About a week before Valentine’s Day, my darling Girlfriend and I were talking on the phone about how neither of us had a clue about what to get the other in honor of the annual February bacchanalia of hearts, chocolate, and the color pink. I don’t know how truly stressed she was feeling about the lack of ideas, but I was an anxious wreck this year. V-Day has always felt like a trial to me, a minefield seemingly designed to trip up well-meaning but clueless guys who just don’t have the ingenuity to measure up to the nebulous feminine concept that is “romance.” Guys like me, in other words, at least when it comes to socially mandated displays of romance such as, say, a holiday dedicated to the idea. And those mines seem to get closer together with every passing year, too, increasing the chances that one of these Valentine’s Days, inevitably, I will step in the wrong place and lose a leg. Every February 1st, I begin the month thinking, “Good lord, how am I supposed to top that one year when I actually managed to get everything right? And didn’t I just go through all this with Christmas a few weeks ago?” You see, it was drilled into my head eons ago that V-Day is supposed to be a big deal to women, and god be with the man who gets it wrong.

So I was taken completely aback when I heard Anne saying, “Why don’t we just forget Valentine’s this year?”

“What?” I stammered. This was an unexpected development.

“No, I mean it. I enjoy the cute little teddy bears and the flowers and all, but really, what good are they? You display them for a couple days, then they go into a box or get thrown out. It’s all really pretty silly.”

“Ooooookay.” I had all my antennae up at this point, scanning to see if the Bothans had gotten it wrong and the superlaser was, in fact, fully operational.

“I know you love me,” she continued. “You show me all the time.”

And just like that, all the tension evaporated. On the big day itself, while other men were spending half a week’s pay on roses and fancy dinners that require reservations and clean shirts, Anne and I exchanged cards — this holiday is largely an invention of the Hallmark company, after all — and then we went to the mall for corn dogs.

Yep, I love that girl all right…

I have this friend at work, a guy about my age who shares my somewhat, ahem, old-fashioned tastes in entertainment, and we often have a good time discussing stuff no one remembers except us. A couple months ago, we were in the midst of one such conversation when we came to an unexpected epiphany. It seems a startling number of the TV shows we enjoyed as small boys — think early to mid-1970s — shared essentially the same premise. See if this sounds familiar: there’s a guy roaming the countryside, sometimes with a sidekick or two but usually alone. Sometimes he’s on a personal quest, sometimes he’s on the run from something, and oftentimes it’s both. Every week he arrives in some new location, where he finds the residents have a problem — a corrupt sheriff ruling with an iron fist, an evil developer trying to strong-arm people into giving up their land, outlaws who terrorize the villagers every full moon… you get the idea. Our hero has unique skills or insight and is able to help the people out; then, at the end of every episode, he’s compelled to move on before the adversary who is pursuing him can catch up. As a shorthand notation, my friend and I refer to this premise as “the guy wandering around helping people.”

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Just to keep you all up to date, the son of a bitch who killed my coworker Julie Jorgenson has been charged with second-degree felony manslaughter, as well as driving under the influence of a controlled substance and assorted misdemeanors related to driving like a f**king idiot. You can read the details here, if you like.

The article I linked above includes a few more specifics on what actually happened that frigid morning: Shane Gillette’s truck was moving at 70 mph, on a road posted for 30 mph, when it struck Julie’s car; there was no evidence he even tried to brake; and his windshield had only about six square inches that were clear of frost. There aren’t enough expletives in my vocabulary to express my feelings about this irresponsible, lunk-headed waste of protein.

Incidentally, I’ve received a couple of emails from people who knew Julie far better than myself, and who’ve run across my blog entries about her. I’m gratified that they seem to feel I captured her pretty accurately. If they’re reading this, I’d like to extend my thanks for their thoughtfulness in contacting me and letting me know.

We’re starting to move on at the office, but there’s still a strange tension in the air, as if we’re all expecting to her to walk in at any moment, flash that huge, endearing grin, and say, “Look, I’m all right after all! It was all just a misunderstanding!” I actually smiled myself as I was typing that, because I can picture it so clearly. It’s really very weird to think that it’s never going to happen, that I will never see her or her smile again. But that is one of the sad truths of life and death, isn’t it? People are here and then they’re not, and we who stay behind are left with unfulfilled expectations… holes in our daily experience.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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I don’t know about all you fine folks out there in InternetLand, but as far as The Girlfriend and I are concerned, midnight can’t come soon enough. Not to be a drag or anything, but the past twelve months have been a real suckfest for the two of us. And no, I’m not just grumbling because 2010 is ending without a second sun in the sky, as we were promised back in the ’80s.

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One of the more amiable examples of Salt Lake street life is a man by the name of Eli (pronounced “Elly”) Potash. With his scruffy beard and missing-teeth grin, he basically looks like any other homeless guy (although my understanding is that he’s not quite homeless; he may spend lot of time out on the streets, but he apparently does have some place to go at night). However, there’s one very noticeable difference between Eli and the riffraff that hang out in the downtown core: Eli is never seen without a beat-up cello at his side.

I’ve heard that Eli was once a professional musician who studied at a prestigious music school and recorded with a philharmonic orchestra. But then something happened to him… a mental illness, or maybe it was a problem with drugs. Nobody really seems to know for sure, at least nobody I’ve ever talked to. Whatever the cause, though, he lost his old life, and now he makes music for passersby in front of the Broadway Centre movie theaters on 3rd and State, or the Capitol Theatre on 2nd South, or sometimes on the plaza in front of Energy Solutions Arena before a Utah Jazz game. He’s a strange cat, to be sure, and his playing isn’t always up to his former standards; sometimes he seems to just be noodling around instead of actually playing anything, but he doesn’t seem to be aware he’s not really playing anything, if that makes sense. Even so, he’s generally pretty entertaining, and I enjoy the flavor he brings to a city that doesn’t have much urban spice.

At some point, Eli made the acquaintance of the Daniel Day Trio, a jazz group that plays at a martini bar near Eli’s usual haunts. And this year for Christmas, the Daniel Day Trio did something incredibly kind for a scruffy guy that most people walk past without giving him a second thought. They captured everything on video, naturally. The audio is a little dodgy because of an inconvenient wind that blew up right at the wrong time, but it’s still worth a click:

In a season that’s so often defined by saccharine sentiment and phony good cheer, it’s a joy to encounter something genuinely heartwarming. Hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did…