Well, aside from the fact that Tony Toni Tone lied when they said “it never rains in Southern California” and the fact that Yaze and I are trying to carpool to the opposite ends of the earth in one car, there was worse news today:

Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESSFiled at 11:53 p.m. ET
SEATTLE (AP) — Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, has died, a close friend said Sunday. She was 58.Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.The writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park and died Friday, Howle said.Butler’s work wasn’t preoccupied with robots and ray guns, Howle said, but used the genre’s artistic freedom to explore race, poverty, politics, religion and human nature.”She stands alone for what she did,” Howle said. ‘
‘She was such a beacon and a light in that way.”Jane Jewell, executive director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, said Butler was one of the first black women to explore the genre and the most prominent. But Butler would have been a major writer of science fiction regardless of race or gender, she said.”She is a world-class science fiction writer in her own right,” Jewell said. ”She was one of the first and one of the best to discuss gender and race in science fiction.”
Butler began writing at age 10, and told Howle she embraced science fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called ”Devil Girl from Mars” and thought, ”I can write a better story than that.” In 1970, she took a bus from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., to attend a fantasy writers workshop in East Lansing, Mich.Her first novel, ”Kindred,” in 1979, featured a black woman who travels back in time to the South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, ”Fledgling,” an examination of the ”Dracula” legend, was published last fall.She received many awards, and in 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer granted a ”genius” award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years.Butler described herself as a happy hermit, and never married.
”Mostly she just loved sitting down and writing,” Seattle-based science fiction writer Greg Bear said. ”For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the ’60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community.”
——Associated Press writer Donna Gordon Blankinship contributed to this report. * Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

Maybe I’m more sensitive to death because of my dad, or sudden death because his was sudden, but this made a big huge thump appear in my gut. Do I feel sad because we lost another elder or do I feel sad because every elder is my father? I never knew I would have Greek Tragedy-like issues. This is the stuff that obsesses writers for the rest of their lives. Perhaps I can spend the rest of my writing “career” focusing on reconciling loss and making peace with the fact that my generation will forever be labeled the “hip hop” generation, even though there’s no real room for some of us who don’t specifically write about breakdancing, graffiti, rhyming or DJing. That’s my next blog. I’m foreshadowing. I have to get something about hip hop being our culture and our track and not just our verse or our surface level gear. Folks are shutting you down if you don’t get simple. For realz.

Rest In Peace Octavia. I hope you get to talk to my Dad and my Grammy. They’re cool peoples.