creativity and Disabilities.

Whether your problems are physical or psychological, there’s no denying that being creative and creating art is difficult to almost impossible when a disability stands in your way. Come learn how different artists and writers work with, past, or through their personal disabilities and limitations to create their art.

 

I’ve been told for years that to be open about my disabilities is a risk to my professional reputation and my livelihood. That to stay publicly in the closet about those struggles  was to make the safest choice. While that may have some truth to that, stigma can kill. It can kill careers and people, because daily life without being able to tell the truth is a crushing burden. I’m a woman, working in fields dominated by men. I’m still in my 20′s. Having physical mobility issues or admitting to having depression has impacted my career less than being a woman has.

If I choose silence about my fight with depression, I will choose to stifle myself, to make a choice that I know would hurt me daily. I respect the choices others can and do make. Silence simply isn’t the choice I can make for me. If I’m open about it, other people know there’s one more person who feels how they do, and has kept going. That’s too precious to me to not use my voice.

If you’re in Seattle next weekend for NWC, the panel is 6-7 p.m on Friday, March 29th. I’m only one of the people on the panel, and I think we’ll all have a lot to share.

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Learning to Live Through This

 Live Through This is an ambitious project from New York photographer and suicide attempt survivor Dese’Rae L. Stage. Stage has been telling the largely unheard stories of suicide survivors through photography and interviews, making the content available and accessible to anyone on a website devoted to the project. Stage is in the final two weeks of a Kickstarter to expand the content on the Live Through This site; if successful, she’ll be able to travel to new cities and speak to more survivors.

bird
In what ways has your degree in psychology shaped your photography of the people you interview, and informed your interview technique?

My degree in psychology provided me with empirically-based facts about suicide and mental illness. My subsequent training in crisis prevention

Live Through This shoot. Taken by Aleksandar Cosic.

Behind the scenes, Live Through This shoot. Taken by Aleksandar Cosic.

taught me how to handle the topic in a direct but empathetic way. It pushed me to hone my active listening skills. My personal experience with my own attempt and the losses of dear friends forced my emotional investment, not to mention my horror at the myths and stigma surrounding suicide and mental illness.

All of that informs my interview technique and the photos I make in conjunction with this project; the best adjective with which to describe them is “receptive,” I guess.

When I meet with a survivor, I ask them simply to tell me their story. I like that they can choose which details to include without me butting in. I take notes while they talk and ask any questions I might have after they’re finished, but it’s all very informal. Telling that story is uncomfortable—and I’ve noticed that, often, it’s being told in its entirety for the first time when it’s being told to me—so I try to ease that feeling as much as I can. There’s some level of trust required. I make the portrait only moments after the survivor is done with their story. I request little more than that they look into my lens.

I don’t want to interfere with their story or the way they choose to express themselves when faced with the lens. I try to stay out of the way. I want to present their perspective in as pure a form as possible. I’m actively listening with both my ears and my camera, and then I’m sharing that with the viewer.

 

Why did you decide to make Live Through This an online project?

One of the ways I’m most comfortable connecting with people is through the Internet. It’s sort of my domain. I spent my teens teaching myself to

code. I made a lot of my closest friends on the Internet and subsequently met them in person. This means that I have couches to sleep on all over the world. Really, it just made sense.

More than that, though, one of the most important aspects of this project is accessibility. While it is essentially an art-based project, a gallery really isn’t the BEST home for it. Being able to put it in a place where anyone could access it at any time was of utmost importance. I’ve received more than one email informing me that it was found via a panicked late night Google, and at just the right time. It serves its purpose to maximum effect by being on the Internet.

 

 

Portrait of Krista Andrews. Taken by Dese'Rae Stage.

Live Through This, Portrait of Krista Andrews. Taken by Dese’Rae Stage.

How have you worked through the difficulty of sharing your own story?

 

I think having time to process really helped me. I also think, at some point, I felt I owed it to the people who were sharing their experiences with me.

When I first started the project, I didn’t plan on including my own story. I said I didn’t want it to be about me. I think that was just fear and shame talking. Turns out, every portrait, every story, every effort I make toward this project is about me. If it wasn’t about me and my experience, I never would have started it to begin with. But that’s the thing—it transcends my experience. It’s universal, and that’s what I like to focus on. It’s a group effort, truly, but I think it did need my voice.

It was actually the interview I did with Krista Andrews that changed my mind. We grew up in the same city—in the same neighborhood, even—but never met until we were in our mid-20s in New York. The things she said that day dug in deep. I rode the train home later and just sobbed. I knew it was time to grow a pair. Sharing is caring, right?

 

Who do you hope Live Though This will help?

Anybody who needs it.

I want it to appeal to other suicide attempt survivors because there are few resources for us—I want other survivors to feel like there is someone out there who understands—but I want it to appeal equally to friends and family members of those who have lost their lives to suicide. I want them to have hope too. And there are plenty of people out there who are fearful and ignorant about who is affected by suicide, the whys and the hows. You know, the people who say, “Oh, that could never happen to me.” It can. It can happen to anyone. In sharing these stories and putting these names and faces out there, I want people to understand that suicide is something that is universally affecting. I want it to be an educational tool as much as I want it to provide hope.

 

When did you decide to start the project?

Portrait of Kevin Hines. Taken by Dese'Rae Stage.

