Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

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.

I wrote this two years ago today to express what I was feeling while I and so many others stayed glued to our Facebook accounts, waiting for any news. I declined at the time to publish it, out of fear that it would make people angry, I guess. And then we got the news and it no longer seemed appropriate.

June 11th was two days after that year’s Apogaea, an Apo of fun and consequence for me. I was supposed to be packing that day. A few days later, I’d leave for NM for the summer, to spend time with my dying father.

A friend of mine is missing out in the desert near Grand Junction. He went out dirt biking over the weekend and wasn’t back Monday as expected. The police found his car (with phone inside) Monday night. As of right now (~12:30pm Tuesday), full search-and-rescue operations are underway.

I and many others are praying for his safe return. I’ve got a ton to do today, but I’ve found it hard to pull myself away from FB, waiting for any updates, hoping for good news. I bet I’m not the only one who is finding himself unable to do much else today.

Seeing so many people expressing their love and concern is heartening. It makes me feel better.

But I have to admit this as well: I am struggling with a lot of anger. I am writing this knowing that many people in our respective community will see it, and I’m certainly not trying to offend. Our community places great value on honesty, and so I’m hoping that people will meet what I say with the understanding that I’m trying to put to words what I feel so I can get it out and let it go and focus all my energy on his safe return.

The last I spent any real time with Nolus was in January of 2012. We went up to Jackson Hole together, and there I witnessed his thrill-seeking behavior at its most selfish and non-conscious. I watched him put other people, including myself, in very real danger, because of the pleasure adrenaline brought him.

Afterwards, I pretty much broke off my connection with him. I decided that someone who could so little pay attention to the safety of others in pursuing his own thrills was not someone I could trust. He spoke the language of consciousness but there was a big hole in his behavior, and so I cut him off.

Today, I have watched as anguish and trepidation and sadness have spread through our community and I have, like I said, been heartened by the love that people have expressed. But I have also been angry to see the anguish and sadness the situation has caused. Not to suggest that it was wholly preventable–I too enjoy sports like snowboarding and mountain biking, and I understand that accidents happen. But I remember going up the tram with him at Jackson Hole, and him heading directly to the out-of-bounds gate–without any avalanche training and without avalanche gear. I told him he’d have to go without me, and he did. So I know that things people do to prevent this kind of situation–leaving detailed itineraries, promising check-in phone calls, carrying extra water–would not have been actions he would have bothered with. Again, let me make it clear that I am not suggesting some kind of karmic retribution on him. I wish only his speedy and safe return. But I also witness this anguish–a friend of mine wrote, “I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it”–and I think of how little he did to spare us from these feelings, and it makes me mad.

So this is my prayer to Nolus: come back safe, my friend. And after I give you the hug that I’m praying you’ll be safe to receive, I’m going to express as clearly as I can what a total selfish fucker you have been and request that you start walking the walk of love for others instead of so often just talking the talk. Part of love is holding people accountable for their actions, is it not? I think it is. Through my feelings today it is clear that I never released you from my circle of love. When you return safely I will hold you to the responsibility of being within that circle. That is what I mean today by “I love you.”

Come home safe, my friend.

What I’ll be publishing over the next few days was written beginning June 11th, 2013, while I and so many people I knew waited for news from the search, and then over the next couple of weeks leading up to Nolus’s memorial. I wrote with the intention that I publish something before the memorial, to try to capture some of the contradictions that I found in Nolus, to try to speak honestly about someone who had been a complicated presence in my life.

I ended up not publishing at the time. The piece felt too complicated and conflicted, and I suppose I was afraid of angering people.

Nolus remains a complicated presence in my life. But the best of his example guides me forward still, and now two years have passed since his death, and I think it’s time I share this writing.

I tend not to be much of a planner. As I write this (Friday, June 5th), I have done this much about planning my route for a roadtrip that starts–started–Sunday: I asked Google Maps for directions from Boulder to Gig Harbor, WA, looked at the options it gave me, and said, “Southern route.”

