OK, I’m going to be easing back into this thing you call blogging, starting now. Thanks to those who missed me; that really makes a girl feel guilty…er, good.
Hm, what’s this greater-than sign? Oh yeah, coding. It’s all beginning to waft back.
To kick things off again, I wanted to call attention to something excellent I read today. An ex-colleague of Colby Cosh’s died recently, and Colby has posted a really indelible remembrance of him. You’re unlikely to have heard of Candian reporter Terry Johnson; his death won’t make the faintest ripple in the wider world. But Colby’s artful, unsentimental character sketch surely will make you remember him. It put me a little bit in mind of the late great Robert McG. Thomas, the idiosyncratic obituarist for the New York Times, but it’s a different ball of wax–a stickier one–to effectively memorialize someone you knew. Colby’s piece is less anecdote-driven than Thomas’s obits, and fundamentally different in that it’s a record of personal experience. Although the subject was as eccentric as any of Thomas’s, Colby captures him in an everyday key and produces a condensed, vivid character study. Here’s a taste:
Terry was so defenceless against the basic demands of life that he never, to anyone’s knowledge, owned a winter coat during the time he lived in Edmonton. A fellow housemate made an annual ritual of frogmarching him to the barber to get his Karl Marx beard and his spirit-of-’68 hair hacked at. No piece of furniture in the common area of the house lacked for holes made by his cigarettes. He had the barest acquaintance with bathing and probably none, in his adulthood, of dentistry. He made do, defiantly. Somehow he acquired a whole wardrobe of other people’s clothing; one got the distinct impression he didn’t get it from Goodwill or Value Village, but that he just somehow gravitated home from the pub wearing a bowling shirt with “Larry” on the breast pocket.
In short, he seems now to have been an addict in training. When I lived with him I knew him to possess no vices more severe than beer, in modest bachelor quantities, and pot, in quite massive ones. Actually, he had one that was arguably more harmful, at least to his ability to meet deadlines: video games, particuarly Sid Meier’s Civilization. No one ever burned a deadline with more determination than Terry Johnson. The rest of us copy-breeders began to get nervous around Friday sundown, with the magazine going off to the printer on Sunday, but Terry would carry on Minesweeping until Saturday afternoon and not give it an apparent second thought. He would vanish from home and office for 48 hours at a time when he was supposed to be quizzing farmers about genetically modified seed or fuel prices.
The alive quality of this sets me to wondering, should Colby drop some of the opinionating and get to work on a novel? (Partial answer: not if that means he would stop covering the NHL playoffs.)