monkeyplus1

 

Ascending on hands and knees, I feel the far valley over my shoulder recede.

 

My hands rub over smooth, wet stones, looking for purchase, advance scouts of where my toes will later find a hold.  I take great pleasure in that my body knows what to do before I do, and it enjoys the challenge. My mind is a weightless captain watching the autopilot handle even the smallest nuances of flight.

 

There are small caves all around; dark, man-sized or larger. Some deep self-preservation instinct keeps me from examining them closely. I must keep them in my periphery, but focus on moving uphill.

 

The sky is grey. Fog shrouds the nearby hills, punctuated by sparse treetops, and it is a wet cold that hangs in the air. I pull small clouds cold, heavy, and wet into my lungs with each breath. My nose runs, and my fingers are half-numb. I know my nose is still there, though I cannot feel it.

 

Nowhere is a rock fully naked, moss on every north-facing side.

 

The hill is not steep, but the roundabout route up makes the journey long, and looking behind, the valley below looks miles and miles further away each time.

 

Ahead there will be a cliff-top house, lit with a warm yellow-orange glow of many candle-lit lanterns, with a group of happy people around a series of wide, multilevel patios of rock gardens and impossibly twisted, life-sized bonsai trees.

 

I can make out the sounds of voices and friendly conversation. These aren’t just any people, but people who will recognize me, even if we’ve only met in dreams, and who, in this state, I cannot hold a grudge against, and have forgiven me all my mistakes.

 

All of the trivial things from that past life have fallen away.

 

Along with the warm light, music, friends, there are hugs waiting for me up ahead, up above. I will arrive, and my entrance will be modest, welcome, and mellow.

 

I will set down my pack, drop my defenses, free my mind of weapons. I’ll find fresh water and warm food, and have a good stretch. The embrace of friends, and inner satisfaction at having completed the journey, will thaw any remaining trace of coldness.

 

This night I will sleep well.

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Where have I been in the last year?

Physically, I still have my two kids, now 12 and 9, I’m in the same line of work, live in the same house, and I’ve traveled no further than a day’s drive from Portland. I’m forty pounds and one wife lighter, that’s something.  As the kids now live with me half time, I’ve had a lot more free time, though not a lot to show for it.

The drone/spacerock/noise guitar-based experiments with my old collaborator, Mike, under the AOM and Pinkstrom umbrellas, as well as my solo noodling with Pure Brown, inevitably rubber-banded MonkeyPlus1 into some very techno spaces, which birthed the “Nonstop Supersonic” project.

 

I’m very excited about a new project, which now stands at only 4 tracks. It’s decidedly different from any other MonkeyPlus1 project, and very low-key. For once, the beats aren’t even remotely center-stage, if they’re onstage at all.Mike volunteered to do cover-art. I’m stoked to have a real graphic designer to it for me, rather than try (and fail) to do it on my own. When he wraps that up, I’ll release that here. Stay tuned!

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Peace the fuck out, smurphy. Hope that flood of information you were always bursting with landed somewhere.

 

Born the same year as me, married the same length, divorced, children of equal age. Also a self-taught programmer.

 

I called him smurfy one day, combining his first and last name. He said, how long did it take for you to figure that out? You can call me smurphy, but you have to respect the “ph”.

 

He was notorious for going off-topic in meetings. And my laughing probably didn’t help but to egg him on.  A business analyst from another team called him out on it one day, said, you know, you’re like a real-life Eeyore. Even he had a good laugh at that.

 

Walking from a company bell-ringing, a joker on our team calls out to me from behind, and I turn and see him grinning, walking next to smurphy, obese irish dude with a shaved head, goatee, sporting geek-glasses with a red unibrow and fuzzy ears.

 

“Ten!” he says, “see?”, and wags his finger between the two of them. A visual joke, he being skinny as a one, smurphy waddling along as round as a zero, launching smurphy into “there’s 10 kind of people in the world: those that understand binary, and those who don’t”.

