Years ago I found out my estranged Grandpa (my dad’s dad) had died in 1990 in the same town I lived and grew up in. My dad and I had never seen or talked to him, as far as I knew. Not exactly the same thing, but I felt weird and sad for my dad, who was pretty much deserted as a small child with his mom and sister. I wondered if this guy ever went to my sporting events, or followed my life at all. I found out he was a WWII Navy vet, and served in the battle of Okinawa. I think every war has fucked up untold millions of lives…

Thank you. I tend to process through writing, it goes all the way back to the days when I kept my journal in notebooks with pink or turquoise pages.

Also, big emotions make me try to slow down and get it right. When I’m just farting on about how much I love The Rolling Stones, I much more careless.

One of the best posts I think I ever created was about the death of Luke Buklin, which I wrote on a day fraught with so much fucking emotion I’m still a little hungover from it two years later. That post always makes me bawl my head right off, and I wrote it. I don’t know if that’s because I’m completely egotistical or if I just did a good job of evoking the emotions I was feeling.

Seems like all these years of blogging have given you the ability to really, really express things in a really great way as you’re sorting through them and not just in the future when it’s been processed. I’m glad you have this. I hope it is helping.

It feels tacky to commend you on a piece of writing when you’re going through this. But, man, that was a hell of a piece of writing.