I try not to be tasteless. Ok, that's a lie. I try not to be crass. But I'm failing this time: Allison Stokke is so freakin' hot.

i haven't been writing. this fact, as an isolated statement, doesn't mean much. but when taken in a larger context, when factoring in this site and my own creative writing, it is bad. bad. i have spent more time in the last 2 weeks writing documentation for an api than i have on my own thoughts.

i had decided this weekend that this was to stop. that i had plowed through enough of my own small projects and could easily dedicate 15 minutes a day to writing. and the assumption is that 15 will snowball into something larger.

one of these projects over the last weekend was dvd-ing more home videos. 9 of 13 done. but i woke up on sunday morning, climbed out of bed and took the most recently compressed video and marked chapters, setting it to export as a video_ts folder. and climbed back into bed.

as i was marking chapters, i was skimming the video. this dvd is footage from 'urban light works' in 2000. it has a lot of footage of yoffy, who i spent the day with setting up an installation. it has footage of kelly, who came out. it has footage of me, bald and silly.

but as i was scanning the footage, a face popped out. popped out from the past; i stopped breathing. i felt sick. lia was staring at me. lia is dead. lia has been dead now for almost 6 years. i feel sick typing this right now, sitting in a tullys in downtown san francisco, a life-time away from that day.

i went back to bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about her. thinking about the murder. thinking about life. i felt sick. i thought i might actually throw up. i was completely and utterly ill-prepared to deal with seeing her on video sunday morning. i still am. i might never be able to watch that dvd, just knowing the pain it will cause my heart.

another dvd had been made last week. a silly one, of another vcu project. on it, i had found some footage that qualified as 'behind the scenes.' it was studio footage, a group shot of the entire class, with the instructor's voice coming from behind the camera.

patrick power.

sunday, after i came home from brunch, scant hours after the above story, i got an email. from meg. again, i was unprepared.

patrick died. i have no details; i immediately answered her email, but have not heard back from her. below is the email she sent out.

I am extremely sad to share with you all that my brother-in-law,
Patrick Donald William Power 2, passed away unexpectedly on October
16.

Loved by many - and at the beginning of a great life with his new
wife, Dawn Bennett, and his 5 month old son, Patrick Power 3 - this
man will be very much missed.

In lieu of flowers, his family is asking for donations for Patrick 3.
There are lots of legal and medical expenses that the family has
recently incured and ANY donation will be super appreciated.
Patrick's brother, Kevin, and I have set up this website as a place
for contributions:

http://www.forp3.com

I am sending this to many of Patrick's friends already, but please
forward to anyone who you think would appreciate hearing about the
news.

lea was a student at vcu. patrick was an instructor; he taught me 'intro to video.' he was amazingly kind and amazingly cool. i got updates every once in while through meg — i heard when he got married, i heard when he had a baby. and now this.

i hadn't seen him after my first year at vcu. once again, it feels like a life-time ago. and, in many ways, it has been. but my mind still cannot process this information; i had to read the email several times before i could even begin to believe that it could be talking about the person i knew.

i got a vhs dub of bjork tapes from him. i have silly videos from his class scattered around my harddrives. kelly got a nickname from him that still gets tossed around once in a while.

the guy was great.

there is a temptation on my end to ascribe some meaning to this; i believe it is natural. but i don't actually believe i can point at richmond or vcu or any aspect of this and place any meaning or blame. it isn't fair or good or even understandable that this has happened. but it has.

i hate that this is where my life is heading, what my age has earned me — the people i respect, the people i love, are slowly beginning to leave this plane. my heart goes out to his family. i am overcome; i cannot imagine their grief.

the world already misses you, mr power.

later:
i posted this yesterday; it is now midday tuesday.

there has been a flurry of emails and im's from people i knew from vcu. but there has also been a flurry of emails to me, from people who knew patrick through his time at vcu.

i invite any and all of you to post comments. i don't feel right posting your private emails to me; i hope that you can share your memories publicly to help everyone smile and remember this awesome man.

i didn't expect to be a conduit with all of this, but it's becoming clear that a lot of people have a lot of things they would like to say. please, please share them everyone. (but you can also feel free to email me with the button below the comment.)

just know that you aren't alone; the sorry and loss and confusion has been echoed by everyone i have spoken to. and our memories are big and large and more than any of us by ourselves.

