By my calculations he’s probably transiting the various moons of Jupiter right about now on his way to be reincarnated as an Egyptian cat… But that all depends on how much you buy into various wormholes, Esoteria, and a brew of speculative masonry, shades of Catholicism, a hearty dose of skepticism, hints of Agnosticness (and/or Gnosticism) but at the core of all of it an affirmed belief in the rights of humans in a fair and just society.
The Pacific has never felt bigger than it does right now, me in Japan thinking about my pal, someone I spent literally thousands of hours with, often in very confined quarters from modem rooms to “space cruises” exploring far reaches of the grand Pacific Northwest while going to set up some Internet connection, launching Wi-Fi hotspots, making podcasts, somehow in Amsterdam as special judges for a notorious cup in which we visited all 32 of the coffee shop candidates because dude was serious when he got on a quest. Roasting out with rock stars in green rooms and photo labs, all-night sessions trying to figure out which is the bad modem in the rack, suddenly throwing on jackets and ties for a lobbying session trying to explain the importance of the free and open Internet and the catastrophe of junk email to legislators that would later call us and say “will you come over to my house and help me connect my computer to this Internet stuff?”
Later, grinning like a Cheshire cat with his arm across the governor’s chair with a bow tie as she signed bills into law. Bills that we helped effectuate into law through lobbying organizations which we quite literally created (it’s amazing what you can do with good letterhead, thanks David White).
Of course he was a legislative page, something about a Catholic altar boy, an herb grower in Alaska, a Deadhead who stayed in hotels rather than dirty campgrounds, and a raconteur who would somehow tie together quotes from Nietzsche, Heinlein and Barney Miller in the same riff.
Throughout those thousands of hours, he drove me nuts as I was the “junior member” of the legendary ISP OlyWa-net, later all those hours sequestered in lawyer offices as we brokered a deal that we thought would elevate us to take on those big telcos (ha ha), the insipid golf tournaments (do you know the story about Belize?), hi-jinks introducing corners of my previous and future home Vancouver, elevators to endless floors of server racks at the mysterious Westin building to find just that one server that plugged in the magic that we helped spread out into the world. Maybe this was your magic. Your website.
You see behind every nonprofit group, NGO, arts group, rock band, music festival, record label, community radio station, artistic collective or otherwise from about 1996 onwards, everyone needed Internet and if you scratch behind the curtain a tiny bit there was one curmudgeonly often thoroughly thoughtful wizard with a heart of gold connecting all of these “users” to the dang old worldwide everything.
He took great delight in being that guy that you might have to remind him three times which he would do just to be a little bit obstinate and make sure you were serious, but if you look at any nonprofit, community newspaper or music festival in and around Olympia for those halcyon days of the pre-corporate-silo Internet (yes here I am sharing this message on a silo nonsensical facsimile of the Internet) you will see an OlyWa or Zhonka logo. And yes, we often got passes to festivals with photos taken from an early-generation digital camera against a crappy wood-panel wall and a nondescript Quince Street office (and at these backstage shows, Jay was much more interested in providing “green room hospitality” to the artists, actively nonplussed although inside he was delighted to be rubbing shoulders with Tad (who is who in that photo) or Negativland or well blah blah blah, or we would be “paid” in boxes of CDs from K Records or Kill Rock Stars or Sub Pop, or there’s the whole story how we danced around the baffling bureaucracy of Evergreen to put KAOS radio online with a very creative solution. Again, on the outside annoyed but inside amused by the technical challenge… after all he had run ISDN to his house, dual frame relays to some conference center, 56K modems (that used to be very impressive) and engineered the first DSL connections in western Washington (yes even before US West themselves), not to mention dedicated IP addresses so geeks (you know who you are) could run servers and VPNs from their house) remember this is in the 1990s and early 2000s. Such things were absurd to even consider.
He knew the inner workings on how an idea becomes a law, how public utilities districts work, why the Hood Canal is a dead bio-region, why Rachel Corrie is/was important, and would explain all of these things while always taking the long way home with a beautiful glass bubbler in the cupholder and somehow we’re ending up at the park with musical stones and somehow we’re making a podcast about it (yeah you can listen to it).
Later both of us lacking B.A. degrees after stalled efforts at Evergreen and other colleges, in the malaise of trying to restart the magic from OlyWa with another incarnation (which he reeled me into unwillingly but with charm and big dreams which let me know that he actually liked me ha ha) we started back, taking weekend courses well, a seminar, it’s Evergreen after all, about how organizations work or something like that, anyway he’ll insist that I’m at his house at a certain time because we were leaving exactly then, of course he was never ready, and :45 minutes later we leave the house with a dozen fried sausage patties and a carafe of best coffee and pint of half and half, and roll into class into the back row, critiquing each other’s essays (“you go on and on way too long, get to the point” he would say (of course he’s right), I would say “you’re way too sentimental with your writing and you pretend to be this serious analytical logical guy” (of course I was right). When I had a notion to write the LSAT and go to law school, he teased and harassed me about it but also gently supported me. And then when I moved back to Vancouver he was visibly annoyed but also gently supported me (again showing me that he actually liked me ha ha).
