Acid Flashback

I never remember what they all are, but they say there's seven stages to grief. It appears I'vealready blogged through six of them. I think I've now reached the final stage -- acceptance. It doesn't hurt so much to know I'll never get another email or another Acidbath and my foray into the archives of Gut Rumbles to assemble this post for the COTV didn't wrench as it did only a couple of weeks ago. But I still really miss him.

Yeah, in the end, he was just a guy, a flawed man with a broken body and a shattered heart but he had an original voice and I don't think I've ever read a more painfully honest writer. Rob didn't hold anything back and he was proud of it.

I don't expect everybody to agree with what I write, or I wouldn't call myself "Acidman." Sometimes I DELIBERATELY pen screeds just to see how many people I CAN piss off. I'm outrageous sometimes. But it's MY goddam blog, and I can do whatever I want with it.

And piss us off he did -- regularly. But it's hard to stay mad at a guy who coined the term computer fucktard to describe himself and who else but Rob Smith could get 26 replies to the question, Does YOUR ass itch when you sit around in wet underwear?

I once told him that I always considered my life an open book on the internets but his blogging made me look like a locked diary. And it did. He laid himself so bare that you got invested in his troubles. If you read him long enough, you were right there rooting for him to "get his shit all in one sock," whatever that really means. For a while there, it looked like he was really going to do it.

If he had lived a little longer, I think he would have. But I don't think he ever really believed he was going to live a long life. Perhaps that's what emboldened him to share the life he had so unstintingly. In an eerily prescient post in January, he said, "Don't ask ME about the secret to a long, happy, healthy life. I'm more qualified to speak of the nasty, brutish aspects and the key to burning out your mortal coil in a brilliant, smoking flash. Ask someone who knows more than I do."

And so he flashed out of our lives as suddenly as a spent firecracker, but one can hardly say it wasn't a life well lived. It was a hard life in many ways, but not many men leave behind a legacy of thousands of bright red toe nails painted just for them and a legion of grieving strangers.

As he often said, "If it was easy, any asshole could do it," and he surely wasn't just any asshole. He was ours and I think I'm going to miss him for a long, long time.