Author: Benjamin

“Holy crap. I’m in Alaska.”

It is far harder to write a short piece (that actually says something) than it is to write something longer.

Happy summer, everyone. Let me introduce my writing/publishing rules for summer.

1. Draft 5,000 words per week. This has been an effective minimum and I see no reason to change it now.

2. Publish every Monday through Friday. I’ve tried on other possibilities and so far nothing else feels right.

3. I may, for sufficiently good reason, take time off. I’m not sure exactly how to define “sufficiently good reason,” but as you read this I am in Alaska and I may decide not to write and publish any other days this week, and you know what? I think that’s fine.

4. I can redefine the rules at any time. I fixed the rules for spring and played by them for the entire season. But I’m looking to speed up the evolution of what I’m doing here, and so I want to be able to give space to dive into any experiment with writing and publishing that seems worthwhile.

Okay, ready? Let’s begin.

Two years ago today was Nolus’s memorial.

I first met Nolus with his then-wife Siva at a party at one of the Steele St. warehouses in Denver. I can’t recall the exact party, but it was probably sometime during the fall of 2007. I remember our meeting. We were standing outside. Siva and I chatted while Nolus sat on the railing and said very little. I can’t say I got an especially friendly vibe from him. As I got to know him better I was able to reflect back that he was almost certainly candy-flipping that night and so could have been feeling many things.

In the summer of 2008, I was sitting in the Albuquerque living room of my friends Brendan and Joy. Brendan and I were friends from high school, and we had reconnected in the fall of 2007 at our 15-year reunion, where we discovered that we were both Burners. Anyway, we were talking about Burning Man experiences, and Brendan and Joy were telling me about some people they’d shared a Burn and become good friends with, a couple out of Denver, named Nolus and Siva. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I know them.”

Our friendship began on November 13th, 2008. Brendan’s favorite DJ at the time, Krafty Kuts, was playing at the Church in Denver, and he made us promise to go and to look for each other. I remember standing by the bar and seeing Nolus and Siva on the dancefloor and experiencing the certainty of recognition pass between us, and we hugged and laughed at the small-worldness of it all and spent the night dancing together.

I think the five of us got together only one time. Brendan and Joy came up to Denver for Super Bowl weekend in 2009. On Saturday night, January 31st, Nolus and Siva and Brendan and Joy and I went to hear Lee Coombs spin at Vinyl. The next day we sat in the room where I wrote this piece, and together we watched my beloved Steelers win the Super Bowl. I remember where Nolus was sitting.

I am today in Alaska, not far from Denali. I am almost certainly stunned by the beauty and majesty I see around me, and the sun has barely dipped below the horizon since I’ve been here and it’s never gotten truly dark, and in the 24-hour daylight I am probably energized in a way that I have never exactly been before, but all of these statements but the fact of my location are just guesses–as I write this it is a gorgeous late spring night in Boulder and in truth I can’t really imagine what Alaska will be like.

Today is the last day I work by this season’s rules. Since the equinox I have played the game thus defined and Sunday is the solstice and here in Alaska I will pass with our hemisphere into summer.

I have learned so much as I’ve done this project over these past three months. The symbolism of spring has been beautifully appropriate: I planted something and let it begin to grow, and it did.

And now what? What will the goals be now?

This is not a blog, I have insisted for months, and it isn’t, but over the summer I will make it look and read less like one.

I will keep publishing because I believe publishing is the most important thing, but what exactly that will look like I don’t yet know.

Beyond that, what can I say? It’s a journey, not a destination. Watch this space.

I met Nolus once in Portland, some weekend day in what must have been late 2009, the weather chilly and overcast, Portland in not-summer. He and Jamaica met my sister and I for brunch somewhere on NE Alberta St., my sister’s ‘hood and, if I remember correctly, theirs as well.

(I could be slightly wrong about the exact timing. I don’t have access to my calender from that time, so I can’t look it up. Stupid computers.)

