Violent Green's son.

[JustJen]

I've found a few threads but will need server space to upload and host them. of course, obviously photoshop don is one of them. that one isn't mark-centric, just absolute dtf legend.

[JustJen]

Mark wrote this about "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", by Genesis - he likely would've changed things up before he died, as he sometimes would revisit old writings and say he was embarassed by how bloated they were, or whatever the case may have been, but at the moment he wrote things, he was passionately all-in with his beliefs. That's how he seemed to live his life.

I've not read through this, but am pasting it in it's entirety from a text file I have here. One of several.  It's so long, I have to split it into two posts. Everything below is from mark.


-----

If you actually read this, enjoy

Since the album begins with an image (the lamb), we should first understand the place of imagery and imitation (the Greek poesis, or poetry; action that creates an external product that serves some end other than itself) in Plato’s work. Plato’s treatment of poetry in the Republic is famous, but to take Socrates account of poetry from that particular book word-for-word and claim it to be Plato’s own would be a crime. Let us not forget:

1: Socrates is a character, not Plato himself. If Plato had felt like giving his views outright, he could’ve done so. Treatise-style philosophy, which is nothing more than a narrative straight from the mind of the writer, had existed since Thales, who was hundreds of years before Plato. Plato specifically chooses a dialogue style that is reminiscent of a play, and uses specific characters with specific traits. We should not assume the Socratic account and the Platonic account are the same thing.

2: Just as importantly, Plato himself is creating poetry with his writings. Look at the beginning of the Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium, or Phaedo. While Platonic works are not as rich as Homer or Virgil, many of the central dialogues are filled with dramatic scenes, from Socrates noble drinking of the poison, to he and Phaedrus extolling the beauty of the countryside they’re walking through. The focus on the Platonic work might be philosophy, but the works themselves are dramatic plays; the exact thing that Socrates attacks in the Republic.

3: But even beyond his dialogues, Plato was a poet. Some of his short epigrams are still with us: ”Even as you shone once the Star of Morning among the living, so in death you shine now the Star of Evening among the dead.” (Epigrams, 2)

Images hold a very important place in Platonic philosophy, since he was the first philosopher to write in images alone (and not just using short metaphors to explain things, like Heraclitus or Parmenides), and because it was a topic of his work so often. We won’t go into my understanding of Platonic imagery just yet, but use this as our first point of comparison: in both Platonic philosophy and in The Lamb Lies Down, imagery is of upfront concern.

The second occurrence of imagery is place and character. We’re given a locale familiar to everyone (if we haven’t been there in the flesh, we’ve seen pictures and know the name), and some understanding of the places inhabitants and how they react with their surroundings. This is the topic at the forefront of Platonic political philosophy: what is the relation between man and state? How can the one interact with the many? This is why Plato chooses Socrates as his main character. He is the most famous and well-documented historical account of an incompatibility between the one and the many, executed by the city he loved. That same incompatibility is there with Rael: the Imperial Aerosol Kid, “don’t look at me/I’m not your kind.” We see, for all its functionality, a sort of sickness in the function of New York City; greed, aggression, apathy.

Until, of course, everything is interrupted by an image.

Now, understand that I write the lamb off as image (within the larger image of the story), because it has no place as a static image. Now, poetic images represent things, but can do so in different ways. The “all-night watchmen” represent something, but it is contained in the idea of them; they represent all-night watchmen in NYC. They could represent much more, but they’re not the focus of this essay. The lamb, on the other hand, due to its importance in the story (and the record title), cannot just stand for a lamb in New York City. Even if the lamb doesn’t represent something larger, it still pulls the mind away from the image itself into further consideration (this is a very, very important point, but we’ll save it): what is the lamb doing there? How did it get there? Why does it cause everything to change? Since this is the function the lamb performs, both for us outside the story and Rael inside the story, it is more of an image than the all-night watchmen.

The image, although it must seem surreal and impossible to Rael, really appears more real to him than his surroundings. The wall of death (an image I’ll leave open for other interpretations) covers him, covering him, immobile, in the crust. A flurry of images, although if Rael experiences them as we do, I’m not sure; Marshall McLuhan, Ku Klux Klan and Caryl Chessman, peach blossom and bitter almond.

And the song begins.

Watch, as you read the lyrics, or read my allusions to them, the functioning of your mind. The words, once read, do stay contained as words. They lead your mind away from the particular word on your particular computer screen toward the thing they represent; people on Broadway, children playing games, bitter almond. This creates a long chain of connection; your mind connects with the words, that connect to the lamb, that connects to different things – maybe a farm, maybe Jesus, maybe whiteness. Notice is, and keep in mind that images can make the mind connect things at all levels of being; a word that is right in front of you, a smell you have a memory of, a city you live in, and a man you have no memory of but construct an intellectual picture of. Although they all have different levels of being, your mind can find a common thread through them. A majority of the essay from hereon will be, using Plato’s theories, to elaborate on the nature of that thread, and how deeply existing things, no matter how opposed they are, all exist together as one. Take, for example, Rael’s own imagery when he compares himself to Jonah in Cuckoo Cocoon. Rael and Jonah are two separate things. They are not the same; imagery lets us think of them in conjunction and as related to each other.

Back to the story. Rael, when he is In The Cage, explicitly denies the temptation to not move and remain where he is. This is the first of many images of movement that are major hinges for the album. If Rael stops moving forward and remains in the cage, the album is over, unless we want to listen about Rael sleeping in the cage until he dies. Likewise, as listeners, if we let our own minds stop, we can’t actually understand the record. It is an image that is composed of images, and unless our mind moves forward to connect the images together with our experiences and understandings, the words remain just particular words. In fact, they’re not even particular words, since the conception of words involves seeing marks on a paper, stepping forward and recognizing them as letters, stepping forward and recognizing the groups of letters as words, stepping forward and recognizing the words as mental images we have, like memories. This stepping forward involves seeing and understanding the particular thing (the letter T, for example), seeing how it is like and unlike other things (the letters H, I, N, G), grouping them together due to their similarity and finding their interactions due to their dissimilarity, and creating a body of knowledge of making them interact (which would be language). When we do this, we can understand these markings – THING – as more than just black lines on a white background. This is our mind universalizing, moving away from single particular black lines and up the intellectual ladder to words, phrases, and images. This is the account of knowledge given not only in the Philebus, but also in the Sophist & Statesman, where it is not Socrates who presents the view, but an anonymous visitor from Elea. For both Socrates and the visitor (thus giving us a less single-minded view), all human knowledge, be it of ethics, art, politics, or metaphysics, consists of this motion between the particular and the universal.


