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I’m not among those hit worst: those who have to clean up the metaphorical and physical mess, those who loved him, those with a hole in their lives where a friend use to be. Everybody who has to be wondering, now, if they had only done some little thing differently, if the story might have ended differently.

Compared to those people, I have no right to complain.

But I do, because I still lost things important to me. I can’t ever listen to any of Linkous’s work the same way again, from 12 Jealous Roses through Good Morning Spider and Dark Night of the Soul. They join Chesnutt’s Is the Actor Happy?, Cobain’s In Utero, Gilbert’s Thud, Smith’s Either/Or, Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and far too many others to name, on the sad list of poisoned works.

I can’t appreciate them for what they used to be; now they carry a dark payload, now they’re full of questions, lines that might be clues. And the biggest, worst questions: what does it mean that so much of the art that speaks to me so deeply is made by people who end themselves? Who among the artists whose work I love, the people I love, friends, people I exchange casually pleasantries with at rock shows or on the Internet would I really not be all that surprised to hear news like this about?

How much should I worry that a strange, small switch inside me might one day get flipped to “broken”?

So, fuck you, Mark Linkous. Many of my friends are nicer than I am; they hope you rest in peace. I can’t agree. I hope you rest uneasily, for now. I hope you find peace only later.

As he comes around the hairpin in his matte black Javelin, Luke is struck by the sight of two motorcycle cops on the verge of the road. The drop-off is steep to the left; on the right there’s a gravel pad on the shoulder of the hill. This is where the cops are. Their bikes aren’t the same model, one has much wider tires than the other. The fat-tired copy is doing a slo-mo wheelie, spinning around in place, only a little faster than a second hand.

The Javelin is the ultimate get-away car. Luke has black vinyl panels he can strap to the hood and the rear; they flap down to cover the plates, the headlights, and the taillights so nothing reflects. You can be in pursuit of this car and it will practically vanish before your eyes. It’s the stealth fighter of the automobile world. Luke gets confused and sometimes calls it a Mustang for no particular reason. Of all the cars ever made, he thinks his ‘72 Javelin has the most predatory profile.

Hours later he rounds the same corner. The cops are still on the dusky verge. Now they’re both doing the wheelie pirouette. They’re not wearing helmets.

Luke isn’t really conscious of pulling off, he’s just aware that now he’s standing near the cops, watching their graceful rotation. The mountain air is crisp. “Must be some updraft,” Luke says. One of the cops replies; it doesn’t really matter what he says.

Luke lies down in the gravel. He can feel it through his jeans, but not through his leather jacket. Nothing happens.

“Must be too heavy,” he says.

“No,” one of the cops counters. “It’s pretty strong.”

Luke shrugs out of his jacket anyway. He’s mildly surprised to see he’s wearing a dress shirt. Its royal blue is even deeper in the twilight. Luke expects to be cold, but it’s not so bad. He lies down in the gravel again; now he feels it digging into his shoulders.

Not for long.

Almost immediately he begins to rise.

His progress is slow, but steady.

Luke doesn’t worry that he will grow hungry; he knows he’s changing. The air grows thinner as he ascends. By the time it’s too thin to breathe, he has changed enough that he no longer needs to.

An unmeasurable time passes.

Eventually, he begins to enter another atmosphere.

verbally expressing my displeasure with cyclists/motorists who do not actively threaten or actually injure me

as mentioned earlier:

I’m in a Taun-Taun sleeping bag, holding lightsaber chopsticks. Christmas day.
Yeah, somebody loves me.

not entirely keen to be a document holder, much less to hold still to be photographed as such

document-free!

There’s a time-honored tradition of sitcom stars (Mystery Team features Community’s Donald Glover, Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza, and 30 Rock’s John Lutz and Kevin Brown) making feature films to emphasize the stuff they can’t do on TV. Mystery Team delivers on that score: it’s not for anyone too squeamish about assorted bodily functions, or anyone offended by salty language. There’s also a tradition of padded-out recapitulation of the gags they’re best known for and general lameness. Mystery Team almost completely* avoids this trap, thanks to its unusually large but generally sharp and off-kilter writing team, which includes leads Glover, D.C. Pierson, and Dominic Dierkes, as well as director Dan Eckman and producer Meggie McFadden. (Large chunks of the crew also worked on the 2006 short “Checkout,” which I now want to see, and studying the credits gives the impression that this is more a case of a few names helping friends to get their film made than sitcommers trying to transition to box office stardom).

