Hanging Out with Kevin Steele

Photo by Kevin Steele. Click to see it on its Flickr page.

When Coffee and Code at Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar wound down late Wednesday afternoon, I took a perch at the bar by the big window facing Queen Street West. Kevin Steele, my friend and former coworker at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, my first job after graduating from Crazy Go Nuts University, was walking by and snapped the photo above. He then walked in and joined me for a coffee.

Photo by Kevin Steele. Click to see it on its Flickr page.

We struck up a conversation, during which time he took a number of photos of me, including the one above. Looking at me, it’s kind of hard to believe that two weeks prior, I was in the intensive care unit.

We hung out at the café until just before closing and then moseyed westward to Addis Ababa restaurant for some injera. We talked about a great number of things, from Jacques Tati films to Isaac Asimov to my adopted role model for my “Bachelor 2.0 lifestyle” (Tony Stark!) to the people I know who are planning on being frozen when they die.

One of the staff overhead our conversation about cryogenics. “Hey guys,” he said, “I don’t mean to butt in, but I couldn’t help hearing you talk about cryogenics. I want to be frozen and revived in the future!”

“Many are called, but few are frozen,” I quipped. I wish I could claim that line as my own, but that’s actually a slogan used by a number of cryogenics enthusiasts.

We talked with him for a couple of minutes about whether he’d actually like the future – after all, would a 14th century peasant dropped in the middle of downtown Toronto be able to cope? There was also the issue of how long a business would keep a freezer running, as well as whether future people would think we were worth defrosting (or worse still, if they’d keep us as pets).

At about ten o’clock, we decided that as interesting and wacky and all-over-the-map our conversation was, it was time to head home.

I’m looking forward to more evenings like that one.