He wasn’t bad. We liked him. Mostly we only knew him from online, but still. We liked what he wrote. Not all of it. Sometimes you could tell he dashed something off, or wasn’t really thinking about what he was writing. A few of his ideas were like, uh, OK? But some of what he wrote was definitely pretty good. Different from what other people were doing. Plus he wrote under a lot of different names, so who knows. Maybe we’ll still keep turning up new things, and like them or not like them. Who knows if anyone will ever see it all.
He was sad a lot, about how things were online. Like things were never quite as good as he’d imagined they could be, or felt they should be. He was occasionally a little hot-headed. If you upset him, or did something he interpreted as mean, he would never forgive you. Never. But that only happened a few times. In general he was your friend forever, and even if you did things differently than he would have, or that he didn’t agree with, he would support you in any way he could. He was helpful. A lot of people asked him for advice, about different things.
And he stayed connected to just about everyone. He might drop out of your life for a few months or years, but then later he’d be back, right there with you, and it turned out that even if you hadn’t heard from him, he had still been following along with your life the whole time. Sometimes one of us would stop reading his website for a while. I don’t know. No real reason. But then later something would make you think about him and you’d start reading it again. And he could tell when one of us did that, but he never said anything about it, never made you feel bad. He was just welcoming. He was glad for whatever attention you could give, but totally understanding about how things happen sometimes.
Only a few of us ever met him in real life. No one who met him said anything bad about him. They said he was fun, it was very comfortable being around him, not awkward at all, like you sometimes expect it to be. He’d remember random little things about you and want to talk about them. He was always asking questions about you. Engaged. Actively interested. And really funny. Energetic, kind of spazzy. Sometimes you sort of wished he would answer more of your questions. So I don’t know. I don’t know how well we knew him, really. But that’s how it always is, right?
But yeah. We liked him.