Goodbye Shannon

One of my oldest memories is my first day at Open Living School 46 years ago. Shannon Olivarez and I filled a table full of tinker-toy robots. I remember naming my favorite one "Flyee." This many years later that name rings into my mind with special joy and sadness. Shannon flies paragliders and pretty much identifies as a bot—he is "Flyee". We were immediately closest of friends, opposite sides of a coin. He's dying. I flew out to say goodbye in person. "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly"

Decade old piece I wrote about Shannon's influence on my musical tastes: Punk Snot Dead

Shannon has always been hyper rational and identified closely with Spock, and in general has always preferred the company of animals other than us primates.

One of my favorite moments while hanging out in the hospital room is when Shannon asked of his friend Jonathan looking for connection between Newtonian and Quantum physics. Thinking of entanglement in particular, between the time a proton splits and when both halves are changed instantaneously when only one is measured, do you think that reveals some aspect of the universe that reveals an absolute time instead of relative time? Like t0 is when it splits and the moment of simultaneous change is one tic in absolute time. Even on his deathbed, he contemplates hard problems in the universe.

The cause of death will eventually be written "liver and kidney failure" but it's a much more complex and longer running incident—extremely high functioning alcoholism, self-medicating complex PTSD from a family of origin with severe abuse and abandonment.

I identify so closely with Shannon that looking at him in the ICU was a bit like seeing myself on my own death bed, though my own experience of abuse and abandonment were completely tame, by comparison.

There's a story about privilege embedded here too. I started my mid-life crisis with years of psychotherapy while my friend was increasing his self-prescribed chemical remedies. Both from divorced families, but I'm all Caucasian and he's half-Caucasian and half-Mexican.

I hasten to add that the story about privilege I reference is more tangled and confused than may first appear. I recently asked him "would you trade lives with me if that were possible?" I was asking if he'd prefer a more sober life raising a family in an upper-middle-class suburb and working for The Man than his counter-culture, intoxicated, life in between, amid the cracks and gaps in the suburban facade. He did not pause long before saying "no." He prefers his life to mine and I prefer mine to his. There is something genuinely repellent in my life and privilege and things in his life to genuinely envy.