Yesterday at lunchtime I had a great IM conversation with Ptery — as my former partner Rozz is now known — & our friend Chris. I hadn’t talked with Chris in a really long time: he lives in Salt Lake City now, & what with, first, a lengthy period of being in the cave from about last August to last March, followed by Anchorage’s Summer of Hate & other political this’n’thats, I haven’t been that great at keeping in touch with him. Ptery I’ve kept in better contact with, at least when he’s on the grid: he’s a transman who is living something of a nomadic life right now.
I dug around in my Flickr photostream to get a photo of both of them, & found these: photos of a hike we took along the very northern part of the Kenai Peninsula adjoining Turnagain Arm in May 2006 with Jesse (Rozz’s nephew who we raised from age 9) & Jesse’s dog Sweetheart. I surprised some emotion looking at them: I had no idea when they were the changes that would follow, which leave us all except Sweetheart & me living in different places now. (Though I do see Jesse every couple of weeks or so: he’s in the Job Corps in Palmer.)
Distance.
But despite distance — what a great talk! I’ll be talking with Chris more tonight when I get off work. I’ve mentioned before that I’ll be doing NaNoWriMo again in November, & I was really happy to hear that Chris is too. We cheered each other along all the way through NaNoWriMo in 2007, and at the tail end of it, with both of us having successfully completed 50,000 words or more in the month, we both kicked back at the Bear Tooth Grill to celebrate. I don’t know what he was drinking, but I was drinking Pipeline Stout. And that’s Rozz he’s talking with on my cellphone.
I should mention that Chris writes really cool poems. We first met in a small poetry workshop that I facilitated for several years beginning in 1998. Maybe I can persuade him to let me post a couple.
