Tag: Death

A Toast to Chester…

Music is Life

I make no secret about the importance music has in my life. At least an hour of my day has music in it intentionally. Not a schedule. Every day i pick the jams. It has had such a profound effect on me that for a long time I would even write in some blog entries on it in Tony’s Music. You can totally say Tony is a dork. But the reality is that music has always been my escape. It has been the voice of reason, expression, intent, consolation, and every other little voice we all have in the back of our head (it isn’t just me right?) *grin* when something really messed up is happening.

Suicide Sucks

Suicide has always been a bane for me. Like a lot of people, I simply dont deal with death very well (read THESE) and suicide is even worse. So in getting the news today it really left me numb…upset…angsty…the same thing every other time suicide makes an appearance in my life…I try to figure out how or why I didnt see it coming, why I didnt reach out more…all the stupid things and idea that rummage through your head when you try rationalize what just happened.

The Concert is a no-go for me

I was planning on being at the Linkin Park concert coming up in October. I was going to enjoy the concert on my terms without 50000 screaming fans weren’t all up in my space. 😉 But now…I don’t think that concert is a good idea for me…it well known that I don’t really do well at wakes, and thats what an LP concert would be to me now…a great big wake with 10000 other people there that are probably thinking the same thing. When I am at my most sensitive, there is always some asshat at a wake that I visibly have trouble restraining myself from shutting him up. Rather than be that guy…it’s just easier (and probably a bit more responsible) not to allow that kind of scenario to play out. I find something fun to do and relax and remember all the awesome things. A concert full of drunk people isn’t fun…for me its a fracking powderkeg. So that’s a big ol’ nope.

So while this week has been insanely busy…Chester’s suicide has totally been crawling around in the back of my mind…

One More light

Should’ve stayed, were there signs, I ignored?
Can I help you, not to hurt, anymore?
We saw brilliance, when the world, was asleep
There are things that we can have, but can’t keep

If they say
Who cares if one more light goes out?
In a sky of a million stars
It flickers, flickers
Who cares when someone’s time runs out?
If a moment is all we are
We’re quicker, quicker
Who cares if one more light goes out?
Well I do

The reminders pull the floor from your feet
In the kitchen, one more chair than you need oh
And you’re angry, and you should be, it’s not fair
Just ’cause you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it, isn’t there

If they say
Who cares if one more light goes out?
In a sky of a million stars
It flickers, flickers
Who cares when someone’s time runs out?
If a moment is all we are
We’re quicker, quicker
Who cares if one more light goes out?
Well I do

Who cares if one more light goes out?
In a sky of a million stars
It flickers, flickers
Who cares when someone’s time runs out?
If a moment is all we are
We’re quicker, quicker
Who cares if one more light goes out?
Well I do

Well I do

Find Linkin Parke here.

FYI – Sometimes I talk a lot about death, it’s a coping mechanism or some facsimile thereof. 😉 You can see all the other posts like that HERE.




10 years old…and I am still here…

10 Year AnniversaryPeople still ask about “Hold No Virtue.” I try to explain it as this. Being virtuous isn’t something to be aspired to or cherished, indicating a material value at some level and thus will be withheld in lieu of fear of loss. Virtue doesn’t belong to the virtuous, rather vice versa…the virtuous are just being good. To hold on high someone that is good is part of the mistake, as I think it should be the baseline for how we interact with one another. I simply think that we have it within ourselves to be better without handing out prizes for it.

Now…as for the “Tonytown” part…well I am happy to say that wasnt actually my idea…

…and then Rob says with that crazy grin,
“HAHA…She’s about to get a free ride on the skinboat to Tonytown!”

It’s funny considering how this all started. I was just starting to tinker around with hosting and just starting to get my sea legs back on the unix of things, and wanted to convert what journal entries I had left to a digital format for later reference. I’d been tinkering with domain usage and an old friend Rob had a saying about me referencing the term “Tonytown” I knew that would be the perfect name for this. The really funny part is that I had assumed I was using the c2/cafelog right (which I wasn’t), and was making all those journal entries public instead of keeping the journal entries private.

…you see there are things you just cant live down, or laugh at. But that is it, the origin of how this all started. I went from accidentally posting all my entries and memories…from Dancing with Death and mentioning (and getting called out on) high school crushes, and even accidentally leaving a homemade rss aggregator running so well that I was getting more traffic from other bloggers articles than they were getting on their own posts.

