Klaproth says "I ate your write up (I forget which one). I could have eaten a box of Alpha Bits and crapped out something better. Your write up now rests in node heaven”.
Or something like that.
I first started writing here a little over twelve years ago and didn’t have a clue as to what was going on and man, was I insulted when Klaproth would come knocking on my door. After all, who were you anonymous people to sit in judgment of yours truly.
I was getting ready to toss in the towel and to say the hell with this place and then I got that anonymous Klaproth message and well, let’s just say I laughed my ass off.
Then, after awhile, things became much easier.
I still remember the first C! dannye tossed my way as if it were yesterday. I dunno, when dannye took the time to C! something of mine it felt somehow more “special”.
Like many others before me, we had our ups and downs over the years but it never denigrated to name calling or getting personal. It was always about “the work”. If that means a subtle change in vocabulary here or a tweaking of the tone there, so be it. After all, it was “the work” that you leave behind for others to see and based on that, an opinion to be made.
As the years went on our relationship developed into what I would call a friendship born out of mutual respect. He also wrote a poem about me and even though he admitted it wasn’t what he considered his best work I still cherish it and tried to repay him in kind.
So my friend, I write this with a tear in my eye and a sadness in my heart for someone that I never officially met but certainly got to know and eventually love.
I offer up my last respects with some words from Mark Knopfler and his tune called “Stand Up Guy from the album Shangri-La, a fictional place from the novel Lost Horizon. The author described it as “a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise, and particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world."
May we both find ourselves someplace similar someday.
There stands the bottle
Here’s to absent friends
All these bottles
Dead soldiers in the end
These days’ miracles
Don’t come falling from the sky
Raise your glasses to the doctor
To a stand up guy
To the doctor
A stand up guy.
One last thing, I’m not quite sure that Dannye was responsible for that Klaproth message that kept me here all these years later but for those of us who know him via E2, who else could it be?
Thanks for everything my friend.