For some reason I never thought you'd die. You always maintained the sharpest young-minded outlook on things. In your last HBO Special you stooped and you coughed but you were as brilliant as ever.
I will remember you in a vein similar to Carl Sagan, someone who's replacement I doubt I'll ever see. You both shaped my mental development and how I saw the world.
It always hits me when someone dies with whom I felt I related. Karl Vonnegut was another. They shared thoughts and ideas that never occurred to me before, and in that moment somehow I felt close to them, as if we were both now part of an elite group, privy to great enlightenment.
I never gave these people anything but in a way they gave me so much.
Life's not fair.
I've released flexamater.
http://flexamater.rubyforge.org
It's a Flex testing framework, written in Ruby. ;o)
I bought this poem off a guy selling it on the street, along with his own self-bound novel (which is pretty much unreadable, but I bought a copy anyway...gotta admire the guy's effort...)
---
The great ones of any age
have done one thing
that we know them by,
that we admire and envy
and that we are afraid of ourselves:
Whatever they wanted.
They have said whatever they wanted,
walked wherever they wanted,
seen whatever they wanted,
love however they wanted,
killed whomever they wanted,
and died whenever they wanted.
They've never given a rat's ass
for what you've seen heard been told tell
feel or think that they should do.
They'll even trick you
so that you can't move into their tower.
It's lonely at the top.
There's only room for one.
---
I understand why the guy has no publisher. ;o)
My dad was badly addicted to cigarettes. He would smoke 3+ packs a day. Then, at the age of 39, he got lung cancer. He survived, and then proceeded to quit smoking.
When he'd tell the story to others, he'd always say that he wished he could start smoking again, just to go through the process of quitting, because it was the best thing he'd ever done for himself. I always thought that was odd, at the time.
But now I understand what he meant, I think. Humans derive great joy from tackling and accomplishing tasks that seem daunting if not undoable, at first.
I weighed 200lbs 2 years ago, now I weigh 150 and can run 5 miles in 35minutes. I almost wish I could be fat again, just to go thru that transformation once more.
I think we all secretly hope for disaster to befall us or our community. I wished Y2K was going to happen. I invite the tsunami to sweep thru downtown Seattle and force me to run for the hillsides.
I wish I'd get fired. I wish I'd get evicted. I want to declare bankruptcy. I want to struggle. Life's too easy.
Deliver me disaster.
I'll be turning 26 soon. Some of my life's goals:
I want to pilot a plane, and charter a sail-boat, both around the world. Race cars on the salt-flats, ride camels across the Sahara, elephants on the safari, and the shuttle to the space-station. Scuba dive. Hang glide. Bungee Jump. Tightrope walk. Sky Dive. Luge.
I want to visit every country, stay in every town, scale every mountain, and explore every valley. I want to learn every dialect, and meet every person. I want to relate to foreign people, read all their books, and comprehend all their ideas. I want to eat in every restaurant, see every play, watch every movie, and listen to every song.
I want to discover a new branch of mathematics, and fashion a new paradigm of programming. I want to solve NP-Complete problems in polynomial time. I want to utilize fusion power, and harness the energy of the oceans. I want to end global warming, eradicate disease, and abolish hunger. I want to restore the rain-forests, and rebuild the mega-fauna ecosystems mankind has destroyed.
I want to create the perfect operating system. I want to run a marathon in less than 3 hours. I want to figure out how to control the weather.
Then, in my 30's...
