Heather Gold

The only privileged access I had to SJ was being very close with people who protected him on a daily basis, and one of his cooks.
You fit an amazing amount of transference for a person in here, for a person you’ve never broken bread with, and from what his praetorian guard tell me, that’s entirely the deal. (So many stories they have that can never be told)

Folks are singing their emo band 3 chord eulogy. The better ones will set it aside for 6 months or 6 years, then to perhaps do a little exposition of the lyrics & structure where they solve for X, and are able to remove most everything that isn’t themselves from the equation in order to extract the meaning for themselves these feelings reflect.

That sorta makes an aspect of SJ as RM Rilke, by way of JFK (DIY culture refs here)
Pain + Time = an operating system. (coughs)

hi James. I do know a number of people who knew him, interviewed him, a couple who once worked with him. Of *course* there’s transference. He was cruel to people too. There’s a lot there that I don’t know. All I can share is my experience. And moments of absorbing what is best from others or what has been best for me is still really significant to me. I don’t have any illusion that my remembrance is any kind of approximation of his day to day acts with many people in person.a I can only speak about my experience, on which i am the expert. And as a little kid, seeing him made a huge impact. Of course it was my energy and imagination to come out. But we all need witness and example to develop and grow. that can come from many places. One for me was SJ.

Was worried I’d sound too out of tune in the initial post.
Certainly you’ve got first order emotion going on, but this is a territory quite beyond.
The experience is so big, so tall, sharply dressed & with platform shoes.
It’s American Icon territory here, Converse Hi-Tops, Coke. Babe Ruth. Honest Abe.
It’s beyond mourning a guy who did cool stuff. I know 3 people with inches of access to him since Next, I’m sure the people you know more like a yard (you’re you after all, gimmie a break).

He got off on his devilish side much as anything else (more, maybe) but that’s the flesh person, not what’s resonating.
This isn’t about a guy who wore shoes, had kids, a vegetarian who liked leather furniture.
Of course your experience is primary & valid, who’s to tell you (or anyone) otherwise?

What’s happening is more than that in at *least* this way…
It’s the emotional transfer of everyone’s hours of …hmm…what if I move this here…click on …wow, thats COOL!. Being jealous of the rich kid you knew getting an Apple II or that first Mac when maybe your own dad had enough extra dough for an Intelivision and everything in the decades since.
If Neil Armstrong was allowed to embody all of NASA & the history of rocketry to Goddard, it might be like that. If WW2 was all Patton or whoever.

Tech is inherently cold, it’s the wire doll mother with food the baby monkey doesn’t like, SJ is the fuzzy mom doll they embraced (as I tweeted to Debs the other day) People need to *feel* more than they need to eat, nothing else has given them a locus of feeling for tech.
Your gig, in some partial sense, is to be a ‘feelie’, but one who knows how to think through the feelie in others. (If I was really stupid here, I’d stick in a line about TNG Counselor Troi, but I have the self discipline not to.)
.I suppose the only other person who’s been supersized in our lifetime in this way was Cowboy Ron, but Reagan was for another kind of people.

‘And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.’ I buried my sister with that line. The people who knew him directly, who carry neurosis stemming from his personal weirdness get to do that,
‘for me mothers and the
mothers of mothers’, his oldest daughter, perhaps, will get that one.

For the Paul Bunyan of tech, the appropriate lines are probably more from Captain My Captain.

It’s a unique & personal experience felt by ungainly hoards….and most of them were like the geeks I saw at HQ the night of his death, hands in pockets or compulsively snapping photos of the cards & candles. Seems like you are spozed to see them, get their hands out of those pockets & placed on each other’s shoulders, & take photos of each other.

(this was so long because I have other stuff I *really* have to do, and this was a great way to avoid doing it)