I received the sad news that Jim passed away this morning, February 17th, 2025, just four days after his 50th birthday. His [sudden] death was a great shock to me, but then again, Jim always had a knack for the unexpected. I’m going to miss him terribly, and so I thought I might revisit how I came to know him and recall some of the good (and bad) times we had.
“Remember me, but forget my fate.”
– Dido’s Lament, Henry Purcell 1688
I first met Jim in late 2014 under equally tragic circumstances. He’d contacted our [MMORPG] Guild to let us know that his brother, Gerald (a guild member), had died in a car accident. We befriended him, took him in, and spent many nights grouping with him. He struggled with alcohol abuse and often said things he’d come to regret later. Eventually, he quit the game, but we maintained contact via email.
When James told me about his troubles, I tried to help him develop a plan and stick with it, anything to get him out of the hell of a nonstop procession of dead-end jobs, and in an effort to encourage his writing skills, I created this website for him.
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Unfortunately, James was a man with many interests, and those interests changed oftener than most people change their underwear. He’d get really into something for a short time, but after a couple of weeks, he would lose interest and move on. So it was with this website, pursuing his Teaching English and a Foreign Language (TEFL) certification, his degree in Anthropology, and an uncountable number of other things.
His drinking, depression, and the crushing hopelessness of his situation eventually led to him getting into trouble with the law, resulting in him sustaining several gunshot wounds that would cause him constant pain and discomfort for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, this was the wake-up call he needed, and after being released from jail, he eventually retreated to Oaxaca, Mexico.
There, he met his wife, Diana, and had finally found some semblance of peace. He loved the food, enjoyed the [mostly] warm weather, and had easy access to LSD and marijuana, which he used to self-medicate. He’d quit drinking and had gotten himself into the best shape I’d ever seen him in, a svelt 165ish lbs (pictured above), down from the 280 I’d last seen him at (and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Taipan Pete), or the 220ish he was when we first met.
His disability checks went far enough to cover his modest southern Mexican living expenses, and while he didn’t have many luxuries, it ensured that he’d never have to work another dead-end job again. He occasionally threatened to start a small business selling street food, probably biscuits and gravy or some other exotic American fare. I’d always chalk it up to his many passing daydreams, harmless and perhaps even helpful, if only to pass the time.
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Gaming was one of Jim’s only pleasures, and for a while, he’d been limping along on an old GTX 2060 laptop. I had a good year and decided to do something nice for my old friend. Perhaps this was my way of “paying it forward” for all the help I’d gotten when I was down on my luck. So in early January, about a month before Jim’s birthday, I ordered a GTX 4060 desktop from Amazon, but to my dismay, it had an estimated delivery date of early March! The seller blamed Amazon, Amazon blamed the seller, and I told them both to go to Hell, and I canceled the order.
On a whim, I’d decided to check a boutique shop my wife and I had worked with when we last replaced our aging gaming rigs. They happened to have a ready-to-ship PC that was exactly what I was looking for:
CPU – Intel Core i5-13400F
CPU Cooler – DeepCool AK400 Digital White
Motherboard – PRIME B760M-A AX6 WiFi
RAM – 32GB Kingston Fury Beast RGB DDR5 6000 – White
Storage – 2TB Kingston NV2
GPU – Intel Arc A750 White
Chassis – DeepCool CH370 White
Added Case Fans – (4×) 120mm Pwm ARGB Fans -White
Power Supply – 650-Watt 80+ Gold Rated
I called to inquire if it was still available, and it was! The next challenge was whether or not they were willing to ship to Mexico. They don’t usually ship internationally, but as I was a repeat customer, they agreed to help. On January 16th, I placed the order.
Shipping to Mexico has a number of challenges:
- There’s the 20% import tax,
- Customs fees, and
- The [very real] possibility that a cartel might help themselves to the shipment…
The shipping cost was about a third of what we expected, so I wasn’t very surprised when I saw a banner on the tracking notice with a link to pay the last-minute import taxes and other fees. The last thing I wanted was to saddle Jim with a COD he couldn’t afford, so I hurriedly paid the geld, took a screenshot, and sent it to James as a precaution.
On the 28th, James sent me a picture via WhatsApp to let me know it had arrived safely, and we were both overjoyed! Over the next 20 days, we often gamed, BS’d on Discord, and exchanged memes as we always did. We’d gotten disillusioned with the Early Access MMO we’d been playing and decided to move on to something else. After evaluating our options, we settled on Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning. Initially, we’d intended to play the Destruction side, but Jim stated that none of the races/classes appealed to him and instead made Dwarf Engineer.
Danish Chris and I were reluctant to abandon the characters we were already playing, given Jim’s fickle nature, but after he assured us that he would stick with it, we agreed to make it a trio and join him in Dwarven fun. To Jim’s credit (and my surprise), he really enjoyed his character and played whether we were on or not, and for once, we were the ones struggling to keep pace instead of the other way around! We were all about three-quarters of the way through progression, and within another week or two, we would have reached the maximum PVE level, but fate had other plans.
~~~
On Sunday, February 16th, we played together, spoke on Discord, and exchanged memes. While waiting for Jim to get on Monday morning, our friend Danish Chris received a message from “DecidingChicken,” another RL buddy of Jim’s, stating that something had happened to him. My mind began racing through the possibilities – perhaps he got sick or hurt himself? As we anxiously waited, I messaged Jim on WhatsApp and asked him if he was okay. A few minutes later, DecidingChicken joined us on Discord to announce, “James was gone. He died.”
He went on to explain that it was heart-related and that he must have passed this morning in his sleep.
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Shock gave way to guilt. I wondered if I could have been a better friend to him. I poured over the emails, Discord chats, WhatsApp, and text messages we’d exchanged over the years and concluded that I did all I could for him.
James was a free spirit, and he once joked that he wanted to be reincarnated as a dog that belonged to a cute hippy chick. I saw him as a stray dog who roamed from place to place, friendly but not housebroken. He was intelligent but stubborn. He’d been hurt too many times and had trouble trusting people. Thankfully, in the end, he did find his “forever home” and could focus on healing the physical and psychological wounds he suffered over his life.
“The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
It goes to show that Ferris Beuller was right; life does move pretty fast, and if you don’t look around once in a while, you could miss it! What that spoiled little shit from Northbrook neglected to tell me was that Death moves pretty fast, too. As Heinlein once observed, “The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.”
I don’t know where he is now, but I hope he’s finally found the peace that eluded him in life. When I close my eyes, I can see his wry, knowing smile and imagine some offbeat nonsequitur remark. When I think about you, I will remind myself that life is short and that it’s best not to take it too seriously.
Epilogue
I originally started this post on Monday, February 17th, as a means to cope with the news of James’ passing. Over the coming days and weeks, I made several additions, deletions, and revisions. I’m reasonably happy with it (for now) and feel it accurately reflects my 10-year-long friendship with him.
I can’t say what the future holds for Pork Circus, but I will continue to maintain the site as long as I’m able as a means to honor James’ memory.