Today was greeted with some rather unwelcome news: the loss of a longtime friend of mine to suicide. Instead of moping around the house and getting drunk I decided to keep myself preoccupied. I find that putting something like that in the back of my mind and doing something else helps tremendously.
But that’s not what this post is about. I present to you, dear reader, a new design for this tumblr blog. You’ll notice some of the posts immediately below this were posted over a year ago. I had originally planned for this blog to be a temporary fix so I could post things while working on a more proper ExpressionEngine powered blog.
Well, after having built that blog, torn it down, and designing half a dozen revamps (and never launching any of them) I thought that I would power through a day of design and code and get this old stand by going again.
I discovered that while I had my ExpressionEngine blog I posted less frequently and with less enthusiasm. I put the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of the complexity of running an ExpressionEngine blog. To be quite honest, for my simple needs it was way too much power.
So here I am back on Tumblr, ready to rock with a refreshed look and a renewed dedication to writing and posting all the crap that comes across my browser. Hopefully you’ll find some of it worth while.
For now, this design is a huge work in progress. What you see now was done in a single day. It is by no means complete and not quite as tight as I would generally prefer, but in the interest of getting going here it is.
Update: I should note that this is looking better right now in Safari (or similar Webkit browsers) rather than in Firefox. There is some odd spacing issues with the typography in Firefox that I’ll need to take a look at. But for now, sleep.
A longtime friend of mine committed suicide. He took his nine month old son with him. The news has finally broken in the local news outlets (link purposefully omitted) and I’ve been reading some of the comments. The story itself in how it depicts my friend, and the things people say about him based on a single newspaper article, is leaving me distraught. There is a lot you can say about my friend from a distance, and I can understand why people would feel the way they feel.
For me there is nothing but darkness. There is nothing I can say, no one I can blame, and nothing I can do that will right this tragedy. What was, I know to be, a toxic relationship between my friend and the mother of his child turned out as horribly as I can imagine. We all failed him and his son.
This whole episode has me thinking a lot about the value of life. How precious that improbable gift is. It is heartbreaking that my friend never lived past 25 and his son past 9 months. I don’t believe in an afterlife or a higher being. I just believe in what we have now, and all we have is ourselves and each other.
In the opening words of Richard Dawkins book Unweaving the Rainbow, he says:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Regardless of what you might say about how he and his son died, it weighs heavy in my heart that my friend won the cosmic lottery—in simply being born—and threw it all away. All of us living have won that same lottery; we should all celebrate it every single day. Stephen and Wyatt, you will be missed.
About Stephen