 

He thoroughly enjoyed one-upping me at every shred of geek cred, though I long since learned not to give him too much fodder, as he could ramble for an hour.

 

As his wife was leaving him, Nario and I had welcomed him back to the end of our row near the window, and we all formed the basis of our friendship, as I drew him out of his shell with philosophical questions about his mormon belief. I knew that because I’d once asked him to get some coffee with me, lo and behold, mormon’s do some weird shit, but they don’t drink coffee, but will glug Mountain Dew like there’s no tomorrow.

 

One thing he’d been talking about was the idea of the eternal soul. I’d said the desire struck me as egotistical. I wouldn’t want to be myself again, I’d want to be something different.

 

He had a really rough divorce, his life was altered so suddenly, and his ex-wife and son moved from Oregon to Georgia.

 

Before the divorce, he said his wife was Peruvian, was a personal trainer. He’d met her when he was a Mormon missionary. He’d spent a couple years in Japan and could read, write and speak Japanese fluently, and spoke passable Spanish, but I’m not sure if he met her in Peru or not.

 

He’d joked that as soon as she had her citizenship, he was pretty sure she’d dump him.  She did and she did. He tried hard not to put up a surprise, and gave practically no resistance to her moving across the country to live with her brother in Atlanta. It fucked him up. He stopped paying the mortgage on his house, said fuck-it to everything but his job, and moved to a basement apartment in downtown Portland.

 

He’d expected his son to have more of a reaction besides, “cool, I can see my cousins.” He worried his son wouldn’t get to know him, and I think, know how cool geek he was.  He said, my son will think I’m just a nice fat guy who brings him presents and hangs out for a day or two.

 

His health took a dive with the divorce. After a coughing fit one day, it looked like he threw up a lung in his garbage can, and left work suddenly. A few other episodes where he was either sent home, left mid-day, or didn’t come in.

 

It was bad for a while, but he seemed to be coming out of it.

 

He’d made a trip there for his grandfather’s funeral, but had a few extra days to hang out with his son, eight years old. Seemed to have come back happy.

 

There was a big scale over by my desk. People would have weigh-ins, but many people would sneak in on the scale, strategically placed far from anything.

 

smurphy saw me on there one time, and waddled up with a joke at hand, saying he laid bigger shits than I was.

 

One day he walks by my desk, pauses long enough to give me a curious nod, and walks over to the scale. He stands there, nods his head, and goes off towards the bathrooms.

 

Some time passes, I notice him making his way, serious face, slowly towards the scale again, back towards our cubes. He gets back on the scale, and I can tell he’s smiling. He walks by my desk, thumbs up and grinning, “two pounds”.

 

It liked to make him feel better, to poke fun at me sometimes. He’d kept making dumb jokes about the bald spot on the back of my head. Asked if I was growing a crop circle on the back of my head, so the aliens would have a place to land. Finally I said, “if it really makes you feel better about yourself to make fun of that, go right ahead. Please, I want you to feel better about yourself.”

 

For a time thereafter, it was battle of the old school. Reminiscing about the days when computers were primitive, and relatively complicated beasts.  It was fun, and there was really no way to top his tales. He’d talk just to hear himself talk, and because I would listen.

 

“What do you need today, little man,” he’d like to say. “What do you weigh, a hundred pounds? What programming task would you like me to do for you today that you can’t do for yourself?”

 

I’d run across him in the hallway, and made a ridiculous arms-out, happy-faced gesture that looked like he was squeaking like a big happy mouse. It was stupid, but it always got a laugh out of me, and I’d practiced in improving my own happy-faced gesture in reply. He’d shrug, face go back to its usual blank state, waddle off to some destination.

 

If the bathroom was empty, and we happened to be there at the same time, he’d make extremely inappropriate comments that nearly caused me to piss all over myself instead of in the john.

 

He was a good guy, seemed like things were getting better. He’d gone on an internet date to go see Moby. He’d tried so hard to find a date, and would send charming and hilarious emails to women, and finally had a girl to see a live show with.

