Please note, the title intends to refer to “Death of a Salesman” for reasons that will be obvious to any willing to do the research and make the connections.

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Blogworld is all abuzz at the unexpected death of Rob Smith, the Acidman of Gut Rumbles, and it should be no surprise give the wide swath he cut with his take-no-prisoners style against anything or anyone who “chapped his ass” where he often wounded his friends even more than his enemies.  I had a few run-ins with Rob, and I am still uncertain if I had made it to the Austin blog-meet if I would have shaken his hand or punched him in the face upon first meeting.  I suspect he wouldn’t have cared which greeting he got from me, as long as I noticed him.

While he was not involved in my starting Random Fate, Rob did encourage more than one person to start a weblog, and in my early, halcyon days of blogging I read the musings of Acidman every day. Time passed, blogworld evolved, life happened, and eventually I stopped reading Gut Rumbles.  Mere existence has enough drama in it for me that I felt no need to be a spectator to a train-wreck that was entirely preventable, and Rob’s joy at living up to his self-appellation of “Acidman” grew tiresome.  Endless vitriol corrodes the soul, and mine has enough holes eaten out of it already that I decided I cannot and would not suffer any new erosion.  This is not to say I celebrate his passing, for I do not.  Every death diminishes the world in some way, often in fashions unrecognized.

Beyond the sadness associated with any death, in this case there is a greater tragedy.  Rob leaves behind a young son in addition to his adult daughter, a son who had become estranged from Rob because of circumstances related to his divorce.  Now, Rob’s son will never have the opportunity to truly know his father, a loss that I recognize is incredibly deep because I see it through the lens of the recent death of my Dad.  I had the opportunity to truly know my Dad as an adult, and in the last 20 years he and I had a relationship that was more along the lines of a true friendship rather than one of father and son.  Sadly, Rob’s son never had much of a chance to know his father in the past few years, and now the opportunity for him is gone.

It is not on behalf of the dead for whom we need to mourn, it is those left behind.

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