What's Stopping You?

I met Joyous Puppet and This Stranger about 3 years ago at this tantric sex workshop. I flirted with her after the class while the girl I came with flirted with him. A few weeks later, I was in Texas, but JP and I started emailing each other and I ended up topping her first sado-masochism scene with me a month or two later while I was in town.

That scene killed her relationship with This Stranger. He reacted far more intensely than he had predicted, wouldn't talk to her about it, and slowly, the relationship ended.

By that winter, Mirage and I were over, too, and JP & I ended up finding solace in each other. We started dating for real after a few months, and she introduced me to some of her friends. Like, mutual friends of hers and TS's. She and I broke up about a year later. We're still really good friends. I see her more than just about anybody.

This Stranger moved on with his life too, presumbly. I ran into him on the street a couple of times, it was always weird.

Two weeks ago, I'm working this convention, and JP asks me if I still want to go to Lakes of Fire, this regional burn event that I'd been wanting to attend, partially for vacation and partially because I'm dating a burner, and I want to be familiar with what her interests are.
Anyway, JP says she had a friend who has a ticket and was looking for a photographer. This friend says they wanted someone to photograph the camp, to put up on the website, because they'd been doing some good stuff with it and they wanted good low light pictures,
which is something I specialize in.

This is all happening in the middle of a show, and it's all going on via my smartphone, snuck in bits of conversation while on the sales floor. I'm not really paying attention. I find out that Sunday, while in the middle of breaking down my booth and saying goodbye to dozens of people, that This Stranger had died on Friday.

It turns out, he was the head organizer of the campsite that was looking for a photographer.

I barely knew this guy and what few interactions we'd had together had not been particularly cool, you know, so, I found out when they were holding the memorial and made sure not to be there, not wanting to step on anybody's toes.

I just found out tonight that what they wanted, but were to.....I dunno, embarrassed, I guess, to ask for, was they wanted me at the memorial to photograph it for his mom. JP had asked me to photograph the event, but there was some stupid errors with the Google Group, and so it was never clear to me if I would have been welcome there by the people actually attending and.....and anyway, that ball got dropped. I dropped that ball.


I also found out last night that he died by his own hands.

And ever since I found that out, I just keep thinking, "I missed the shot."

You can talk about fault, responsibility, judgement, communication skills, whatever you want to talk about to try to make me feel better about this, but the bottom line in my heart of hearts is, I missed the shot. Say whatever you want, the image isn't in my camera, and as Steve Jobs once said, "real programmers ship on deadline."

Gah. I hate suicides. They're senseless and tragic and you're left with all these pieces that don't fit and no way to know why they don't. You want to jam them in.

I've had more than my fair share of stories like this. At least once a semester back in college, I would have to sit on one of my friends until Western Psyche opened for Admissions in the morning. I learned pretty quickly to tell the difference between the kids doing it for attention and the serious life-threatening cases.

From a very narrow perspective, you could say that keeping my best friend from killing herself was partly what caused my "marriage" to fail.

The first guy within my circle of friends who ever succeeded in killing himself, his girlfriend had known he was feeling depressed. She called him up and offered to come over and make dinner for him. He sat there, the phone in one hand and the gun in the other, and calmly discussed dinner plans and helped her make a grocery list. Then he hung up, and called 911 to let them know that in a second, there'd be an unsupervised, loaded weapon in his room, because he could hear children playing outside, and he didn't want any of them to find the gun.

It's weirdly a comfort to me to know that the last sound on earth he heard was the sound of children playing.


There have been other deaths in my life: overdoses, a girl reacting to her sexual violation, a practical joker buddy who died of some bizarre strain of pneumonia because nobody believed he was paralyzed, and on top of those, more than my fair share of suicides.

Each one has been like a hastily discarded puzzle, tiny shards of someone's life left behind on my floor, vague beyond helping.

In 2010, I danced with this guy's girlfriend without asking him, and now he's dead.
In 2003, his door was locked so I didn't bother knocking. Four days later they found him in a cheap motel room in Texas, the needle still in his veins.
In 1995, I had a beer with this guy at an Irish pub. We complained about the Chips'n'curry and now he's dead.
In 1992, I noticed she wore long sleeves in the summer. When she died, she used the blood from her wrists to write "He wouldn't stop" on the bathroom wall.


Is it just me that inexorably confuses my lack of information with guilt? Or is this some innately human tendency?

It's not like I've come any closer to learning The Whole Truth of those friends of mine who haven't passed away. It's just that I notice how little I know about anyone each time the scoreboard gets counted and put away.

I struggle against rest, against relaxation. It feels foreign to me, a startling change in itself.

As I lay in bed, I came to realize that I am not truly as franticly worried over Roo's impending arrival as I first was. The primary source of my comfort came from remembering all the times when I soothed her anxiety attacks.....( Read more... )