Somehow in the mid-2000s it seems like the Internet had another sea change with all these open-sharing platforms of which he was an early user of everything, especially Flickr where there is a trove of goodness(and including this Facespace which was only for certain universities at the time). The Clubside Breakfast Time podcast was one of the first 100 podcasts existing in the world, us with clumsy balanced laptops at various cafés from Bellingham to Centralia, posting up with various mixers and headphones to talk about Oly life, play music from obscure bands, and digging into philosophical or hilarious (to us) topics. Some of these still exist right and going through our endless strings of text messages across six different channels the past few days, several times he said “I’m gonna get you all those files for you to archive”, i say repeatedly “OK great, just put them on a Google Drive or whatever” and then of course something like “I would never use that service what you gotta do is open up a secure socket layer and blah blah blah something something blah” and I’ll say “I’m not opening a command line just give me the damn files” I never got the files, I never got the passwords to the blogs (or his unsecret movie/tv show archive).
What I do have are newspaper clippings, some but not all (Did I mention the column he did for the Olympian newspaper?) Plus the articles he “critiqued” for me about open Internet from Menu Magazine, something about a court diversion program in Works in Progress, and more articles in the Business Examiner including the slightly odd “40 Under 40” award in which we didn’t really fit the other 38. Yeah I know it’s just artifacts right but I also say “we are the stories we share” and he loved to share despite him insisting otherwise ;)
Through those back-in-Vancouver years, I ramped up a merry-go-round of “next generation” Internet companies in Vancouver and somehow found myself as the veteran experienced guy in many circumstances and loved sharing the stories about “the legendary Unabonger” with my new recruits as well as sharing the stories back to him about how I was taking the knowledge that we had gained together and building new things with it.
Yet wasn’t always easy for him operating with his keen intellect and very specific highly technical skills to find those new/next jobs (once you go from being an entrepreneur to being a guy going to job interviews with someone who you’re clearly more experienced and let’s be honest, smarter than, it’s a tough go) however, then somehow he was going to the Bahamas or Bermuda to do some Internet thing back and forth, I was back and forth to Jamaica and we laughed about the absurd irony of it all remembering being stuck in the office processing support tickets while also looking at real estate and jobs in The Hague.
Along the way both of us developed a significant level of gallows humour about medical conundrums, me with ME/CFS, him having a terrible trip and fall requiring a very complicated extraction from “Cosmo’s Condos” another busted bone incident in Toronto (i think), around the same time as me with an IV in Mexico, then his bout with cancer (which he kept significantly low-key for a very severe condition) and I wrote back to him saying “yeah I know it’s cancer and all that but I also know you’re invincible and cancer ain’t got a chance against you, it’s probably trying to figure out a way to get out of you” sigh
Then there was a job at the State and he was so excited as he had dropped a bunch of weight (yeah yeah he was a big dude, always make sure you have the XXXL T-shirt for him from your company/bar/band and he’ll be so excited about that, evidence abounds) found a great new hairdresser, and I remember a phone call from outside of McCoy’s (one of the many establishments which he kept me posted about from Olympia) looking great and feeling positive and then saying “I used to think I had a really high alcohol tolerance but now that I’m lighter, I’m finding that it’s not to be the case” and I joked back saying “yeah think of me at 140 pounds trying to stay up with you big guys where you’re constantly giving me another double peaty scotch drink and wondering why I’m fading out”.
Sure, both of us dealt with pain and loss of career opportunities (name check for The Clash) as a result but frequently had long talks especially while he was out on space cruises narrating the drive around Olympia streaming consciousness like :“so there’s this new band I gotta tell you about”, or “you remember the old Fish Tale place…”, “Oh you remember Lois…”, “Oh you remember C Average,”… “Did you see the video of Kevin Smith calling me out from stage about getting him baked before the show?”, or “nah i don’t get coffee there anymore, instead ya gotta go to… we’ll go there when you are here next. When are you coming here anyway?”
All while he rolled around town, fiddling with some sort of headset or double phone set-up (I didn’t even start in about the VoIP phone topic well we could take a desk phone to any of these Wi-Fi hotspots, or was it ethernet(?), and the office phone would ring through while we were having coffee and Eggs Benedict and pausing a podcast recording to explain IP numbers and DNS settings), and then in the midst of conversation, suddenly there’s another mutual friend on the sidewalk and he’d call out “hey I got Uncle Weed on the line!” He helped a guy (me) who has no homes or too many homes feel like i was still part of the Oly cool kids.
Going to all these hundreds of conferences/trade shows/events/Chamber of Commerce meetings/meetups/whatever, we made kind of a funny pair, suddenly were Abbott and Costello but about the Internet and ummmm weed (did I tell you about that HempenRoad film story? How we normalized and demonstrated how to be a competent productive member of society while being verrrrry open as well as hosting loads of activist sites?)
