Note: This is from back in 2019. I thought I had already posted it here, but I hadn’t, so… here it is:
A very few of the people who come into your life connect with you in a certain way, and get to know you well enough, that they carry a piece of you with them. It’s almost as if that piece of you only exists in the world because they have it. Brad Linaweaver was one of those people for me.
We became friends soon after I came back from Japan, in 1996, and immediately started arguing. About everything. He was still a minarchist - I don’t know whether he ever came to consider himself a full-on anarchist, and it doesn’t really matter. He was big enough to admit when he had been wrong about things as big as the war on Iraq, and that alone gave me immense respect for him.
We talked a lot about everything - why he was wrong, why I was wrong, why the world was wrong, how best to get the ideas of liberty into film and fiction. He was in my student film for NYFA in 2000, and worked his butt off to help get what seemed to be the entire libertarian community of Los Angeles to be in it too. I suspect that because of his somewhat brash, cocksure, self-promoting manner, a lot of people don’t fully appreciate the lengths he went to and the effort he put in to help those around him.
We had a falling out that lasted for a few years (partly his fault, partly mine), but reconciled and were in touch occasionally after he moved to Florida. There are all kinds of great things I could say about him, about his dedication to his writing and to helping new writers, about his surprising humility re: the Iraq war thing, that he gave a shit about what was true, while choosing to immerse himself in the phoniest of industries. And I could go on and on about how completely shattered I am that now he won’t be able to read my first sci-fi-ish novel, “Annabel Pickering & the Sky Pirates.”
But I’ll just say this: Brad really was one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and it is no exaggeration to say that a piece of me left this earth yesterday.
RIP, Brad.
Very moving. I lost a good friend a few years ago too, and I still have moments when I start to make a mental note to share something with him, or ask him a question, before I remember he's gone.