Headwaters

First things first: Sisyphus is now available for purchase as a digital download or CD through Bandcamp, and can also be heard on your favorite streaming site. My deepest gratitude to everyone who has accompanied me on this lengthy journey. Now, on with the final three blog posts!

"Headwaters" was a late addition to the Sisyphus tracklist, having been written in October 2023 and replacing a different song for which my bandmates and I had been struggling to find the correct arrangement. Upon further consideration, we realized that this was likely because the song wasn't as strong as some of the others on the album, and that it was rehashing thematic and topical ground that was already being covered in a more interesting way on other songs. However, in some ways the sources of this song go back much farther in time than any of the album's other tracks do.

Around the turn of the millennium, most of my time on the internet was spent in two places: on a semi-popular website and forum I ran that discussed my experiences as a woman involved with tabletop roleplaying games (a somewhat quaint idea now that gender parity is much more of a thing in the RPG hobby - I've never been happier to become obsolete), and on LiveJournal. Because of this status as what I suppose we'd now call an influencer, I got a fair number of LiveJournal friend requests from random people who'd visited my website and liked the essays I posted there. The internet was different then, and often I would accept these random friend requests after taking a peek at the journal in question to make sure this person wasn't a raging bigot or a weirdo or a perv. The request I received in the winter of 2002 didn't seem like it came from a person who was any of those things. It came from an Australian guy who seemed to spend most of his time reading SF and fantasy, rehabbing what sounded like a pretty serious knee injury, and playing on a recreational netball team (what the hell is netball?)*, and I accepted it.

I'm not entirely sure why my friendship with Greg endured when I've lost touch with so many other people I met online during those years. In some ways, timing was in our favor. Not long after we connected on LiveJournal, I traveled to Spain for the first time and had a profoundly meaningful experience there. By total coincidence, Greg had visited some of the same sites that had so deeply moved me just a few years before, and I think that sharing that additional point of connection helped to deepen our friendship beyond just having similar interests. Not long after that, I started running a campaign of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer roleplaying game (combining two interests we both shared) and wrote summaries of the campaign in my journal. He mentioned that he had a lot of ideas for where he'd take the game next if he were running it, and said I should reach out if I ever wanted to hear them - sure, why not, grad school is hard and it helps to have an extra person coming up with game session plots. We've run five RPG campaigns together this way.

As you might expect for two people with a 16-hour time difference between them, most of my interactions with Greg have typically taken place asynchronously: via LJ comments, emails, message board posts, Twitter DMs. There have been times in our friendship when we were in contact almost every day, and longer lulls of not managing to talk much for months on end. Through it all we held on to a hope of someday being in the same place at the same time. After several previous attempts were thwarted by job loss, a global pandemic, and other unforeseen circumstances, Greg finally made his way to Minneapolis in the summer of 2023. It was a truly wonderful visit, and I was struck by how natural his presence in my day-to-day life felt, as if it were as normal and expected for him to be there alongside all the other friends I've known for 20+ years.

Herons in the rookery still nest up in the trees.

We spent a lot of Greg's visit taking in the natural beauty that Minneapolis is fortunate to have preserved within its city limits. As we walked and hiked I found myself talking a lot about how my environment had changed with time, and how different some parts of it were from the way they had been in the past: shipping on some stretches of the Mississippi River ending to slow the spread of invasive carp, the trickle that was the drought-stricken Minnehaha Falls that summer when they should have been a roaring torrent. It's not lost on me how the same innovations that have allowed me to befriend someone on the other side of the world and finally share space with him have also contributed to too-warm winters in Minnesota and devastating bushfires in Victoria. The world is just as full of damage and decay as it is of beauty, to the point where it's hard to separate one from the other.

Something that has come into sharp relief for me since the all-too-brief time I spent with Greg is how the Internet is simultaneously the source of all the best and worst things in my life. It introduced me to my husband and some of my dearest friends, keeps me connected with my music community, puts vast quantities of knowledge and information at my fingertips, and makes my daily life easier in countless ways. It is also an addictive cesspit that exposes me to a constant stream of bad news and an anxiety-inducing 24-hour news cycle, creates a breeding ground for radicalization and the spread of misinformation, and (not to be too dramatic about it) continues to actively contribute to all sorts of ills that chip away at the foundations of our civilization. I'm not sure whether having one is worth putting up with the other, or even if that's a useful way to think about the consequences of choices none of us fully knew we were making at the time that we made them. Maybe all that any of us can do is to hold tightly to moments of magic no matter where and how we find them. I am grateful for the opportunity to have practiced finding joy with my dear friend against all the odds, and for all the other treasures that I am still working hard to pull out of the muck.

(This is the place where I would include a photo of Greg and me if we had managed to actually take one at any point during his visit. I guess we'll just have to do it again sometime, yeah?)

* I know what netball is now. Don't @ me, other Australians.