About John
Black
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| John, as Frida, for Halloween |
I met John Black at my first job out of college in the fall of 1997. We both worked for a travel publisher in Austin. My first memory of John is riding on the elevator with him during my first week of work, early in the morning. He was sucking on a cup of coffee and looked very grumpy.
"How's your first week going?" he asked me.
"It's going ok. I'm not used to getting up so early, though."
"Don't worry," he told me, "eventually your soul gets numb."
I would eventually learn this was John's sense of humor, but hearing that during my first week at my first "real" full-time job scared me. Later, he would tease me about the face I made when he said that. We became good friends due to any number of things. Our love of the same food (we ate lunch together often), a similar sense of humor, and a need to make things. From the beginning, John encouraged my writing. I wrote my first published piece at this job and John made a design for it and published it on the company's web site. Eventually, he designed the first version of this journal site. We also began a literary and arts e-zine called STILETTO.
I
moved from Austin to Miami, back to Austin, and then to Chicago. Throughout
all this we remained friends and co-horts. We updated STILETTO and John
often designed the online versions of my writing. I always assumed he
would design the cover of my first book, if I had anything to do with
that decision.
In 2000, while undergoing routine blood tests, John discovered he had leukemia. He had not yet developed symptoms. For this, and for many other reasons, I believed he would beat this disease. He was very strong physically, as well as spiritually and emotionally. He felt a strong affinity with blue jays, something he discovered after his diagnosis. He began to notice them and when he did, he felt a lightness of heart and a sense of hope.
Through it all, he kept creating. He always amazed me. He usually had several projects going on at once, and finished work much faster than the average artist or designer. He was a very intense and concentrated worker, but once he was done, he didn't typically obsess over something. He moved on to the next thing. He was incredibly prolific. He also was talented in many media. He painted, he drew, he liked working in Photoshop, he had done theater and performance art, he played guitar, and wrote his own music.
I now believe he worked so intensely and got so much done because he instinctively knew he didn't have too much time. In the spring of 2003, he underwent a bone marrow transplant. The transplant was successful, but John died due to an infection resulting from a weakened immune system after the procedure.
Besides assuming John would design my book jacket, I always thought he would be at my wedding. After we got married in August, Nate and I took a road trip through Texas and New Mexico. I thought about John a lot on that trip. While we were in Santa Fe, we stopped at a glassblower's studio on a whim. I browsed for a few minutes and almost immediately, I found a glassblown blue jay. I think of him as a wedding gift from John. The bird now sits on our home altar.
Before he went into the hospital, John knew I was interested in updating my site and replacing the old design. The current design was an idea he had, done quickly and emailed to me before he entered the hospital. I've kept the design as a memorial to my friend. John was one of the funniest, sharpest, most talented people I have ever met. I love him and miss him. If you are interested, John wrote about his leukemia experience in an anonymous online journal. You can read it here.