I’m in Portland as I write this (though not as you read it), on a roadtrip in which I keep encountering Nolus’s traces in my life. He has been very much on my mind. I think of that time I met him here, and I think of him here in community, and I think of the ways in which he made his life his, and I think about Boulder, and Portland, and this trip, and what I am looking for, and what I have found thus far, and I think a lot about Nolus, and I write.

I drafted Monday’s piece on Tuesday, August 5, 2014. I was just two days off my bottom, the day (quite different from the Greatest Day) when the necessity of making substantial changes in my life became immediate and unavoidable.

I have no idea what possessed me that day to write that introduction to the pieces I had written about Nolus in the days following his death. I had no immediate plans to publish them. Perhaps I found the draft printout of the pieces I had written thus far and, in that space of need for immediate changes in my life, started working on it again, as something unfinished that needed finishing? I really don’t know.

I wrote that day, “I sit at the cusp of vast changes in my life,” a sentence I left untouched in the piece I published Monday. As I look back over the last ten months, I look to where I was when I wrote that and I’m pleased and take some pride in just how far I’ve come. It seems like a different life. Was a different life. “Sitting on the cusp” doesn’t quite describe where I am right now. I’m embedded now in the process, embedded in bringing those changes to fruition.

And yet there remains a certain core uncertainty. The process continues, and where it will ultimately come to something like rest remains far beyond my ability to see. At the time, the uncertainty was born of the insistent desperation that overwhelms stasis and becomes a drive to action and thus, paradoxically, a form of hope. The uncertainty I feel today is that elevated-heart feeling of when fear ceases to be a negative and gives way to thrill, as of a driving motion not wholly within your control. It feels awake, it feels in-the-moment. It feels alive.

Two years ago today I arrived in New Mexico for the summer. It was, appropriately, Father’s Day. I arrived in the afternoon and found my parents in my dad’s room, watching the end of the U.S. Open golf tournament. (My dad loved golf, and it always seemed right that the U.S. Open falls the same weekend as Father’s Day.) I gave him a CD of Mendelssohn’s gorgeous Octet for Strings for a birthday/Father’s Day present, and he expressed some dismay that I’d gotten him anything, like, I’m about to die, why are you bothering?

I arrived on Sunday, knowing that on Friday I’d turn around and return to Colorado for Nolus’s memorial. This was the context for my arrival in NM. This was the context for my summer. As I write this now, I can think, Wow, a lot happened all at once, didn’t it?

Written August 5th, 2014

Nolus Sunoon was a bit of a fucker. He could be pathologically self-involved, selfish, sanctimonious, hypocritical, in denial about his own demons. If there’s such a thing as being addicted to marijuana, he was. He was also one of the most beautiful men I have ever met, a shining light, and when he died hundreds came out to mourn him and share stories of their love and his. He is deeply, truly missed. I miss him.

I sit at the cusp of vast changes in my life, and I cannot deny that Nolus doubly inspires me. He lived his life as he chose, which is something we say about people but rarely truly mean. I mean to say that he created the life he envisioned for himself. After he met Jamaica at BM09, he started talking about splitting his time between Portland and Denver, and he simply made it happen. I have lived too much of my life in the shadows and have suffered for it. So he inspires me to shine my light. But, like I said, he also could be a fucker. And he inspires me there, too, to not become so self-defining that self-reflection becomes impossible. Don’t just preach love, live it. That hundreds mourned him and mourn him still shows just how much love he lived. That so many of us acknowledge what a dick he was shows how much work he still had to do.

In his example he gives two gifts, flipsides of the same coin. He was a powerful man.

Written two years ago today.

My friend Nolus Sunoon was found dead yesterday evening. He had gone dirt biking alone in the desert outside Grand Junction on Saturday, and his absence was discovered and reported Monday evening when he failed to show up for a class he was supposed to teach. According to reports, the Mesa County Search and Rescue team quickly found his beloved 4Runner. I assume search began at first light. They found his body a little after 5 p.m. He was 34 years old.