From Balloon Juice:
The blogger who posted as the always hilarious Jon Swift has died.
He had so many funny posts that it is hard to choose one, but this take-down of Mark Noonan ranks near the top.
I started reading RSS feeds ((Just after the debut of the iTunes app store.)) when I downloaded NetNewsWire 1.0 for iPhone. To fill my greatly expanded reading appetite that I soon developed, I explored the blogrolls of those sites which I already read. Many of them linked to Jon Swift.
The Jon Swift blog has lain dormant for quite a while, but when Al was posting I thought he was producing some of the best satire on the internet. I think sticking to his conservative persona really paid off – only after his death was his identity revealed ((By his mother!)). I remember lying on a recliner in the hot Nice Sun, sipping a cool drink and reading Jon Swift on my iPod between dips into the pool. It’s how life should be ((I was even happier when I discovered that the local mall had Wi-Fi, so I could get the newest posts straight to my iPod. Heaven.)).
Maybe my memory of the blog is distorted by my holiday memories, so I’m going to re-read the archive in full. I think I’m going to appreciate it even more this time ((I’m older, more knowledgeable.)).
Anyway. I always feel sad when someone I know dies, particularly the young. As well as the loss of ((In this case, anyway.)) a beloved blog, it’s also a reminder of my own mortality. Death’s a strange thing and we all learn to deal with it in our own ways, but I feel that, at 18, I’m still largely untouched by death. Even though I have only one surviving grandparent (and her brother died last week),I’ve never been to a funeral. I don’t think I’ve yet felt the grief of losing someone close to me.
How long can it last?