Geoffrey H. Goodwin, writer, poet, genius and gentle madman of note in my world is no more, having passed away in June, just a few weeks after our last conversation. Lacking mutual connections, I only just found out. Sorry for the delay in writing this, Geoff, but if anyone would have nothing but good things to say about this belated eulogy it would be you.  

Geoff and I met in the year 2000 in Boulder, Colorado. He was getting his MFA at Naropa University and I'd gravitated to Colorado for the first time between various multi-year overseas gigs. We kept in fairly regular contact over the years, and managed to connect three or four times in the mid 00's - twenty teens, mostly in the Boston area where Geoffrey lived for a decade or so after getting his MFA (in Horror Writing if memory serves, a funny degree to get from a Buddhist university). I spent a night at his apartment in Framingham once, curled up on a sleeping bag next to a bookshelf crammed with paperbacks, science fiction novels, obscure stuff if memory serves. Geoff was a self-confessed "problem book collector."

Geoffrey was also among the kindest people I've ever known. I cannot recall a single conversation we ever had in which he expressed rancor, bitterness or malaise towards a fellow human being. His overall bearing and temperament was not unlike that of  Eliot Rosewater, the titular character of Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, a damaged, beautiful person who loved all beings unconditionally. 

I told Geoffrey this once, and he laughed.

In 2014 Geoffrey's life took a bad turn when he was in a car accident caused by a drunken driver. The accident left him in chronic pain, which led to medication, which led to sporadic bouts of madness. (Sporadic madness was a condition which Vonnegut's Rosewater also endured.) We would talk about these bouts of madness from time to time, usually afterwards. He always tried to make them sound fun, or at least amusing in hindsight.  

I wish we'd spoken more than twice a year over the past decade, but so it goes. He would occasionally send me pictures and improvised music tracks. I'd try to do the same. We had vague plans to have him come and visit, but his health issues made that seem long term at best. 

The last conversation we had was about Philip K. Dick. Geoff was a massive fan of PKD; somewhere I have a blurry photo of Geoff sitting on PKD's grave, but I can't seem to locate it at the moment, so this belated eulogy will have to go out with an even blurrier photo I have of Geoff, probably taken in Boulder with my first digital camera. I'd asked his opinion on the Amazon Man in the High Castle series. He said he thought PKD's Electric Dreams was better, which led to a conversation about the merits of various PKD screen projects that kind of petered out the way text conversations often do.

I wish I'd called him sooner, but again, so it goes.

I'm looking for a suitable PKD quote to close this thing out, but I know that whatever I find will fail to encapsulate my dear and complicated friend. Despite this, I am sure that Geoffrey would say of whatever quote I picked "YES! That's the perfect one. That's exactly the one I would have picked. Thank you, my friend. Thank you."

So I'm going to go with this one, from one of PKD's more obscure works, Our Friends From Frolix 8.

 "The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give." 

~ Philip K. Dick

Goodbye old friend.  My world is smaller, less kind and less weird without you in it.