Oh, Jon....

 

@carlosquevedo-raphael

Last week Bob let us know that dear Jon-Tomas Newman (how fancy is that name???) had passed. Jon was witty and funny and sweet and had an incredible joie de vivre that I have seldom found in men much, much younger. At the beginning of 2024, he started having more and more health issues (getting old really sucks) and he finally passed on last May.

I am going to miss him. I think he had the best stories from the sixties and seventies and the BEST tea on online 'boyfriends' I've read in any blog (or anywhere). You should go back to his blog and read his hysterical accounts of the many online characters trying to get with him (some were funny, some were puzzling, some were downright worrying). Jon was also the only person online that seemed to faze Lurkie a little bit (hi, Lurkie!) and I think we may hear from him talking about Jon sometime in the future. You know Lurkie and his lurking ways...

But meanwhile, this is what Jon wrote last December, right at the eve of 2024 when we were all a little different and we were all lucky to still have him with us:

 Well it is New Years Eve. In a few hours 2023 will transition to 2024 and all the glory and grief of the year will be behind us while we begin to mold a new year into something we all hope will be a better year but suspect that it will not.

Our world continues to convulse from something called Climate Change, the politics of our own country like most of the world sits atop a keg of powder on which the fuse has been lit and it may just explode this year, disease continues to befuddle our medical community leaving millions of people in varying stages of pain, suffering and grief and more than ever in the history of humanity brother fights brother ever arguing that I am right in my beliefs, faith, outlook and everything else and you are wrong.

And yet we continue as only the human race seems to be able to do.

And this new year that approaches brings us a clean slate, a new beginning which historically we have squandered. How sad we are as inhabitants of this planet. A planet that will, by the time the new year gets here, have a population of over 8 billion yet only has the resources to deal with about half that number.

I will try to do my part to make life better in 2024 by doing the simplest things. I will continue to allow everyone to not need to be the same as me, to have differing ideas and philosophies of life even if they are not striving to do the same. I will continue to strive to find at least one happy point in every day be it the smile of a child, the sun rising and setting, or the pleasure that comes when you bite into a piece of fruit and it explodes in you mouth with sweetness. I will actively seek out the happiness and goodness that exist in every day I am alive.  

And, I will continue to write about my life, the good and the bad, to share the experience of being Jon Newman with those of you who find an interest in my doing so here in this blog.

My readers here make up the tiniest microcosm of of humanity. Yet, they are some of the most wonderful people that I have had the pleasure to know. They are, in many ways, the best social outlet that I could ever hope for and I thank each of you for this past year we have had together and look forward to the year to come with all its trials and tribulations and, yes, the sadness and the happiness that it will bring.

You are all very special to me in so many ways. You call me on my shit when I get going and you stroke my ego when appropriate. I think that is as good a definition of what a friend is as can be.

So, my friends, the happiest New Year possible for you and for our world at large.

Gonna miss you, Jon.

XOXO

P.S. Go sign his obituary!  I already did. When I am no more, I hope you sign mine, if I have one. Because even if all you knew of me was this blog, Constant Reader, you can still say you kind of 'knew' me. And between us and the internet you may know me much better than many people IRL do. No cap...