Late to the late

A problem with the Internet being so damned huge is that it's easy to completely miss an important signal in all the noise.  Somehow it escaped my attention that blogger and journalist Chez Pazienza passed away two years ago, and I'm just hearing about this today.

Actually, you know, I can tell you exactly how I missed it.  That I was a regular reader of Pazienza's original blog, Deus ex Malcontent, but when Pazienza left it fallow to co-found The Daily Banter and to work on various side projects with his partner-in-crime Bob Cesca, I just sort of drifted away.  Much of the Banter is behind a paywall, and I was never enthusiastic enough about the site beyond Pazienza's contributions to dole out the money (if I even had it when the Banter was founded), and I have to confess I'm not the biggest fan of Cesca's work, though I respect it.  I listened to the podcast Cesca and Pazienza did for awhile, but eventually that fell out of my queue years ago.  We were sometimes on Twitter at the same time back when Twitter was the big best thing for smart people and not merely a troll patch for eggs, but then for a long time I pretty much was off Twitter because Facebook was a way to say more to people I was closer to.  And anyway--

And anyway it doesn't matter.  Ships cross the vast sea, back and forth, en route from one port to another, and along the way sometimes they pass close enough to exchange signals, sometimes they're nearer than that and sometimes they're farther away.

Pazienza wasn't somebody I knew, exactly; but he was a friend of the blog in its earliest days, weirdly and undeservedly enough.  He commented here a few times, responded in a friendly way to comments I left at Deus ex Malcontent, and it seems to me (though it looks like the DXM domain name is long gone and I can't confirm beyond my muddled memory) that he once cited and linked to something I wrote in an approving way.  We had some exchanges on Twitter years ago.  I mean, really, to be clear, it was probably a one-sided admiration all things considered; I thought he was great, and on one or two occasions he blew my mind by noticing my humble blog's existence.

It's not like I worshiped him or anything.  But he was a cool kid on the Internet in an era when blogging was still sort of new-ish-ish and social media wasn't really social media yet.  When I was a much more aggressively aspiring writer, instead of someone with crippling years-long writer's block; when I was passionate about politics instead of shell-shocked; when I was updating this shamble of a blog every day instead of once every 76-point-something years; back in those (cliche alert) halcyon days, he was the cool high school senior when I was a blogosphere freshman.

With some of the personal things he wrote about, stumbling across news of his death and its circumstances, I wish I could say my reaction was shock and not a grieving, "Oh no."  It was, when you clicked on the link, exactly what you expected to read.  Which wasn't easy or comforting, it was only sorrowing.  Of course he did.  With what feels like inevitability, which only makes it worse.

I'm at a loss here, you know.  He wasn't exactly a friend or a hero, but he also wasn't not those things, either.  I liked him but I hardly knew him.  I feel like, after losing track of him for years and not even noticing that he'd died, like I've picked up a thread exactly where I dropped it quite a lot of years ago, to discover it abruptly severed, puzzling yet completely expected.

For what it's worth, goodbye, Chez.  I sure as hell wish you were here.





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