heavy on my mind...

surely you've heard the news. a huge section of the blog community is talking about it. and i've been wanting to blog about it all day but just couldn't pull away from work long enough to get my thoughts in order.

i'm at home now, and oddly enough i'm still bewildered by the whole thing. and it's all so very strange to me in a way, because i didn't know him, i've never met him, and hell for a while there i didn't even really have a clear picture of what he looked like until pictures started appearing on people's blogs today in memory of him.

aaron hawkins.

the uppity negro himself.

the really, really strange thing is, though, that he's been on my mind for the past week or so. i'm not kidding. i've been reading his blogs for a while now, and i've always found them to be buckets full of information on anything and everything under the sun. i was always amused by his wealth of knowledge and vast array of interests. and the fact that he was a chicago blogger made him all the more interesting.

so, yeah.. i'd been thinking about aaron for over a week now, because there's a coffee shop by my house that i frequent, and there's this black guy with dreads who's in there every time i go. he's always on his laptop typing away, and i kept wondering to myself whether or not he looked like aaron. not because any black guy with dreads looks like aaron, but because he's mentioned my neighborhood in several of his posts, and maybe in the back of my mind i figured he lived in the hood. so i pictured him typing his blog entries from his laptop at the coffee shop. i glanced over at the guy a few times, trying to see if i could match the tiny little picture on the bottom right corner of aaron's website to this guy and while my gut feeling was that it wasn't aaron, i couldn't help but wonder.

and that's why he's been on my mind.

but of course, the guy didn't turn out to be aaron, and frankly i have no idea who he is. but aaron's gone so i suppose there's no need for any further speculation.

it's so weird how the death of someone you've never even met can affect you the way aaron's death has affected me. i mean, sure, we knew of each others existence and communicated via comments on various occasions, but i didn't know him half as well as some of the other bloggers did. but i figured all along, that being a chicago blogger, i'd probably meet him eventually..

so i'm kind of sad now, because that will never happen.

and i'm even more sad that he was going through so much that he felt the need to bow out. i can't even begin to imagine...

rest in peace brother...