Travis would have liked this video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c63y0i2jcHs

Actually, I think he would have liked the edits, and ultimately he would have burst quietly into tears as he did. Hardison eyes are just leaky like that.

He was more hip than I am. I remember one day, he turned and quoted Beck to me, "I'm a loser, bay-bee, so why don't you kill me?"

How should I have known that he was quoting a musician who would garner some critical success? I just thought he was being weird, a quality that I never much embraced when I was a "sharper than a serpents tooth" teen.

Speaking of which, I'm fairly certain he got to read the first Series of Unfortunate Events. He would have loved Pete Jackson's King Kong.

It's late, and I can't sleep, so until the relax stuff kicks in, or for the next few minutes, I will write about him. The only shirt I have of his is that grey one. When I went to the Houston space center, I wore it so it's kinda like we were there together. (I know how pathetic that sounds, but I couldn't not "take" him, and I got to see the mission control room.)

I can't figure out what to do with the cremains. I suppose people get sprinkled somewhere, but frankly Cynthia would not hold still for that and I'm not going there.

This is going to sound absolutely strange, but I thought today that I'd make soap, but that may be too a-unlawful b-difficult c-grotesque and d all of the above. Plus, I'd have to get some lye, and then I'll wind up on one of those terrorist lists, and that would just complicate things a bit much for me now.

What would be cool is if I could cast the soap into a face monkey mold, but that would entail molding the original, which as it is limestone is just not going to happen in my lifetime. Well, I do have the smaller clay mockup. that's an idea, actually.

The other thought I had was to enlarge the old Barron's art that Powell graciously sent me and entomb him in that. I'm not sure he likes being in that plastic box. It's a maroon oblong, and at first I thought it was so "zarathrustra" and 2001, but now I'm not so sure.

I don't want to become that crazy woman who keeps her dead in a box. I'm beginning to sound too much for comfort like that Jeanine Garofolo character from Mystery Men.

So, missing him fierce nine years later, I ask you, as if you were Johnathan Price in Brazil and this metaphor wasn't already hyperextended and in the wrong medium....

- Thais Hardison, April 2009