Live Through This, Portrait of Kevin Hines. Taken by Dese’Rae Stage.

The project was years in the making, really. I started cutting myself at 14, and when I got to college (2001), I decided to study psychology so I could help others like myself. It was never that easy, though.

Faculty members wanted nothing to do with topics like suicide and self-injury. All but one (Chris Dula at ETSU) told me to wait until grad school. Working in Dr. Dula’s lab really reinforced this idea that I could help people. I worked with a grad student to put together a comprehensive self-injury self-report measure. I volunteered at a crisis center, and did my first suicide prevention training course.

During my final semester at ETSU, I applied for Ph.D. programs and ended up getting into one. I can’t tell you how shocked I was when I got there and my intended mentor wouldn’t get behind my research interests.

Eventually, I quit and moved to New York. There was a period of dormancy that lasted a few years while I discovered my love for photography and subsequently taught myself the skill. It was in 2010 that I realized I could connect those two passions, photography and suicide awareness—that I didn’t have to address suicide academically for it to be affecting. I bought the URL in September of 2010 and set about making contact with people who might want to get involved.

 

Where do you hope Live Through This will go, after the Kickstarter?

The Kickstarter is really still just a beginning. It’s going to allow me to expand the project in a way I’ve only been dreaming about for the past two

Self-portrait. Dese'Rae Stage.

Dese’Rae Stage. Self portrait.

years. I’ll be taking it to 15 cities, but there are certainly other places I’d like to go. Most of middle America isn’t included in that list. I want to go to some states with the highest suicide rates: Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Alaska. I really want LTT to reflect the breadth and depth of the collective human experience of depression and suicide attempts. As best I can, anyway.

I want to start incorporating video. I originally conceived of LTT as a multimedia undertaking, but I needed to start somewhere, so I started with what I knew. An outpouring of support has come along with the Kickstarter, especially from other artists. I want to get some of them involved.

I’m also hoping that the future holds a book project, more speaking engagements, and educational exhibitions.

 

The Live Through This project can be found on the LTT website, the LTT Kickstarter, Facebook, and can be followed on Twitter @lttphoto. To find out about Dese’Rae Stage’s other work, you can find out more on her website, and follow her on Twitter @deseraestage. If you are currently feeling suicidal, you can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

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Everybody Knows Someone

This is a photo of me at 17. It was taken by my boyfriend at the time. I weigh 115 pounds in this photo. That fall, I was seeing a therapist again Lillian age 17about my eating disorder.

It was probably my third or fourth time in therapy since I was 14.

It was my third relapse.

I’ve seen a total of seven relapses since the ‘first time.’ I’ve seen at least ten therapists. I have induced vomiting, abused caffeine, starved myself. I’ve been an overeater. I have often lived day to day using intense calorie restrictions. I’ve been a compulsive exerciser, and abused my body to its breaking point. I have severe dental health issues, because some of my most active and severe periods of struggle were during childhood and adolescence. Starving myself set me up for an adulthood fighting dental issues, which I’ve rarely had insurance long enough to address.

I’ve been treated with medication, cognitive therapy, Maudsley Family Therapy, and worked with friends to normalize my eating, to make food no longer my enemy. Eating is still hard for me. I will still deliberately skip meals, exercise more than my body can handle, and compulsively weigh myself. I still eat less than I need. My recovery was and is imperfect. As I grow older, the long-term consequences of my eating disorder become apparent in my x-rays and abnormal lab results.

This year, the theme of the National Eating Disorders Awareness Week is “Everybody Knows Somebody.”

You know more of us than you think.

You can click here to learn more about the NEDAwareness week. To find resources or help, you can visit the NEDA website.

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Dead Heroes

Hunter S. Thompson died February 20th, 2005. He was a journalist. A writer. A husband, for a time. A father. A man who stayed a close friend to his former wife. A man who lived and loved with his second wife. He was fierce and weird, talented, called gonzo by Bill Cardoso, embracer of the word, inspirer of kids who would never drink as much as he did or do as many drugs.

He killed himself with a gun when I was 20. Ralph Steadman wrote about how Thompson had told him he felt “trapped” if he didn’t know he could commit suicide. Trapped, any year, every year, if at any moment he didn’t know he could check out forever.

Hunter S. Thompson was a strange, talented, weird human being. And it was weird for me at 20 to think of him as a human being, not a walking (now cremated) legend. That the man who wrote Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, a book handed to me when I was only 14 by my own mother, that he was dead. I wouldn’t read Steadman’s words for years, but I felt a weird, terrible, fucked up kinship with a dead man I’d never met in person, only solely through his words. I had my last cigarette a year ago or so today, give a few days, I think, unconscious, fitting. I’m writing this in between deadlines and packing moving boxes and feeling a deep unsettled feeling, more to do with my life and the chronic, painful conditions I have, the ones that make my own hip burn and my head spin.

Sympathy and empathy. You feel that for fellow human beings, when you stop buying the legends and stories, and see the fucked up, imperfect, amazing creature who lived them.

I know you are missed the world over. None of us will be you, but many of us will miss you, miss the hands that wrote the words that stirred us, clicked inside us, made us think. Helped us live. Made us chuckle, even when things had gone to hell.

Tomorrow I’ll get up, write articles, tend to a column, keep slogging through things both beautiful and painful. And even tomorrow, you shall be missed.

Goodnight, Mr. Thompson.

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