over the hills and far away

I believe today is the day. One year ago, my friend Andy Woodward passed away in his sleep, the result of a congenital heart failure. I don't want to make the attempt to condense into a silly blog entry all my memories and feelings surrounding the connection I had to him, but suffice it to say that he was a singular person.

Without a doubt, I am a better person for having known him, and to have experienced his powerful trajectory of peculiar individuality. Andy was fucking weird. Weird, brilliant, sometimes off putting, provocative, ludicrous, and almost charged with a desire to live his life to his own standards of person hood. I know that doesn't make any sense. It's hard to describe Andy in a way that is truly Andy.

Look, here's a picture of him and my pal Shannon when we were dumb 16 year olds:

And again, intentionally caressing a guitar case in an unsettling manner:

But I think this photo of us at our informal 5-year high school reunion is my favorite of Andy, as he's grown out of the horror show of adolescence. He graduated from Virginia Tech, and was completing his Master's in education so that he could teach high school English. Here he is, serenely bemused, a little hammy, and finally comfortable in his own skin:

I miss him, and can only helplessly question why someone with his brilliant and good-hearted potential had to turn it all in on account of a bum heart valve. RIP, Andy. May you discomfit all the angels of God's entourage.

you've been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life

My memory is so treacherous that moments like this are bewildering and magical. Most of my high school experience is fogged so well that all I can tell you is I was a lame and dorkish small person, with a burning desire to set myself apart from unintellectual conformist cool people. Examples of this are difficult to fish from the miscellany of half-memories I retain, although:

1) Several of my closest friends at the time owned server space accessible via "anticonformity.com," and my personal part of this had a lot to do with tributes to anime characters and elaborate sketches that Lena, Andy and I would distract ourselves with during Geometry,

and

2) This image.


I just stumbled across this somewhere in a dark corner of the internet (you don't say) and was struck with a peculiar sense of familiarity. I am almost positive I found this image, or one of its spiritual brethren, somewhere on the world wide intertubes as it existed circa 1999, and took pains - not to print it out! - but to create my own, personalized version. Possibly featuring Heero Yui from Gundam Wing, although I am less sure of this point. I know I didn't keep this blowjob on it, though.

The main thing to keep in mind here is that I never took pains to fill in any names on the list, because I had no enemies other than the all-consuming teenage angst that evidently drove me to the extremes of amateur graphic design in MS Pub.

I am an island of such great complexity.