ceep

that's him, the elusive and effusive christopher alonzo pryor. yesterday i was informed chris no longer walks the earth with us. apparently he passed away just about one year ago.


i feel badsadmad. chris was the real don quixote.


chris and i stopped actively being friends probably two years ago. we were out one evening at a bar we both praised as the coolest in pasadena. chris had a couple shots of cognac, i think, but it might just as well have been tequila. in any case, he was into mixing a couple of shots in with his oat sodas, (his term for beers.) the shots were like a truth serum for chris and as we sank into the familiar but confusing state of inebriation, chris could not be shut out of a round table discussion and in his zeal for stirring, interesting conversation, he let me know that he did not like me.

i think it was his way of saying he loved me. there was some follow-up discussion that spilled out on to colorado boulevard where his bike was tied to a stop sign. he kept trying to explain to me that he disliked me because of some great potential he saw in me. chris thought i was a marxist, (which is not all that far from the truth, i suppose,) and as such, he could not imagine how i could work where i worked at that time doing what i did at that time. in fact, chris and another friend of mine, the inimitable spifler, had argued about all things economic and race related in the comments of my blog a few years ago. were you to look through the comments of my blog in its earliest days, from inception in february of '05 right through the summer of that year, you would see many comments from chris, aka "crash pryor." we undertook blogging around the same time.

i think "crash," may have been a name he adopted after the oscar winning film came out, but i am not sure. he also went by "ceep," when i met/knew him. he meant it to read as "c.p.," but the funny thing is my wife always read it, like when he commented on my blog, as "seep." i preferred chris. because of the monikers i always felt like "chris," was more personal or intimate, and since he was my friend...



chris was a bad-ass writer. in spite of the fact that he got paid very little for what he wrote, he wrote volumes as evidenced by this blog. chris loved all manner of worldplay as should be noted by just a cursory scan of that blog. moreover, he commanded a vast array of knowledge and understood a wide variety of references. he was a renaissance man, which is at once refreshing and rare these days.

chris was an artist. he was angry. he loved everyone and everything. he raged and he raged. chris was determined to be outside of, to stand apart, to avoid stasis and always move forward. chris and i had differences because i believed if you lived in this world you had to make certain concessions for it. i live by the golden rule of firefighting, (which i learned in my days as a firefighter,) 'you can't help someone if you are not safe yourself.' and so it is that i did not, do not, live the rough life chris chose. despite my reservations about capitalism as a viable economic system and how i would infuse elements of socialism into our society above and beyond what we have today, (to include single payor healthcare,) i work and do the best i can so i can make a home for my family and so i can maintain a certain degree of personal, (social,) health.

it's like the discovery i intuited chris mccandless made at the end of his journey, dying in a trailer in the alaska wild. it seemed he came to conclude that man is in fact a social animal and as such has certain needs to maintain his health which include the pleasant company of his peers. socialization is thirsty work, son, (or yo, either of which chris would have said and did say plenty,) and so i take care of self first in as much as i need to and in my free time i rail against the wicked ways of the world. it works for me. it may have pissed my good friend off to no end. maybe he even judged me to whatever degree. still, it works for me and i judged chris too. i thought he did not understand me. no big deal.

i don't know how chris died and while it has only been 17 hours since i learned of his passing, it is a mystery i can hardly bear. i can't imagine what could kill chris. he was a fucking rock, riding his bike all over los angeles like a crazed banshee on a mission to expose all manners of corruption and write all wrongs.

i used to pick him up and drop him off at a little back apartment he lived in near the rose bowl. never having gone in with him i always wondered what the hovel looked like on the inside. i imagine his computer was central for writing and beyond that station, i doubt the rest of the place received much care. chris was not interested in much beyond his writing. he enjoyed the company of ladies and mixing with his friends. he worked out regularly and rode his bike everywhere he went including to the train or bus to link up for a longer trip.

it's been well over two years since chris and i were in touch. i see his last entry on his blog was in early october of last year, ('07.) he commented on my blog after i posted a picture of my new son; mark, in march of '07. i can see he posted the comment at 9:59am but i have no idea on which date this occurred, (due to the inadequacies of blogspot.)

Crash Pryor said...
Congratulations, man...didn't even know...

out of the blue one day i found this comment and i was elated to hear from chris. i had been lazy for letting go of the friendship. i was not offended, and i guess i will learn a life lesson from this but i just let chris go because life is complicated and i could not keep up with so many people and so because of a perceived sleight, i just let go. so when i found the comment i clicked on crash pryor and i went to his blog and read a few entries and eventually clicked to comment. i wrote a long and detailed message telling chris i wanted to catch up with him but before posting it my computer crashed. i was beyond pissed off about this-i lost the message completely. once i got my computer running again i just decided to let the comment go for now, thinking i would pop in on him one day. (therein lay the regret.)

how did chris die? what sent him to this thing he once referred to with me as "the dirt nap?" i emailed a friend of his today in search of an answer so we'll see if i ever get to the bottom of this mystery. i did not know chris's friends from virginia. he played me a tape once of f-stop, the band he was in once upon a time. they sounded good, reminded me of fishbone a bit.

i had checked in with his blog as recently as about one month ago, primarily because of a comment that was left on an abandoned blog of mine. (as an aside, here is another long exchange between chris and i on the nature of capitalism and its practical applications in modern society.) again i had no idea when the comment had been left so it occurred to me maybe auriferous was in fact chris pryor, the one and only ceep. after some investigation i discovered it was not ceep and had been left in march of this year.

as i write with just a couple of tears sliding down my face like tiny regrets, his friend kevin replied to my email and told me all he knew was that chris died on his birthday last year, or rather, he seems to have crashed his bike after passing out and died two days later, (oct. 17, 2007.)

the friend who originally informed me of all this said he had googled him and discovered the comments page posted by the mortuary in richmond as well as a tribute from one of his friends in mog. so i went and googled him also just now and discovered a well written and poignant blog entry from a good friend of chris's. therein chris's friend suggests chris was riding his bicycle to a local atm when he collapsed. to me, chris was the ultimate outlaw and this is why i remain worried. the pen is so mighty and i suppose it may be perceived of as paranoia but i just hope it really is as simple as all that. (and it probably is.) i am also saddened by the fact it was his birthday and i hope he did not die from a broken heart, from missing his loved ones back in virginia, from struggling so.

chris's blog ominously says "bob's your uncle," as the last sentence of his introduction. and so as i sit here listening to my uncle sing "lively up yourself," i salute chris pryor. he was a man in the best sense of the word. he was always true to himself and what quixotic behavior existed there only served to color him in the brightest hues of the life he lived.

he once quoted this song to me and i find it a fitting tribute to him. lyrically it is one of u2's best songs but it conjures chris in the various images constantly flying at you. chris was like that. in terms of f/stop, he was a 1.4, all at once. i regret that i did not get back in touch with chris in time but i am thankful to have known him.