In which post titles are really hard sometimes

On October 7, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

My wife and son both had Friday off so I took it off as well, and the three of us have mostly lazed around all weekend, which is not something I’m going to complain about. We went to the zoo on Friday– and I strongly recommend going to the zoo on a Friday afternoon when a rainy morning and a weekday means that not many other people are out and about.

Which is fine. Because for the most part the world spent all last week going to hell– even beyond the obvious stuff in Washington, which I just don’t have the fucking energy to even talk about. Wednesday night, one of my co-workers at the furniture store died. He was in Indianapolis for his cousin’s funeral, which was enough of a shitshow to begin with, staying at his sister’s. He went to sleep and didn’t wake up the next morning. He was thirty-one fucking years old, and I doubt the cousin whose funeral he was in town for was much older.

Nobody is supposed to die in their fucking sleep at 31.

His roommate also works at the store. He told me the other night that the last thing Griff said to him was that at least his grandmother, who passed away all of a couple of months ago, wasn’t alive to have to attend the funeral of one of her grandkids. And now she’d have to go to two.

I can’t pretend we were super close. We were co-workers. I liked the guy quite a bit. But his funeral is tomorrow in Evansville and I’m not going, because I already have to be in Indianapolis for a conference from Wednesday through Friday and the con on Saturday and I just can’t squeeze in a ten-hour round trip drive today and tomorrow. But it’s got me fucked up anyway.

This post wasn’t supposed to be about Griffin. I meant to talk about video games a bit; I’m still trying to beat Dark Souls 2 (getting closer, especially if I decide it’s okay to ignore the DLC) and I haven’t played Spider-Man in like three weeks because I got abruptly tired of it like a day after my initial impressions post. The combat consistently annoys me and I’m not convinced it’ll get better. I’ll probably bring the PS4 with me to Indianapolis, though, so I’ll have time to play when I’m not at the conference.

I dunno. I got too much fucking serious in the world right now. For right now gabbling about video games is where my head’s at. At least I thought it was.

RIP, Mrs. Gates

On March 11, 2018March 11, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories, Teaching1 Comment

image-29403_20180310.jpgx I got a text from my mother just now, while I was eating dinner, that my second grade teacher had passed away, at the admirably ripe old age of 92. Mrs. Gates is one of the several teachers that my book Searching for Malumba is dedicated to, one of only two from my elementary/primary school years.

I had found myself wondering about her many times over the years. My second-grade recollection of her was that she was one of my older teachers, but that could have meant she was 40; kids are terrible at pegging how old adults are, right? As it turns out, she was nearly 60 when I had her, so she was probably nearing retirement at the time. I remember her as being probably the best example I ever had of the “strict but fair” teacher, which was something I always tried to emulate in my own career.

The funny thing is that when I try to unearth specific memories of what she was like as a teacher, I can only come up with one or two of them, and the clearest memory probably counts as educational malpractice, to the point where I almost feel disrespectful for talking about it. Mrs. Gates was always big on cleanliness– keeping the room clean, and in particular, keeping our desks clean. She’d actually inspect them from time to time– I have no idea how frequently; this could have been a daily or weekly thing for all I remember, or it could have been more frequently than that.

I am still in touch with literally no one who was in my second grade class, but I can think of perhaps four or five kids who are no more than a quick Facebook search away. And I guarantee each of them remembers the day Mrs. Gates got tired of Jonathan W. (I remember his full name, but why let him Google this?) having a sloppy desk for like the nine hundredth time in a row and in a fit of frustration dumped it out on the classroom floor in front of everyone. Objectively, with thirty-some-odd years of hindsight, this was probably a terribly humiliating thing for Jonathan and was not the proper way for her to have handled the situation. I certainly can’t imagine dumping a kid’s desk out on the floor in front of the whole class. And yet, I think for most of us, it made us more fond of her– and make no mistake, strict as she was, the kids in that class loved Mrs. Gates. Because this lady wasn’t taking any shit, and chances are most of our moms would have done the same damn thing in similar circumstances. I stayed friends with Jonathan until he moved away, I think in middle school sometime, and that story was still getting told at slumber parties years later.

For whatever it’s worth, I suspect he’d probably still laugh at the story. I dunno; maybe I shouldn’t have told it.

Rest in peace, Mrs. Gates. I hope wherever you are, all the desks are pristine.

She grew up tall and she grew up right

On October 2, 2017October 2, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

I would like to submit that it is impossible to have been in high school in Indiana in the 1990s and not be a huge Tom Petty fan. Absolutely, utterly impossible.

Reports are confused; he may still be with us and he may be gone. All I know is I drove home tonight blasting this song, and then Wildflowers, at top volume, and I had to stop singing along partway through the chorus because I was crying.

RIP, Sonya Craig

On July 7, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn life, Writing5 Comments

Friendship online is such an odd thing. I have a couple of friends in my Clark Kent identity who I’ve known for damn near fifteen years and who I’ve met once and never, respectively, and I don’t have the slightest idea when those numbers might go up again. We met through the previous incarnation of this blog, over at Xanga, and at the moment I can honestly say that the only reason I’m still on Facebook is so that I can keep track of the two of them. I have a handful of other friends who I lost track of after college and reconnected with– again, on Facebook– and for at least one of them I think we actually have a closer relationship now than we did back then. But I never see any of them.