Mystery Team strikes me as the inverse of Rian Johnson’s terrific Brick. Brick applied noir detective tropes, plot elements and mood to a story set in a high school; Mystery Team applies “Hardy Boys” or even Scooby Doo-styled high school elements to an adult detective story. In both films the two modes collide with startling results. Mystery Team plunges its hapless naifs into an encounter with the town off-the-rails drug dealer and a strip club of positively Lynchian nightmarishness, but what elevates it to near genius is that the adult plot operates almost completely under the narrative logic of the juvenile mystery. It also doesn’t hurt that the three leads demonstrate good comic timing and a believable chemistry. Glover is better than the hit-and-miss Community might lead you to expect; Pierson and Dierkes are even stronger.

* There’s an introductory segment before the title sequence that felt dreadfully forced — lots of beats on that were clearly supposed to be laughs, but fell flat for me. It’s possible that it took me a few minutes to calibrate my expectations to the film’s internal logic, but I think the intro was just bad.

Dear Senator-Elect Brown,

I am writing to urge you to reconsider your support of the pending health care reform legislation.

My experience has afforded me some insights which you might find useful in considering this matter.

First, I’ve experienced directly how badly our current system fails us. I went several years without the benefit of regular health care. As a freelancer, I made too much money to qualify for medical assistance programs, but too little to afford insurance payments. I am fortunate that in that time I did not suffer serious injuries, and that I did not have chronic illnesses which worsened.

Shortly after moving to Massachusetts I took a full-time job with health benefits. Last year, I took a tumble and broke my arm. I was treated in the emergency room and released; about a week later I had completely routine outpatient surgery with no complications. I wasn’t even admitted to the hospital.

The total bill for my care was more than the sticker price of many new cars. It could literally have formed the down payment of many homes. I can scarcely imagine the consequences for me if I’d suffered this injury without insurance. It might have bankrupted me. Without adequate medical care, the injury might have permanently impacted my ability to work.

There is something very wrong with this picture. It’s not right that prohibitive insurance costs place regular preventive medical care out of the reach of so many Americans. It’s not right that the price of an everyday injury could push someone over the brink of bankruptcy.

My second insight comes from my work in the software industry. I hear many people expressing concern that that healthcare reform is important, but this is not “the right plan.” I think this is misguided, even harmful. Making healthcare better for all is a very complex challenge. In the software industry we understand that extremely complex problems can’t always be solved exactly on this first iteration. We know that “perfect is the enemy of good.” We try to ship something good, then make it better. We also know that when a critical problem is discovered, we sometimes need to push an emergency fix to market as soon as possible.

That’s the situation America finds itself in. We need an emergency fix as soon as possible. The current package isn’t the best of all possible health care reform initiatives, but it has one enormous advantage over any other plan: it’s been through negotiation and debate, and it’s much closer to being “shippable” than anything else could be.

Although my insights come from the software industry, if you think about it, legislation is software. One of the aspects of the Founding Fathers’ genius is that they gave our nation the tools to modify its laws, even The Constitution, as required by changing conditions. If we pass this package and it doesn’t always work exactly as its authors intended — which is likely — then it can be amended to correct its deficiencies. If it somehow makes the situation worse for a majority of our citizens, it can be repealed outright.

If we do nothing, or if we derail the current effort in favor of other legislation that will take years more to work its way through the system, we face these certainties: Illnesses that could easily be prevented will keep children out of school and adults out of work for days they don’t need to miss. Treatable illnesses will worsen and become chronic, reducing quality of life and vastly increasing the expense of managing them. People will die when they don’t need to.

How can America accept this choice, the do-nothing status quo?

How could you justify acting to prolong it?

Thank you for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

Doug Mayo-Wells