thecreeper

damn, real good

can we add like 30 more mins to that

really rolls the r's

i feel like it used to be a lot easier for me to put how i'm feeling into something that feels earnest and worthwhile. but whether its a combination of getting older or having less time for things...since his death, i have found myself unable to form much of anything. it's all blank and numb. i hate myself for not being there last weekend, even if i know that i would have basically put myself into an untenable debt to be there. i feel guilty when i have even the littlest bit of fun, but feel sad when i am not making the most my day to day. i wish i had a better way to put, it just sucks. 

i don't know what else to really say about it. it sucks. how do we live in a world where one of the most gregarious and giving and welcoming people i've ever met is straight up murdered? i haven't slept well since it happened. i keep waking up and thinking about how this all happened. for it to go down the way it did, for lack of a better word, it's been haunting me whenever i have a moment of clarity.

a few years ago, on route 100 near where i live, a man was so mad at a young woman during the merge at the end of the highway that he pulled out a gun while driving and executed her in cold blood over a pointless merging dispute. this has nothing to do with sean, but it's something i've thought about every day since it happened. i drive the road that this happened on every single day to go to work. i see where this woman died, i see the scene of the crime every single day. if traffic is bad and i can't go that way to work, i take an alternate route near spook's family's home and have to drive by the exact spot where Jackass star Ryan Dunn killed himself in a drunk driving accident. Both of those events i drove by 24 hours after they happened and think about every single time i pass by. I didn't even know these people but the events just have stuck with me. The Bianca Roberson execution in particular has stuck with me because of how pointless it is. to think that someone is so undeserving of life as to execute them for not driving the way you want them to speaks to something broken and wrong in our society.

and this is just strangers. i knew sean. he was one of the first shizz guys to contact me out of the blue when i joined theshizz. i was just riding on raub's coattails into a community i knew little about, and for daemon, that connection was good enough for him. we connected on games, comics, and metal very quickly over AIM. we talked often, and i gave him a hard time as the years moved on about coming to magfest in those early years. daemon was without a doubt, the first guy that made me feel like i was welcome here and had a place here. and that was not unique. the man, in my experience, was never a gatekeeper. he was the dude holding it open, welcoming you in. i can't count the amount of times over the years he would engage literally anybody and try to make them feel like part of the group without knowing anything more than a screenname. 

i am well aware after 16 years here that people during shizz time is just not the same person you are in every facet of your life. when you are penned up with nerds of similar interests for a weekend, a lot of personalities get inflated and the casual day to day or family parts of your life aren't necessarily on display. it's easy to get a view of someone that is not all that accurate to the person they are outside of a 3 day weekend in January every year. but with that being said, sean didn't seem to have a veneer he was fronting around me or any of us. i think that overly joyful, welcoming person was just who he was.

this is a dude who upon meeting me for the first time after many many years, tackled me and hugged me and took a picture of us. i'll be honest, i had no idea what daemon looked like at this point in his life and the bearded handsome man that was all over me i had no clue who he was. but he knew me, and he wanted so bad to connect with me and everyone else. that first night at magfest we chatted about left 4 dead 2, anthrax, playstation, and god knows what else was spewing out of me.

outside of magfest, i really feel like sean led a second revival of theshizz as a message board and community once he finally visited magfest. i think everyone can agree the dude was a constant fixture here for the last few years, and a source of enthusiasm, whimsy, and creativity that we needed. this is a dude who was basically a simpsons/shizz meme factory for like over a month and every single one of them was rooted in a deep history with this board and the people here. this is a guy who you could quite literally say was more or less posting here until right when he passed. it's fucking gut wrenching to see a post from like a day or two before it happened. it's like you want to scream out and try to change what happened but you can't.

the one constant the last two weeks for me has been this past magfest. i think i spent more time talking to sean and just being around him than i have ever in past years. and it happened in a true shizz way of just finding him randomly in hallways and becoming part of a shizz mob looking for more shizz. we talked about our kids and shizz history and how long ago 2003 seemed and he expressed how much he hoped i would keep coming to magfest and keep the tradition alive.

while i stayed offsite and it limited a lot of the casual interaction, the chromelodeon show became the capstone on our relationship. when we both arrived for the show, he told me how this was a culmination of over 10 years of regrets for not getting to see their last mag performance or last show. he told me he was gluing himself to me for the show once they opened the doors, and if you look at the pictures from the evening, that was absolutely true. i've had a child in the past few years and i don't mind saying a lot of the piss and vinegar in my system just isnt there anymore and raucous live shows just drain me quickly. but sean kept me up and kept me in the moment for that. his enthusiasm was youthful and infectious. he was so happy to see something he was convinced had passed him by with friends he wasn't sure he was ever going to see in this setting. at one point i had to tell him he needed to let me go because i was too damn old and i was feeling out of breath and near death.

and......that's it. he's no longer with us due to an act of malice and violence from someone he knew and trusted. i don't mean this as an insult to anyone else, but this place is just not as good, not as bright, without him. the act of murder in this situation has consumed my thoughts because i don't understand how you think someone like sean is someone you need to wipe off the face of the earth. 

as a father with a kid near the same age as sean's child, the parent factor of this is not lost on me either. to leave a kid that age without a father has broken me over and over again, especially considering the custody circumstances. this is a kid who will never really know or remember their daddy, and it eats me up inside. i think about my daughter and how she has basically filled me with joy and hope beyond the cynical facade i had kept for years and it brings me to tears to think his kid may never know the kind of guy that sean was.

i want to feel better and take positive from a tragic situation. i'm still working on steadying the course on that. but, i know some things to be certain: i know that sean would have wanted this community to thrive beyond him. i know that he would have wanted us all to come closer together if something like this happened. and i know he would have wanted straight fucking covers of video game songs like god intended.

i've been thinking a lot about the nature of this board and how in these days a message board is almost a throwback, how it's probably never going to attract a much larger crowd than we've got. but it's the people that matter. and that's always been the case. this board, as a piece of software, is nothing special and is used by countless other sites for their forum software. its the people that choose to come here and dedicate their time and make something special for everyone else that make this place a home. if you remember those people and honor their memory, they never really die here. daemon's posts are littered across this board, his presence was felt on nearly every member here, and for me, that's proof that shizzies never say die. we live beyond the posts we make and the life we lead by inspiring and making an impact on the people here we care about. if there's one thing i've gathered from monitoring the last 2 weeks of this board, struggling to process my own emotions, it's that daemon did for me what he did for every other person here. he lived a life that was totally devoted to this board and the people on it. he treated everyone like they were the best fucking dudes, and there's something incredibly admirable about living a life like that. if you review every post on this  board, it's impossible to find anything that says "yo that guy was kind of a dick to me."

that just wasn't sean. and i really miss him. i hope i can sleep better finally getting this off my chest. i love you sean, and i miss you man.