Police have officially released the details of what happened the morning my coworker Julie Jorgenson was killed. It sounds like the rumors I posted the other day were all right on target, with one added tidbit: the dipshit driving the pickup not only had iced-over windows and was going way too fast for the road he was on, but he was also straddling two lanes when he collided with her. Not at all surprisingly, investigators believe he was “under the influence of a drug.” Exactly which drug is still unknown, pending the toxicology report, but I’m putting my money on methamphetamine, judging from this photo. Isn’t he a fine-looking specimen of humanity? I know people always look like hell in mugshots, but I can tell just from looking at this creep that he’s a worthless piece of redneck filth.
The filth’s name is Shane Roy Gillette. He has a previous record relating to various drug charges, so I don’t have much doubt he’ll be doing some serious time for this incident. The tragedy is that he’ll get out in 15 to 20, still relatively young, while Julie will have been dead for decades. Bastard.
You may recall me mentioning a while back that the classic sci-fi TV series Doctor Who was filming an episode right in my own backyard, specifically Utah’s Monument Valley. Well, now you can catch a glimpse of the result in the official trailer for Series 6. (In case you don’t know, the Brits call a television season a “series,” and what we think of as a series is a “program” — well, technically, a “programme” — and yes, I realize this trailer won’t make a lot of sense to people who aren’t familiar with the show. To be honest, I haven’t seen enough of the most recent season/series to consider myself “familiar” either, but hey, it’s Doctor Who, and it’s Utah, so I get that much at least…)
When I was a teenager watching the super-low-budget ’70s-vintage Doctor Who in my bedroom late at night, I never could’ve imagined the show coming to America. Back then, every alien world or historical time period the Doctor visited looked suspiciously like a rock quarry just outside of London, a windswept heath right out of Thomas Hardy, or a really cheap plywood set. To be honest, that was part of the show’s appeal for me, because it was so different from what I was used to, and everything looked so… British.
The show is different since its 2005 relaunch, with more variety in its real-world locations and CGI enabling the producers to create (mostly) realistic and truly unearthly virtual places, but there’s still something constrained, for lack of a better word, about the show’s overall look. I think it’s the difference between the cozy, worn-in landscape of the U.K., and the rugged, wide-open spaces I’m familiar with out here in the western U.S. Which means I’m itching with curiosity to see what such a quintessentially British series is going to make of such an iconic American landscape. I hope it’s more than just that wonderful helicopter shot we see in the trailer, that the producers really took advantage of being here. I suspect they did, what with all the talk about “somewhere different, somewhere… brand new.”
Incidentally, although this marks the first time Doctor Who has filmed in America, I know of at least one other episode that was set here, and once again, the action took place in the deserts of Utah. Well, in tunnels that were supposedly beneath those deserts, but still, close enough. Salt Lake City was explicitly referenced, in any event. It makes me wonder who on the Who staff has the fascination for my home state….
Hm. You know, the modern incarnation of Doctor Who is produced by BBC Wales. It occurs to me that my own ancestors were Mormon converts who originated from Wales. Now isn’t that an interesting coincidence? Is it possible the producers feel some inexplicable pull toward this dry, desolate land so far from their own green hills, like something in their blood? Sounds like a Doctor Who storyline right there…
Inspired by a conversation with my coworkers, here’s Harrison Ford’s big-screen debut, in a 1966 crime thriller called Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round:
Dead Heat starred James Coburn as a criminal who’s pulling various con jobs as he gears up for a bank heist. It actually sounds like a pretty good flick, based on the plot summary, but I suspect the only reason anybody talks about it today is because of Ford’s somewhat ignominious debut. It is available on DVD, it appears, so maybe I’ll throw it in the Netflix queue, just for kicks.
Harrison was a contract player for Columbia at the time, earning $150 a week and going uncredited for his walk-on part in Dead Heat. He would struggle along in this bottom-rung position for a few more years, appearing in forgotten movies and random television episodes, mostly westerns. His big break finally came in George Lucas’ American Graffiti, in which Ford played the badass hotrodder in the black ’56 Chevy, Bob Falfa.
What a strange, somber, frustrating, and seemingly endless day this has been.
The memorial service for Julie, my unfortunate coworker, was held this afternoon. I planned on attending — I even wore a shirt with a collar! — but as the time to leave approached, I found myself with a job sitting on my desk. And like a good little drone stationed on an eternal assembly line, I just automatically picked it up and started doing what I do.
It could’ve waited, especially considering that all the people who were next in line to see it went to the service and wouldn’t be back for a couple hours. I should have put it off and gone as well. But I didn’t. I figured I could take a quick look at the thing and have it finished in plenty of time to get to the memorial, and then the job would be waiting and ready to go when the next person on the line returned. Except I didn’t think through what other people were doing, and even though I was finished with fifteen minutes to spare, I found myself in a deserted six-story building with no one to give me a ride to a church too far away to walk to in anything less than an hour or so.
It’s not the first time I’ve been stymied by the realization that my car was 25 miles away from me and I was effectively trapped within the relatively small radius I can walk in a reasonable amount of time. I have good reasons for riding the light-rail to work, rational reasons: I save money on fuel expenses, and avoid wear and tear on my car; I don’t have to park my beloved Mustang in too-narrow parking stalls where it’s going to get covered with door dings; I’m being a good citizen by not contributing to traffic congestion or the ever-present crud layer that chokes the valley in the colder months; and the 30 minutes or so I spend on the train can be used reading. But once I reach the downtown area, I’m essentially stuck there, and that’s sometimes inconvenient as hell.
I only hope that wherever Julie is now, if she has any awareness of what’s happening back here on our plane, she understands why I wasn’t there. God knows it’s something I’m going to regret for a very long time.
Incidentally, I hear through a reasonably reliable grapevine that the police think they know what happened, even though they haven’t officially released the news yet.
For any Loyal Readers who may be interested, Julie Jorgenson’s obituary is now online.
Much of my initial shock has subsided now, but I’m still sad about a friendship I never quite made, and horrified by the manner of her death, and I suspect those things are going to bother me for a long time. I’m also deeply angry about the senseless, unfair, random stupidity of what happened. I haven’t seen any follow-up stories in the news since the initial report on the accident, so I still don’t know if the guy who hit her was drunk or otherwise impaired, or if he’s just a f**king idiot. Not that it matters much. The end result is the same.
Just a reminder that I’ve turned off the commenting feature due to those golmonging spam-bots (“golmonging” being a highly technical terms utilized by Lloyd Bridges in the original Battlestar Galactica, naturally). If you’d like to respond to anything I’ve written or otherwise contact me, you can send email to jason AT jasonbennion DOT com. I can also be reached on Facebook.
For what it’s worth, I really miss the conversation around here…
I have the good fortune of working with a lot of really incredible women, many of whom are young, smart, ambitious, and almost preternaturally glamorous. They are exactly the sort you expect to encounter in this crazy advertising industry, and you can tell within moments of meeting them that they’re on a rocket-ride to fabulous careers and lives.
But the world is frequently capricious and cruel, and one of those young ladies won’t get to finish her ride. Her name was Julie Ann Jorgenson, and she was killed this morning in a brutal car accident.
