Jake,
I wonder how many times you would have used the word 'ostensibly' this past year. I wonder how many times you would have come up with another theory on the tobacco manufacturing process. I wonder how many arbitrage firms you would have started to create focused on the interplay between the Yen and Euro. I wonder how many books you would have read by some author from Cuba. I wonder how many more books of notes you would have taken on that author. I wonder how many times you would have quit motorcycle riding. I wonder how many times you would have called, just to make sure I was not at work but knowing that I was. I wonder how many new numbers you would have added to your cellphone. I wonder how many calls you would have received from existing numbers.
Life has not been the same. You would tell me it never is. But not everybody has that luck. Definitely think you did. Between all your theories, your business plans, your stories, your friendships – you generated more things to think about than not to think about. You opened more chapters than you finished, exponentially. Before your even completed your major in Economics, you were heads down accumulating Philosophy. You left me hanging thinking up new ways to value the buyout of an asset management firm while you had already moved on to find further efficiencies for index funds. It wasn't that you were too lazy to execute and close on an idea, it was that you were too excited about the change of the next one. You had a way of filling life around you with that change. And you helped me appreciate that element of change. Friendships would not end -- they would change. Theories on economics would not end -- they would change. Your private cigarette company business plan never went bankrupt, it resurfaced in many incarnations over many different influences in many different venues.
It is your aversion to things ending that makes this anniversary most tough for me. No one is sitting next to me in a New Haven bar picking a fight with the entire offensive line of Fairfield U for all the right reasons (though clearly lacking all the right back up). No one is talking to me up on a roof about dog bites and bleeding text. No one is telling me to come on some quarter-planned trip to an extremely cold or extremely hot locale for some 'ostensibly inane' reason that I would actually consider.
I miss you, man. I wonder if you know that,
-q