This week I heard about Fele Umbra dying.
I have a lot of thoughts. Not least because I knew him most through the Naiad and Hijinks. Mostly I remember the few times I was sober meeting him and a morass of drunken times merged into one.
I say I was sober, I’m not completely certain I ever met Fele Umbra sober. I remember him loudly declaring (with the Naiad) one time that Rehab was pointless.
There’s a type of person, an alcoholic raconteur, that I get on really well with, that I know how to flow with and who you see in the pub every so often and just continue the conversation with from last time.
They’re usually men though I’m not convinced Fele Umbra was. Certainly I’m using he/him pronouns but I don’t know for sure his gender identity. Certainly he was pansexual the last time he and I talked about such things, and, meant affectionately, he had the sexuality of an alley cat. A Shadow Cat perhaps.
He was a year younger than me but I’m pretty sure he was around uni as or before I got there as I’m pretty sure he was on LuBBS and that was how I first encountered him. I think he got banned a couple of times from LuBBS, unsurprisingly given that he was blunt to extremis and could be a dick over code. The fact that I’ve read two obits now and they both mention his reputation for being an arsehole is something I’ve definitely noted and not been at all surprised by.
As with all raconteurs I’m not sure what was true and what wasn’t but I’m pretty sure he had his undergraduate degree early and was working on a masters when I first knew him. I don’t know he ever got it, I think he maybe dropped out when he formed his company. I think his drinking got worse after the pandemic too and I wonder how much the Yorkshire House shutting down played into that. People drink differently in the pub to at home.
The last conversation I remember having with him was in Hijinks flat, it was about speed running life. He’d lost his parents young, he’d gotten his degree young, he’d founded a successful business (I think at that point it was successful) before he was thirty and now all there was ahead of him was decline. He was waxing poetic about the decline and there was no dissuading him.There are rumours about what he died off, I assume something addiction related.
But all I’m thinking about is conversations layering into conversations, talking about Speed Running life in Hijinks flat folding into a conversation in a bar on campus about living fast and dying young. I think the Naiad and I were present, I forget who else. There’s a shadowed corner of my brain who dismisses the rest of us for the cowards we are and it’s only Fele Umbra who had the guts to go ahead and do it.
I’m old I suppose, 42 seems young to die, and he raced himself into that grave.