But this all involves motion, and if we stop the motion, what can our mind do? Nothing. The only way for a human mind to stop, at this point, is death (but we’ll talk about that later). Rael doesn’t want this, so he rejects the idea of sleeping or sitting in a happy daze remembering childhood memories. He is held by natural forces; stalagmites and rock. He cannot break through the nature that holds him down. The Platonic comparisons here are obvious; Plato’s doctrine of the spiritual soul and the natural body is famous; they are two different things. This becomes explicit in The Lamb Lies Down during Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging. Hundreds of lifeless bodies, just waiting for the fuse to be lit and get them running. Plato believes the soul/mind is divine, the part of man that connects us to the gods, and it is the natural body that holds us down, away from true happiness in the heavens, distracting us from divine philosophy and turning us toward pleasures of the flesh. However, since the gods gave us our bodies as well, we still need some pleasure, but in moderation. But this is too much all at once; now we’re talking about In The Cage, Grand Parade, Larnia and The Colony. Let’s back track and say that it is Rael’s nature as an angry young man seeking only pleasure is what holds him in his cage, and only a decision by his creator (Peter Gabriel in the case of Rael) can let him out.

Here we are introduced to brother John, who cannot help Rael if he wanted. We’ll return to him in due time.

Rael is released from the cage, walks through the factory, where he sees with us that a man is not his body; the body is something else, controlled by something that is not in the body itself. We keep this in mind as Rael comes into the underground copy of New York City. This New York City is a visual poem; a copy, a representation of something more real (which is the account of poetry given in a dozen Platonic dialogues). The copy, function exactly as the image should, leads Rael’s mind off to further images; the images of memory. We see what held Rael in the cage; he is violent, hateful, and aggressive against his fellow man. He is moved by sex alone. His heart has grown fluffy; it is covered and obscured by something outside of it that doesn’t belong there. Rael needs to shear away the hair to get to the core of his heart. Move now to the image of Plato’s Socrates, urging young men who care only for honor and pleasure to shear those desires off their hearts and find a life in truth through philosophic study, to see the relations between particulars and universals. This, the philosophic pursuit of truth and happiness, is the heart of mankind; the pleasure, honor, wealth, that’s all just the fur that stops it from freezing when it gets cold.

So, a life of truth over a life of violence and pleasure is to be preferred, but we do need some pleasure and honor to keep our heart warm and beating. Can it be just the proper balance between pleasure and knowledge? This is the big question in the Philebus. But, as we find out in Counting Out Time, trying to simply subjugate pleasure to knowledge seldom profits anyone. There is something else needed to produce success and happiness. But Rael is wiser now, and sees that his way of life in NYC is was certainly lacking an important principle: the connection between himself and the things around him that the intellectual part of us can show us (remember, the function of your mind through images). Without this intellectual/spiritual connection, there can only be opposition; anger and hate where Rael cannot have pleasure, and rape where he can.

Carpet Crawlers is too filled with images for a complete run-down. A paper itself could be written on this song; each line is rich and filled with vivid imagery. Let us extract two important parts from the song:
1: the sheer quantity and quality of the poetic images that we experience along with Rael.
2: the mantra that is repeated endlessly – you gotta get in to get out. Lets think about this line. The Crawlers want to get out, but they have to get in first. If they are not in, then they must be out. Why don’t they just stay out? Motion. Staying out will bring stagnation, and as we’ve discussed, this is not a possibility for us. We must always keep moving.

Notice how the contradicting principles (inness and outness) are reconciled through the need for motion. Picture a black square, and then picture it moving through the shades of grey until it becomes white. Without the motion in between the two colors, the transition between white and black is impossible, but the motion can join together two completely opposing things. Again, here is Plato’s account of knowledge, of the function of the mind; moving back and forth between principles, called dialectic. We see white, we see black, we see their similarities and dissimilarities, group them together as colors, and then see the colors between them. This happens in motion; always in motion.

The motion lands them in the Chamber of 32 Doors, where Rael is faced with a specter of his life in NYC; how will he interact with these people? Can he trust them? Should he become violent and bestial toward him? All the kinds of people are here, no matter how opposite they might be. Who will he trust? He must trust someone, if the motion is to continue; if the motion stops, he will die in the Chamber. Knowledge alone doesn’t help the academics, magic doesn’t help the priest or the magician. Rael needs the positive human interaction, call it love or trust, to get him out, or he will die.

[JustJen]

A quick summary of established Platonic philosophical principles used so far:

1)The ability of the mind to connect separate things that are unlike, thus always finding one strand of likeness through all things, even when they seem to fundamentally oppose each other.
2)what exists intellectually or spiritually can have more reality than what is physical
3)a rejection of a life of physical pleasure alone
4)seperation of mind and body
5)the necessity of motion to being
6)the necessity of positive human interaction to proper motion

Continuing on from the 1st record.

Plato has two specific dialogues that deal with love: the Symposium and the Phaedrus. In both, love (eros in the Greek) is an internal force of motion in the soul of the lover. As explained in Phaedrus and Phaedo, our souls, before they pick a body from the grand parade of lifeless packaging, spend their time in the heavens with the gods. Here, they can look upon the universal vision of good; they can see beauty, justice, and truth in their fullest, most absolute sense. When the souls go to earth and end up in a body, it causes them to lose their memory of these things. This memory is reawakened when they look upon a particular manifestation of these principles, and our souls, wanting to return to the heavens, feel a pull toward these particulars. This is the account of the Phaedrus. Symposium picks up where the other leaves off; here it is explained that we proceed from the vison of a single beauty (say the beauty of a beautiful body) and proceed through the same universalization process detailed earlier, until we return to the vision of beauty we had in the heavens. Our love for beauty pulls us up, in the same way our love for wisdom pulls us up from black marks to letters to words to languages, from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls to beautiful cities to Beauty Itself. Without this love, there is no motion, and motion, as we already know, is necessary.

The love operates in us through a sacrifice. As humans, we have the ability to cease our movement and draw ourselves inward to our minds to nejoy our own train of thought forever. When we see something beautiful and fall in love with it, we sacrifice our opperunity to enjoy our own ego and move outward toward the beautiful object. The love exists for the sake of the beautiful thing; it does not exist for us.

So, when Rael hears the Lilywhite Lilith asking for help and the charity of her fellow man, him agreeing to do so on the condition that she help him isn't him showing love at all. This is the same old NYC Rael, looking out for #1, and the people outside of him are either enemies to be defeated or tools to be used.
And where does this take Rael? Into the stagnation he had tried to avoid in the cage. The Waiting Room shows us the state of the human soul without love or wisdom; stagnant and waiting for death. And this is exactly what happens to Rael. His opperunity to do the right thing that John passed up (the opperunity to do a loving thing for someone else) Rael has just passed by. Lets hope he remembers this in the future. Luckily for him, there is no death to be had. Here, the Lamb Lies Down storyline embraces another key aspect of Platonic philosophy explicitly; the soul is immortal. We've expected this point since we saw the lifeless human bodies lined up on the factory floor; only physical things have death, and the soul is not physical. In Phaedo, Socrates drinks the poison of his executioner gladly without complaints, knowing full well the Supernatural Anaesthesist will take him to his next life.

