Dwenius

We regret to share with you the news of the death of Brett Summers. Brett died on Saturday, August 6th from complications arising from chronic alcoholism. Those who knew him, or were familiar with his published works, will mourn the loss of such a truly gifted friend and companion.

Brett Summers, also known as the author Brett Palomar, was born in Los Angeles on May 16th of 1968 to Darrell and Sharon Summers. The family returned to Texas when Brett was 13 and after several moves Brett graduated from high school in Tomball, Texas, a National Merit Scholar. The experience of migration would inform his latter writings. Brett then attended Texas A&M University where he obtained both undergraduate and Masters degrees in Philosophy. In 1994 he moved to Houston, and then to Austin in 2003, putting his incredible grasp of ontology and "meaning" to work in Austin's nascent artificial intelligence industry. He spent three years at Cycorp in that capacity. A consummate coffee lover, he spent his last professional years in Seattle doing similar work.

Brett loved hard. He was often a penetrating critic of his country's follies and of his local community. He had wide range of friendships, many of them centered around the Burning Man experience, the Usenet group Talk.Bizarre, and his beloved aikido dojo. These friendships and connections figure prominently in his later writings and the lessons learned from his observations form the core of his last published work, Overcoming Peace of Mind. Published under the nom de plume Brett Palomar, the work is available on Amazon. Those wishing to hear Brett's voice again, or to gain insight into the ennui of the turn of the century, have a blessing available to them there.

Brett was loved. Few people have left such an indelible impression on so many so quickly. His was not a friendship for the age of ease and low investment and he can number among his friends those outsiders who have pushed through the noise and brittleness of modern society to ask, as he did, what the good life is, and how do we live it, and always with Brett; how can we share it with friends.

He died in Columbia Missouri, surrounded by his friends and family. Brett is survived by his parents, his fiancee Hannah, and the many who loved him. Services will be held on Friday, August 12th, at the Reser Funeral Home in Warsaw , MO.

[Paul Lord Brett's parents decided not to publish in the local paper, as he had so few friends in MO, but they asked me to post this to FB and LJ.]

[Now that LJ seems to be up again. Jesus, Russia, can you put your bullshit politics aside for a minute? I got IMPORTANT SHIT to do and I need LJ up even if it requires that you stop suppressing dissent for a few hours. So cool it with the DDOS.]

I posted some short notes yesterday with the high points, but I wanted to share more details:
Continue reading →

This may be disjoint and long as I want to capture as much as possible for all of you. Some of the news below is stark.

Continue reading →

My very dear friend Brett Summers is currently in Columbia University Hospital in Missouri, and his condition is extremely grave. He has been struggling with alcoholism for some time and developed Hepatitis over the past year. Several stints of rehab were only marginally successful and about a month ago he fell into a coma in his house. He has been in the hospital since then with acute liver and kidney failure. His family and doctors are unsure whether he will live a week, or a month,
or —

I'm flying out tomorrow and hope that he will be out from sedation long enough to know that I am there. If not, I'll play him the Orb, and read to him from Italo Calvino, and leave him the get well cards that Calvin and Rose made, and otherwise keep him company through midday Thursday.

Please send your love and good thoughts for him. Anything you post here, I will do my best to relay. I'll either read it aloud to him or print your words and leave them by his bedside, or both.

Yesterday after a little sugarin' (I went with everyone to the first shack, with the ginormous Belgian horses pulling the cart to the OMFG complex grade B ambrosia at the end. Bought a big jug of that stuff, yep), I got out of the house with my guitar and amp and pedals in hand, to hang out with a local guitarist who happens to play in the Grateful Dead cover band I saw just last week. We knew of each other thanks to, natch, an Internet guitar geek forum where cork-sniffing tube elitists argue the merits of different bits of kit. Go internet go.

As Anne would say, "FINALLY."

We started playing and all of a sudden 5 hours had passed. Unsurprisingly, my exorbitant rig sounded completely and utterly ill even at neighborhood volume. Somewhat surprisingly, all these years of woodshedding have finally started to pay off in the hands/ears/chops department. We were both listening to each other and navigated our way through some very satisfying grooves and segues within the canonical "open jam goes HERE" songs in the repertoire. D. has a high gear he can take his solos to that I haven't got but that's a "feeding off the dynamics of playing with others" thing that is my next big learning challenge.

It was awesome. We're going to do it again. and D. is plugged into the local scene in a way that should lead to more opportunities to jam, hopefully culminating in an actual steady gig. So that's the plan.

I had a dream that there was a version of the Bible– King James text, natch– where every ritual object of value, every prize, every temptation, was replaced by bacon.

Eve eats the bacon of Good and Evil.

God tells Abraham to sacrifice his bacon.

Moses hears the voice of god in a pile of burning bacon, and later comes down from the mountain to destroy the golden bacon idol that his people were worshipping.

Jesus goes to the wedding in Caana and turns all of the water into bacon.

Satan appears to Jesus in the desert and offers him all of the bacon in the world.

and so forth.

I give this brain worm to you for free.

We have taken a momentary break from the Papa-tales at bedtime– which is a relief, honestly, because we were deep into reruns and I was desperate for a little more variety and a shorter bedtime routine as the moving/house-hunting/etc. ramps up– and out of almost nowhere, both little ones are interested in _Where the Sidewalk Ends_. We tried before, but something didn't click. Now they can't get enough.

Now, thanks to this book, Calvin tells me, "I think that boogers are actually snail teeth. You know, from the sharp toothed snail that lives in everyone's nose! His teeth break and then when you blow your nose they fall out!"

and then two nights ago, the two of them stayed up probably 90 minutes past their bedtime, cackling in the dark at each other while they used various funny voices to recite this gem:

My beard grows to my toes,
I never wears no clothes.
I wraps my hair
Around my bare,
And down the road I goes.