I could probably stand to learn to be more of a planner. Instead of having hardly any idea what I’m doing, I could have like ten, fifteen percent of an idea. I’d probably throw that fraction of an idea away in the moment, but at least I’d have a starting place.

Either that, or I should just own that I’m not a planner and really fly by the seat of my pants. My default pattern actually seems to lead to a lot of stasis.

Anyway, as you read this, I am somewhere between Colorado and Washington. It’s beautiful here. I’m having a great time.

My birthdays have not tended to be the greatest.

As a kid, having my birthday right after the school year ended meant that I never had the big blowout birthday parties so many of my classmates did. I couldn’t exactly hand out invitations at school, and many families went away during those first few weeks of summer vacation.

My adult birthdays have generally been little better. In a low place the other night, I started giving names to some of my recent birthdays. In order that this not be a diatribe of held-over disappointment aimed at my friends and family, it’s possible that not all of these, um, actually happened:

The Year I Was Alone Because My Wife Went on Vacation. The Year the Locusts Came. Eight Years in a Row with George W. Bush as Our Nation’s President. The Year I Went Out to Celebrate with My Friends and Ended Up Buying My Own Dinner, Which Really Shouldn’t Have Been a Big Deal, but It Awakened Within Me Some Demons I Didn’t Realize Were There, and Man Oh Man Did They Feed. The Year the D.A. Declined To Press Charges. The Year My Friend the Professional Baker Made Me a Cake but Was Denied Entrance Into the Party. The Year That While I Was DJing at One Bar, My Girlfriend and Dear Friend Who Is Also a DJ Left to Get a Drink at a Totally Different Bar. The Year I Was Bitten by Not One but Two Snakes. The Year Humanity Vanquished the Great Evil that Has Plagued Us Since Time Immemorial.

(Wait. That last one shouldn’t be on the list. That one hasn’t happened yet. That one will actually be a pretty good birthday.)

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My most fun birthday, hands down, was my 39th, two years ago. I was at Apogaea, the Colorado regional Burning Man festival. When I got to the Apotuckey Derby, which if you weren’t there you’ll just have to use your imagination, I realized I didn’t have to drink the crappy mint juleps they were offering, so I went back to my dome and made a delicious Manhattan. Then I realized that it was my birthday and I didn’t have to decide between Manhattans and gin tonics. Why not both?

Later, I invited every friend I could find into my dome and plied them with cocktails. Jan poked her head in at one point and offered me an edible. “They’re really mild,” she said. When you’ve been two-fisting Manhattans and gin tonics for hours the correct answer to that offer is, “No.”

Obviously I said yes.

Later, there was a burlesque show at Center Camp and I watched my new friend CJ totally rock it and it was awesome.

And not long after that, I tried several times to tie a bow tie and, for reasons you can probably deduce, failed. In frustration, I lay down on my bed and let’s call it took a nap as darkness was falling. Robin woke me up gently and sweetly some hours later.

Here is the place where the tone of this part of the piece changes. It had been an awesome birthday, but I awakened to a different energy than I’d fallen asleep to. I felt a pervasive feeling of melancholy, and after some reflection, realized it wasn’t just the result of having partied all day. It wasn’t just me that was feeling it. The whole festival had a subdued air that night. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced at a festival before. I wouldn’t understand it until a few days later (and even then I would question if what I was thinking was possible), on Tuesday the 11th, when in the desert outside Grand Junction the search team found Nolus’s body.

Like I said, my birthdays have kinda been a mixed bag.

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So today’s my birthday. Right now, I am somewhere between Boulder and Gig Harbor, WA. I’m scheduling this post well ahead of time so that I can give myself over to whatever adventures come my way.

I miss and love you all, and though I’m writing this days in advance, I’m going to say anyway: It’s beautiful here. I’m having a great time.