Current mood:

missing a piece

So yesterday we got a call from my brother (he lives in the same co-op) telling us that Matt had been in a really bad motorcycle accident and was in the hospital. For most of today I was trying and failing to maintain an air of hope, which shattered when I received word this evening that he had died from his wounds. It hurts.

I lived with Matt as a roommate for one year and a housemate for two more. By the end of that time we were, of course, both rather annoyed at each other, but nonetheless we still got along pretty well, and we both really enjoyed our intellectual discussions of mathematics, philosophy, computer programming, mythology, politics, sci-fi/fantasy novels, really bad movies, Discordianism, the Crusade (hell, that's one more of the Council of Five gone), RPGs... all sorts of stuff. Those were good times.

Even before we were roommates we spent a lot of time together back in freshman year. Wandering around campus late at night, drawing faces on eggs and putting them up around the Egghead sculptures, going to English folk dance practice and Ren Faires, coming home from practice and trying to dance Rufty Tufty in the tiny common room of the second floor quad, hanging out on the balcony and discussing philosophy, a weekend backpacking trip up near Tahoe, Irish music with Seafoid Cruthanta, studying for IS finals, the beginnings of the Campus Crusade for Chaos and Confusion... and then that summer Hazel and I returned to Davis for a couple of days, and met up in Matt's apartment for one of the most important conversations of our entire relationship.

Sophomore year we moved into the Co-Op That Wasn't with Yev and Corso. Gah, the living conditions were hell, but apart from that it was a great year. We gift-wrapped all the boulders of Stone Poem for CCCChristmas, we put up 108 bright yellow paper smiley faces all over campus, we set up a very odd decor scheme in our room, we hooked up our computers for a lot of big Starcraft games, we learned to dread Yev coming home from aikido practice to show us the new moves he learned, we ate more ramen than most people do in their entire lives, we debated for hours the true meaning of time from the perspective of both mathematics and computer science, we role-played vampires, we role-played cavemen, we tried our damnedest to make the co-op work, we finally moved out when we realized the cards were stacked against us.

Junior year Matt and Yev and I went into Exile--we had a tradition of naming our apartments. A lot of that year sort of runs together in my memory, probably because I wasn't getting much sleep. I do remember, though, that Matt was frequently encouraging me to sleep more, mainly by vigorous glaring and rolling of eyes when he woke up in the morning to find that I had spent the whole night grading papers.

Senior year we moved to a new apartment once again. A wonderful housewarming party with blue-green lighting and plenty of sea shanteys led to it being christened The Grotto. I think two of the main influences on Matt that year were the fact that we were right across the street from the International Food Store and the fact that we suddenly had a backyard (and by "backyard" I mean "small fenced cement area"). Thus he cooked even MORE interesting spicy foreign food than before, and set up all sorts of interesting projects in the backyard. The project most prominent in my memory was Cybertremere's cape... in order to dye such a huge mass of fabric, we drove around the neighborhood in early January collecting discarded Christmas trees, let them dry out in the backyard for a few weeks, then Matt and Cybertremere set up a makeshift firepit using cinderblocks, balanced a trash can over it, filled the trash can with water and a huge heap of dye powder, lit the Christmas trees underneath, and boiled the cape for, I don't know, probably a day or two. We had a lot of barbecues, too, or "meat orgies" as Yev called them. For Matt's birthday that year we rented three absolutely horrible movies (Night of the Demons II, Dungeons and Dragons, and... hm... I forget the other one) and played Horror Movie Cliche Bingo. As in "Ooh! The cheerleader was the first to be killed by the zombies, but she got naked first, so I get to cross off the upper left square!" Heh. That was a great party.

I'd be lying if I said I always got along with Matt. Towards the ends of both junior and senior years we got into a lot of (rather petty, now that I look back on them) squabbles about apartment maintenance and chore responsibilities and so forth. But that sure as hell isn't what I'm going to remember him for decades down the road.

Matt was really really motivated (and motivating) in all things. If I remember correctly he worked himself through college all the way. He started off as an animal sci major, pried his way into computer sci/engineering, and supported himself by programming for the psychology department over the summer.

On 11 September 2001 we spent the day riveted to the TV in shock. By that evening we knew there was a war coming, but we'd be damned if we didn't do what we could to at least try to stop it. Working with some friends we managed to put together a pre-emptive peace rally in Central Park in just three or four days, and around 400 people showed up.


And now, because I can't think of anything else to say, here is a retrospective of the various characters I've seen Matt play in RPGs. Perhaps it will encourage further reflection on his personality.

Corso's Vampire game: an extremely paranoid (and effectively so!) Ventrue, with tons of very useful security gadgets

My Immortals game: a caveman who became immortal and turned into sort of a wandering priest archetype. I recall that at one point, long after he realized he couldn't die permanently, he climbed up Mt. Everest and jumped off just to see what it would be like. (Damn. Okay, I'm tearing up now.) Another time he and Corso's character (the archetypal scientist) and Hazel's character (the archetypal herbalist) managed to domesticate the woolly mammoth. I think they eventually became a horde of barbarians, rampaging around the ancient middle east in giant carts pulled by the last surviving herd of (shaved) woolly mammoths.

Corso's one-shot Pentagon Infiltration game: some sort of infiltration/covert ops specialist, I think. I was playing an inventor whose secret project was stolen by the military to turn into a superweapon, so I hired Matt's character and Yev's character (a ninja) to help me break into the Pentagon and steal it back. The ninja got shot fairly early on. Matt and I disguised ourselves as soldiers. I tried using a combat knife to shave my beard so I wouldn't be recognized, and rolled a TRIPLE CRITICAL FAILURE on my Dexterity check. I had to spend most of my remaining Willpower just to prevent myself from cutting my own head off. Yeah, we all had a good laugh over that one. Never managed to finish the game though.

Cybertremere's Dragonstar game: a combination mechanic/techno-sorceror. He lived in a spaceship cobbled together out of spare parts, and had a magic roll of duct tape that could fix anything. I was playing a pilot who eventually got transformed into a robot, which was useful because he could use his mechanic skills to repair me (MEDIC!). Unfortunately it also meant that if I annoyed him he had a magic spell that could turn off my power source. Towards the end we were doing all sorts of weird time-travel and dimension-hopping, and I think we ultimately ended up facing down some dark and nefarious god at the end of the universe. Then Cybertremere pulled the "and then they woke up" ending. Bah.

My Call of Cthulhu game: a psychiatrist (MEDIC!) who also belonged to a secret society called the Grand Fellows. He and the other characters (the psychiatrist's wife, played by guess who; a student of photography and the occult, played by Cybertremere; and a kid with amnesia and strange powers, played by another friend of mine) managed to investigate a couple of haunted houses and exorcise one of them. I was planning to lead this into an epic struggle between several secret societies backed by dark eldritch gods, but various people moved out and we didn't get around to continuing.

Some LARP game or other: a Malkavian with two insanities: pyromania and pyrophobia. No, these are not mutually exclusive. Basically he would light things on fire and then freak out and run around screaming. I think at one point he ran screaming through a big important meeting with his hair on fire. The others looked at him, rolled their eyes, and continued with the meeting.


Rest in peace, Matthew Godwin. May Nyarlathotep, Eris, Loki, Hermes, Coyote, Nasrudin, and every other trickster god in the multiverse be with you tonight.
-=-Barnabas Truman

Take thine refuge with thine wine in the nothing behind everything as you hurry along the path.
--THE PURPLE SAGE
Honest Book of Truth; the Book of Predications, chapter 19