RIP, Dan

I’ve lost a colleague and, more importantly, a friend.

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I met Dan Sorensen at least a dozen years ago, possibly more. He had heard that I was taking over The Prospector, my college’s student newspaper, and had stopped by my office to introduce himself. He was a philosophy professor, but he also had background in journalism — more background than I had, certainly. It was a good conversation.

A few years later, I wandered into a faculty lounge, where he was having lunch, and tried to hold up my end of a discussion about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Fortunately, I’m relatively curious and not afraid to ask questions, so it wasn’t too hard. And Dan was generous with those questions. We both knew that he knew way more than I did — hell, most of my knowledge about K & N was probably oversimplified, popularized nonsense. But it was another good conversation.

We connected over the next few years. I served as mentor for a semester. I wrote letters to support his attempts to land a full-time philosophy professor gig. We both were parents of children with autism. We both had grown up in the church, and were glad that was over. We bonded over tacos, though his tacophilia was — like just about everything, I think — more present and intense than my own.

I visited him at his home in Reno a couple times. Late nights of long conversation, ranging from work to philosophy to parenting to skateboarding to music.

He was an unusual thinker. I rarely “liked” anything on his Facebook page because, most of the time, I had no idea what he was talking about. (He was fine with that; Facebook was more a record of his gestalt at the instant of that particular post — highly idiosyncratic.) The same bemusement happened from time to time when we were talking — but I was never afraid to say, “Hey, I have no idea what you just said,” and he never seemed to mind.

On my second (and last) visit to Reno, he set up some music equipment in the living room. He had recorded a kind of electronic synth and drum loop, and had just bought a new Gibson Firebird, and wanted me to record something. He picked one of Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” — “Do nothing for as long as possible,” which was at once awkward and thought-provoking — and I noodled away.

I liked what we’d done, though somehow it got erased or lost. But he emailed me another short drum loop. I added a guitar riff and sent it back. An “80s Miami Vice vibe,” he said, and told me he’d get back to me once he’d had time to sit with it awhile.

That was about eight months ago.

Since then, he’d left Reno — for Florida, and then New Mexico, as I understood it. Teaching online increases mobility. I stayed in touch, if that’s what you can call it, over Facebook; he had sent me the vinyl of PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love, which set me on a journey listening to her whole ouvre. Most recently, he’d convinced me that I should compare her demos for Is This Desire? to the final, released album. I was supposed to report my findings to him.

A couple weeks later, he was still writing relatively cryptic responses to jokes I would post.

And not many weeks after that, he was dead.

In just the few days since I learned of his death, I’ve already caught myself composing thoughts about PJ Harvey for the next time we talk. It’s not quite the level of Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy” — I feel much less guilt, certainly — but I relate to the speaker’s instinct to share beauty, only to recall that the person isn’t around to share it any more. A deeply hollow feeling.

I think I will pull up that drum loop and see if I can turn it into something, maybe this summer. Maybe I’ll consciously pursue that 80s Miami Vice vibe. It seems a fitting tribute.

P.S. It may seem weird that I didn’t write about how he died. The truth, though, is that my knowledge of that is fourth-hand, and, not being family, I don’t feel it’s my place to break such news. At the same time, I wouldn’t want people to assume, or fear, that he took his own life. That did not happen; his death was accidental.

But anyway, this isn’t about his death. Just his absence.