Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

15 Jun 2012, 22:39 p.m.

"A clipboard to catalog all my finds"

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2012 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

The first few times I hung out with Leonard in person, he brought me to his friend's parties. Kevin Maples and his pals were interesting, of course, but somehow -- two Fridays in a row -- at some point during the party, they all slipped elsewhere, and Leonard and I were alone in the living room with Kevin's guitars. And Leonard played his songs for me.

I was in a serious relationship with someone else at the time. I thought I was just making a cool new friend. But, in retrospect, all the other partygoers could tell that something was happening, and unobtrusively left us to it.

I'd learned of Leonard through his geek humor site, Segfault, then started reading his blog. His prose had attracted me. His songs arrested me.

A few months later we were dating, and a few months after that we were fairly exclusive, and now we have a world together.

His creative energies flow into his prose, which gets more marvelous every year. He doesn't play much guitar anymore, and I miss that. If you like Constellation Games then you might also enjoy the science fiction songs he wrote, which include:

There's also stuff like "Shoshone Shoeshine" (as mentioned in this week's Constellation Games commentary), and his Age of Reason trilogy, which I adore but which Leonard has stopped playing and never recorded.

I wish I could go back to that room in Oakland, hundreds of Friday nights ago, and listen to that one-person concert with the ears I have now. I think I would close my eyes the whole time. I don't think I could stand seeing him, or me. I think I miss that moment as others miss their hometowns. I think I was too transported to know I was happy.