Raels next incarnation takes him to the pool of the Lamia. Note again the assualt of poetic image, and notice how much more and more the listener and Rael are becoming the same person. This would seem to defy logic, since the listener is a "real" person, while Rael is a fictional image; nevertheless, both have the same experiences; the coolness of the water, the smell of garlic on fingers, etc. Lamia shows Rael making progress; he is literally moving forward, through his love for the beauty of the Lamia, but he is also learning the lesson of pleasure. When Philebus tries to insist that the life of pleasure is the best way for man to live, his argument is defeated by the fact that there is no such thing as true pleasure; each bodily pleasure only ever exists in the relation of its corresponding pain. The sex with the Lamia can only exist with the pain of their death; the sating of his hunger can only exist with the repulsion of cannabalising them. But the very fact that Rael can move toward their beauty, out of the Waiting Room and into some sort of contact shows Rael's progress.

But the progress could be stopped short for Rael, as it was for the Colony of Slippermen. Being surrounded by beauty of the senses, it is easy for the soul to lose its memory of True Beauty, forget the connection between all things and stop moving, slack-jawed and staring around them. The Slippermen illustrate the state of the soul before it dies of stagnacy; barely human, addicted to sense pleasure, trapped and powerless. But Rael, with a less fluffy heart and a few lessons learned, has no problem going through with the operation necessary. He and John go through with the castruation. Now, if this rendered them sexless, there would be a problem, since Plato admits that a human life without pleasure isn't one to be lived. However, the yellow plastic shoobeedobie isn't totally useless. Rael is willing to fight for it as well, chasing the raven and willing to undergo pain for the place of pleasure in his life. John shows once more he is mostly lost to the apathy, and remains. John is a coward, and cowards don't move; they remain in themselves, with their cowardice and ego.

Platonic ethical philosophy is based on the connected cardnial virtues; courage, wisdom, moderation, and justice. These virtues keep the virtuous soul moving forward in the right ways at the right times toward the right people. We now see these virtues start to find a place in Rael, as he wisely realizes to pursue the moderate pleasures in his life.

Rael chooses the right path in following the ravine, and ends up balanced on the edge of the ravine, instead of falling in. The ravine is the deep, never ending black pit of the ego. Here is were the stagnant end up; people who choose momentary pleasure, fear, self-protection and aggression. It is no surprise that this is were John, who twice refused to help Rael, ends up. But Rael must choose between helping John, who is drowning in the ravine, and this new copy of NYC presented to him. But he knows that choosing this image of New York would only continue his time in this underworld by choosing his old life of aggression and violence, so Rael, choosing courage and love instead of fear and anger, leaves behind the image for the sake of the real connection between he and his brother. This is his second chance at the choice he had with the Lilywhite Lilith, but instead of looking out for himself first, Rael lets his love move him forward and outside of himself, creating a connection between he and John. As he rides down the scree and through the rapids, Rael's courage is tested; if he succumbs to fear, he'll once again be putting himself before others, making a selfish and stagnant decision for his own ego instead of love. In a moment, Johns face becomes his own, and he understands the nature of It.

What is It?
"It" is the common thread that runs through all things; the nature of being and existence. This is what images work on; all things, whether they're similiar or opposite, even if they're chickens or eggs, are connected through their participation in being. Our mind works through the images, following from one being to another, moved in this motion by our internal principle of motion; love. The more we open ourself up to love, the more we understand the nature of It.

***here's were things get dicey, folks***
It itself is the highest level of being. It is the vision of Beauty, Truth and Good that the new souls see in heavens. For the lack of a better word, It is God; god's presence in all things gives them existence in being, and in the motion of our mind, we proceed from one particular manifestation of god to the next. Even if we don't believe in god, we believe in those things he represents (beauty and truth), although we are often distracted from these things by physical matters, which are realized most fully in their intellectual sense. A correct ordering of the three human principles; intellectual knowledge, bodily pleasure, and spiritual love; will balance our soul out perfectly so that it can understand all things as connected and one. Even things completely opposed to each other are united; as black and white are united under the idea of "color", divinity and secularism are united under the idea of a grand deity.
Rael's journey an image of a philosophic one. He begins removed from all things external to himself, and distrustful to the outside world. He soon realizes that without the help of others, he is trapped and can do nothing. It is not his body that he needs to look after, since it is just a package, but his soul. He must work first to move himself away from pleasure, which is never pure and always tainted with pain, into knowledge, and make that knowledge turn into a knowledge of love. As his knowledge and love grows, he can begin to see more and more the connections between chickens and eggs, Rael and John, here and now. These connections do not fade, and the conenctions allow him to have both knowledge AND pleasure, even though they seem to oppose each other. He will be able to get in and get out all at once, not having to choose between the two but having the pleasure and knowledge of both at once.







 @JustJen

If you're read Phaedrus, you should probably read Symposium

Just a little quote, because I happen to be reading it now...

The nature of Love

"As the son of Poros("resource") and Penia("poverty"), his lot in life is set to be like theirs. In the first place, he is always poor, and hes far from being delicate and beautiful (as ordinary people think he is): instead, he is tough and shriveled and shoeless and homeless, always lying in the dirt without a bed, sleeping at people's doorsteps and in roadsides under the sky, having his mother's nature, living always with Need. But on his father's side, he is a schemer after the beautiful and the good; he is brave, impetuous, and intense, an awesome hunter, always weaving snares, resourceful in his pursuit of intelligence, a lover of wisdom through all his life, a genius with enchantments, potions, and clever pleadings.

"He is by nature neither immortal nor mortal. But now he springs to life when he gets his way; now he dies - all in the very same day. Because he is his father's son, however, he keeps coming back to life, but then anything he finds his way to always slips away, and for this reason Love is never completely without resources, no is he ever rich."

-Symposium, 203d

[JustJen]

He sent me this poem he wrote, but I don't know if it was something he had shared widely, I don't quite recall anymore. It may have been from his LiveJournal, which I will see if I can find the link to... it only had one or two entries though...:



The twenty failed sonnets previous
Gurantee this one's success.
And since I only ask
Your oblivious appreciation
Forgive me if I don't let you read it
...
But while you're here
Let me ask
What is it like to be the face of my ego?
...
I love you
My phantasmal social meterstick
But your calibration is faulty
Since I didn't study the original very closely
And now I measure in surreality
The ingredients for the cookies I'm baking you
I'll eat them myself
So I can be sure you'll enjoy them
Just like you think it's sexy when I play air guitar.
....
Oh, you would hate my image of you.
But I know neither of you are real anyway.

