[Warning! Unfunny material and the use of the first-person singular, dead ahead! Proceed with caution!]

I've been debating whether or not it's appropriate to incorporate the recent passing of Douglas Adams into AtAT's plotline, because at first I felt that somehow I'd have to make it funny; I suspect that Mr. Adams would have wanted it that way. Frankly, I'm not up to a challenge like that right now. I'm not going to summarize his life or list his body of work, since zillions of other people have already done a better job of that than I ever could, but I do have a few things to say about the man, and so I ask that you indulge me for a moment.

Whenever somebody dies, and especially when the passing is sudden, there's a lot of sadness about a life cut short and the tragedy of unexpected loss. But when I saw on Saturday that Douglas Adams had died of a heart attack the day before, my first response after the initial requisite disbelief was an odd moment of unbridled panic. It wasn't until later that I realized that what I had experienced in that brief flash wasn't grief for the loss of the man, but rather a completely selfish sense of loss for whatever projects Mr. Adams had yet to deliver. Should I feel guilty about that fact? I don't think so; mourning the loss of an artist is one thing, but mourning the loss of his art is probably the highest compliment anyone could give him.

Moreover, the loss is compounded because the man made us laugh. In a world like this, we need every laugh we can get, and so I can't blame myself for selfishly mourning the laughs I could have had if only Mr. Adams had gotten a little more time. I feel much the same way I did when Phil Hartman died; of course I was shocked and saddened at the tragic circumstances of his demise, but there was also a whole lot of "No more Lionel Hutz? No more Troy McClure?" undercurrent as well. Laughter is one of the things that helps us cope with loss, and so to lose the laughter too is the real kick in the stomach. And what made it worse this time around is that Douglas Adams was making me laugh many years before Phil Hartman; in that sense, he was an older, dearer friend.

In a corrugated cardboard box somewhere back in Chicago, I still have my original weatherbeaten paperback copy of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I first acquired at the age of eight after my big sister told me to read it. That fact is more significant than it looks at first glance. We were living in Australia at the time, and along with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Adams's first book was one of the Holy Trinity of three works that really warped my eight-year-old mind into the twisted thing you see before you today. In a very real sense, it changed my life, and anyone who has read the book and seen any amount of AtAT can probably understand how. When the time came for me to return to the United States a year or so later, I was allowed to fill exactly one small suitcase with items to bring back with me-- I had to distill my entire life into five cubic feet, and make it count. The Guide obviously made the cut. That action speaks louder than any words of praise I can offer.

Now, of course, just as Troy and Lionel live on in syndicated Simpsons reruns, we'll always have Mr. Adams's existing work to make us smile, and something tells me I'm going to be falling back on that safety net for the rest of my life. I still read the Guide and its sequels every couple of years, and I always find something new in there that I hadn't noticed before. And they still make me laugh, and more and more often they make me think. I don't doubt that the books did something horrifying and wonderful to my brain on a very basic neurological level, because (for instance) I just noticed that I've been carrying a towel around in my omnipresent shoulder bag for the past few weeks for no readily apparent reason. Was it an omen?

The obligatory Mac stuff: One of my biggest regrets is that Katie and I have never made it out to the San Francisco-based Macworld Expos, and missing last year's turned out to be a huge mistake. It wasn't until after the show that we found out that the MacAddict affiliate dinner to which we had been invited was host to none other than Douglas Adams himself. We could have had dinner with Douglas Freaking Adams. Sure, we got to see him speak in person at a couple of the New York-based AppleMasters events, but it's not the same as discussing life, the universe, and everything over breadsticks. Now we'll never get that chance-- well, not unless we run into him at Milliway's in a few million eons.

It's no wonder that Adams was chowing down with the MacAddict folks, because he was as big a Mac addict as they come, ever since the beginning. He even mentions them by name in his books. Faithful viewer Jens Baumeister set our minds at ease about one thing that had been troubling us: at least Adams didn't depart from this world never having used Mac OS X. Appropriately enough, in his last ever posting to his own web site's discussion forums, he mentions that he "was going to wait till the summer to install it," but finally broke down and tried it a few weeks ago. While he acknowledges the operating system's rough edges, his final words are positive and forward-looking: "I think it's brilliant. I've fallen completely in love with it. And the promise of what's to come once people start developing in Cocoa is awesome." Yes, the man's last word (at least in that medium) was "awesome." How perfect is that?

Anyway, thanks for letting me ramble. Make no mistake, kids; if it weren't for Douglas Adams, there'd be no AtAT. If I had to do the pack-my-life-into-a-suitcase thing again, I'd have a tougher time of it (it's a good thing PowerBooks don't take up much space), but I like to think I'd still find room for that ratty old copy of the Guide. And a towel.