I have an odd memory. I remember exact times of occurrence, but can't even remember my own phone number that I have had for almost 5 years. I remember sitting in the library during second period on a Wednesday in late January of 2001 when a teacher pulled me into the hall. I remember receiving a phone-call from my ex, while playing an emulated version of Super Metroid on my shitty old laptop in my apartment on Hawthorne. I remember a thousand phone-calls, a hundred smells, and never misplace anything because I remember what color the surface was that I left it on.
I received a text message and then a phone-call on Wednesday from one of my oldest and dearest friends explaining to me that a mutual friend had been found fatally wounded from a gunshot in his apartment in Bloomington. I was listening to Bill Withers at full volume, and finishing a rush job on a 12 hour turn around piece for New York Magazine:
The piece is an editorial for an article on New York's mayor Bloomberg riding on the coat tails of the republican party to help ensure re-election.
I don't read a lot of what people have to say about my work, but several months ago I ran across somebody saying that the "soul" had been taken out of my work since I had started taking on more clients and doing less personal work. No, the soul isn't gone...it's just hiding for when it is needed.
My sincerest and most wholehearted condolences and sympathies to fellow friends and family members of Keith Stevens. He was a dear friend and will be sorely missed.
I met Keith 10 years and a little over a week ago at Dan Pierce's 14th birthday party. We were friends, though I never knew how close of friends we really were.
Through our relationship I always felt that Keith held some sort of grudge against me. We were very similar people, though due to his self-consciousness and my ego we were never able to admit this to each other. We were both awkwardly overweight teenagers, neither of us ever found it very easy to relate to our peers, we both had our own personal obsessions with the macabre though both handled it in our own specific ways, we both had ongoing self-destructive bouts of depression, and foremost neither of us ever knew when to shut up. And no matter how stupid I thought it was, Keith was proud that he had fought for his country. And that is a kind of pride I will never be able to experience. Keith was made of a material that I will never even be able to fathom.
We had an ongoing argument for years; Keith insisting that cigarettes would kill me, and myself insisting that guns would kill him. When I moved to Chicago he even drew me a picture of my gravestone atop a pile of cigarette cartons...and here I sit writing this message with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and Keith is gone.
I have experienced a lot of death in my life, but never that of an old friend. It is a dull sickening kind of grief, distant but still there. The last thing Keith said to me was a few months back through an instant message critiquing a new song I had sent him; 'Needs more cowbell.' And honestly I can't think of a more Keith thing to say.
I am sorry that we were never closer. I will miss you Keith.