[JustJen]

another of his poems he sent me:

Recollections at 4am should never be invited
All the best memories go home when the bar closes
4am comes
Nothing but thugs and rapists looking for an open door.
And when theres no cars outside your window
You hear the past right outside your door
Because they followed you back
And you're too afraid to not walk alone.
You remember finding hope, and tucking it behind your ear
To wait for cases exactly like this
But you must've knocked it out when you
Were combing your hair before the party.
Bullied in your own humid home
By your own humid choices
That stick too close on your skin on a night like this.
They come through the doors of the lonely
Who offer them drinks
A sucker punch and split lip later
And theres nothing left to do but clean the mess before company comes.

[JustJen]

I'm going to send you a conversation I saved from AOL Messenger when you were just a newborn or shortly thereafter. Not sure you want it here. Hoping I'm doing the right thing sending this at all. LMK when you see all this, and how you want me to proceed.

[TAC]

  And...I haven't shared this on the forums yet, but it is fortunate that you found us, because there has been some serious consideration behind the scenes about whether to close the forums.  Those engaged in the discussions were fairly unanimous that it should continue, so thankfully, we are here to discuss.  I plan on posting more about that later... 

 

[JustJen]

  And...I haven't shared this on the forums yet, but it is fortunate that you found us, because there has been some serious consideration behind the scenes about whether to close the forums.  Those engaged in the discussions were fairly unanimous that it should continue, so thankfully, we are here to discuss.  I plan on posting more about that later... 

 

oh bosk dont' borlag us.

[TAC]

I wouldn't put Bosk and Snorelag in the same sentence.

[JustJen]

I wouldn't put Bosk and Snorelag in the same sentence.

I wouldn't either if he wasn't considering borlagging the forum

edit - still adding pics to the imgur album as i find them

[JustJen]

I saved this in a text file called remember.txt

this is from VG on AOL Messenger, spring/summer 2004:

FoxtrotInferno: I'm trying to do a full research day today...I hope you're feeling better as the day wears on...remember that if you're still alive to listen to music when the sun goes down, it was all worth it

---

when i was diagnosed with glaucoma (a progressive issue, and the leading cause of irreversible blindness) years later, the first thing i said to comfort myself and my daughter, who was at the eye doctor with me that day, was "i don't have to be able to see to hear the music so it'll be okay".

----

mark is always with me.

I still can't listen to Ocean Cloud by Marillion. Some memories are always there. others are always pushed away. this is a good opportunity to come to terms with them all, and for that I thank you, E.

[JustJen]

He posted this somewhere about "soundtracks of your life"... you know, memories associated with music -

Whenever I look at the past, before I see pictures, I hear music, whatever it was I happened to be listening to.And of course, there are some albums you can't hear without thinking about the past. What are the main ones for you?

Jeff Buckley - Grace, and Pain of Salvation - Remedy Lane
Ahhhh. Sex music. Well, not even sex music. Lying in a warm bed with a girl I really, really loved, waxing philosophical and packing bowls. I introduced her to prog rock. She introduced me to Buckley. When I hear these albums, it's like being in the womb, perfectly warm and content and loved. I miss her. I play these albums when I forget that.

Dave Matthews Band - Before These Crowded Streets, and the Tea Party - Transmission
Picked both these up on my first trip to the town where I currently live. While we were here, we checked out the local campus: 7 years later, I'm going into my fourth year there as an honours student. Driving around this sunny Maritime paradise with my family, listening to Dave Matthews as I took in all the scenery.

Marillion - Brave, and Devin Townsend - Ocean Machine
When I found out Alex was pregnant, I pretty much went insane. Heavy drinking every night (I gained like 35 pounds), and if I couldn't find someone to drink with, I got my hands on whatever drugs could be had and wandered around town in the dark, through roads were people didn't go, or graveyards where no one would find me. I didn't want to be asked questions. These two albums, the first for it's dark, lush beauty and the second for its youthful power, kept me alive. Other albums made it into my midnight wandering rotation: Terria, Deloused in the Comatorium, Lateralus, Black Utopia, Misplaced Childhood...but when I was the blackest moods, the line "I'll wait for the ocean to rise up and meet me as it rose up before" made me feel like I would survive. And I did

The Doors - Greatest Hits, and Pink Floyd - The Wall
My first actual rock band. We covered songs from these albums constantly. This was when I started smoking weed. I was 16. We drove around in Jay's Bronco listening to those tapes and smoking dope and making plans for our smash hits.

---------

and now, you are 16. i know you've had some medical issues and setbacks (I don't use facebook anymore but when i did, i occasionally would peek into the "Remembering Mark Adams" facecbook group)... I just hope that getting to know what an amazing, amazing, BRILLIANT (smartest person I have ever met in my life, and this is coming from a woman with two degrees and a supposedly gifted IQ, whatever that means), compassionate, kindhearted man your father was will in some way give you some kind of peace and satisfaction on this quest to get to know him.

 please ask me anything. i may not konw the answer but i'd do for you what i'd do for my own children. that is a promise from me, to you, for mark.

[JustJen]

millahh did you save his king crimson guide off last.fm? they deleted it since i linked you to it on reddit two years ago!! i thought i saved it to my computer but can't find it!

https://www.reddit.com/r/KingCrimson/comments/6lmbk1/question_about_documents_by_deceased_fan_violent/

ugh i'm so sad. (I'm nibblesmcgiblet)

[Cool Chris]

I still can't listen to Ocean Cloud by Marillion. Some memories are always there. others are always pushed away. this is a good opportunity to come to terms with them all, and for that I thank you, E.

There are a couple songs that I will always associate with the worst period of my life, the time when I had to struggle to find reason to get up in the morning and trudge through the day. 25 years later, they are some of my favorite songs, and I listen to them often. The memories are still there, but for reasons I cannot explain, I am able to find joy in those songs. Maybe it is because those songs were with me, and with them I was able to get through those bad times to where I am today.

[JustJen]

I still can't listen to Ocean Cloud by Marillion. Some memories are always there. others are always pushed away. this is a good opportunity to come to terms with them all, and for that I thank you, E.

There are a couple songs that I will always associate with the worst period of my life, the time when I had to struggle to find reason to get up in the morning and trudge through the day. 25 years later, they are some of my favorite songs, and I listen to them often. The memories are still there, but for reasons I cannot explain, I am able to find joy in those songs. Maybe it is because those songs were with me, and with them I was able to get through those bad times to where I am today.

That's so lovely and encouraging. I hope that I can someday listen to "the Mark stuff" without feeling like something broke inside my stomach.... (I let the pieces lie just where they fell).....

I will always associate that line from porcuine tree with mark and with the moment ogrejedi/ben told me he died.

When I met mark I had never heard of porcupine tree. Because of mark, I've gone to around 20 PT/Steven wilson shows now and met him more than a half dozen times and have an entire hallway of my home filled with signed tour memorabilia and pics and backstage passes etc.

The first porcupine tree song he sent me was Drown With Me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlwUwMgRd0I

I ugly cry when I let it play.

