As you doubtless discovered, I'm an inveterate clipper-and-mailer of media tidbits... newspaper articles, oddball statistics, book passages, snapshots, adverts, found objects... anything that interjects itself into my life to remind me of someone. For all that I've always found the impulse vaguely embarrassing, a pursuit better left to helicopter moms and well-intentioned grandparents, it's never been enough to deter me. Nowadays it's made worse by all this new-media nonsense -- amidst the online flood of information, it's just so easy to fling things across the virtual divide via Facebook, or Twitter, or what have you.

Except when I want to send something to you. That's not so easy. Where do I direct the links, the photos, all that wry commentary that isn't half as clever as I think it is? I'll find myself reading something, thinking of you, and copying the URL, with no idea where to paste it. It's not like I forget you're dead; even when I want to, I can never lose touch with that. It's just that I can't seem to forego the ritual: encounter something, mark it, and send it your way. It's an orphaned impulse, a dropped connection, and I don't know how to resolve it.

And today, in a whole other conundrum, I find myself lost about how to mark your birthday.

So I guess I'll solve both problems at once (though imperfectly), and address something to you here. A sort of unsendable birthday card, on an uncelebratable birthday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/magazine/01fob-consumed-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

I saw this awhile ago. It made me think of that high-heeled woman on her cell phone, leaning against her stalled/steaming Hummer in the central valley-- and of course you joining in the long, gleeful parade of middle fingers extended out hundreds of open car windows, part of that slow line of mudspattered Tahoe refugees inching back to the Bay, airing your collective opinion of that lady and her classy manicure and her broken-down monstrosity of a vehicle.

It made me think of your countless small acts of provocation against unattended SUVs. It made me think of you, teetering between satisfaction and sheepishness as you recounted a carpark confrontation with some especially vapid Hummer driver. (Had she stumbled across you leaving a note? Writing in her dirty windshield? I can't remember...) As I recall, she first seemed naively bewildered at your hostility towards her "car", then increasingly apologetic as you explained your environmental reasoning. It hardly seemed possible, but she'd simply never thought about her gas consumption before, or any of the other multidude of sins against the environment, vehicle safety, or simple taste that she was committing.

It was you at your best: puckish, idealistic, earnest. You felt like it was a successful encounter -- ground-level activism gone right.

I would've liked to know what you thought of the article. Would you find it funny? Or would you be irritated to find Hummer-driving assholery elevated to anything so heroic as "brand-mediated moral conflict"? I wish I could find out. I wish you could be around to tell me.

Happy birthday, I guess.