But it’s always been fun. It’s always been an enabler for me to speak my mind on the subjects that even some of my close friends aren’t comfortable discussing. It’s enabled me to grow what was a hobby into a skill, and even more into expertise. At one point I even labelled myself a giant dork for having such a hobby. 10 years of WordPress (in all its incarnations), 10 years of expression. This little piece of internet real estate was my true enabler. It let me groom and cultivate the world…all colored lovingly in my rarely humble opinion.

10 years…and I own a successful IT company rather than worry about the 9-5 grind.
10 years…and now I’ve met all the wonderful bloggers, writers, and people that inspired me.
10 years…and now I own my own hosting company…not just one little blog.

…and this was very likely the first little step.

Cheers interwebs! Happy 10 Years of putting up with my nonsense!

-Tony




Indifference kills…

A day or two ago, I started seeing links to a very provocative video that was released detailing a situation whereby a child was not only hit twice by traffic, but that for some time a large number of people ignored the poor child that was struck and moved on about their day. I have two links for this on CBS News and The Sydney Morning Herald (there are more but these two paint a good enough picture). I haven’t been so outraged in a long time. And hopefully this will shed some light for all those friends of mine on why they couldn’t understand why I have to help…

indifference hit and runYears ago, when I was 19, we were leaving Ellum going northbound on 75 and were exiting to hit Cafe Brazil I think…our exit was slowed to a stop, but the highway was full speed.

I was looking out at the cars passing by so fast. Then it happened…I watched a biker get rear-ended and hit again twice by cars that did not stop afterwards, the bike with no driver spun into the middle of the highway, further causing another biker and a couple other cars to crash.

My friends in the car were jamming out pretty loud so when they heard me scream “NO!” they didn’t realize what it was I had seen right away. It wasn’t just that all those people were in trouble. I wasn’t just fear that gripped me. I was soooo angry. Because even after all that…the cars weren’t stopping.

I couldn’t stand it, and jumped out of the car I was in and ran onto the highway to get people…anyone to stop and help. The people in the cars that had crashed were fine, and even their cars were relatively okay…but the bikers, no one would come near them.

The second biker was closest and was in full riding gear, he was able to tell me his name, where he was and which day it was. A doctor stopped his car to block the lane properly and help with him as I then ran to the second biker.

The second biker was barely breathing and he couldn’t talk. His eyes were alert and frantically trying to communicate…it was pure fear…and though and I could tell he was trying to move – he didn’t have the strength to even move a finger. I was afraid to even hold his hand his body was in such bad shape and…slightly twisted.

It took the police 5 minutes to get there because of the traffic jam, and it took the ambulances almost 10. It was Friday night around 12am on northbound 75. I don’t remember much after that, I was horrified. At some point I guess I’d given my contact information to the police and that doctor that helped out there, because the next day he called me and thanked me for the effort. Unfortunately, he also informed me that one of the motorcyclists had passed away at the site of the accident, and the other had passed away overnight in the hospital.

That wasn’t my first tangle with Death. But that was when it became clear to me that I’ll never be able to even feign indifference in these situations. I would never be that guy that just kept driving on.

A year or two later on vacation in New Mexico, while I was blissfully asleep in the passenger seat. The driver of the car I was in fell asleep from exhaustion and drove us off the side of a mountain at 60mph. Your best imagination could not describe what happened to us in that fall. The only thing that didn’t happen was the car didn’t explode…

…It took the busload of people behind us over 30 minutes to get to us from the road. It took over an hour for an ambulance to get there, and almost two hours to get us back to the hospital. The truck had bounced and rolled over 100 yards down. Days later, we were shown pictures of what had happened and what happened to the truck, and pictures of where it had happened. If that bus hadn’t stopped and those people on it not come, the sun and environment would have finished the job for both of us.

It wasn’t just seeing a wreck now that influenced me. As far as I was concerned, I felt, and still feel to this day, that I have a moral obligation to help in any way I can. I don’t expect the same from everyone, but from experience, I sure as hell hope that when something like that happens to me, someone will be around that feels the same way I do.

And for anyone that feels they can’t be bothered to stop and help, I hope there was a lesson in this somewhere.

My .02 for the evening. Hope everyone has a great night.

-Tony