First entry of the year and we are already a quarter past into it. If you look at the entry just below this one, you will see why. On that subject, let me also briefly thank my inspiration Kylie Ireland. Circa 2008, you see, Kylie went through hell as Production Designer on The 8th Day. Kylie blogged about it at the time. It was incredibly painful to see that she was going through this. But Kylie, if you are reading this, know that your writing about the hell you went through on The 8th Dayhas helped me IMMENSELYover the past year or so. It is not easy being the less-than100%-healthy caregiver of the last surviving member of my family who has been living with a degenerative disease, what with the asshole incompetent phony "French" "healthcare professionals," and even MOREasshole dopehead relatives who try to dictate to me from hundreds of miles away while high as fucking kites and then have the temerity to turn around and talk to MEabout respect when, in true ex-New Yorker fashion, I tell them to kindly go fuck themselves. Many things have helped me through the past year. My Intar-Webs cat family as mentioned in my previous entry have helped me understand how to cope with someone with reduced mental capacity. My love of aviation has helped me develop and follow a routine, a procedure, a checklist so that important things get done, or, at the very least, not overlooked.
And when things get really bad, I ask "What would Kylie Ireland do?" Kylie Ireland, being an atheist, may be less than 100% enthused about the Jesus reference, but that is the thing about Kylie Ireland. She was my introduction to atheism. I never became an atheist, but it was Kylie Ireland who showed me that atheists can be decent people. Not Richard Dawkins (recently dumped by Lalla Ward), not Sam Harris, not Christopher Hitchens, but Kylie Ireland. The result of that is that Kylie Ireland is still well-liked and admired today while Dawkins and Harris have fizzled out into bufoonery trying to reinvent themselves when the atheist brand jumped the shark. Dawkins and Harris are professional atheists. Kylie Ireland is just an awesome human being who happens to be an atheist.
I have corresponded a lot with Kylie in the past. Not a lot as of late, however, and certainly not much this month.
April , Bloody April!
April, you see, is when we lost one of the best human beings in this universe, Amber Rayne, who was a frequent co-worker and a good friend of Kylie's. Amber had also been an Internet acquaintance of mine. She did not have to say word one to me. I was a complete stranger. But she did answer me publicly. Always very polite, always very kind. Not normally what one expects from a well-known person, but entirely consistent with what everyone within the industry said about Amber. It says a lot about Amber that, in an industry full of jealousies, with members taking to various parts of the web to blast each other and settle petty differences, not one bad word was to be found about Amber. Amber was that kind of person.
We just lost another such person. In the course of the past night, Sinn Fein/IRA murdered Lyra McKee. Lyra was a journalist. She was from what she would call Northern Ireland and what I call Ulster. That difference did not matter. Lyra, you see, defied SFIRA, just as did and does her friend Ann Travers. Lyra wrote a book on the murdered Ulster Unionist representative and Minister Robert Bradford. But, although Lyra was from Northern Ireland/Ulster, she, unlike her co-religionist Gerry Adams, never allowed the entirety of her being, her existence, her professional life, her personal life, to be restrictively defined by the fact that she was from Northern Ireland/Ulster.
Rather, she traveled to America to research an article on concussions and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a subject of great interest to American NFL fans and to Veterans, many of who have never heard of Northern Ireland/Ulster. Lyra was also a tireless advocate for LGBT rights. Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein/IRA claim to be pro-LGBT, a claim in which they have entirely discredited themselves by murdering Lyra McKee last night.
But Lyra McKee was much more than just an avatar for causes and issues. Like Amber Rayne, Lyra McKee was first and foremost a person, a human being. I interacted with her. Just like Amber, she was someone famous who had no reason at all to even reply to an ordinary, extremely unaccomplished schmuck (i.e. typical denizen of the Intar-Webs) such as yours truly.
But Lyra, just like Amber, was so kind-hearted, that she made the time to reply to me.One thing we had in common was our love of cats. Lyra, indeed, was a member of my Intar-Webs cat family. Whenever she put out a photo or a tweet about her cat, I would share it with the rest of my cat family, and whenever I saw something funny or wise or both about a cat, I would make sure to include her in my cc list.
Lyra was also a caring person. She took the time to wish me well on a couple of occasions. She also talked with me about the future of Northern Ireland/Ulster--not from the perspective of the divide, but from the perspective of things that every person is affected by, things like job prospects in the area. I remember reading a couple of items about scientific and other job opportunities in Northern Ireland and Ulster, which I forwarded to Lyra. Lyra was a thoughtful and insightful person. On the scientific article, she replied, "The thing you have to remember, is that not all of us are right-brained," meaning that, while what I sent her would employ some people, it did not have a guaranteed prospect of employing the entirety of those who needed employment. I also sent her something I read about call-centres. Lyra responded that she thought and believed that there had to be something better for the future generations of Northern Ireland/Ulster than the Province just being one big call-centre.
Lyra was caring to EVERYONE. Years ago, I remember her plugging Jamie Bryson, a blogger who was closer to my side of things than to hers. She did not plug him out of the fervour of a convert. She plugged him because she thought he was a good read, politics aside. It takes a big person to do that these days in America. In Northern Ireland/Ulster, it takes someone of superhuman power. That is why today people from as wide as the Ulster Unionist Party, individual members of the Democratic Unionist Party and ordinary, not-strictly-affiliated loyalists are mourning her loss, as are people from her side of things, such as Naomi Long.
One person who, I must point out, has said jack-squat (i.e. not one damned thing) about Lyra, at least at the time of writing, is the jackoff who goes by the stage name "Tommy Robinson." "Robinson," you see, is big on calling out terrorists...especially if they are Muslim. If said terrorists are white like him, "Robinson"...um...does not seem to...um...have much of a problem with that. I could speculate on why that is. For one thing, "Robinsonb" is a stage name, and the man wearing it has more in common ethnically speaking with Gerry Adams than he does with anything "Englsh" as he markets himself to be. (Indeed, there are persistent rumours going around that "super-patriot" "Robinson" attended the funeral of an INLA terrorist in mufti.) It could also be that "Robinson", like Davis Aurini, Richard Spencer, Andy Warski, Sargon and François Legault does not think that white people can be terrorists. Lyra McKee's death shows the fallacy of listening to dream-world idiotic fanatics like "Robinson", Aurini, Spencer, Warski, Sargon and Legault.
Days like today, and the day that Amber Rayne died, make me want to quit the web. Assholes on the web don't bother me. Assholes on the web are why God invented the "block" function. Nice people on the web, nice young people on the web who die suddenly bother me because they remind me of my family, destroyed in a car accident decades ago, the central lesson of that for me being that dying is not something that happens only to the old and sick.
But as long as we live on, we take a little piece of those we left behind us wherever we go.
The above sentence is something I say whenever I hear that someone has lost someone. But days like these, I find it hard to live by the sentence above. Days like these, rather, I fee a lot more like what I wrote on the first anniversary of Amber Rayne's death.