RIP Five Years After

[mallorys_camera]

Figured out what it is about Halt and Catch Fire that captures my attention.

It’s because Lee Pace, the actor who plays the enigmatic Joe MacMillan, looks strikingly like Jayson Rome. Their voices even sound alike.

Jayson Rome was a technology whiz who left his job at S&P Capital to become a math teacher at New Roots. He was RTT’s math teacher. He was very kind to me at a time in my life when very few people were being kind to me, and RTT was absolutely out of control, and I was struggling very hard.

He was probably the handsomest man I have ever laid eyes on. And he had a fascinating intellectual history; he was very, very smart. Of course, that was part of why I found him so interesting, but the nature of my interest wasn’t a crush so much as it was a question I couldn’t shake: Where do I know you from?

In 2015, he abruptly walked away from the New Roots job.

Moved back to New York City. Became a VP at Morgan Stanley.

In 2016, he jumped from an 8th floor suite of the Country Inn & Suites in Long Island City. Died instantly.

I was haunted by his death. I actually made a trip into the city to burn sage in front of the Country Inn & Suites a week or so after his suicide. Which was weird and almost creepy because like I say, I didn’t really know him, and while No Man is an Island, blah, blah, blah, thousands of people commit suicide every day, and I don’t care. And I’ve known other people who’ve committed suicide. Some of them moved me, but some of them didn’t, so it’s not like I feel any great anguish over that particular methodology for morbidity.

I still feel a compulsion to learn the why behind the act. Like the story behind it would explain something important.

But, of course, I never will.

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No other real news to report.

Must finish the gecko piece. (Geckos are pretty cool.)

Think I will have another shot at making tiny polymer clay tulips before I move on to the task of making tiny polymer clay daffodils.

Should begin laying out this year’s garden.

It’s supposed to be very warm today, so I will go tromping.

I feel kinda sad. It’s loneliness, I suspect. But when the phone rings, and I recognize the number, I don’t pick it up because I don’t want to talk to anyone.