He hadn't tweeted for a few days, so I sent a message to one of the friends he hadn't successfully pushed away. It was not this friend's first rodeo, but searches brought up nothing and we figured he'd just gone quiet.

But yesterday, as I was in the cinema waiting for Boiling Point to come on, I had a strong feeling that something was not right. Six days and no Neil on Twitter? Neil used Twitter in the good times and the bad. In the good he was a dancer, skipping between multiple forked branch threads of jokes and not miss a beat. In the bad it was a void into which to yell or regret or hope for something better. Most of my experience is the former, though I confess to slightly turning my head away from the latter.

I searched his real name on Facebook. First hit. Funeral home announcement. Same state. Same father's name. I didn't know a huge amount about him so I screenshot it and started a Twitter thread with mutuals who could work to verify it.

Neil was not a diffident person, nor an easy character to define. Primarily you would say Neil was a writer, one who brought the Rabelaisian to sports writing. He had a professional job where he could write as banal as any clickbait outfit would want you to (no diss, have done this myself) but his wild eyed writing was as authentic an opening into anybody's soul as I have seen in the age of the internet.

What I really responded to in Neil as a writer was how it was never detached, never ironic in the shitty way of distanced spectacle; rather it was all love, and a love that comes with the understanding that victory and joy and success come hand in hand with concussion, death, senility, injury, misery, decay, and horror. And that underneath it all, the butt of the joke was the writer himself.

Here's something from the G1 Climax in 2019:

I can relate to a dude like Taichi a little bit, and not just because of the whole Miho Abe thing. He is talented yet lazy, and he sabotages himself at times because he’s scared of what will happen when he actually gets what he wants. He makes Poor Choices, and this has left him sort of drifting on a sea of his own burned potential, content to beat up nerds and fuck Miho Abe even though he knows he’s just using her because she’ll do whatever he wants and it is a kind of sickness, to take advantage of someone’s love like that, but people do it because it’s easier than being the man worthy of that love, and it all ends in heartbreak once poor Miho Abe wakes up one day and realizes she has wasted all her prime years on a broken thing like me and Taichi because we’re never gonna get better. Not really. This is who we are, babe.

More importantly, to me at least, was that I felt he was a good friend. There was no need to self-edit in front of someone like Neil, or any requirement to perform your best (or worst) self. He knew we were from different worlds but he was more interested in the connections than the disparities.

I had offered an open invite to Neil to come across the water and stay at mine so he could go and soak up a game at Liverpool. Daresay we'd hang and get Jude involved and talk shit until late. Part of me felt this would never happen, but I always hoped that it would.

(A sidenote, I guess, but it is why I am always very suspicious of those who automatically suspect sports and masculinity of having this unlovely veneer at expense of emotionality. The emotionality was always there with Neil and with others. Sports chatter and pop culture talk was the spine of our interactions, yes: but we spoke nearly every day. We cannot speak of love and loss every day. Well, unless you are Neil talking about the Detroit Lions.)

It is no secret that Neil had a drug problem: he said as much. Given his frequent lucidity, it did not colour things with me too much. He would occasionally push me (and others) but I never felt the internal malice that I have done with people like JS, and he was so defenceless and hurt when I would occasionally fire back (maybe once or twice) that I could only warm to him more. People online in 2022 are just not meant to be that vulnerable in public.

I recognised in Neil some shared aspects I have seen in others with addiction issues; aside from struggle and demons, a refuge in nostalgia, in the good times shared, as an anchor point. Those moments that made someone happiest in their core, refracted until they become outwardly sad.

I'm now in 5 Twitter DM groups where everyone is sharing a different side of Neil and I recognise the essential truth in them all. There are also certain words and phrases that I'll never hear or use the same again: "hooting lustily" being an all-time favourite.

There's much more I could say. I arrived relatively late in the Neil Internet days; arguably in the decline, if a glimpse at his forum postings and his remninscences of said are anything to go by. But I feel like I got a lot of Good Neil over the 8/9 years (maybe more?) we were chatting and in the same football and NFL predictions groups. Near enough daily for stretches of months and years. And that's more than most will get out of anyone.

I'll miss Neil a lot. Neil would never have written something like this; he was a scatalogical Romantic, an experimental Dionysian prose poet in the digital age, whilst I am a mere realist and accountant of truths. But he didn't want you to be anything else than what you were.

February 26th

This month is the most I've ever been paid in one month. Possibly this sounds like an ostentatious brag but it is not. It is a normal amount of money, the normalmost amount of money, in line with the national average and still less than other people in my line of work get paid (before we start on the factors that lead to expenditures to even be able to do it [and before we talk about how I lose money next month because of the strikes {and how it was slightly raised because of outstanding pay from another job}]) but still. A small victory and an incredibly temporary one.

It is a Saturday and I am working.