I‘m writing this as much to ameliorate my own sadness as to ponder on the wonder and power of the blogosphere.
I’m anally retentive, obsessive, needing to really get into the detail of anything that I get interested in. I like the voyage of discovery into a new topic… and I like knowing stuff. As my good friend Jeremy pointed out – I need to be an expert… it’s probably a need thing, part of wanting to be needed.
So as I started to brief Hutch from Retro di Corsa on the detailed spec of my new bike I started reading lots of bike blogs.
I stumbled on a blog by Fast Boy Cycles based in New York while eating my ‘al desco’ sandwich. Fast Boy, or Ezra Caldwell to give him his real name, builds really cool road bikes… and seemed very similar to Hutch in philosophy…except that he was a manufacturer of frames as well as a builder but shared a lot of the ‘Retro di Corsa’ view of marrying the old and the new.
As I munched my sandwich I scrolled down his blog. I realised he took great pictures, was a talented cook and video maker, clearly was involved in music, liked to travel to interesting wild places. I clicked on the photo icon on his Fast Boy Cycles blog… wow, he takes really great pictures, loves working with his Leica and old Nikon’s doing stuff like using expired Fuji colour film…. I was really feeling an affinity with this guy.
Maybe I was drawn by this picture of the frame he gave his girlfriend on her birthday morning because she’s ever so slightly naked – but it seemed a nice thing to do.
I realised I was looking via a Google Images link at the 2010 blog… so I clicked to ‘Previous’…. and was really getting a view of this fascinating, talented, lovely guy…. but from some of the pictures I was starting to sense something sad…
…and then I saw that the blog stopped abruptly in late 2012….
So in the course of 35 minutes I’d met a guy I never knew existed, started to really like him and his work, built some sort of affinity ‘friendship’ only for it to appear that during this time he’d just died?
It gets happy and then not so happy….
After spending 30 minutes more trying to find him or what happened to him with no luck I went home quite low.
Next morning I started again and found him! He was blogging but under a slightly different banner.
It’s a tough, poignant but ultimately inspiring ing read. I’d got back in touch with my ‘friend’ and while it wasn’t good news it was good to see him again.
johnnieshelpdesk 