I dreamed I was hanging out with a blogger I used to follow until he died this year. He was a cynical bastard, though sometimes it seemed like he was a good dude underneath, and when I was with him we were walking the streets and found Christmas lights lying all around, which we collected.
I started to say something sarcastic like that we should throw them away, and that the people who lost them deserved it.
He looked at me more genially than I would have thought possible, and said, naw, let's put up Christmas lights. And so we went around putting the lights up on the trees outside people's houses.
I woke up from the dream feeling like I had somehow actually connected with his spirit after death, and that he was letting me know that he had put away most of the cynicism and was happy now.
Like I said though, it was just a feeling.
I respected his writing so much, and interacted with him a bit, and mainy like him because he thought in a completely different way from me, he was an engineer by trade, and he applied his nuts and bolts practical knowledge to human psychology.
But I didn't know it at the time, because if you had asked me, I would have said I just appreciated his blog, and that was it.
He died in March, his last post about how he had some scary pain, had to go to the hospital, and found the hospital to be so disgustingly unsanitary that he checked himself out against doctor's orders.
The title of the blog post was:
Death Dodging
And that was it, he died. No more posts. His girlfriend let people know in the comments that he had died, and people thought it was a troll for a while but eventually believed.
What was weird about it was that his death really affected me, and I felt like I knew him, and that was strange even to me, and as a kind of tribute to him I saved his website and went back and reread it from the beginning, and noticed that over the years I had adopted some of his ways of writing, mainly expressions he used.
It was after I read everything that the feelings went away. I also did some digging, since he blogged anonymously, to find out who he was and if he had really died, and found that he had.
So that was it. An odd interlude in my life. How could the death of someone I don't even know feel like the loss of a friend? I hardly interacted with him.
He has been referred to several times on the forum, Aurini and thoughtgypsy are members who I have heard talk about him, but I asked Aurini and he said he didn't really know him.
I waited, and there were very few people who even mentioned his passing, and he had a lot of intelligent men out there who were his fans, but only one or two blogs even mentioned he was gone.
I guess that was part of it, not only the suddenness, but the idea that someone who was so smart, so funny, who had so much to offer could disappear like that and no one would notice, it seems. There wasn't the anticipation and the big send off like the passing of forum member Private Man. He was just gone.
That was back in early April, and this dream was just a few nights ago. I make no claims to have contacted the dead, even if that is what it felt like. It could just be that all that time I wasn't even thinking about him my unconscious mind was resolving my feelings below the surface, and presenting a resolved emotional issue to me.
Either way, I was grateful for that dream, and greatful for that dude, AfOR (Anonymous for Obvious Reasons)was his name, and his blog was:
Wimminz - celebrating skank ho's everywhere.
It's still up. Pretty black pill in some ways, pretty hopeful in others. Excellent advice for men who are going through the twin demons of divorce and false rape allegations at the same time.
Wonder why he seemed bitter sometimes.
RIP AfOR.