not emo but not NOT emo: aka i carry the whole structure in my head
an email pinged in just now which put my recent mind at rest a bit, from a longtime colleague of r¡chard's, someone who worked with him much more recently and saw a lot of his last days -- i'd sent this guy a note of condolence a few weeks ago, and, not having heard, been (ever so slightly) thinking, WHAT DID I DO? DID I OFFEND HIM? DID I SAY SOMETHING WRONG?

well, i didn't, obviously -- at least, some of what i was saying i think he was quietly disagreeing with, but not to make a dispute about: this has after all been a VERY tough year for this guy, his old friend and closest work-colleague dying young, and dying a pretty hard way... and one of the things he said, which was part of why he'd taken so long to reply, was that he'd found the outpouring of sad smitten love disorientating, because the outpourers included so many of r!chard's foes, or anyway folks that had been fallen out with, suddenly declaring his sainthood, a sainthood this particular colleague, as the one who then spent the time firefighting and peacemaking, i suspect finds a little galling and misconceived; being a close friend is hard work sometimes, and it's annoying when less close friends are suddenly parading a slightly self-deceiving perfectness as the key to the relationship they'd like to memorialise

like a don juan who pops off and everyone's suddenly like "the perfect family man" -- actually the REAL person is the person the genuinely left-behind are going to be remembering (and battling a little to reinstate, and then battling themselves for the mean-spirited pedantry of this): i sat up in bed suddenly in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, having said, "richard never second-guessed me and i loved that" having remembered a WHOLE EARLY EPISODE where he DID... long enough ago, it's true, that i just burst out laughing, at his outrageousness and how angry i'd been and how i handled it (the only bit of cap-O cap-P 'Office Politics' i've ever attempted, let alone pulled off) (haha i wz so awesome in my rage, blimey!)

anyway: structure -- here is my handy motto for and model of structure, for anyone who ever worked on a magazine or wrote a long article or a book... "what comes up must come down" -- the SINGLE MOST PERFECT REPRESENTATION of how i think stuff works is the chuck jones wile e.coyote cartoon where he sends up a bunch of darts (with bombs on them) to get the roadrunner, and then as the rest of the cartoon plays, with all its little scenes, the darts are coming down, punctuating, which is to say, SHAPING the story, and every one of then (of course) hitting the coyote not the roadrunner

so you and i, we all send darts up all the time -- but bcz of my job (the things left to be done before the magazine if finished and ready to go, tick tick tick tick tick... ), and bcz i'm a writer, my subconscious is basically a vast check-off list of all the darts, "have they come down yet?", and some of them are decades aloft, and a part of me is unconsciously calibrating, "ok so was that dart a bomb i aimed at ME?" -- if i haven't heard, where did that dart go, what did it do? can you wreck everything with just a careless sentence? (ts: carefree vs careless)

this year has been so strange bcz i sent up a whole bunch of darts over the last 18 months, with a conscious mind towards effects for me i REALLY REALLY wanted, dubdobdee as carefree pirate at last, and what's been happening instead is a rain of darts from WAY longer ago, darts i'd long ago stopped thinking about, and very nearly entirely forgotten, and this is exhilarating and yes disorientating as well as sad and hard sometimes; and part of the process of slipping anchor i guess mmmph