A good friend and colleague of mine passed away last weekend in an incredibly tragic car accident. In an effort to both honor the memory my friend Steve and for me to personally cope, I’ve started this particular post at least a hundred times in my head and have composed a number of drafts of story after story about him. All of the memories are great and good, and make me laugh, but none of those drafted posts truly convey the enormity of what I feel and have felt for the past 7 days. I seriously doubt that they ever will, and no matter how many times I type this, it will never come out right or to my own satisfaction.

Below is my favorite picture of Steve, with his former bandmates from Exit Ocean. I took it at one of my favorite bars in New York City — Siberia — which no longer exists. Yes, you will notice that Saturday Night Live’s Jimmy Fallon is in the shot. Exit Ocean played that night at Siberia, and apparently Jimmy Fallon and Russell Crowe showed up (although we didn’t end up running into Russell Crowe). I think we all couldn’t stop talking about it at work or while hanging out with common friends in Williamsburg for what seemed like a month, but that was a fun time.

(l-r: Steve, Brad, Jimmy Fallon, Jon, and Chris)

Following in line with my speechlessness, I’m directly taken back to a particular conversation with Steve from about seven years ago while we were working together, in which we debated brevity (his preferred methodology) over (my particularly exhausting) long-windedness (which is actually in my opinion my being “thorough”, but I digress). He used to tell me that “everyone needs an editor,” and was absolutely convinced that I should describe things “using the least possible words.” I laughed, because I’m usually anything but brief. My counterpoint was that if you turn on the internal editor while you’re writing, you tend to lose the initial thought, idea, or feeling that was truest to the moment. This week has been no exception as I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on our friendship, but I find myself putting into practice something he had said to me long ago. Of course, I learned this from Steve. I think this is cosmically appropriate somehow.

We challenged, sparred, bantered and joked on inane topics such as these occasionally while we were at work. Mostly, this would happen over IM while we were sitting in the same room — Steve used to have a pretty ridiculous chat icon that had an AOL IM buddy guy dressed like a rapper on it, that had big gold chains with gaudy, animated diamonds that would blink every couple of seconds, and it said (oh so eloquently) “Bling Bling.” It was because of this I remember always calling him “Steve-to-the-izzo” — he even used to say “BLING BLLLANNNG!!!” and then briefly flash a gang sign of some sort and he was anything BUT gangsta, which is why it was so funny. I thought that was hysterical; I still laugh everytime I think about it. It was funny to us how, as two English majors from the same university, who graduated a year apart and had a lot of the same overlapping friend set — we had ended up working in the same industry on the same project at the same company. (And years later, we both ended up doing Product Management while in living San Francisco, in the same sector of technology.) Given all the similarities between us, it was really impossible for Steve and I to have not to have become friends within this lifetime.

Steve’s colleagues set up a blog for him on WordPress.com the next day, after the accident. Upon seeing this, I decided to call in a favor. As a result, upgrades on the blog have been waived, and the domain http://stevewolkoff.com has been purchased and mapped to the blog. In the future, should Steve’s family want this domain transferred for purposes regarding the Foundation set up in Steve’s name or otherwise, it will be relinquished to them. It’s my hope that not only Steve’s name live on through this gift, but that it helps others to express their feelings, communicate with one another, and be bound by one person that has touched all of our lives in many amazing and profound ways.

To the Wolkoff family I offer my deepest and most heartfelt condolences, and for Cindy, I wish not only a speedy recovery, but peace and healing in both mind and spirit.

Rest in peace, Steve. I will miss you.

That sure is a loaded title up there, isn’t it? But now that no one is listening, it feels strangely OK to be myself around here. Now that that’s said, I wanted to dash off a quick post before I lose the moment.

Where shall I begin?

Today — June 18, 2008 — marks the fact that I’ve been maintaining Agendacide.com, my personal online journal, for 10 years. (Additionally, today also marks my one year anniversary at my current employer.)

When I started this site, I was in a drastically different place in my life, having been dropped off on the curb after college graduation with an English degree, hoping to make sense of it all from there. Obviously, lots of things have happened since then, and it would take a seriously exhaustive and intimidating post to fill you in.

I nursed a strange brand of emotional laryngitis that I couldn’t even wrap my head around for a period of years. In fact, I couldn’t even describe it and it was absolutely maddening and infuriating to me, until the point at which it devolved into apathy. Though it may seem in real life that I’m completely there and absolutely present — the picture, or expression of myself, wasn’t a whole one.

Maybe it was born out of a desire to remain private and incognito, or something deeper like shame or embarrassment, or the fear of rejection. Somewhere along the way, I became paralyzed by constant scrutiny, and suppressed my emotions and thoughts until this site was no longer was my therapy — it slowly grew into my equivalent of an online anxiety attack — a testament to, and a constant reminder of the things that I used to do growing up that hurt and stung, the idiotic things I’d done, and quite frankly, it exposed all the chinks in the armor I’d built up for so long.

There are many things I haven’t published sitting here in my draft folder. Maybe they require a second look, or should stay in various states of incompletion. To me though, when I read them again, the feelings are real and the emotion is there. I’ve just been wondering where I’ve been though. Maybe you have too, and I wish I had an answer for you. I’ll admit it in all honesty: I’m confused, and I’m figuring it out.

I’m a little rusty with the writing, but I hope you’ll bear with me. This is really hard for me, and I’m obviously out of practice. After 5 years in New York, and 5 years in California, equalling a decade’s worth of ideas and thoughts lost and tumbling in my head, I hopefully think that maybe I’ve learned something from it all, but we’ll see about that.

I’m really eager to begin and end this chapter of the site, and there’s so much I want to share: new designs, new stories, and even some experiments — I’m sure that I won’t be able to recall or implement it all for you in any sort of chronological manner or in one fell swoop. But I figured that without me thinking too much — and before my internal editor tells me to stop this — let’s hit the “Publish” button for the first time in a very long time.

And we start this off again, with no agenda… as it always was.