(turns out cody has an excellent post on patrick as well.)

i have written quite frequently over the last year or so about how the world is a very small place. i hope you like these stories; you're getting another one now.

on monday nights, we trek to ugly's for drinks with anyone and everyone who wants to come out. generally, this means i hop off public transportation, race home, stuff our faces with dinner and then race to the bar. to get there by about 7.30. some mondays it works better than others. usually we scarf dinner in front of jeopardy. (jeopardy, which, for some reason, comes on at 7pm on the west coast, followed by wheel of fortune at 7.30. on the east coast, these shows are swapped. ive never known why this is and have never investigated further.)

last night, we flip on jeopardy.

and wilson rickerson is staring right back at me.

wilson and i went to college together. we were in the same frat. now, granted, i haven't seen him in years, but we are still only a degree or two away form each other. (in fact, i got email today from cs box (whose site seems to be mia at the moment) about all of this as well.)

i freak out and call petunia. i know she is on the east coast; it's too late for her to catch it. i should have called chris davis and adam. sorry guys, i hope you can forgive me. she and i talk as i watch wilson play.

wilson gets the last clue, which also turns out to be a daily double. he bets it all.

the answer, in case you can't read it is:
'this heroine details her own consumption of 5,277 cigarettes, her gain of 74 pounds & her loss of 72 pounds'

the question is: 'who is bridget jones?'

wilson misses it. (look at his expression in the photo. it says it all.) with it, he misses out on final jeopardy, bowing out of the game with $0.

but i look at it like this:
1. wilson would fairly easily be in my 'top 5 people i know i would expect to see on jeopardy', even if i cannot fully explain the surprise and delight i got from turning on the tv and seeing someone i knew, especially for longer than 10 seconds.
2. if wilson was going to lose, this might have been the perfect question to go out on. it's a pop culture question, devoid of anything he should have learned in college. and, let's face it, it's a girl question.
3. as i said several times last night, if there had been a 'frat foolery' column in last night's game, wilson would have cleaned up. i feel like i must have photos or video of him acting nutty. perhaps with a mohawk. he cleans up nicely it seems.
4. seriously, it was insanely cool to find him on my tv randomly.

right now, last night especially, i love the world.

and wilson — i was rooting for you, buddy.

I've graduated magna cum laude from Brown, and the registrar's office tells me I should expect my degree in the mail in one to two weeks.

Holy shit, it's done.

I picked up the phone today and part of me got bent sideways inside. My loving Grandmother, telling me to turn on the TV. That's hardly ever a good sign, is it?

And there it was.

It's been nearly a decade since I graduated from Virginia Tech, but nearly every picture was of a place I'd been before, walked across dozens or hundreds of times. That shaky cell phone video that's everywhere? I know that place. The blood stain on the sidewalk? I ran past there to catch the bus at Burress. And having had several classes in Norris, I think that might have been the room I had Calculus in one semester. My wife used to live in Ambler Johnston.

Amy said she was fighting crying today, that in some way it felt eerily similar to that day in September five and a half years ago. And I agreed on both counts. We're midway between being college freshmen and sending a child off to be a college freshman, and it lends a weirdness I can't really grasp. Knowing that we'd always kind of daydreamed of our kids going there, of retiring and living near there, and knowing now that in many ways it is inexorably changed.

