Friendship and Loss

Ladies and gentlemen, Seattle lost an excellent person this morning.

He boarded a jet plane and he flew across the ocean.

Damn you, J-dawg.

Seattle lost a gentleman, and I lost a (emotionally and geographically) close friend.

A particular type of friend, though.

Not just any friend. But then again no friend is just any friend. All my friends are friends of particular kinds. I have my drinking friends, my talking friends, my catch-up-over-lunch friends, my work friends, so on.

But this type of friend that I've lost is of a special kind. For he was a philosophy-friend.

We willingly brought our minds together. We thought together. We read together. We talked and (drank) together.

I remember when I first realized that I may have found a new philosophy friend. I was reading Joan Bondurant's Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict. We had been making small talk in our place of work. He asked me what I was reading. I told him.

His reply: "that seems like something I would read."

My thought: "Oh, really?"

Why oh why would you want to be reading about Gandhian political philosophy, stranger?

Slowly our conversations became longer. We started chatting more.

Then we decided to take the next step: a full fledged bro-date.

I suggested we meet at a place that had a bar, have some food and some drinks.

How funny that on that night the bar was full, so we ended up sitting at a table in this nice restaurant! A server and everything! He drank well whiskey on the rocks, I know I had a maritime red ale, and probably a few others. We ate food.

We talked about John Searle, about Zen, about other things.

I remember how tentatively my words came out of my mouth.

It can be hard to speak honestly when you encounter a new philosopher. I have to be much more careful with my words, because we have not yet worked out our terms.

When meeting a new philosophy friend I never casually use words like 'metaphysics,' 'post-modern' or 'nihilism' or this or that. Because I fear that my understandings of those words are different.

But that night we had fun. We talked. We would return to that same restaurant many times. Exchanging  ideas over drinks. Laughing at the sight of us in our nearly identical glasses. Laughing at our garbled use of words like becoming, being, and emergent property.

Lol. Reading Manuel DeLanda with someone will do that to a conversation.

Either way, this is my tribute to you, Jeremy.

I'll miss having you in this city with me.

But I know you wanted to get out for good reasons.

Onward and upward.

I promise to keep thinking and writing on here.

I know you intend to do the same.

I look forward to seeing the ways in which our thoughts diverge and converge.