A Tribute to our Friend Brian

I’m sorry to say that we lost our dear friend and coworker Brian in November. It’s been incredibly tough, as you can imagine, but all of your love and support has been incredibly helpful. Thank you. It’s really helpful to feel like we aren’t alone. Below you’ll find a a eulogy and a slideshow. We wanted to share this with you because you aren’t alone either. We all lost him, and we’re all in this mess together.

Eulogy

I. For Sorrow

After the third time Brian borrowed this book, Jurassic Park, from me, he returned it and said, “I’ve read this book for the last time. It’s stupid.” He borrowed it at least two more times after that. On the day we cleaned out his apartment I discovered that he stopped borrowing this from me only because he got his own copy.

To my surprise, I found a passage in this book that resonated with me. “Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.” The passage does’t make me think of Brian, but it resonates because it pins me as the dupe who expects stability, like a goat tied to a stick, unaware that it’s in the T-rex enclosure, or that predators the size of a T-rex even exist.

I looked for other passages that did remind me of Brian, but it’s the book in its entirety that reminds me of him. The novel is comprised of three things, all of which Brian loved. 1. This book is a scathing indictment of a reckless billionaire. 2. Much of the dialogue in this book involves shrewd scientists lecturing overconfident ignoramuses on complex systems. 3. Much of this book is about people getting eaten by dinosaurs. Or at least mauled. Any time you want to feel a little closer to him, I have two copies of this stupid book, now, which you’re welcome to borrow from me as often as you like.

II. For Joy

Brian took great pleasure in color coordination. In signing everyone up for Me Undies. In talking about his own Me Undies. In showing off whatever Me Undies print he was wearing that day. In offering up for conversation whatever Ezra Kline had been talking about. In correcting other people’s misspellings. In quoting verbatim the advertisement for audible.com that opened every episode of This American Life for a few months. In writing raps about Harry Potter and revising the lyrics to Black Hole Sun. In keeping up with every new bicycle component on the market. In reading everything from stupid fiction about dinosaurs to forward-thinking non-fiction about every topic imaginable.

Many of the little things he enjoyed are indications of how he was a tireless investigator, ever curious, committed to seeking out the new, and improving his life from his mind all the way down to his underpants. He delighted in sharing these discoveries, and without him the rest of us are doomed to lives of obsolete knowledge, last week’s news, and bunched undergarments.

III. For Girls

To say that Brian played what we called his Sad Lady Jams at the shop constantly is not hyperbolic. Big Thief. Cate Le Bon. Sharon Von Etton. Phoebe Bridgers. Adrianne Lenker. Angel Olsen. Big Thief again. He wore a t-shirt that said ‘The Future is Female.’ He wouldn’t stop talking about a trilogy of books about lesbian necromancers as well as the book Vagina Obscura.

The poet Eula Biss explains a connection between the bicycle and feminism that makes me think of Brian. “A bicycle in traffic must be predictive to the point of clairvoyance, must know the cars better than the cars know themselves, must understand their motivations and their common blunders. Cars don’t always signal their intentions. And cars aren’t always nice to each other, through they usually show each other some respect in deference to the damage they can do to each other. They are like important men in conversation with other important men. Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.” This seems like a comparison that Brian understood intuitively. He refused and refuted the patriarchy at every opportunity.

IV. For Boys

One of the first moments that Brian and I shared together, we shared as coworkers, and it was one of the first times I wondered whether we might become friends. It was the day that David Foster Wallace—a writer for whom we had mutual respect—died. I stopped by the bike shop where we both worked to tell him the news, which sounds weird but back then news spread by something we called word-of-mouth. Brian stopped the music and called for a moment of silence. He and I shared thousands of other moments of silence over the years but without occasion. In the beginning of our relationship there were so many silences that for a long time I wondered whether perhaps he didn’t like me. I’d arrive and work and say, “Good morning, Brian,” and he wouldn’t respond. Often, though, twenty minutes later he’d lean around the corner to blabber on about the film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, or to ask what I thought about Thomas Pynchon. I decided to behave as though he liked me, and then we became friends. Presumably. He could be difficult to get to know and to get close to, but once you were close enough he was wonderfully funny, inventive, and never dull.

Speaking of David Foster Wallace, there are a couple of passages in Wallace’s works that make me think of Brian.

“Lonely people tend to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans…People affect them too strongly.”

And another, “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to chose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

V. For Silver

Many of the gifts that I’d given him over the years have suddenly returned to me now, such as this notebook I’m reading from, which I made for him years ago. These things have been especially difficult for me to accept back into my life, and for awhile I wasn’t sure why.

I read a fantastic book called On Having and Being Had, which is a critique of capitalism written by a poet who wants to write for a living but cannot without being ensnared by the system she’s critiquing. She says money is our most common yardstick for success, but also for everything else. Around the time of his divorce, Brian told me that his ex-wife (and I’m paraphrasing an old memory here, so I’m sorry, Kate, if I’m getting this wrong) had wanted him to grow up and make something of himself. His response was that all he wanted to do was fix bikes. He never compromised about that. (Or about anything, which was both admirable and annoying.) How many people can say that they pursued doing what they loved for their entire lives?

If we use units of measurement other than money, Brian was more successful than most. He didn’t hold a single conviction he hadn’t thoroughly examined. He challenged others  on their bad ideas and sloppy thinking rather than indulging them. He had a sophisticated worldview born from a whole lot of critical reading.

I know he would’ve liked this book about capitalism. In it, there’s an excellent short essay about the bicycle. The poet writes, “Cars make you stupid, in the way that wealth makes you stupid. In the way that any sort of power makes you stupid, really. And it is this, my own stupidity, that I dislike most about driving.”

I know he would’ve liked this book about capitalism, because I gave him a copy for his birthday last year and he told me he liked it. It was another of my gifts to him that came back to me, sitting at the top of a box of books that I carried out of his apartment.

I’ve heard the analogy that losing someone is like a door closing, and you can never go back into that room you shared. There’s no knob on your side, and everything you loved about being in that room is forever unavailable. What this analogy omits is that sometimes all of the furniture that had been in that room ends up on your side of the door, purposeless. These objects no longer hold the magic they held when they symbolized a friendship. They are painful reminders that you have really lost two people—your departed loved one as well as the person you were when you were in that room who you can never again be.

VI. For Gold

Thank you, Brian. For everything. The current of your influence runs through me more deeply than you supposed, and I know the same holds true for a greater number of people than you could ever have accepted. You taught me to work on bicycles, which very directly changed the course of my life for the last fifteen years. Thank you for teaching me to clean the kitchen as I cook instead of piling up a mess until the end. You changed my mind about so many things that matter more than kitchens, from my estimation of how kind human beings generally are to the trouble with eating meat. You taught me the value of admitting to ignorance.

Thank you for your precision in everything.

Thank you for your verbal horseplay, silly portmanteaus and puns, and your exacting, cutting jokes.

Thank you for unremittingly being yourself.

Thank you for the time that we had together.

VII. For Secrets Never to be Told

I’ve been having dreams. In one, Brian’s head was extra narrow and kind of quashed like a parallelogram, but otherwise everything was fine. In another, I was at work and Brian was running late and I sat there waiting for him to come through the back door but he never did. I woke from that sleep but the dream relentlessly continues. In another, we were snowmobiling, which he absolutely would’ve hated, and I also would’ve hated it, but in that dream I saw him walking up a hillside in the show, casting shadows on the winter sky as he stood there, counting crows.

One for sorrow.

Two for joy.

Three for girls and

Four for boys

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for secrets never to be told.