God fucking dammit.

Michael Crichton died today.

Anyone who knows me and has come close to discussing literature with me knows that he is my favorite author.

That aside, I can honestly say that he is a person who I have never met, yet who has impacted my life. My first memory of Crichton was reading Eaters of the Dead in something like 6th grade, and doing a book report on it. I had some trouble with the book itself and my dad had to help me get past some of the words. Even to a 6th grader, Crichton's style was readable. Poetics aside, I think there is some value to a simple, direct style. I made (with the help of my parents of course) a bitching diorama - complete with big clay figures re-enacting the scene where Bulwyf and Ibn mass their troops together to fight the Wendol. It beat the living crap out of the rest of the class who had some shoe boxes covered in construction paper.

I got an F. My teacher told me that I shouldn't be reading about or thinking of such violent things.

From what I read in Crichton's speeches and essays, we shared something about or childhood. People in authority never liked us, and just as he once purposefully plagiarized a George Orwell essay to prove a point, so have I, many times, sacrificed a good grade to mouthing off to a professor or instructor with whom I disagreed. I grew up not trusting teachers in general, and nowadays I find it ironic that I'm on track to becoming one myself. I also think it has something to do with why I'm 25 and still live in a fucking college apartment.

From then on, Crichton became my favorite author. I read everything I could get my hands on, and each time a new book arrived I grabbed it up days after it was on the shelf. I watched his films. I read his essays and watched his interviews. I even followed ER for a few seasons and I don't even fucking like dramas.

I always found my own writing to be very unpoetic. I try to be as objective as possible and leave it up to the reader not to interpret what happens, but what it means and implies. Clarity, I have found, often raises more questions than ambiguity. Leaving something open to interpretation has always seen sort of drab to me. Leaving something open to discussion is far different. That is the little bit of stylistic territory Crichton seems to have forged into for himself.

Put flatly, Crichton is the reason I began writing - specifically fiction. I ask a question and, like myth-makers of three thousand years ago, dream up an answer. I can only hope that there is a place for me somewhere out there among all of those real writers in the world.

Beyond that I don't really know what to say. I'm still in shock I suppose. With the death of another of my heroes, George Carlin, the election, and my graduating from college, there seems to be a strange sense of finality in the air. Like, this is it. I don't really know what it is, but it's coming. And soon. And if there was one thing that I took away from Crichton, it is that the world is an ever-changing place, and it is okay to be okay with that. Things change, and that is the way it is. Change is natural and normal, not something to be afraid of, as so many people are. Change causes us to re-evaluate our positions, re-adjust our methods, and ultimately to grow. With that in mind, maybe this ominous, looming it isn't such a bad thing after all.

If I could say one thing: at the very least, Crichton kept a socially awkward kid from New Jersey's imagination alive. I can only hope to achieve that. Thank you.