I googled the web for any previous postings by my dear Munch2 and found his previous postings as long ago as 1995 when he was just a 15 year old pioneer of the web and a photo of him (see photo on the left) in a Kidlink class. It's so precious and bittersweet to see his photo then and hear his youthful idealistic voice again in these postings on kidlink:
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Subject: File: "KIDART PXBENWAL"
|=|----------------|=|
|=| THE KIDLINK |=|
|=| PHOTO EXCHANGE |=|
|=| PROJECT |=|
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|=| Coordinated by |=|
|=| Ben Walter |=|
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1) Who am I?
My name is Ben Walter, and i'm 15. I live in the outer reaches
of civilization in Cambridge, England ;-> I love music,
reading, computers and going to see movies. I'm a DeadHead
(or as close as you can get to one stuck over here :->); that
is I love the Grateful Dead. I'm about 6ft tall, and I love
wearing brightly-coloured tye-dye shirts. I guess typical
clothes for me are jeans and a t-shirt (tye-dyed of course!)
with the odd silk head-band thrown in for effect :-> No
60s retrospectives here folks! *grin*
2) What do I want to be when I grow up?
I'm not entirely sure what I want to be. I certainly want to
carry on working on the Net; I love the Net and all those on it.
I'd think to carry on working the KidLink community and help
it to expand. I'm really entranced with the whole idea of
a global community of kids. It's the sort of thing most
people are only dreaming of, but it's happening now and
we're a part of it!
3) How do I want the world to be better when I grow up?
I would like to see people learn to understand each other
more. I would like to see people treat each other as they
would treat themselves, and realise that they aren't alone.
I'd love for people to understand different ways of thinking,
and learn to respect them rather than ridicule or criticize
them.
4) What can I do now to make this happen?
I think that the KIDS project is working on this right now. It's
getting Kids all around the world working together and learning
about each other. There is a big difference between learning
that there are however-many-million people living in, for
example, Russia, and talking to a russian child, learning about
how they see the situation. It makes people see how events around
the world affect real people. For example in the recent uprising
in Moscow I knew people who actually were in the city at the time.
It wasn't just a crowd of blank faces, hell, my friend could have
got hurt..
//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\ > ben@tsunami.demon.co.uk <
\ bjw@gnu.ai.mit.edu
In the land of the night \ ben.walter@lambada.oit.unc.edu
the ship of the sun is drawn by The Grateful Dead. \//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//
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As I am copying this message and including his old photo... I have dispersed his pixeldust into the web world for the duration of this site and his kidlink site. One never knows how long one's words will last online. Online sites converge into one in mergers and acquisitions... sites go out of business... new website redesigns replace old pages. I discovered that munch2's website "bwalter.org" is probably going to be down someday. I thought of buying his domain and so that I never see it replaced by someone else's information. instead, I could pay a tribute to him on that site. If more people comment on these messages and his words proliferate, he lives on in the pixeldust, his words echo forever in cyberspace.
There's so much beauty in him that I see again when I read this message -- all that idealism I saw when he was passionately engaged in mudding in the first day of the MIT class we took together so long ago. Hmmm... 6 feet tall-- I never knew he was that tall and never knew he loved tie-dyed shirts although I can imagine that he did as a hippie visionary of the X generation. Or is that the Y generation? I believe the Y generation starts in 1978.
3 comments:
Janet, I'm so sorry. Are you doing ok since you found out? If there's anything I can do - anything at all - please let me know. My sincerest condolences to both you and to his family. I will be keeping you in my thoughts.
Love you, and really, if there's anything I can do, at all, please don't hesitate to ask.
Many hugs,
Eugenia
Day-day
Wow. That is a lot of writing. It seems like you found the perfect place to write all your inner thoughts and to also vent. I skimmed through some of your previous entiries but I'll try to find some time to read them more thoroughly. It must be tough to lose a best friend but I'm glad you are staying strong. Remember to always keep your chin up and smile. ;)
-John
ps- I think the quote below epitomizes the emotion in your rhetoric:
"Some people come into our lives, leave footprints in our hearts, and we are never ever the same."
Hi Janet,
Just read your two posts about Ben after stumbling across them - late at work on a friday I was remembering him and the line he loved in his teens; "In the land of the night the ship of the sun is drawn by The Greatful Dead", a great line, so I googled it with his name attached and found your blog!
Good to read some lovely words about the man and legend that was my friend Ben.
Thankyou.
I found out Ben had gone a while ago. Around New Years. He will not be forgotten.
I knew Ben at our UK secondary school, Parkside in Cambridge, and he became a good friend of mine. We were in a close bunch of 6 or so brainy kids at Parkside (knicknamed the XYZs, on acccount of the algebraic tendencies some of us had!).
I shared some good times with him. One fantastic memory is one summer when we would take his parents' tandem bicycle to go see some cutting edge guy at a series of university computer society talks. Two young school kids in a room full of the brightest souls at Cambridge at the time, I'd regularly have to get Ben to explain what the hell was going on...
Afterwards we'd tear arond the town some more on the tandem. Whilst driving that tandem Ben was erratic at best - I remember that odd, wobbly physicality about him - and we had some close calls, which Ben would just laugh at with hilarity. He was increadibly joyous and light hearted with so much in life, he even revelled in the joy of the happy mistakes of it.
I saw less and less of him as he got more and more into the net and the rest of his adolescent trappings. Then he dissapeared to the States. I visited him there when I was driving across the States with some friends back in '99. I might have briefly met you then, he was living in a Boston warehouse and studying at MIT and just seemed right at home, doing what he loved.
The last time I saw him was a few years back in Cambridge on one of his visits to his parents, across from either the States or China.
So I mostly remember him as he was back at Parkside, full of the most raw energy and ability. He's one of the only people I've known that I can truely apply the word Genius to. It was in so much of how he was.
And you're right. Who could forget hat smile. A beaming, blinding grin. Full of the freshness and joy of life. I'll miss him.
If you want to get in touch you can reach me at benyoungman@gmail.com.
All the best,
Ben Youngman
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