The only way I came to terms with SW not playing porcupine tree songs much anymore at shows, is the fact  that if he played that I would surely die of a broken heart, unless the love of my life (I'm so so very fortunate and blessed to have one) was with me and holding me tight...

ViolentPink - if you want to understand your dad's mindset from the time your mom got pregnant until the time that the conversation I had with him (that I sent to you via PM) occurred, listen to Clutching at Straws by Marillion.

Don't just put it on and hear it.

LISTEN to it. Live it. Sit there and listen to it and read the lyrics and breathe it in and feel it and understand it.

I can barely listen to that album, but somehow I occasionally do.

That was our album, as was Marbles. But that album was everything to both of us.

sorry if this feels too personal to people outside the relationship, but you came here for this and I will never deny you access to Mark, when I may be the closest person to him that you will find online anywhere in your quest to know him.

he would want you to know him as he really was. he loved truth. learning was truth to him. his life was about acquisition OF truth.

[Cool Chris]

This may not be the thread for it, if so, I apologize. But for those of us who did not know ViolentGreen, would someone like to share a 25-50 word bio of him? I know those of us who did not know him might not have the right to participate in this remembrance, but I like to think we are all a community here, past and present, and I would like to know more about a fallen member.

[JustJen]

This may not be the thread for it, if so, I apologize. But for those of us who did not know ViolentGreen, would someone like to share a 25-50 word bio of him? I know those of us who did not know him might not have the right to participate in this remembrance, but I like to think we are all a community here, past and present, and I would like to know more about a fallen member.

edit - oh boy, 25-50 word? Let me try this again, right up front here, before the longer winded one:

Mark was brilliant. He loved philosophy, music, logic, justice, knowledge, his family, his friends. He loved debate, but was the epitome of what debate should be - respectful yet passionate. He was a good man and a wonderful friend, and a loving father.

----------

He was a Philosophy of Religion scholar, intending to pursue a PhD or whatever the highest of learning was for that degree. He worked and went to university for that and had gotten accepted at a prestigious grad school or similar where he was going to continue his studies. He was in a relationship with ViolentPink's mother for a time and she got pregnant but was still in high school IIRC, while he was already going to college, and so she had VP while he was away at school. She also ended up going to college in the same town as Mark had moved to, and brought our new member VP with her there I believe, and so he ended up being able to spend time with his son, whom he loved so much. Mark was a scholar of the highest degree, and loved the greek philosophers and was incredibly articulate. He loved debating, would have hated all Trump stands for, and had a strong passion for music, which he loved to share with people.

I knew him from dt.net, then later dtf, and via online conversations/relationships that had far more depth than i feel comfortable talking about here. He was the smartest man I knew, and was going to be a brilliant philosophy professor some day, probably a writer of philosophy as well (he wrote stunningly well), and probably would have been the next famous philosopher. I would've expected him to be quoted in the future like Plato and Kierkegaard and Augustine and so on are today.

Others would be able to speak more to his last months, maybe. He was struck by a taxi while crossing a crosswalk and was in a coma, when doctors said that what had made him HIM would never recover - he was brain dead.

this is my recollection. i hope others will add or change what i may be misremembering if anything is incorrect.

[faizoff]

Such a difficult yet uplifting thread to read. After becoming a parent you tend to look the world so differently and get so emotional when reading strangers lives and the journeys they go through.

It's very emotional reading through the replies and I don't even remember about ViolentGreen.

[splent]

I didn’t talk with your dad much (I usually didn’t post in P/R) but I do recall his posts being very insightful. I also remember pictures. But I’m glad you reached out and found us.

[JustJen]

I'm not finding any SQL databases in my archives. I would be glad to  extract data from the old corrupt ones though, if given access to the information, and if at all humanly possible. IIRC, all SQL work had to be done right on the server though, which I haven't had access to in a good decade or more.

Edit - spoke too soon. found a sql backup but i have to leave for work shortly and don't have time to really do anything with it except extract it and ctrl+f for "ViolentGreen" which thus far has just netted me his email address, which I will share via PM if desired. I'll try more once I'm home tonight.

edit 2 - ok there are a number of his posts but boy is it in a tricky and thickly-coded format just now. but hang tight, VP, and I'll get you everything I can. This could end up taking me through Friday/my day off though because when I get home from work each night I basically am a zombie until I pass out at like 930pm lol. But FWIW, opening the database file in Firefox and using that search function has resulted in me getting notified "More than 1000 matches" exist in it for "ViolentGreen" so. It appears most of it is from the PR forum so far.

someone should get hefdaddy over here.

-------

just came across ariich's first ever sharing of Haken music here. I had no idea it was so long ago that Mark was still alive.

here's an example of the thickness of the coding I'm wading through (and FWIW there's no line breaks aaaahhh)

Code: [Select]

Re: The DTF.org chat thread v.1.00','ariich',[EMAIL AND IP REDACTED BY ME/JUSTJEN]',1,0,'','Also, if anyone has 15-20 minutes to spare, please check out this thread about my brother&#039;s band Haken: http://dreamtheaterforums.org/index.php?topic=463.0<br /><br />They&#039;re amazing, and they put two new songs up which are just brilliant. It&#039;s also got free downloads of both songs if you like what you hear. :)','recycled'),(9477,337,3,1179854021,298,9477,'Re: The DTF Library and Reccomended Reading Thread.'
difficult to convey because the board is parsing some of it, which I guess will make it easier when I post VG' stuff. anyway. gotta leave in a few. ttyl

[jingle.boy]

https://imgur.com/a/c3NZWoc

.....

jingle.boy - I'm glad you did, and sorry I don't use it anymore. It's still there, but dormant or deactivated for the forseeable future. But my photobucket... now that's still there. I'm going to get some stuff out of that tonight as well to share.

That's a relief.  I did indicate to him that you hadn't been active on FB since May, but wasn't sure if you had other social media presence (Twitter, IG ...).

Also, looking thru this photo album, I just finally realized why your website domain was h-fangirl (ie, the "h" is for Hogarth). 

[JustJen]

https://imgur.com/a/c3NZWoc

.....

jingle.boy - I'm glad you did, and sorry I don't use it anymore. It's still there, but dormant or deactivated for the forseeable future. But my photobucket... now that's still there. I'm going to get some stuff out of that tonight as well to share.

That's a relief.  I did indicate to him that you hadn't been active on FB since May, but wasn't sure if you had other social media presence (Twitter, IG ...).

Also, looking thru this photo album, I just finally realized why your website domain was h-fangirl (ie, the "h" is for Hogarth). 

LOL yeah. I had a marillion fan directory there for a long time, but let it fall by the wayside and just kept the domain for a dozen or so years.

[rumborak]

Somebody pointed me to this thread, so it's probably time to log in once again!!

For me, the days Violent green/Mark posted here were THE days of DTF, and Mark was a big factor making it what it was. We had great sparring session on the Religious/Political forum (before I was banned, lol), and as others have said, it was Mark's "stick to the topic" attitude that made discussions endure past the usual superficial statements but instead delve into deep aspects of the topic at hand.

