I so don’t want to write about death, regular writers of this collection of words can most likely attest , it seems like the tag that looms the largest, what can I say it’s not intentional, it just the timing. My goal with this blog was to write about what happened more or less as I feel like writing about it. Now once again it seems that death is in the forefront.

On December 7, a day which will live in infamy for more then one reason, my cat Ren died. I don’t want to sound like one of those crazy cat owners, whose cats are their lives, they have cats on their checks, and send cat cards, and buy books with pictures of cats doing funny things Problem is, to some extent I am a crazy cat owner, not so much on the cat pillow thing, I do talk to my cats , and Ren was my favorite conversation partner. Ren had been my cat since ’90 or ’91 – I am sort of crap with dates.

From the moment I met her I knew that we were going to be friends, I think she knew too, because she peed on my jacket. I was marked. Soon she became my newest roommate; the day I moved into the apartment she moved into my closet, and she never left. She saw me through the cyber punk, the first round of retro electro,grunge, alt-rock, indy, emo,free jazz, the second techno explosion, the internet boom, the internet bust, shoegaze, illbient,glam, acid jazz, a classic rock phase, a myriad of bad relationships, a couple of good ones, five apartments and one house, lots of parties, hundreds of records, 4 labels, 5 or 6 magazines, millions of words, one successful tv show, two failed pilots, 4 plays, a gaggle of museum shows, and a couple of films, one school, a separation, a reunification, one incurable disease, and a small army of colds, flues and food poisonings.

I can’t think of many friends that have weathered that many roads with me. She saw me at my best, she saw me at my worst and at my most average, and loved me regardless. Sure conversation could be a little one sided, but she always listened , she was my collaborator and my muse. And now I have a cat shaped hole in my heart (and that’s not my line , but damn it is a good one). Ren always hung out on my desk, lounged out, willing to have any idea bounced off of her. She stepped on pianos, jumped on keyboards, triggered machines, what others might see as animal interference provided a strange insight and opportunities to go down different roads.

The details of the stories that Ren and I shared are probably of little consequence to anyone save the two of us, It s not really about words, it’s about a truth that goes beyond what can be verbalized. It’s a truth that can’t be explained. So here we are left, oh dear and gentle reader, You and I , and the only thing I can say is, that my heart is broken, that the simple act of sitting on the couch to read a book is forever changed by her absence, and that I miss my friend.

One downside to daily blog writing, well Monday through Thursday blog writing in my case… is that you write as you need to, I set aside time write, comeback, write, comeback edit. Generally speaking that works. My schedule is more like a task list then a concrete structure, that works fine for me, that is unless you have a day like today. Those are the days that you get thrown a curve ball. Today I got a curve ball.

I found out that a old friend died, now if you have been reading this site with the slightest of regularity you can tell i am sentimental, overly so. Friends that I haven’t seen in years I think of , wondering what they went on to do with their lives. friends from grade school, people from temp jobs. Now. please realize oh dear and gentle reader that i have a near legendary level of forgetfulness as well. I can forget almost anything with ease; I once pulled over to the side of the road to hear a song on a staticy college radio station, telling my wife I had to find out what this song playing was. She looked at me weirdly and said Ok. I said I wanted to immediately go and purchase said record, again she just looked at me like I was crazy and nodded. Of course the announcer came on and I realized it was a song I had put out on my label.

Like I said forgetful, I did say that didn’t I… but then wicked deep of weird and arcane knowledge, its how my head is wired, different then factory specs, but I am not complaining.

The hardest things are people that you have difficult or unresolved issues with, like all humans I have a few. Today i decided I was going to resolve one. If not resolve it, make some sort of effort, i had tried before but that was a decade ago. Harold was a friend of mine 18 years ago, we were club kids back in the day, going to First Avenue, hanging out, chasing girls, wearing skirts, and talking about film. In my late teens and early twenties we were close. Until the time that we weren’t. Thats what happens when youre 21 you have moments good bad, and you grow. Of course what came between us ultimately was a girl, but then isn’t it always. Without getting into details Harold and I never spoke again, the girl broke my heart so severely It was in a cast for some time after. life went on, my heart survived to be broken again, the next time not so easily though.

Whenever I saw him, he avoided me, I would wave or say hi- and he would just stare past me like an executive avoiding panhandlers. He would walk to the other side of the street rather then be on the same side as me. Its like he just couldn’t ever let go of the past, personally I ‘d long since forgiven any past wrongdoings, because you sort of have to. To some extent life is like a bookshelf, you only have so much room and if you want to keep the good books you have to dodge the bad ones.

