Sunday, March 23
Erik Winn was tall and skinny and had skin like tanned leather. He wore
glasses and shaggy sweaters and tall leather boots. His teeth were terrible,
until he had them all out and got dentures. He smoked constantly –
hand-rolled cigarettes from a big can of American Spirit tobacco. He rolled
more expertly and effortlessly than anyone else I have ever met. He drank
coffee, slowly, all day long. He seemed to live on peanut butter sandwiches,
bananas, now and then a baked good from Trident, where he was very nearly part
of the physical structure of the place when he was living in Boulder. He was,
whatever else my description might suggest, a handsome man, and I know there
were women in his life before I knew him, though by the time we worked together
he was almost monk-like in his ascetism and claimed variously to have given up
on love, on art, on a lot of what my Christian heritage is always calling the
things of the world. He played classical guitar, skillfully, and sang, though
I always had a hard time getting him to start.
He was an unapologetic radical in most things, unconventional even in his
radicalism. He was a genius, a self-taught scholar, a philosopher, a
technologist, and a crank.
He wrote object oriented code of a kind deeply concerned with ontologies and
proper names. He made terrible puns in the comments, insisted on Hungarian
notation, hacked with a kind of ragged yet controlled intensity. He was a Free
Software zealot, helped run a free computing collective in Portland, worked on
Debian, and argued fiercely at SparkFun that we should embrace the ethic of
open code. Only a handful of people working there now likely remember who he
was, but he shaped the entire thing all the same. Nearly everything we do with
a database still flows through a handful of his lines; most of the code I’ve
written in the years since is informed one way or another by a reaction to his
style and concerns.
He lived somewhere on the other side from me of a lot of Buddhism, somewhere
way out beyond the Marxists on the political part of the spectrum, in a
neighborhood adjacent I think to the anarchists but too rich in the experience
of defeat to sustain very many illusions. He was suspicious of orthodoxies and
pieties to the point of a nearly crippling refusal to accept consensus reality.
He was bitter and jaded and laughed a lot, went on extended tirades and wanted
us all to be kind to one another. He was funny. He was decent, from a
deep-down place, to everyone I ever saw ask him for anything, except maybe when
the bullshit of the world and the sheer folly of everything were too much for
him to function.
I will not forget the story of the truckload of weed out of Kansas that they
lost after someone in a random parking lot circle passed them a joint and when
they got out of jail the truck had just vanished. I won’t forget the stories
of the squat in Portugal, of Boulder in the 1980s, of the life at the edges of
things and just a little outside the lines of the sanctioned order. I won’t
forget all those rides down the Diagonal back into town in that beat-to-shit
little Honda with the sun going down behind the mountains and the wind through
the windows. All the time he lived in that van in Casey’s driveway, watching
our drunken antics and ridiculous arguments with a quiet amusement. The winter
nights and summer afternoons we talked for hours about what the good life might
be.
For a long time, I was afraid to talk to Erik, because I was afraid that in
talking to him I would feel like a fraud and a coward and a sellout. And now
he’s gone, and I won’t ever talk to him again, and this is what that kind of
fear gets you. I should have been a better friend to Erik. I’m grateful I
knew him when I did. I wish we lived in a world he could have more easily
reconciled himself to.
tags: colorado, debian, linux, sparkfun, warelogging
p1k3 /
2014 /
3 /
23