Heck I didn’t even tell you about how I met Jay about 12 hours after meeting the charming Charles Lance Tomala and incandescent Scott Orr setting up at Super Saturday at Evergreen (selling tie-dyes and gautie clothes while i was setting up to vend hemp bags and a flower sticks) less than 24 hours after I had arrived from the island of Guam (learning about the Internet the day Jerry Garcia died and thinking “I should be part of this”) and uprooting my life from beaches and slacker Jimmy Buffett tour guide jobs to the worst winter in Olympia history (1996) and the grey skies and educational complications but within scant hours of arriving, I’m met these three dudes who would impact my life immeasurably, now one is gone. (Maybe i did tell you already but not all of it, cause cannot tell you all of it…)
{Of course from that circle of comrades, we’ve lost a few others along the way, in the text thread with Jay it would be catch-ups about mutual friends who had checked out early under one circumstance or another, always delivered with empathy and thoughtfulness}
Oh did I even mention his wedding, when we were all wearing kilts and he was being married to dear Brielle, the two of them in a church like some kind of medieval fantasy tableau on the way to a Renaissance fair? Brother Daniel Olson his best man, us with flasks tucked into sporrans and posing with trimmed up beards? Or him helping me box out a very special large quantity green gifts (in cute sticker plastic containers no less) for everyone who came to the going-away party at the Clubside Café when I left Olympia – the Numbskulz from Pe Ell rocking out, strangers peeking in the windows with great envy as we poured keg beers with all the coolest kids in town (that means you).
[And yes I can tease him about the surliness and the obstinate-heartedness cause dude would be the first to tell you that he’s never wrong and always willing to argue his point and while he would never concede that you were correct later on, he would show you through a gentle act of kindness and flipping your own argument around back to you. I’m speaking from extensive experience here and with a heart full of love.]
Jay loved life, Jay loved Olympia, Jay loved Cascadia, Jay loved intelligent conversation, Jay loved spacing out with a ridiculous movie or TV show while he’s also taking a phone call (btw, no matter if you were in the midst of a critically important conversation on a deep topic at the end of the receiver you’d hear “what’s going on?” and he would reply, switching to a drawl “nooooththin’”), while simultaneously freshening up a Volcano, wrangling food for some dog or variety of cats, or filling up thermoses of coffee for that Evergreen class or a drive to set up a hotspot in Sequim or wherever.
We talked a lot recently which is one piece of solace I can take from this experience. It would either be five minutes or an hour and a half, never something in between, the last time in the middle of September I got to remind him as he was feeling a little bit concerned about “what comes next” that I know he’s brilliant, kind, thoughtful and he’s loved by so many people and I’m always there to support him no matter what no matter whenever and that I love him.
The last couple days since I got the news from Lance and others who were there with him during that final stretch, I’ve struggled to figure out how to share his story: a podcast? a zine? yet another video playing ukulele and telling stories?
I want to be there for a wake or a funeral or a ceremony and I wanna make a speech (cause that’s what i do) and I want to tell all of the stories around the campfire but none of those things are gonna happen, not right now anyway. Though I am really happy that returning the stage for the first time in 13 years in Vancouver, this summer, I shared the legend of the “Internet hippies, spinning up servers and modems in those 1990 days” on a big screen at the planetarium at an event by our pal Kris Krüg (ps you should watch it ;))
I do know I have a tremendous archive of bits and pieces, so many hilarious photos, some which are rather incriminatory, some stories that definitely will never be shared, and so many that I want to share because so many people knew bits of Jay but very few of us knew all the multifaceted aspects of this big generous brilliant obstinate multidisciplinary man who was always on the side of openness, acceptance, compassion, and curiosity and opposing fascism, tyranny in all forms.
So to you dear reader, from my humble little house in a minor provincial city across the incredibly vast Pacific, what stories would you like to hear about Jay? What artifacts should I surface? How shall I surface them? If Kinko’s still existed I’d be down there making an almanac of artifacts, but for goodness sakes I’m not making another website.
To dear Brielle Brennan, I know this is so incredibly hard for you and one of these days soon I’ll call you and we’ll gab… Please know over the last few days instead of posting this message here, I’ve called around to all manner of characters he/we met at conferences, sometimes only once or twice and sometimes dozens of times, to tell them personally my stories about Jay and break the news of his passing. Learning about such things in this format is “suboptimal” as Jay would say, so I wanted to give Jay the respect he deserves for a true pioneer and critical builder and connecter of arts and humanities, technology and communication, and social justice and public policy.Also we both loved listening to John Cairney reading the musing of Robert Burns and the fact Todd Rundgren’s “I hate my fcking ISP” was the hold music at Zhonka” – ha!
To all Jay’s friends, please let us share his stories, most of the memories and help Brielle both emotionally and logistically through this most difficult of transitions in life.
And remember whenever you have a chance to talk to a friend who is out on a space cruise, make sure you tell them you love them at the end of the call. Honestly.
Questions accepted, suggestions encouraged.
Yours very fondly from Tsuchida Cottage, Okayama Japan
Dave Thorvald Olson / uncleweed
