Annie: Horace would be pissed if I cried, so I won’t. I’m going to say all this in the most calm and collected voice I can find. Otherwise, he’ll probably find more annoying ways of haunting me.
He’s already stinking up my bedroom with his weed and cigarettes as much as he can. Volant Twinkle barks in the middle of the night, and I keep finding dog shit on my floor that didn’t come from any of MY dogs because they’re all properly house trained. I really can’t afford to piss Horace off any worse than I already have.
He’d be pissed if I cried because I’m positive he would ask me where all my feelings were while he was alive. He lived too far down on my list of priorities, and he put me as close to the top of his list as he could. He resented that.
He needed human connection. And that was difficult for him because he truly was terrified of all of you, no matter how much he loved you. I was the only person he would ever reach out to, because I was the only one he wasn’t scared of. And there were too many times I didn’t have the time. So sometimes he tried with other people. And that didn’t work. He used to quote this line, which I find stupid, all the time.
Once he reached for something
Golden hanging from a tree
And his hand came down empty
He found that when he got too close to people, they would end up hating him. It happened with some of the people in this room. I suspect he might be annoyed with some of you for even being here, but Horace was about love and peace, so he wouldn’t have been too pissed that I didn’t have guards posted at the doors to keep you out. In the last five or six years of his life he was doing everything he could to understand why people he let too far in wound up hating him and hurting him. He recognized the problem was within him. He was the only common denominator in the equation. He just never understood it. He did try, though.
I understand why it happened, though. I should have explained it to him, but I never had the time.
It happened because there’s a learning curve with Horace. From a distance -- for example, from the point of view of Facebook Friends -- he’s kind and caring and thoughtful and humble and loving. And he really is all of those things. I’m not saying they were faked in any way.
But when you get closer, you recognize how exceptionally needy he is, and it becomes more repulsive the more you see it. Horace will be there for you whenever you want him. He will listen to whatever you have to say, and he will be nice about it. He will try to refocus you to help you feel better.
But he just got tired of it after enough time because there was no time for him. It was about you. And when your expectations rise high enough, he will certainly fail to meet them, and then you’ll be pissed.
I know. I’m talking about him like he’s still alive. For me, he is. He’s more annoying now than when he was still physically among the living. Now he’s with me whether I want him to be or not. I don’t get to tell him we’ll talk in the morning and then not have time to talk to him then either. He sits in my bedroom smoking and he and Voley are all over that damn house. There’s nothing I can do to get rid of him. I guess it’s his revenge for all those arguments he lost.
I remember when Horace’s Dad died, Horace had to speak at The Memorial, and he got into an argument with his brother about the music they should use in the video Horace made for the occasion, and he finally said fuck it, I’m not doing this. And I was the one who had to talk him into giving a eulogy. And he was grateful to me for that later.
So, I’ll leave you with this eulogy from Aaron Sorkin, who was Horace’s favorite writer.
Charlie Skinner was crazy. He identified with Don Quixote - an old man with dementia who thought he could save the world from an epidemic of incivility simply by acting like a knight. His religion was decency. He spent a lifetime fighting its enemies… So, this fight is just getting started because he taught the rest of us to be crazy too... You were a man, Charlie... A great big man.
Now I guess Jack wanted to say a few words. So… Jack?
Jack: Thank you, Annie. Yeah. Here’s the thing. I was one of the people Annie was talking about. Horace and I started out incredibly close. We just clicked when it came to producing Art. I heard what he did with The Most Dangerous Game, and I knew we were on The Same Page. I wrote him his first original theme song, and that’s what I titled it. You can still hear it on his show sometimes.
And the more we worked together, the greater the Art we produced, the closer we became until finally I expected things from Horace he just couldn’t do. And you know what? That was entirely fair for me to expect. I bought him his goddamn starship. You would call it a MacBook Air, but we called it his starship. All the way to the end, he used that. Even when someone bought him a more powerful computer, he used the fancy one only for videos. He loved his starship almost as much as he loved Voley. And when he failed me, I hated him. I did what I could to hurt him.
I call it my Wolf. There’s a dark and angry part of me that comes out when I feel hurt. I had a lousy childhood, and my adulthood was little better. Hurt People Hurt People. And my Wolf is a product of all of my pain. And when I unleash it, it can be incredibly hurtful to anyone in its path. That was something Horace tried to help me heal near the end.
And here’s the thing about Horace. He could have hurt me back. I know that. He knew that. And he wouldn’t do it. The thought of revenge was repulsive to him. He just went away, and he went on with his life. We didn’t talk for like two years. And damned if he didn’t use the starship I gave him to make his Art better all the time. And, really, his Art was all that mattered to him.
He did an entire episode about why he didn’t do revenge. He told me about that episode, but to this day, I’ve never heard it. I don’t have the time, either. It’s evidently called “A Dish Best Served Cold.” Maybe I’ll listen to it someday. If I can find the time…
And, for Horace, everything was about Time. Once he got his Disability, time became an empty void for him. He loved the absence of alarms. He loved choosing how to spend his minutes. And nothing infuriated him as much as wasting them.
Horace preferred the small to the large. Whether we’re talking about businesses or Artists or choices, the smaller the better. One of his friends was always making enormous dramatic decisions, and then reversing them a few hours later. It was the drama she loved, and Horace wanted no drama anywhere except his writing. He lost patience with her.
And it was kind of Annie to let that person into our gathering. I probably wouldn’t have. I still have too much of The Wolf inside. Annie knew Horace wouldn’t like The Wolf, so she was in charge. She’s kinder than I am.
Now, I’m a minister. And I know a lot of folks are looking for a religious message from me right about now. But Horace had no idea of God in the way most of you think of Him… or Her… or Them… or Whatever. He wouldn’t want me to lead you in The Lord’s Prayer or something. So I won’t do that.
Annie thinks Horace is a ghost now. Horace would have vomited if he heard that. He had no patience for pseudoscience. He was all about evidence and Occam’s Razor. Think horses before zebras. If he were here, Annie, he would be offering you at least five perfectly natural explanations for what you’re experiencing. And you know that about him even better than I do.
But belief isn’t a choice. It’s something so deeply buried inside of us that it’s almost impossible to change. For those of you who believe in a traditional God, Horace could offer you about a billion arguments against your position, but none of them, no evidence in the universe, will change your beliefs. They’re not really a matter of choice.
So, I’m not going to leave you with a religious passage. I’ll leave you with this, instead. It’s from Carl Sagan.
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Horace was part of that universe trying its best to know you and to let you get to know him. Remember him as you see fit. He’s gone back to The Cosmos.
And yes… I love you.
