C-Dog!

Hey man. Everyone really misses you. The Bard crew have been getting together a lot lately, talking about how sweet it was to know the big guy. You’ve really made us think hard about what a family we truly are. Sure, we may be a comically, intensely fucked up and emotionally WACKY family, but we’re tight in a crisis. Looking at everyone during the memorial, I couldn’t help being struck by the talent and sincerity that was represented there. I think you’ve made us all better artists, better people, better friends. You’d probably laugh at how all of us seem to need to own a part of you, to the point that if you added up each of the memories we all have of you there would probably be like a dozen Crispins. A sort of “loaves and fishes” thing, I think. Of course, there was a fair bit of the weepy stuff. Mea culpa on my part. You know I’ve never really been very good at managing loss, and I guess when the sadness hits the rage is never far behind. Please forgive my anger, I was just mad at myself for not spending more time with you.

Do you remember our secret goodbuddy handshake? Palm over fist and then fist over palm? As you put it that day, that was “random cool”. We were always just two midwestern boys who didn’t want to leave our backyard rocketship projects, even when our mom’s were calling us to dinner. We once joked that you would always be The Skipper to my Gilligan, and then you saved my bike from the Bard Security Graveyard. Y’all is my hero.

I can’t really buy that you’re very far away, because you left so many great toys to play with. I still crack up when I think of the day you showed me the hard-drive-in-motor-oil sound piece. I said; “Yeah man, but WHY?”, and you sort of grinned and told me that you just had to see if it worked, and that it was working “just fine’ (and just for the record, I personally think the Amacher Cigarette Butt In A Jar sculpture was the best thing ever seen at Bard, but that’s just me). I guess the others will think I’m losing it (well, more than usual), but I actually still expect to hear from you. I listen to the spaces between sounds when I’m working, and put my ear up to bottles and other mad things like that. You see I know in my heart if anyone could ever figure out a way to get a message through from the other side it would be the guy who could hear what sound was coming from from a broken cell phone, the guy who could make old machines talk in coded lingo, the guy who could offer up a thirty gallon big yellow baptismal bucket, designed perhaps to renew weary old cowards like me. Please get back to us as soon as you can. I’ll be right where you left me.
Love,
dale