State & Tula

Hi, everyone. Any attempt at an introduction or explanation of what I'm trying to do will stop here and wait a while. I'll begin the inaugural post with what won't be the last mention here of my alma mater, The University of Texas. The latest BCS standings were released about an hour ago - we're #2, and in position (for now) to win a three-way tie-breaker for the Big XII South division title and a chance to play ourselves into the national championship game. I don't suspect the standings will hold, but at any rate, there is at least reason for hope right now. For that, I say, it could be worse. Hook 'Em Horns.

So anyway, I go through phases during which I flirt with the idea of contacting people I know or used to know but haven't talked to in a while. Usually I don't follow through with anything - I'll google someone's name in a couple of different ways or look at their Myspace page, and then I won't think of them for another 3 years. It's probably for the better. Lately, though, I've been slightly more serious about reconnecting with people. See, I'm getting married in a few months, and there are certain folks from my past that are/were important enough to me that I'd really like for them to see it happen. There's Walt, for example, the guy I started my old band with, with whom I share a birthday and who may or may not still be in the Army. Speaking of sharing my birthday and joining the Army, there's the long-lost Mike. The last I heard of him, he married some chick who goes to Renaissance fairs. Go figure! There's my friend Heather from high school, I hear she has three kids now, and the list goes on and on.

Then there's Kyle. He's one of a handful of what I considered "inseparable" friends for the first couple of years of college. He drove a big old gold-painted monster of a car, and we'd drive around crashing classy parties in the rich neighborhood and listening to jazz on the tape deck. Things change: in 1998 I stopped showing up at school, and Kyle declared he "had the blues" and was moving to Louisiana. He wound up at LSU, and I dropped in on him a couple of times during Mardi Gras or whenever, but we weren't really close once he left, and like a lot of friends do we gradually fell out of touch altogether. I got a random phone call from Kyle in 2002 while I was scouring the dollar bins in the back of the old Sound Exchange in Austin. He was living with a girlfriend in San Francisco and working for some kind of advocacy group, and he told me he wasn't the same person he used to be and was thinking of moving "somewhere." Somewhat fittingly, my clearest memory of that conversation is walking out of the record store to get better phone reception and almost getting run over by an ex-girlfriend. The distraction of nearly dying at the hands of a girl I'd really kind of screwed over threw off the dynamic of the conversation and made it hard to remember what we'd been talking about. Kyle said he'd let me get back to it, and that was the last time I heard from him.

I had a close call in 2005 when, according to my friend Mikey (not the Army one) I missed Kyle by about 15 seconds at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. I had run off to get beers, and Mikey said he appeared like a ghost, out of nowhere. He looked the same except for a crew cut, was back in New Orleans to work in media, and left a phone number that turned out to be wrong. This made me start thinking about how I could go about finding the guy, and when I starting making wedding plans, the idea of getting back in touch with Kyle had been lingering in my head for a while.

After some Google iterations, a scan of Myspace turned up a long-abandoned page for a filmmaker/teacher based in Taipei with a picture attached that was certainly the Kyle I knew. He was never as into film as some of us were, but there he was. And God damn, he looked exactly the same. A web link on the page didn't work, but left me with the name "La Corriveau," which as it turns out was the popular name of Marie-Josephte Corriveau, a convicted and executed French-Canadian murderer/folk hero from the mid-eighteenth century. The hunt was on. Anyhow, putting two and two together, this is where I wound up, and it's as far as I've gotten:





Well, if an adult puppet film about an executed and apparently anguished Quebecois frontierswoman/army brat isn't getting anywhere, I don't know what is. Calling Kyle Craig.