As of November 28, 2012, the guy on the far
left of this photo is dead.
Specifically, he is no longer in possession of his head, which he removed with
a shotgun.
If that sounds terrible, it is. (Trust me, I miss him very much.) But it’s also
the sort of crisp, clear writing that Darin Nicholas Nick Johnson
would have appreciated. Here is the exact moment when I knew that he had a gift:
It was the middle of the afternoon. A man lay on his back in the middle of the hallway. He was barefoot and wearing no shirt.
[…]
“You’re sure you’re okay?” I asked as I passed the guy in the hall again.
“Eventually you will make a mistake,” he said calmly.
I shrugged and went to my room, where I curled up under the covers and started to fall sleep. Before I did, I groaned and climbed out of bed to lock the door, in case he had been talking to me.
That’s from a mass email he sent to friends
while working in Antarctica. Those emails became the basis for his book Big Dead Place, which I highly
recommend.
I recently went through my email archives, but
was only able to locate a handful of emails from Darin/Nicholas. Here are two.
The first is from 2001. I asked Darin why he stopped sending mass emails about
his adventures in Antarctica. Here is his reply:
From: Johnson, Darin
Subject: RE: hey!
Date: 12 May, 2001
7:31:45 PM EDT
To: Ryan Bigge
Hi Ryan.
Yeah, I tentatively decided mass emails are gross. I can't quite put my finger
on it, I like to get them but when I send them I just feel cheap. So I rarely
correspond at all! With anyone! I should get a job as a consultant for Negative
Solutions Inc.
I'm writing
a book called "Big Dead Place" about Antarctica. I don't know yet if
it will be a travel account or a nonfiction story using themes and literary
devices. The idea is that Americans conquer Antarctica but that spiritual
corruption conquers Americans. (Maybe it's a human story, but I only feel
qualified to go for the jugular of Americans.)
Yesterday
I heard that in July it's traditional to have a holiday called "Christmas
in July". Christmas trees. Egg nog. Candy canes. Listen, one Christmas a
year is already too much and these zombies want to have two.
I must go
eat waffles.
Take care
of yourself.
Nicholas
This
second email, from 2003, was in response to a question I had about where
Nicholas was now living.
From: Nicholas Johnson
Date: 27 June, 2003
7:11:39 PM EDT
Ryan,
Are you
still in Toronto? I don't remember why, but I gathered you found Toronto an
improvement over Vancouver; still true?
I'm back
in Seattle. I'm subrenting an apartment in a real honest-to-god neighborhood. No
more eating at the gas station, and I don't have to sneak around in the alleys
looking for a dumpster for my trash. There's birds, and a garden in the back. Kind
of creepy, but oh well.
I spent
the last week pissing in cups and bleeding in tubes for my employer at this
place called LabCorp in the suburbs. The gal who works there wants to become a
nurse. There were six copies of TV Guide on the waiting room table, though the
TV was playing an in-house video touting a pharmaceutical company. I went in
one day for a drug test and she sprayed blue stuff in the toilet and told me
not to flush the toilet and not to wash my hands or I would have to retake the
test. The top of the toilet was taped down with some tamper proof red tape. When
I came out she told me about people who have snuck in with bags of other
people's urine hidden on their person. But it's usually too cold (chilling on
the way to LabCorp) or too hot (from the microwave that they heated up in
before they arrived). "Then I have to call their company and tell them
their employee tried to cheat," she said.
Though I
have been reduced to a hollow shell of the correspondent I used to be, thanks
for all the emails you've sent my way. A while ago you sent me one from salon.com about a guy on the ice who wrote some shitty article
comparing working in Antarctica to being on "Survivor". I later found
out that that guy was so good at poker that he had taken a bunch of people for
about US$6,000 over the course of the season, not cheating, just playing. So
even though he had a very low-paying dishwasher job, he made some good money
down there. That story is far more interesting than anything he wrote about,
yet it is nowhere to be seen.
That
article about the guy reporting from the DMZ was hilarious.
Speaking
of hilarious, I'm reading your book. Besides laughing though, I am happy to
finally learn what that whole cocktail craze was all about. The way you explain
it gives it perfect meaning, rather than just being another retro fad to fill
the void. You did the same thing in tracing the emo/indie thing. So I'm reading
and alternating between laughs and "aaaaahhhh, so that's what that
was..."s.
Working
on anything now?
I'm
trying to get all my pictures together and a glossary for my book, which I just
sent off to Feral House for the first round of publisher edits. It should come
out sometime while I'm at the Pole, where I have a year contract starting in
October. It is difficult to imagine that anything can be worth the miserable
year of hell entailed in writing that accursed book whose publication is to me
like excising an inflamed tumor, but I suppose it will be interesting to see if
there's any fallout while I'm there. In any event, I learned a lot in the
course of the project. One time you said to me, "These emails are good. You
should write a book about this." Though I can say with absolute authority
that those emails were mostly ego-driven dogshit, thanks for the support. It
helped.
I hope
you're well.
Nicholas
