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We lived together (in the Biblical sense) for a year off of Greenlake, BBQing and playing bocce ball in the yard. Man, those were some times.

We had beer and fish at a ferry terminal restaurant on the bank of the Chao Praya river.

The fish was spicy.

For all of the reasons Josh talked about, Ian MacKaye is one of my heroes, too. And that’s why, when I was a teacher in an urban high school, my “wall of heroes” started with Ian MacKaye. And the coolest thing was when I tried to explain why, the kids’d say, “We don’t get it, but if you get so excited about it, it must be pretty cool.”

Yeah, it is pretty cool.

During the early days of Amazon, one of our editors, James Marcus, had an interview with Mr. Murakami. When I heard this, I had to go. Murakami, as I expected, was calm and reserved, except when he started talking about fiction as a black box. Mostly, I just wanted to be there, in the presence of a writer of such magic, and it was nice to just sit there, not really listening.

When Paul finally decided to leave Amazon and Seattle, we threw him a huge bash at the Alibi Room.

I wrote him a poem to send him off; it was filled with inside jokes and the like. Near the end of the evening I gave it to him on a piece of paper.

He read it once, and then took out his lighter and burned it to ashes. Then he looked up at me and said “Thanks, man.”