I am also severely dismayed that nobody has posted VG' picture of the  Symphony X CD yet 

[Cool Chris]

Rumbo!

[axeman90210]

Somebody pointed me to this thread, so it's probably time to log in once again!!

For me, the days Violent green/Mark posted here were THE days of DTF, and Mark was a big factor making it what it was. We had great sparring session on the Religious/Political forum (before I was banned, lol), and as others have said, it was Mark's "stick to the topic" attitude that made discussions endure past the usual superficial statements but instead delve into deep aspects of the topic at hand.

I am also severely dismayed that nobody has posted VG' picture of the  Symphony X CD yet 

I think it was in the photobucket link that Jen posted a while back. At least that's what I would tell you if you were really rumborak, but seeing as you didn't sign your post clearly you're an imposter

[JustJen]

Somebody pointed me to this thread, so it's probably time to log in once again!!

For me, the days Violent green/Mark posted here were THE days of DTF, and Mark was a big factor making it what it was. We had great sparring session on the Religious/Political forum (before I was banned, lol), and as others have said, it was Mark's "stick to the topic" attitude that made discussions endure past the usual superficial statements but instead delve into deep aspects of the topic at hand.

I am also severely dismayed that nobody has posted VG' picture of the  Symphony X CD yet 

first thing I posted, actually. it's right in the imgur link.

[millahh]

millahh did you save his king crimson guide off last.fm? they deleted it since i linked you to it on reddit two years ago!! i thought i saved it to my computer but can't find it!

https://www.reddit.com/r/KingCrimson/comments/6lmbk1/question_about_documents_by_deceased_fan_violent/

ugh i'm so sad. (I'm nibblesmcgiblet)

Unfortunately, no, I had never saved it off, it didn't occur to me that it might get disappeared.

So, my experiences/impressions of VG.  Well, the "RIP Mark" in the custom text by my avatar refers to him.  I can't wrap my head around that having been there this long. I don't know that I can say anything better than what has been said already, but he always pushed me to up my game, whether discussing music, politics or philosophy/religion...it almost felt disrespectful to be flippant or cursory when there was so much thought, depth and presence in what he wrote.  Not that he couldn't be flippant and crass of course, but he knew his spots.  Even if I had no interest in a given topic, I'd still click just to see if he said something that might spark an interest, cast something in a new light.

He left a VG-shaped hole when he passed.

[violent pink]

I'm going through my hard drive now. why wait?

For you, ViolentPink, and for everyone who loved him.

https://imgur.com/a/c3NZWoc

I will keep adding images that I find that are suitable for this album but these in particular I saved in a folder named "Mark" in a folder called "Received files 04 to 07" in a backup called "My old laptop backup - 2008". (For my own reference, because there's going to be SO much that I will wade through during this labor of love I'm setting out on.)

jingle.boy - I'm glad you did, and sorry I don't use it anymore. It's still there, but dormant or deactivated for the forseeable future. But my photobucket... now that's still there. I'm going to get some stuff out of that tonight as well to share.

Edit - photobucket is doing a LOT of gatekeeping of my pics because of silly limits they've set, and they want me to pay them money to access my own stuff easily. I'm going to see how long I can fight through the ads and popups and dead pages before giving in though. Not sure what all I have on there anyway.

I SHED TEARS, looking at this. thank you so fucking much for sharing these with me.

[violent pink]

Hi all.
I just got accepted to this website after I did a lot of digging. I am Violent Green (some may know him as his real name, Mark)'s son. Recently it was his 12 year anniversary of death, so I took it upon myself to do some research. Mom always talked about how he went by Violent Green on music forums so I decided to do some googling, which brought me to a RateYourMusic thread full of peaceful wishes to RIP. I saw a post saying that he was most on this website, so I decided to request to be on it, because I have a question.

Did anyone reading this interact with dad while he was on this website? What was he like?

I was four when he died. I'm 16 now. I'd love to hear your stories.

Feel free to also ask me anything, I'd be happy to answer your questions

Mark was my best friend for a couple/few years, starting in 2004 until maybe a year/8 months before his death. We had a falling out, but reconnected maybe three weeks before he died. I have a daughter who is maybe a few months older than you, which was something we discussed a lot - I talked about her, he talked about you. He and I were inseparable from the day he got back to school after leaving Digby, where he stayed with his parents, your grandparents, while he recovered from mono.

He would text me good morning, good night, that he was going to work, had arrived at work, was going home, had arrived at home. We would simul-listen albums. He taught me almost everything about the music that has been my entire life the past 15 years. I went back to college and got a second AAS degree because of him - Liberal Arts with an emphasis in Philosophy of Religion. My daughter has known about your existence, E., for probably a decade. Her name also begins with E. I'm respecting your privacy here, but your middle name gives me joy and has since the day your father told me your full name. He was what I considered the love of my life up until the time he died, and I was absolutely devastated by that. It was a big part of my drifting away from these forums, despite also being a long-time contributer to the back-end workings here and at others with my other name, VFS.

I have an external hard drive with photos and screenshots, and maybe some other things saved. And you may somewhere have his Marbles CD by Marillion which I had signed for him by Steve Hogarth ("H") at the concert in 2004 that your dad convinced me to go to despite the fact I was in a bad marriage and was risking hell at home for me going away out of town alone to see a band that my husband despised...

I have so many memories and yet had pushed all of them back because it was just too painful to think about Mark all these years.

I have long thought this day might come, but somehow wasn't prepared for it. When I heard yesterday that you had appeared and posted, I made a drink. I don't drink these days aside from occasional weekends with loved ones, but I needed it to calm the freaking out I was doing inside over the fact I never really processed his death. We were going to finally meet in person after years of AOL messaging and webcam chats. It was to be at a King Crimson show in Philly, but he died before that day came. Knowing he wasn't going ot be there, I didn't go either. I couldn't be there. I couldn't be anywhere. I shut down completely for a long time.

I dont know what to say or to share just now. But I wanted to at least reach out and say yes, I have memories and stories and pictures. And so much love. Of your dad, for your dad, about your dad.

Oh how he loved you and fretted about decisions and events, and one of the most important conversations of my life was when he asked me for help because he wanted to get to spend time with you but knew that your mother loved you so deeply that she was unsure of whether that was a good plan. I suggested he go to the Red Cross and take an infant CPR course and anything else that a babysitter might take, and the idea of an academic solution brought him to actual tears. He called me a genius that day. He took that course, and soon he was having his visits with you. He took wecam photos of you two together and sent them to me. I have one still on my external hard drive. You both had the most pure joy on your faces, E.

https://i.imgur.com/NruKhnL.jpg


I will get you everything I can, but please understand this is revisiting a part of my life that is so hard for me. And also know, I understand. My father died when I was four, too.