When I got sick, (see post below) I decided that I needed to put it in human terms, so I named my disease Harold, after someone that I had a good relationship with that went bad, but I hoped to someday repair. what really gets me is that he had passed away a month before I named it, but right around when i was diagnosed, The timing of that is just a little too eerie.

He and I had made a film in 1991 about Lillian Colton, a Seed art pioneer, and a woman who i just truly adored. She passed away earlier this year, and several people had asked about this film which I never had a copy of. I had given his name to various people but none felt like doing the effort to find him. So today, I tried- the first web page that came up for him was his obituary. No information other then who had survived him. So his death, like most of his life save that period of time when we ruled a small corner of small night club, in a small city, in a small country, in a very big universe, was a mystery. Now there will never be that resolution that I always hoped would come. So I sit in my basement and listen to David Sylvian, and type it to people that didn’t know him, in fairness maybe I didn’t know him either. But, we did spend some time together a long time ago.

I had a dream….er well I had a dream, not the Martin Luther King kind, rather a dream of a dead friend coming to say hi. Before I explain the dream a little background. About three years ago my life got very weird; within a period of four months three very influential people in my life died. The second one was Sonia; in a different life a universe away we were partners, she owned a salon called Hair Police, I ran the gallery and organized giant parties/openings. Together we helped build a cool scene for late night dancing and helped to usher in techno and house culture to Mpls. She took me under her wing when I was 20 or 21, under her tutelage I learned a great many life lessons about business, and being a human. I learned an open mind is a better one, that you can make your life whatever you want, a lesson that sadly I often forget to apply. When she died we hadn’t spoken for three years, not out of anger-well not really. More just out of being human. You’re not in someone’s life everyday and space happens. She missed my wedding; I missed a reunion party; time and distance and alakazam you don’t talk for a while.When she died it was all of sudden, lung cancer had attacked her body, and she kept it very quiet. The first most of us knew she was sick was the funeral. Sonia was an effervescent life force, she had a way of sweeping you up in her universe, and it was a universe always in expansion. She had a way that made the simplest task seem revolutionary; there is a line in a Dave Clark5 song that I really hope to live up to “they were young with all of their mite’, Sonia lived that to the fullest. She was the same age as my mom, but you would never guess that, hell it was hard enough to imagine that they lived on the same planet.
When she died I was shaken to my core, the wake up call that no one lives forever…well, except for Dick Clark.

Her death followed by another started a series of events that eventually led me to separating from my wife and spending a year pretty much eating ice cream. It was more complicated then that but if I was to pick one event that was a catalyst t was that spring summer of deaths. My wife and I did get back together, and then went through a period of work hell, followed by my getting diagnosed with Kidney Disease, and a lot of heavy Zen contemplation, followed by some serious lifestyle changes.

Then last night I had a dream, one of those its definitely a dream, where Uptown Mpls, merges with Manhattan and Brooklyn, and I am having dinner with Sonia. We are at a booth, just having a conversation and eating French fries. The room seems to be filled with people I know: my musical partner smoking a cigarette, a mid 70’s Jack Nicholson (ok I don’t know him) and a hand full of real waiters and service people. Most commenting that I seemed to be talking to that and myself they couldn’t see her, like a device from some schlock film.

I ignored that when I realized that she was wearing the clothes she had on in her casket, and right as I realized that I saw her as she used to look. The only difference was that her eyes looked dead, big and black- somewhere between a Keene painting and a zombie. What really freaked me out was that today as I was walking through Costco I saw a woman with those eyes. She was pushing a shopping trolley filled with Toilet paper and candy. Some sort of ghost consumer at thee big box superstore.

In the dream I got to tell my friend I missed her, she got to tell me she missed me too. No great message from beyond the veil, save to say hi to a mutual friend and tell her that another friend who passed on had been in her “chair”, apparently you still need haircuts in the afterlife. We walked out to the street and I woke up, because the dream was over.

I don’t know that I believe in ghosts, I don’t know that I don’t. I believe in energy because it has to go somewhere. So there I lay at 5:43 in the morning, staring in the darkness at the unfocused blobs of stuff in my room. When my wife’s old boss, died I swear he came to visit her that night, and we had a conversation-again as a dream. He was surprised I saw him; I was surprised that there was a presence in our room. He was there to see her and say goodbye. He thanked me for a smile kindness I had performed for some of the mourners, and then was gone.

It seems like all of my dead friends and family show up in my dreams, maybe its because like all somewhat neurotic people closer to 40 then they are 30 tend to have it on the brain. Or maybe its real and you do get to make peace in the end. I felt better, if not for feeling weirder: I got to tell my friend I missed her, and at the end of the day that is something.