I waver between being sadly numb and being pissed at "The Media." Following this over the course of the day, it's disconcerting to see how the story bends to suit the angle of the hour. How very like a feeding frenzy a press conference becomes. Thinking everyone must have foresight as keen as their hindsight, journalists dog officials about why the campus was not locked down after the initial incident. One went so far as to note that, hey, high schools get locked down all the time. And I suppose if you went to a small, liberal arts college for your journalism degree, you might not realize that with 30,000+ people, hundreds of buildings and thousands of acres, locking down that campus is aking to shutting down a small city. Did it eventually get locked down? Yes, but only after the arrival of every nearby police force, the ATF and the FBI to assist. But while you get that kind of response for mass murder, I don't think Steger would have gotten it for the first two, do you?

Sadly, I think Steger, who has been a good president for Tech, will end up losing his job for not anticipating what no one could have conceived of prior to 10am today.

Oblique shout-out to William & Mary in tonight's episode - NBC

this link came through in my feed reader with the following note:

"Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence is a W&M alumnus. Could this mean the characters went to the WaMmer? It doesn't have a medical school, but they could have gone there for undergrad."

this came through a feed i'm subscribed to:
http://del.icio.us/network/waxpancake

this is part of the email i ahd to send, after i read this note and did a little digging:

it's andy baio's delicious network page — an easy way to watch some of the 'hip' blogosphere. (andy does waxy.org/links and upcoming with leonard lin.)

and i've been reading it for like 2 years now.
and i've learned the user names of the people who come through that feed.
including davextreme, who really likes nerd crap like i do.

and then, this afternoon, i read the scrubs reference. and i read 'wammer'. and i think 'who the hell calls it the wammer other than people i know?' and i look up who the hell davextreme is, because, really, it is a small world.

and wow, it is a super small world. because davextreme is dave ely, who went to william & mary. who i know personally because he was also in my frat, a couple of years behind me.

so i've been stalking dave online for a long time now without even realizing it was him. but it is. and the world is tiny.

wow.

this is my third such event in the last four months.

i met will carter's friend peter at a coffeeshop here in potrero hill a few months ago. then i sat next to jason choy's brother-in-law randomly at a dinner in nova over christmas. i still need to tell that story.

man. and i promise my next post will be more on human cheese. i thought about it all weekend and still have more to say.

i was listening to luna on a playlist this morning (why yes, 'california all the way' was the song, why do you ask?). it made me think of susan otis. when i spoke to her several years ago, when i found out she had married and was still living in dc, she commented on how she remembered me being obsessed with luna's 'penthouse' album. this, in turn, got her into them and she was addicted to 'california all the way'. which i then got. and its a damn good song, still. but it makes me think of her. and i dont know how that makes me feel anymore.

way back in the day, i had some serious hots for this girl. but our communication was, to put it nicely, lacking. it has never been clear what happened. and i think that is part of the problem in my head. i'll never know. i know i wrote her a letter, clumsily explaining i had strong feelings for her. i think this was after freshman year of college. i know that this letter was met with radio silence. a long, long silence. i know that i evenually spoke to her again. and she said she had written me back, explaining she felt the same way about me. (this is when i still knew people who were email and computer phobiac. it meant writing real letters, ones that perhaps end up lost somewhere.) i know that sometime i drove to uva and brought her to w&m for a formal. i know we didnt kiss that weekend, though, after the fact, it turns out she wanted to kiss me. but i was naive and she, it would seem, was timid. i know that petunia and i were dating by the time i found out about the contents of her lost letter. i know this caused all sorts of drama and grief. and i know that nothing became of any of it. ever.

like i said, i dont know how i feel about her anymore. in my thoughts, she seems to be this two-d character, one who briefly went up against the younger, more stupid tripp. she fits into that weird year or so of my life that no longer makes sense to me. perhaps i have made peace about it all. perhaps i just realize that, in the grand scheme, it doesn't matter. perhaps i am a fool.

there were days where, if you had asked me, i would have said 'yes, i will marry this girl. this is the girl that was made for me to love.' and again, perhaps this was my age and romanticism — but i cannot recall having that feeling of certainity about anyone else. perhaps i learned my lesson. perhaps there was something more there, during some fraction of a second. perhaps i will see her in an airport in 5 years and we will both be divorced and the stars will align.

but right now? i don't think i care anymore.