And making friends as Luther is even weirder, right? Because the vast majority of you don’t even know my real name. I’ve got this network of people, mostly bloggers or independent authors, who I interact with a lot on Twitter and a bit less on Facebook and on the blog. I consider a lot of them friends, but the thing is people have Real Lives outside of their online personas (well, I don’t. I’m told people do, though.) and sometimes they just get busy or change jobs or move and their priorities change and suddenly someone you interacted with on a daily or near-daily basis has just gone poof and you don’t know why, and sometimes you don’t even notice for a few weeks, in a way that would never ever happen with people you know in the real world.

And sometimes you log into Facebook and you find out through the grapevine that someone’s depression finally caught them after a lifetime of struggle, and that person is gone, and you don’t really know how to react to it.

“Follows @nfinitefreetime,” it says there. Were I not connected to her on Facebook, too, I’d never have known she was gone. It’s not like Twitter is going to notice and unfollow me on her behalf, right? There was an outpouring of grief among our little sci-fi indie community last night on Facebook and Twitter; I retweeted a bunch of them on my account, or you could just check the #thankyousonya hashtag if you like. There were tons of posts, and the amazing thing, to me, was just how many of the people participating were also people I “knew” and considered friends the same way I did Sonya. She was at the center of a big group of people online, and we were all reacting the only way we could.

I don’t really know her, is the thing. I don’t know her family, or her RL friends, or what she liked to do with her time other than write and hang out with yahoos on the internet. I know she had a cat, named Fang, who was frequently the subject of tweets and Instagram postings. I don’t know where Fang is right now. I hope he’s okay. I know that she was the type of person who created random meme pictures for people she’d never met on their birthdays, which is where that picture up at the top came from. (My Twitter bio at the time referred to me as a friend to muskrats.)

And yet.

I wish I could have been there for her, when she was suffering, to point out all these people whose lives she’d touched and would miss her when she was gone. But I never did. Part of the reason why? I know people online who are struggling with anxiety and depression and the insane thing is I wouldn’t have listed her as one of them.

I dunno, guys. I don’t know how to end this because I don’t know how I feel right now. I don’t want anyone to ever feel like suicide is their best option. And I want to say something like “If you feel that way, know that you can reach out, even to a relative stranger online,” but the fucked-up part of depression is that that information doesn’t matter and it’s not that simple. She’d probably had people she knew in the real world tell her that, people who she’d actually recognize if they walked past her at the grocery store, not rando authors behind an @ on Twitter. And she took her own life anyway, because that’s how depression fucks with you, because it’s a disease, not a goddamn personal failure, and you can’t help it.

God damn it.

You will be missed, Sonya. I can only hope that you’ve found some peace.

For obvious reasons

On December 27, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I’m not remotely in the mood for the universe right now. George Michael, Carrie Fisher and Richard Adams in two days?

“Fuck 2016” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

A very important question

On December 26, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

Who is the coolest person that SURVIVED 2016?

In which 2016 is an asshole yet again: RIP, Steve Dillon

On October 22, 2016October 22, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

Goddamn, this one sucks. If you’re not a comic book person you’re unlikely to have heard of Steve Dillon, who passed away today (of as yet unannounced causes; if he was sick, his family kept it quiet, and he was working up to the end) at the disgustingly young age of 54. Dillon did a ton of work in a long career in comics but was known primarily for his work with writer Garth Ennis on titles like Punisher and Preacher. He also had a run on Hellblazer that I’m less familiar with.

Dillon was one of my favorite artists, despite having caught a fair amount of shit from me over the years. His greatest strength as an artist was tied in tightly with his greatest weakness: Steve Dillon could really only draw one face, when it came down to it, and most of his characters ended up being that same face with differences in hair, headgear, eyepatches, things like that. But the man could capture a range of expressions on that face that was flatly unparalleled among any artist I’m aware of. Absolutely goddamn nobody can capture shades of emotion in a comic book character’s look like Dillon could. He had a grounded, realistic style that made him perfect for the books he had long runs on and occasionally (and I say this with love, believe me) hilariously inappropriate for others:

That is, believe it or not, supposed to be the Hulk.

He’s also responsible for this moment, which will live forever:

If you have led the type of life that resulted in getting paid real money to draw the Punisher punching a polar bear in the face, you have won as a human being. Steve will be greatly, greatly missed. He was one of the good guys.

A brief note on Gene Wilder

On August 31, 2016August 30, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn movies1 Comment

I know I’m a couple of days late, but: while I am not the world’s biggest Gene Wilder fan, and in fact I’m pretty sure I have never seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in its entirety, and in additional fact am suddenly not even entirely sure that’s the proper name of the film, I will always, always, always be grateful to him for this fucking sublime moment from Blazing Saddles:

I would kill to know how many takes this took. Cleavon Little is trying so hard to keep his shit together and Wilder is just torturing him. It’s the best moment in an entirely brilliant movie. RIP, Gene. And fuck you, 2016.