 

I don’t know why women don’t like me, he said one day. I’ve got an irresistable charming sense of humor, I’m extremely overweight, and I’m hung like a chipmunk.  As if that was something to be proud of.

 

He charmed the girls at the front desk of the building into printing him a no-access ID card, that just had a picture of his smiling mug he’d emailed them, and asked them to print “Not a Serial Killer” on the card, and they did it, five bucks. He handed the ID card to his date.

 

They’d had a good time, though music made it impossible to have a conversation.  I don’t think she was up for a second date, didn’t happen.  He’d planned on seeing Regina Spektor a few days ago, the first of November. Changed his mind, said he didn’t care, and sold the tickets on the company bulletin board.

 

He had some days, where I could tell he was getting stress, boss telling him to clamp down and get more shit done, be quiet, and focus.  I didn’t want to give or take any heat, so I split for a couple days. On Wednesday, he’d calmed down, and when I talked to him, his hands had resumed shaking.

 

He’d had a case of the shakes back in April or May, and had a disappearance from work.  That turned out that because he sent the email from his own domain, swmurphy, the bosses email stuck it in the junk/spam folder.

 

Thursday he surprised me, I walked up to his desk to shoot the breeze, he turns around, hands shaking but smiling. “How should I do it? I think pills.” He said he hated being assigned multiple high-priority requests, all that would take a long time to do, then having the priorities constantly switched on a daily basis, depending on what conversation his boss had just had, and ended up getting nothing done.

 

Caught off guard, I probably agreed, then quickly changed the subject.  I think 404 walked by, and we were suddenly talking about CMN.TB_CRM_CLIENT_MAP versus CMN.TB_XRF_CLIENT_ID, the supposed reason I was at his desk in the first place.

 

He wasn’t happy, but showed up in costume for halloween the next day, wearing color contact lenses he’d ordered off the internet, and devil ears spirit-gummed to his head, painted head to barefooted toes in red.

 

We were grabbing lunch at the same time, horsing around, then as we walked back upstairs through the staircase and were out of any earshot, again he said, “Yeah, pills would be the way to go.”

 

Yeah?

 

“I think you’re right, little man”, he said. “I hope there’s not an afterlife. It would be just another fucking hassle, of some kind or another.”

 

“Probably,” I agreed.

 

“You really think, pills?”

 

I frowned, “or shotgun. Put it in the mouth. Squeeze. Pop. Don’t miss.”

 

We laughed.

 

“Knowing myself, I’d miss,” he said.

 

“True, true. Stick to the pills.”

 

Didn’t see him at work this Monday, on Tuesday I’d checked periodically to see if I could spot his shiny pink dome behind the cube wall, walked by and saw his empty chair.Figured he was on PTO. On Wednesday, checked his calendar, no PTO, sent email to his domain asking if he’d gone AWOL. No reply.

 

Couldn’t help thinking, he wasn’t in good health, thoughts of our jokes, now in bad taste, a few days before.

 

My friend G called, she asked if I knew sean had been absent from work, said, yeah, been trying to email him. smurphy’s playing hookie. “Well, they found him,” she said. I pictured him laying, still, glasses askew, cats meowing.

 

What the fuck was he doing? Where was he?

 

“Well, he’s not coming back to work.”

 

What, they fired him?

 

“No, he’s deceased.”

 

I’d almost emailed another friend earlier that afternoon, saying how sean’s jokes about suicide last week seemed to be in poor taste since he hadn’t shown up for work for three days. About how mis-management had left a small team of developers with no standards, no redundancy, fucked-up silos of shit-code only the author could read. It would blow up in their face if someone critical like him just quit, or suddenly keeled over, off’d himself.

 

I asked without having to, “how?”

 

“Pretty sure it was suicide.”

 

Yeah. Fuck. Not the slightest surprise. Disappointment. Shame. I wish things had turned out better.

 

> shutdown -immediate

 

swmurphy

1973-2009

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If that last post was dark, it was actually followed by an even darker one that was fortunately left in draft form.A little sunshine mixed with some solitary introspection goes a long way.    

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