A good friend of mine, Kevin McCormick, died last week. I didn’t really know how to deal with it, then – the shock of it, the circumstance, it all became just a haze I didn’t know how to walk through. A memorial site was put for him, that contained people’s stories, and pictures of him, and the things that he did. He was a great engineer, in the true sense of the word – curious about the world, and the kind of guy who decides to make things happen.

He was always doing some sort of project, whether it was rigging up an electronic jukebox for a bathroom in the years before .mp3, or building a crazy loft for a room, or firing a carrot through a box of Bisquick with a compressed air cannon. I’ve never known anyone to have as much stuff as he did – he’d pick up anything that seemed even remotely useful, if it comtained something novel.

I have a really terrible memory for events, and so it’s rare that I remember specific chain of events with a particular clarity – but I remember one night, FB had brought home an old HP tape drive. This ran some tape, maybe a half inch wide, on reels maybe 12″ in diameter. You’d feed the tape cartridge into the machine, and it would spool out some amount of tape, into the machine, whose top was clear plastic. You could see the flexible tape fed into the machine, and it would be grabbed, by a pair of rollers. If the rollers missed the tape, a jet of air would try to push the tape into proper alignment, and the rollers would try again.

I remember that the first night he brought home this tape drive, we watched it for something on the order of a half an hour, as the tape fed, missed, realigned itself, failed, pulled the tape back in, spooled it out, and then finally caught. We watched this loading sequence over and over, simply marvelling that someone had thought that a jet of air could make this happen, then had actually made the whole thing work. That sense of curiousness, coupled with his his intense drive to actually *make* things, and a creative, artistic vision… well, it’s a rare quality, and one I doubt I will ever again see embodied with such intensity.

I’m glad I remember that moment – I’m grateful and proud to have shared a quiet moment with Kevin, marvelling at the wonderous vagaries of the world.

In the last several years, I remember seeing Frostbyte only twice, both at weddings in Boston. One time, he gave me (and many others) a tour of the Warehouse, which was just an astonishing place, with Fred Fenning’s old laser equipment, and Frostbyte’s assorted electronic stuff. It was pure chaos, but beautiful in its industrial and artistic functionality – chaos you could only appreciate, knowing that the conductor in the center of it all knew every bit and bauble that was in those piles, and that if it was ever needed, this was where it was supposed to be.

I never told Kevin that I loved him – I don’t think I did, at any rate. I don’t tell many people I love them, even when I do. I have what is, to me, a surprising number of friends who I feel genuine love for, and I rarely if ever express it to them. Just not that kind of guy, on most days. Hell, I rarely ever tell my cousin I love him, and he’s as close to a brother as I can imagine. I love him to pieces.

No, I don’t really know where this is going.

I thought of something sort of selfish. At one point in college, I came inches from being run over by a car. I had skidded out in the first rain of the season while biking to a hobby store, and managed to slide across an intersection into the path of an oncoming car. The car had seen me slide, and stopped in time, but literally inches from me. I had a moment where I thought to myself, “this is it, that’s all I get,” and my life flashed before my eyes. I know it sounds trite, or cliche, but it honestly happened, where every memory I had of my life up to that point played out for me in sequence. I thought it was curious, when it reached present day, that I hadn’t actually died, so I rolled over, to hit my nose on the tire of the car that had stopped. That’s how close I had come to death – a nose. But the notion that your life flashes before your eyes – true stuff. And the thing that occurred to me, was that I hope maybe Kevin remembered that moment, watching the HP tape drive, as well.

I didn’t know how to respond to Kevin’s death, until tonight. Ei-Nyung and I were talking about her NaNoWriMo plot, and she was telling me about how one of the characters worried about whether he’d be remembered after he died – probably influenced to some degree by the recent events, even if not intentionally. And Colin had just come home and said that at Kevin’s memorial, more people showed up than the venue could accomodate, and it struck me just how incredible and appropriate that all was. Frostbyte got a real kick out of bringing people joy. He’d play music he loved, and hope you loved it, too. He’d show you something cool, and hoped you’d find it cool, or inspiring. I always thought that one of the things he really loved was seeing that creative spark that he had, lit in others through his actions, and I imagine him standing outside the chapel, watching people go in and out, remembering his extraordinary life, and revelling in the joy he brought others.

I have a very clear image of Kevin in my head, but few clear memories of our time together – I have a very bad memory for events – the sequence of events themselves. I couldn’t remember, literally, anything that we had done together for days after I’d heard he died. I had this image of him in my head, and he simply wasn’t doing anything. He was standing there, waiting for some memory to animate him. After hearing all the stories, and seeing all the photos people had posted, he’s really come to life again – I can see him walking around, doing things, talking to me – it’s as thought I can reach out and touch him – and in that, the loss becomes concrete – only now, do I fully understand what I will never see again, and it just utterly, compeletely breaks my heart in pieces.

I wish I believed in an afterlife. I wish that Kevin could understand what kind of impact he had on me – that I could sit on a couch with him and reminisce about the old days, and the days yet to come. I wish I could tell him how much he meant to me, nad how many times I was just in awe of his genius. I wish I could hug him, see him smile, look into those intense, blue eyes and see him laugh. I know it’s all in my head, I know that he’ll live in my memory, and that the image I have of him how – the clear, animated, vibrant image of him, I’ll remember forever.

Gah. Dammit, I’m crying again.