Howler

There's a message on my phone that's over three months old. It's an invitation to a party in Vancouver that I never attended, partly because I could not find the time but more so (if I'm truthful with myself) because I was being a wallflower, afraid to poke my head out of the little coccoon of my own life and get to know a bunch of strangers.

The guy who left the message was also, let's face it, a bit wierd. He continually wore a three pointed jester hat, replete with little silver tinkle bells on the end of each point, and he liked to engage people with discussions of his experiments in "telepathy" (I was strongly tempted at this point to throw in a Beat poem by Tim Minchin). I'm not graceful about my distaste for magical thinking.

He called himself Howler. He'd literally invented his own name and managed to get other people to call him by his invented name and even though I am myself, as mentioned, a pretentious twat, that gives me even more of a licence I feel to call out other even more pretentious twats and expose them for what they are. We police our own. I never referred to Howler by anything other than his real name. For reasons that may even already be clear, He shall remain Howler today. Git.

I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like Howler. I did. I was incredibly fond of him, and we always hugged in the street when we ran across each other. Despite the "LSD-thinking" he was incredibly open hearted, and genuinely seemed to love everyone and everything that his life came into contact with. That kind of open compassion and goodwill, without any kind of agenda, without any sense of articfice, was infectious. You came away from visiting howler a better person. He's one of the only people that I've ever described my full family history too, because he listened without any kind of judgement.

We actually shared a large group of common friends, including some of my closest friends from university. We'd been hiking the north shore mountain in groups, we'd hung out in beat cafes at 2 am playing chess with weathered old European guys who chain smoked as they analyzed the board.

he May have been one of the organizers of the Vancouver naked critical mass bike ride; taht may be giving him too much credit. Howler wasn't really one for organising. He was an enthusiastic participant. He generally just showed up in a whole bunch of places.

The invite itself had come as I passed him in the park not two blocks from where I'm writing this, where he and two of the most gorgeous women I will ever meet were learning how to walk on stilts, possibly in preparation for the festivities I was doomed to miss (To Karl: I will discuss the hot girls in the spring. for now suffice to say that 23 is the perfect age when you're really blonde and toned and obviously not wearing a bra because gravity seems to have given you a free pass, possibly in homage).

That time in the park with the stilts and the vision in hot, young, fresh sexiness was the last time I ever saw Howler. Two weeks later, on July 12, he was at another party on Texada island, and decided to take off his clothes and walk into the sea.

He was declared missing; there were search parties. On July 20 his body washed up on shore. I still don't know, can not guess, whether his death was accident or design. Howler believed a lot of strange things, and an experiment in drowing and rebirth was not beyond him. or he may have chosen to swim underneath the island shelf; Texada has an almost unique reverse tapered undersea geology.

I don't know. I'll never know. I know that I miss my friend. And the last part of him is the message on my cellphone, a ghost message now, which I stop and listen to every two weeks or so as I edit my inbox, until my service provider changes and this vestige, too, this last whisper of the dead, is lost.