Here is an entire chapter from my most recent book, Hidden Experience. This is a collection of my memories and blog posts about my friend Mac. This was terribly emotional to write. I am adding it here ten years to the day after his death.
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Chapter 4
Remembering Mac Tonnies
Last night I dreamed I was an android. Someone told me, very casually. I wasn’t particularly surprised, but the revelation left me with a vague sense of existential unease. Speaking of dreams: that’s one very good reason for creating a blog that I hadn’t thought of moments before, when it just seemed like a Cool Thing To Do. A dynamic medium like this welcomes dreams... in 30 years, we’ll be carrying around personal dream recorders and thrusting them into the faces of friends saying, “Watch this!” But everyone will be too engaged in their own half-forgotten Technicolor reveries to pay much attention.
—Mac Tonnies
January 26, 2003 (the first week of his blog)
Friday, October 23, 2009
Mac Tonnies, my friend, is now dead. He was found in his apartment on Thursday, October 22.
Mac was one of a kind. He was a brilliant thinker, very funny and a beautiful speaker. I’m crying in a coffee shop in Moab as I write this.
You need to understand something—I needed Mac to reassure me that I wasn’t delusional or insane. He got some desperate late night calls from me, during my moments of darkness. He was enormously supportive of me, and my confusing issues.
A little over a week ago, he’d called me out of the blue. We would occasionally have ridiculously long talks about UFOs and the paranormal, and this was the first time he’d ever called me. We spoke for about three hours, and that was normal. I shared some deeply personal stuff, and he was understanding and humorous.
Mac and I never met in person, but I considered him a close friend.
Text added Dec. 2018:
The post above was written at a coffee shop in Moab, Utah. I added it to the blog within minutes of hearing the awful news.
Mac was a remarkable young writer, whose thoughtful voice could have changed the way we think about UFOs. He was a blogger, and his site Posthuman Blueswas perceptive, creative, wry, shrewd, smart and funny. It debuted in 2003, the dawn of the internet era, and he played with ideas about the future, humanity and UFOs. He lead the quintessential bohemian life, working as a barista in a Starbucks in Kansas City, Missouri while producing a remarkable outpouring of creative work.
He was an author, playwright and essayist. He hosted an episode of Supernatural Investigator, a Canadian television show about the research and implications of extraterrestrial life—and watching that now is heartbreaking.
His death hit me hard, and it took me nearly five months before I could collect my thoughts enough to write about him.
My Pal Mac Tonnies
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
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| in his element |
Just a few days ago, I wrote an email to a friend about Mac Tonnies’ final book. I typed out the word posthumous, and was struck by how much it looks like the title PosthumanBlues, the name of Mac’s blog. My mind can get trapped in an unhealthy obsessive spiral, and I see every little coincidence as a sign of something deeper.
This is a long post, a rambling self-examination on the loss of a friend. I’d been dealing with a jumble of spinning memories, and needed to get them out of my head and written down. I may remove it from the blog at some point, but it feels honest.
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In late October of last year, I drove back from a small UFO conference in California (Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland event in Joshua Tree). This was a decidedly heady time, and a lot of intense stuff had invaded my life.
I stopped in Moab, Utah to visit a friend, and camped in the desert at the edge of town. The next morning I had a smoothie at a small breakfast shop, and for some reason I’d requested bee pollen as an extra. I’d never had it before, and figured I’d give it a try. Within minutes of finishing the drink, my face turned red, my lips puffed up, and I was itchy all over. I left the restaurant, walked around the corner and threw up on grass next to the sidewalk.
I was having an allergic reaction. At no point did I feel my airway closing up, but believe me—I was one step away from driving to the emergency room. I took a Benadryl, and waited for it to pass.
While in the throes of this anaphylaxis event, I went to visit a UFO researcher named Elaine Douglass. We had met once before, and had spoken on the phone many times.
When I arrived at her home, she saw something was wrong with me. I tried to explain, but was worried I would be sick again. I ended up lying on her bathroom floor for the next half hour. Eventually the symptoms began to subside, and we drank tea together at her kitchen table.
We talked about her research, and I told her about my ongoing weirdness. I felt progressively better, and after about an hour I seemed fine. I thought our visit would be short, but we ended up talking for hours. It was late in the afternoon when I finally said goodbye.
At that point I had a long drive in front of me, from southern Utah to my home in Idaho. I went into a little cafe on the main street to fill up on coffee. I pulled out my laptop, checked my email and found out that Mac had died. I sat alone in the back corner of the cafe and cried.
I had talked with Mac just a week or so earlier; it was a typical conversation for us—deep, wide ranging and lots of laughs. It spiraled on late into the night.
I’d assumed that one day I would sit in a coffee shop with Mac, we’d drink espresso and talk, just like we always had. And now he’s gone.
I wrote a short notice and posted it on my blog.
Mac had a reverence for espresso—he wrote about it lovingly, and often. I went up to the counter, ordered a double latte short, and savored every beautiful drop.
At that point nobody really knew how he had died, but from what I’d found online, it was assumed to be a heart issue. Earlier in the year, Mac had told me of an experience where he had gone to the hospital to get some sort of heart exam. This was after he’d fainted at work. He was calm and dismissive about the whole thing, treating it as a nuisance.
I got in my car and started driving north. The emotional numbness was oppressive and scary. I chose to travel on the two-lane desert highways, avoiding the inhumanity of I-15 and Salt Lake City.
The drive was astounding beautiful. I had a series of podcast interviews with Mac all loaded up on my iPod, and I listened to them as the sun set in a glorious display of red and orange. The route was empty and desolate, and I drove for as long as an hour without seeing another car.
One of the downloads was a four hour long Coast to Coast interview from just twenty days earlier. This was particularly beautiful and bittersweet. You could hear the delight in George Noory’s voice, it was obvious he was perfectly charmed and engaged talking with Mac. As silly as this sounds, you could sense his mind expanding trying to keep up with Mac’s big ideas.
During this time alone in my car listening to Mac’s calm and wise voice, my chest began to ache. There were sharp pains right behind my ribs, and I knew something was wrong. I have a minimal amount of first aid training, and the symptoms of cardiac arrest are severe “crushing” pain. That wasn’t what I was feeling, it was presenting as something less intense, but something was wrong.
The pain in my chest seemed related to the allergic reaction from that morning, but at the same time, it wasn’t lost on me that it could be some sort of sympathetic reaction to Mac’s death. I pulled into a gas station, bought a single aspirin in a little foil packet. I swallowed it and hoped this wasn’t the big one.
I got back in my car and drove off into the lonely night.
When I finished all of Mac’s interviews, I started over and listened again.
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