Best wishes, friend. Feel free to private message me, or to respond here. I never come here anymore, but I wasn't going to miss you for anything. But it's gonna take some time to process.

<3

thank you so much for coming back and saying this. thank you so much. i dont really know what to say about this. it took me on a rollercoaster of emotions. thank you.

[violent pink]

A quick summary of established Platonic philosophical principles used so far:

1)The ability of the mind to connect separate things that are unlike, thus always finding one strand of likeness through all things, even when they seem to fundamentally oppose each other.
2)what exists intellectually or spiritually can have more reality than what is physical
3)a rejection of a life of physical pleasure alone
4)seperation of mind and body
5)the necessity of motion to being
6)the necessity of positive human interaction to proper motion

Continuing on from the 1st record.

Plato has two specific dialogues that deal with love: the Symposium and the Phaedrus. In both, love (eros in the Greek) is an internal force of motion in the soul of the lover. As explained in Phaedrus and Phaedo, our souls, before they pick a body from the grand parade of lifeless packaging, spend their time in the heavens with the gods. Here, they can look upon the universal vision of good; they can see beauty, justice, and truth in their fullest, most absolute sense. When the souls go to earth and end up in a body, it causes them to lose their memory of these things. This memory is reawakened when they look upon a particular manifestation of these principles, and our souls, wanting to return to the heavens, feel a pull toward these particulars. This is the account of the Phaedrus. Symposium picks up where the other leaves off; here it is explained that we proceed from the vison of a single beauty (say the beauty of a beautiful body) and proceed through the same universalization process detailed earlier, until we return to the vision of beauty we had in the heavens. Our love for beauty pulls us up, in the same way our love for wisdom pulls us up from black marks to letters to words to languages, from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls to beautiful cities to Beauty Itself. Without this love, there is no motion, and motion, as we already know, is necessary.

The love operates in us through a sacrifice. As humans, we have the ability to cease our movement and draw ourselves inward to our minds to nejoy our own train of thought forever. When we see something beautiful and fall in love with it, we sacrifice our opperunity to enjoy our own ego and move outward toward the beautiful object. The love exists for the sake of the beautiful thing; it does not exist for us.

So, when Rael hears the Lilywhite Lilith asking for help and the charity of her fellow man, him agreeing to do so on the condition that she help him isn't him showing love at all. This is the same old NYC Rael, looking out for #1, and the people outside of him are either enemies to be defeated or tools to be used.
And where does this take Rael? Into the stagnation he had tried to avoid in the cage. The Waiting Room shows us the state of the human soul without love or wisdom; stagnant and waiting for death. And this is exactly what happens to Rael. His opperunity to do the right thing that John passed up (the opperunity to do a loving thing for someone else) Rael has just passed by. Lets hope he remembers this in the future. Luckily for him, there is no death to be had. Here, the Lamb Lies Down storyline embraces another key aspect of Platonic philosophy explicitly; the soul is immortal. We've expected this point since we saw the lifeless human bodies lined up on the factory floor; only physical things have death, and the soul is not physical. In Phaedo, Socrates drinks the poison of his executioner gladly without complaints, knowing full well the Supernatural Anaesthesist will take him to his next life.

Raels next incarnation takes him to the pool of the Lamia. Note again the assualt of poetic image, and notice how much more and more the listener and Rael are becoming the same person. This would seem to defy logic, since the listener is a "real" person, while Rael is a fictional image; nevertheless, both have the same experiences; the coolness of the water, the smell of garlic on fingers, etc. Lamia shows Rael making progress; he is literally moving forward, through his love for the beauty of the Lamia, but he is also learning the lesson of pleasure. When Philebus tries to insist that the life of pleasure is the best way for man to live, his argument is defeated by the fact that there is no such thing as true pleasure; each bodily pleasure only ever exists in the relation of its corresponding pain. The sex with the Lamia can only exist with the pain of their death; the sating of his hunger can only exist with the repulsion of cannabalising them. But the very fact that Rael can move toward their beauty, out of the Waiting Room and into some sort of contact shows Rael's progress.

But the progress could be stopped short for Rael, as it was for the Colony of Slippermen. Being surrounded by beauty of the senses, it is easy for the soul to lose its memory of True Beauty, forget the connection between all things and stop moving, slack-jawed and staring around them. The Slippermen illustrate the state of the soul before it dies of stagnacy; barely human, addicted to sense pleasure, trapped and powerless. But Rael, with a less fluffy heart and a few lessons learned, has no problem going through with the operation necessary. He and John go through with the castruation. Now, if this rendered them sexless, there would be a problem, since Plato admits that a human life without pleasure isn't one to be lived. However, the yellow plastic shoobeedobie isn't totally useless. Rael is willing to fight for it as well, chasing the raven and willing to undergo pain for the place of pleasure in his life. John shows once more he is mostly lost to the apathy, and remains. John is a coward, and cowards don't move; they remain in themselves, with their cowardice and ego.

Platonic ethical philosophy is based on the connected cardnial virtues; courage, wisdom, moderation, and justice. These virtues keep the virtuous soul moving forward in the right ways at the right times toward the right people. We now see these virtues start to find a place in Rael, as he wisely realizes to pursue the moderate pleasures in his life.

Rael chooses the right path in following the ravine, and ends up balanced on the edge of the ravine, instead of falling in. The ravine is the deep, never ending black pit of the ego. Here is were the stagnant end up; people who choose momentary pleasure, fear, self-protection and aggression. It is no surprise that this is were John, who twice refused to help Rael, ends up. But Rael must choose between helping John, who is drowning in the ravine, and this new copy of NYC presented to him. But he knows that choosing this image of New York would only continue his time in this underworld by choosing his old life of aggression and violence, so Rael, choosing courage and love instead of fear and anger, leaves behind the image for the sake of the real connection between he and his brother. This is his second chance at the choice he had with the Lilywhite Lilith, but instead of looking out for himself first, Rael lets his love move him forward and outside of himself, creating a connection between he and John. As he rides down the scree and through the rapids, Rael's courage is tested; if he succumbs to fear, he'll once again be putting himself before others, making a selfish and stagnant decision for his own ego instead of love. In a moment, Johns face becomes his own, and he understands the nature of It.

What is It?
"It" is the common thread that runs through all things; the nature of being and existence. This is what images work on; all things, whether they're similiar or opposite, even if they're chickens or eggs, are connected through their participation in being. Our mind works through the images, following from one being to another, moved in this motion by our internal principle of motion; love. The more we open ourself up to love, the more we understand the nature of It.

