Today was the opportunity for friends and family of the quirky and wonderful Jimmy Thompson to say good-bye to him at a small church in Noe Valley in what was a secular service that went on some two-and-a-half hours, yet never became boring.
The reason was pure Jimmy; as a person he was the diametric opposite of boring. I cannot even begin to describe his life because I never got to know him that well. But the many people there today who did know him intimately painted a loving portrait of a big man (6'4" tall) whose outsized passions seem to have strained the known world's capacity to contain him.
And, in the end, the world failed. A week ago yesterday, early in the morning, his wife and his father found him in the yard out back. His exceedingly bright star had burned out. His inner pain remains unknown, and now, essentially unknowable.
The church was lit up by Jimmy's inventions, the amazing TIX clock, other blinking gizmos, and a lovely piece of circuitry that constantly changes shape as you watch it, sort of an acid trip fueled by that psychedelic known as electricity.
His obituary, written by his sister, appears at sfgate.com under "obituaries." Search for his by name. People have been signing his online Guest Book, and there you can begin to sense the spirit of this amazing human being, gone all too soon, at age 52.
Please follow that link before reading what else I have to say.
***
Tonight, I have decided to start a list of my passions. This is not about me, but about you, because I hope to convince you to do the same. Let me start. (Let's face it, you don't really have any choice.)
* I love to eat.
* I love to drink.
* I love to make love.
* I love to hug.
* I love to laugh.
* I love to make other people laugh.
* I love people who know how to laugh.
* I love flowers, bushes, trees and everything green.
* I love animals.
* I love water, and mountains, and forests, and especially beaches.
* I love people, all sorts of people.
* I love art, the art of people...music, paintings, sculpture, literature, performances of all types, and the quiet creations of children.
* I love children.
* I love sports, especially baseball.
* I love numbers.
* I love color.
* I love language.
* I love to learn about other cultures, other languages.
* I love the terrible pleasure and pain of being in love.
* I hate death.
* I hate greed.
* I hate power.
* I hate entitlement.
* I love modesty.
Okay, this is getting ridiculous, but I hope you get my point(s). There are so many wonderful little things about being alive, and a few big things that really suck. But in our low moments, the sucky things loom larger than they truly are. You have to believe we can affect this world of ours to maintain enough sanity to even participate.
I surprised myself, in college, when I answered (anonymously) a survey by some psych major trying to gather data on our view of suicide. At that age, I knew a few kids who had considered or even tried to kill themselves. They were, to me, among the most brilliant kids in my universe.
I found myself defending the right of a person to kill him or herself. These many years later, I'm still puzzled about the certainty of my position. I had never been suicidal myself; in fact, I was a model of optimism, idealism, and hope.
If only I didn't know now what I didn't know then.
Do you know who wrote that?
As I have grown older, and watched many of the brightest stars in my universe burn out, often by suicide (the fast method or the slower ones), I realize how many among us cannot continue to exist in a whole way in this greedy, isolated, alienated, disconnected world our capitalistic empire has created.
The brightest lights among us continue to extinguish themselves before we have even heard their message.
Let that be a warning to humanity. Protect your artists; don't let them escape prematurely. Otherwise, the human race will lose its collective ability to imagine a future that sustains us as who we are -- a collection of extremely fragile and vulnerable spirits.
This world is a much poorer place without Jimmy Thompson. He just couldn't last here. And that is something that should give all of us pause. The creeps and the egotists, the mean-spirited and the assholes continue to rise in this society of ours. The artists continue to chose to exit the scene.
No society I wish to be part of sustains itself in this way. If anyone is going to kill himself, let it be Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, i.e., the war criminals. These are the people we need to march onto the court of world justice. The bad people who have wasted a precious eight years in power not trying to limit the damage of climate change or forging global alliances, but to secure control of oil reserves and muscle around what they thought were weaker countries unwilling to play by their rules.
Listen to the poets. The answers are in their words:
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted as if I should ever come back...
-30-
3 comments:
One of friends onEbonyFriends.com told me to read your article just now.I want to say it is a nice article and I share your views.
David - there are many reasons why i find your blog compelling. What makes it often inspirational, I think, is that it prods anyone to overcome a common, debilitating fear -- "what meaning is there in the story of *my* life?" or "what would I possibly have to say that anyone would give a shit about?" There's so much experience wrapped up in just one life - any life - that goes left unsaid or unexpressed. Thanks for keeping it real. / jeff
Dear David,
I have been following your blog enough to know you would write about Jimmy when you are were ready. I am glad you did. I know him less than you did, but even in his departure he left me, from reading the obit you provided direction to, with some great turns of phrase that had a powerful ability to conjure up a character I never met. I wish I had, but his words, and his fascinations still made me smile.
Not a mournful reaction I know, but even if departure of a creative soul, much loved in the fabric of a community is a terrible thing, you surely know as well as I, how the impressions and transmissions of their hearts can long outlive their physical presence. Let my smile at Jimmy's words and the brief glimpse I had of his unique character in your words and those of his sister, be a tribute to a man I never met.
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