Leadership...it happens

Dear Scott,

Man it has been for ever since I contacted you. Way back when I started with STAND it was always a mixed bag of projects and deadlines. On occasion we would have those late night, quasi-booze fueled conversations about life, and by life I mostly mean girls and work (which at STAND those things were often one and the same).

I remember when I first met you in person my first though was that you were far too tall to be so young. Being the fossil I was at STAND, it seemed like everyone was atleast a decade younger than me. I mean I had Hampybags to keep me company, but he couldn’t hold my hand all the time. You were great because you carried yourself more like a full-fledged grown up than I ever have. You also had that wonderful talent where when you said something it sounding like it came from years of experience (even if it was self-admittedly bullshit). And well, there was the tall thing, and having a 5 o’clock shadow at noon.

My strongest memory of you or I has to be the “Night STAND almost ended” as it came to be known. It was you. There were three or four of us walking back to the apartment after some meeting, and it was ridiculously hot, it got up to like 100 degrees that day. It was so hot in fact that were we all kind of in auto-pilot mode, wandering through the streets of DC, which if ever there was a town where you needed to be on your toes, it’s DC. Anyhow, we were all chatting and bitching about some form of STAND drama or another, just kinda zoning out. In my head what happened went like this. You were walking infront of me with Maggie and you guys were kind of droning on about something or other and I was kind of just watching the back of your heads. We came up to an intersection, it was one of those DC intersections, a cluster fuck of like 8 streets converging on this crosswalk gauntlet. We had crossed one street and were waiting for the walk sign to change over. Just standing there, sweating, and staring and the little red hand waiting for the little walky dude to pop up. When the sign said walk, we all started walking into the street. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of lights, and my hand instinctively went up in front of me. Then with a WHOOSH! this SUV roared past our faces, about two inches from our noses. We all just stood there for a second. Stunned. We started to cross again, and about 5 steps on the other side of the street, we all kind of stopped independently from one another. I remember one of us saying something like “holy…SHIT!” and then the lights came back on in our heads and we all realized just how close we all came to dying. I looked down and my hands were shaking like crazy, and I felt kind of a rush of panic. That SUV had to have been going atleast 40 miles an hour. If we had taken one more step, that would have been it. Road pizza out of all of us. Jesus. Then someone said, “I know this sounds bad, but could you imagine what would have happened to STAND if all three of us got whacked?” That’s when the laughing started. The kind of laughing one does when the only other expression available to express what you are feeling is to shit your pants, and fall to the ground. While I am unsure if it would have indeed been the “End of STAND” it would most certainly have been the end of STAND for all of us, and would have put a severe damper on the rest of the retreat festivities moving forward.

I recount this long story, which you really had to be there to get the feeling for it, simply to illustrate a point. The leadership, and atmosphere that you had created (for me specifically anyways) kind of made me think of STAND first and foremost, and I am fairly sure most of us on the MC back then felt that way. Foregoing sleep, school work, our occupations, we were driven to make sure the organization, and its larger purpose succeeded. I think a lot of that was due to you. I always felt like if I did my job properly, and diligently, it would give you ammunition when you were representing us to the world of people out there that could help us achieve our goals.

I don’t really know how much of this is nostalgia, and how much is fact. But I still feel convinced that someday I will be voting for you, and have more hope in the action that I have in a majority of my life.

In anycase, you have my email, and obviously a backlog of a bazillion gchats and mail chains if every you need something, or just want to play the remember when game. Our Facebook relationship was really just a standard thing and we never really did much with it. But I guess on the bright side of things, I had an excuse to write this.

Today was a great day, but tomorrow our FBfriendship will end,

Curt