Ain't No Telling

As some of you have likely noticed, tqrstories is re-running some of Lalo Telling's greatest Terminal hits. To those who don't know why tqr would be doing this, the simple answer is Lalo succumbed to a brain tumor this past year 3 days before Christmas. As curator and head honcho of tqr, you'da thunk I would have known one of my best capital managers had split the scene for that mysterious hereafter. Alas, I didn't find out until Lalo's absence the Spring quarter raised my suspicions enough to start my own private investigation. I actually think he'd begged off the responsibility in an earlier correspondence, but mentioned nothing about any problems healthwise or any other 'wise' and so I let it slide.

I'm wondering now if I shouldn't have been more perceptive then ... but Lalo is a slippery kat, coming first into our midst an intelligent machine patterned after the cold calculas of Kubrick's 2001's Hal9000. Being the creative geni that I am, (and averse to copyright infringement to the tune of sooner-than-later discorporation) I named the avatar he'd inhabit Hal3000, which was later shortened by Lalo to the catchier and 0-percent-lawsuit-risk friendly H3K. But due to the great crash of 2010 (or 2009 I can't be recall) all Terminal archives of H3K have been wiped clean. Sometime during his decadelong run with us, he became a Fox (Lalo Fox, shaken, not stirred) which morphed into his final nom de plume, Lalo Telling.

None of these were/are his "real" name. Lalo, it seems to me, lived in many worlds. In the world of flesh and bone and bodily tribulation he was someone else entirely I never had anything to do with, which was in keeping with his desire. In this world of contrived personae and limning the relative merits of those fantastic worlds coming into our e-mail inbox in the form of others' stories, Lalo, no matter what avatar he happened to be sporting, was solid as ... a fox, as sharp as a blade forged of tungsten carbide steel and certain as death and/or ultimate discorporation.

And so the world out there turns a little lighter for the load. But here, in this world of goodstuff, VC and cracked capital managers, he is forever, and never was. Until we meet again, Lalo. Ain't no telling...