Eric

I met Eric because he was in a band with two guys I had met in the university marching band. The first thing that struck me about him was that he was a good songwriter. In that role, he would agonize endlessly over the lyrics; judging the importance, relevance and precision of what he wanted to say in each word of every phrase in every line of every song. Even then, Eric was obsessed with rhetoric, semantics and meaning.

In January 1996, Brad, Eric and I began having nightly philosophical discussions. In the beginning, I perceived him as being legitimately curious but undeniably confused. He was unable to focus his questioning thoughts into coherency. He staunchly, perhaps valiantly, struggled to find definitions and explanations for his perceptions, experiences and assumptions.

Things at the time were simpler for me. I thought I knew exactly what I thought, and expressed myself boldly, blind to my own hypocrisy and ignorance. Whereas Eric sought meaning in every experience and a means to express it, I assumed experience irrelevant to my pursuit of objective truth. I didn’t care a bit that I had little experience of experience.

Eric explored his own perceptions, curious about how his senses interacted with their environment. In that pursuit, he experimented with marijuana and hallucinogens, and became narcissistically focused on attempting to make sense of and understand his chemical-induced experiences and realities, eventually confusing all realities, inducing paranoia and a schizoid state. The two of us spent some long, excruciating hours locked in his dorm room until he had more-or-less one reality left to deal with.

We spent many late nights for the next eight months or so soberly exploring philosophical and religious ideas. He made me keenly aware of the prominence of top-down processing and self-delusion, which are far from confined to a drug-induced state, and the limits of abstract objectivism. We scrutinized the natures of reality and probability. He challenged me to be logically consistent. He made me realize that knowledge can never be trusted because there is no such thing as a trustworthy source, and the only way to pursue knowledge was through legitimate communication and genuine dialogue, and neither in a vacuum nor solely in another. He introduced me to John Frusciante’s first solo album "Niandra Ladies and Maybe Just a T-Shirt," My Dinner With Andre and Aleister Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend.

Life is short and ever-changing. I regret we didn’t have more time to spend together. We went our separate ways, but he will always be a large part of me. Perhaps the physical distance I have spent from all of my friends at one point in my life has taught me more than anything the importance of companionship and the value and enjoyment found in experiencing life with others you love.