My Inaugural Blog - A Dedication

My inaugural blog. I’ve never even read a blog so I’m not sure exactly what to write or how to write it, but I’ll try to use properly grammar and correct speling for your reading pleasure.

Who knows where this literary odyssey will take us, but if I only get one entry completed, I might as well as make it something substantive, a dedication. (I promise future submission will be much like myself: wry, non-sequitur, non-repetitive, polarizing, non-repetitive, and slightly smelling of cabbage.) The most important people in my life are my parents, but this dedication isn’t for them. (Who’s sorry for not buying me those Air Jordans, now?) No, this dedication is to a guy I haven’t seen in half a dozen years, Erich Kern.

For those of you who don’t know Erich, he’s a bastard…but in a good way. I met him while in the Army when we were both deployed to Macedonia/Kosovo. We were roommates, actually bunkmates to be precise. I still remember the first time we met. I just got into the theater of operations, dropped my bag off in my assigned room, and met my new roommates, except Erich. I had to go to work and by the time I got back to the room, everybody was asleep and the room was pitch-dark. Using my incredible spidey-sense, I felt my way to the foot of my bed. I leaned forward slightly and banged my face into a pair of giant, stinky feet. (Oh, I guess I should mention that the Erich is a hair over 6 foot 6 inches tall and his feet would hang outside the frame of his top bunk by about 7 inches.) After spitting the toe jam out of my mouth, I crawled into bed feeling dirty and abused.

Eventually, we met in a more traditional sense, shaking hands rather than rubbing my face on his swollen hogs. We spent 4 months together and developed an immediate dudeship. The bastard is one of those solid guys that everyone gravitates towards. I mean everyone. Yes, you. Built like a basketball power forward, but kind-hearted to where women wouldn’t feel threatened. Tall and good-looking, but self-deprecatingly hilarious that guys don’t want to kick him in the groin. For the female readers, think a young Clooney – suave, smart, charming, and a little playboyish. For the guys, think Vince Vaughn in Swingers – leader of every circle, ridiculously good at everything, hilarious, got the world on a string but doesn’t take anything too serious, talking trash while kicking your ass at Playstation. All the females on the camp knew Lieutenant Kern. If the Army ran a Bachelor reality show, this is the guy in the Jacuzzi with a handful of roses. He’s the Fonz before he jumped the shark. I think the women at the camp came up with fake maladies just so they could go to the medic’s station.

Throughout life, certain people leave an impact but eventually drift away. You want to keep in touch but it gets tough when you keep bouncing around every few years. Plus when that guy is as popular and the center of so many people’s lives, it gets even harder to get a lot of face-time. I’m sure that would have happened eventually, but we never got that chance. Erich and his fiance went on a ski trip to Kaprun, Austria shortly before Thanksgiving, 2000. I was supposed to join them but another guy backed out and I didn’t feel like being the third wheel. I woke up the following Monday morning and while taking a shower, I heard Erich’s name being mentioned on the radio. I assumed he was being awarded a medal for doing something amazing, but I quickly learned that he died while trapped inside a train that caught on fire inside the mountain of the ski resort. We had hung out for the past year and in an instant, the bastard was gone.

Every now and again something makes me think about him. It becomes less and less frequent nowadays, but when it happens, I immediately recall two things – first, the parties at his pad which were ridiculously stocked with booze and women, and second, the time he took a lazy jump shot in the lane and a short kid, a good foot shorter than him, rejected his shot with a forearm. We gave him hell for that and still would. As I begin this web log, it reminds me that he was one of the early pioneers of the internet who took the time to set up his own website back in the day when no one knew the potential of the internet for anything other than porn. So as I begin my first foray into this www thing, I’m dedicating this to Erich and his family that survived him. As someone said during his funeral, Erich is at Heaven’s bar drinking a Guinness, waiting to buy us a drink. Hopefully, Heaven has a Wifi connection.