***here's were things get dicey, folks***
It itself is the highest level of being. It is the vision of Beauty, Truth and Good that the new souls see in heavens. For the lack of a better word, It is God; god's presence in all things gives them existence in being, and in the motion of our mind, we proceed from one particular manifestation of god to the next. Even if we don't believe in god, we believe in those things he represents (beauty and truth), although we are often distracted from these things by physical matters, which are realized most fully in their intellectual sense. A correct ordering of the three human principles; intellectual knowledge, bodily pleasure, and spiritual love; will balance our soul out perfectly so that it can understand all things as connected and one. Even things completely opposed to each other are united; as black and white are united under the idea of "color", divinity and secularism are united under the idea of a grand deity.
Rael's journey an image of a philosophic one. He begins removed from all things external to himself, and distrustful to the outside world. He soon realizes that without the help of others, he is trapped and can do nothing. It is not his body that he needs to look after, since it is just a package, but his soul. He must work first to move himself away from pleasure, which is never pure and always tainted with pain, into knowledge, and make that knowledge turn into a knowledge of love. As his knowledge and love grows, he can begin to see more and more the connections between chickens and eggs, Rael and John, here and now. These connections do not fade, and the conenctions allow him to have both knowledge AND pleasure, even though they seem to oppose each other. He will be able to get in and get out all at once, not having to choose between the two but having the pleasure and knowledge of both at once.







 @JustJen

If you're read Phaedrus, you should probably read Symposium

Just a little quote, because I happen to be reading it now...

The nature of Love

"As the son of Poros("resource") and Penia("poverty"), his lot in life is set to be like theirs. In the first place, he is always poor, and hes far from being delicate and beautiful (as ordinary people think he is): instead, he is tough and shriveled and shoeless and homeless, always lying in the dirt without a bed, sleeping at people's doorsteps and in roadsides under the sky, having his mother's nature, living always with Need. But on his father's side, he is a schemer after the beautiful and the good; he is brave, impetuous, and intense, an awesome hunter, always weaving snares, resourceful in his pursuit of intelligence, a lover of wisdom through all his life, a genius with enchantments, potions, and clever pleadings.

"He is by nature neither immortal nor mortal. But now he springs to life when he gets his way; now he dies - all in the very same day. Because he is his father's son, however, he keeps coming back to life, but then anything he finds his way to always slips away, and for this reason Love is never completely without resources, no is he ever rich."

-Symposium, 203d

god i wish i was smart enough to understand this

[violent pink]

He posted this somewhere about "soundtracks of your life"... you know, memories associated with music -

Whenever I look at the past, before I see pictures, I hear music, whatever it was I happened to be listening to.And of course, there are some albums you can't hear without thinking about the past. What are the main ones for you?

Jeff Buckley - Grace, and Pain of Salvation - Remedy Lane
Ahhhh. Sex music. Well, not even sex music. Lying in a warm bed with a girl I really, really loved, waxing philosophical and packing bowls. I introduced her to prog rock. She introduced me to Buckley. When I hear these albums, it's like being in the womb, perfectly warm and content and loved. I miss her. I play these albums when I forget that.

Dave Matthews Band - Before These Crowded Streets, and the Tea Party - Transmission
Picked both these up on my first trip to the town where I currently live. While we were here, we checked out the local campus: 7 years later, I'm going into my fourth year there as an honours student. Driving around this sunny Maritime paradise with my family, listening to Dave Matthews as I took in all the scenery.

Marillion - Brave, and Devin Townsend - Ocean Machine
When I found out Alex was pregnant, I pretty much went insane. Heavy drinking every night (I gained like 35 pounds), and if I couldn't find someone to drink with, I got my hands on whatever drugs could be had and wandered around town in the dark, through roads were people didn't go, or graveyards where no one would find me. I didn't want to be asked questions. These two albums, the first for it's dark, lush beauty and the second for its youthful power, kept me alive. Other albums made it into my midnight wandering rotation: Terria, Deloused in the Comatorium, Lateralus, Black Utopia, Misplaced Childhood...but when I was the blackest moods, the line "I'll wait for the ocean to rise up and meet me as it rose up before" made me feel like I would survive. And I did

The Doors - Greatest Hits, and Pink Floyd - The Wall
My first actual rock band. We covered songs from these albums constantly. This was when I started smoking weed. I was 16. We drove around in Jay's Bronco listening to those tapes and smoking dope and making plans for our smash hits.

---------

and now, you are 16. i know you've had some medical issues and setbacks (I don't use facebook anymore but when i did, i occasionally would peek into the "Remembering Mark Adams" facecbook group)... I just hope that getting to know what an amazing, amazing, BRILLIANT (smartest person I have ever met in my life, and this is coming from a woman with two degrees and a supposedly gifted IQ, whatever that means), compassionate, kindhearted man your father was will in some way give you some kind of peace and satisfaction on this quest to get to know him.

 please ask me anything. i may not konw the answer but i'd do for you what i'd do for my own children. that is a promise from me, to you, for mark.

oh my god. ive been obsessed with music linking to memories for years. ive recorded me rambling on about it. this is incredible

[lonestar]

I think this is one of the best things I've seen happen on DTF. 

[Lethean]

This is pretty amazing - it would be even if all Violent Pink found here was a few memories.  But to have pictures, poems, long meaningful posts... It's really cool to see that happen.

Violent Green sounds like someone who brought a lot to this place and I'm sorry for everyone's loss, especially Violent Pink.

[JustJen]

I'm going through my hard drive now. why wait?

For you, ViolentPink, and for everyone who loved him.

https://imgur.com/a/c3NZWoc

I will keep adding images that I find that are suitable for this album but these in particular I saved in a folder named "Mark" in a folder called "Received files 04 to 07" in a backup called "My old laptop backup - 2008". (For my own reference, because there's going to be SO much that I will wade through during this labor of love I'm setting out on.)

jingle.boy - I'm glad you did, and sorry I don't use it anymore. It's still there, but dormant or deactivated for the forseeable future. But my photobucket... now that's still there. I'm going to get some stuff out of that tonight as well to share.

Edit - photobucket is doing a LOT of gatekeeping of my pics because of silly limits they've set, and they want me to pay them money to access my own stuff easily. I'm going to see how long I can fight through the ads and popups and dead pages before giving in though. Not sure what all I have on there anyway.

I SHED TEARS, looking at this. thank you so fucking much for sharing these with me.

You're so welcome. I'm getting ready to head out for work in a minute here, so forgive me for being brief with this reply - I haven't finished going through the sql database of posts yet. it's very thick with information that i haven't found a good way to go through yet, aside from just re-uploading it to a SMF forum somewhere. i've been toying with the thought of buying server space but am just not sure yet about that commitment.

I have saved AOL conversations that I've also not sorted through yet because it's a pretty emotional thing, and I wanted to be sure you'd come back here and see the posts I'd already made first, before going deeper into my hard drive.

Sending all my love, and I hope that we can keep in touch. I'll certainly be returning here from now on to keep an eye on this thread, as I've been doing a couple times a day since you first posted. ttys

[jingle.boy]

Jen... your JustJen inbox is full.  VFS is not - check your PM there (or clear your inbox).