I woke up around 4:00 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so went for a social media scroll. I got some absolutely tragic and painful news.
A friend of mine, Mark, died yesterday. I'm still struggling to wrap my head around it.
Alex and I met Mark back in, I think, 2011 (possibly 2010). His band Synapse was opening for Faderhead. We really liked them as the openers, and then ended up chatting with him and the other members of the band for a while after the show.
After that, we made it a point to try and see Synapse as often as we could. One time we even drove all the way up to Steamboat Springs and back to be moral support for a night, because they were booked for a show in a venue that didn't seem like the right type of place, ha.
Here's Alex, Mark, and me. We were wearing our Synapse shirts.
We also hung out frequently at the various goth nights, back in our clubbing days. Eventually we hung out at his house a few times, sometimes as part of a larger party, sometimes just us.
A few years later Synapse broke up, and Mark started up a new project: Voicecoil. We've been to a lot of Voicecoil shows. He also had a side project, Gravity Corps, though we never saw him perform as that project. (I know that he had a previous project as well, Machinegun Symphony, though that project was over by the time we met.)
We were excited to see him as part of an upcoming festival in May, and he seemed excited, too. I'm beyond gutted that it simply... won't happen. We're not going to see him. As many, many times as we went out to see him perform, and as many times as we hung out outside of that... I wish we got to do it again.
Mark was always kind to us, and to so many others on the scene. He was well-known and popular, but he always made us feel like he wanted to spend time with us. He always asked about how we were doing, remembered the things we specifically cared about. Even on show nights, when he was often in high demand, he made time to sit and chat with us, often for long stretches of time. Even at his album release party in 2022, he spent nearly an hour with us. The last time we saw him in person was last May, when he opened for Beborn Beton. It was a great show, and catching up with him beforehand was one of the best parts of the night.
Alex, Mark, and me again. This was either a late Synapse show or an early Voicecoil one.
Today, his Facebook is full of other people saying the same things that I remember most. That he always made so much time to talk to and spend time with so many people, to make sure they were doing all right, taking a genuine interest in them. He mentored our friend Jake in his music. He was always, always so encouraging to other artists.
He had a rough several years. Recently, I know he felt very betrayed by someone... He refused to name names, but someone he'd thought was a friend that he trusted turned out to be saying some extremely cruel and awful things to and about him. Mark was almost completely blind (could see things from one eye within about an inch of his face, and otherwise just faint light and dark, as I understand it.) Apparently this person was being absolutely awful about his disability, and it very clearly bothered him in a way that he was rarely willing to express.
His very long-term partner and he broke up a couple years ago.
Most significantly, a few years ago he lost a different partner to a sudden accidental death. He absolutely never got over that loss. Her birthday would have been on Monday, which was the last thing he posted about, and I think that may be what led to him leaving us.
I'm heartbroken, and still struggling to feel adjusted to him not being here anymore.
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