Re: Josh Gross Memorial
Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 9:23 pm
Like I said before, I find myself moved to tell my stories about Josh; I almost have to. It's my way to remember the unique individual, the friend that he was and start feeling better about everything. I hope that some of you will read these, see some of his nuttiness in the stuff I remember, and smile.
My first meeting with Josh was actually as far removed from our later friendship as it could be. It was 1996 and I was playing Prince Imrahil in Dol Amroth, when a new squire named Arathis spent several weeks pestering me with blatantly dumb questions and trailing around behind the prince like Terrell Owens' publicist. I couldn't believe that anybody would seriously want to kiss my butt the way this kid did, and it was really annoying! Then as now, I hated sycophancy. I was caught on record saying "Arathis will be a knight of Dol Amroth over my dead body!"
Well, sure as shootin' it was all an act on his part. He was playing the dorky sycophant because someone had told him I had a massive ego and would be flattered by it. (I did have an ego, but I hated flattery.) Plus, and probably more importantly, he got a huge kick out of purposely being a doofus and watching my stressed-out attempts to be patient get more and more strained.
When we figured all this out and realized that we actually had far more in common, it was too late for me as Imrahil (slimy MUSH politicians had used my comment about Arathis to get me threatened with de-featuring, ironically, and I left the culture) but it proved the foundation of a longstanding friendship. He became Amarthion and proudly carried on the tradition of the noble house, Girithlin, that I'd founded as Thorondur. He wound up making it more or less his own before convincing me to come back to Gondor as Findamir.
This brings us to about 1998. Josh and I, together with Sirion/Indilzar, were about the only people in the entire world who thought Dol Amroth was a cool place to role-play, and we started getting a trifle militant about it. We all read "Peoples of Middle Earth" and campaigned to get Imrahil's sons added as feature characters in Gondor. (That effort finally paid off later that year when Josh was awarded-- and properly, because he deserved it more than anyone-- the role of Prince Elphir.)
Josh called us "The Triumvirate" (we also had a shared passion for the Latin language and ancient Roman history) and we essentially became our own little club. From that foundation, chivalrous roleplay really flourished in Elendor's Dol Amroth and would reach its apex in the early years of this century. Everyone who's ever played a Swan-Knight in Gondor, well, you can thank Josh Gross for that.
We talked about other stuff too, became about as close as I can imagine you can be with a friend online. He told me I was the older brother he never had and I called him the younger brother I should have had. I remember when he was graduating from college and agonizing about his friendship with a girl named Kate, who he thought he wanted to be more than friends with. I was going through the exact same thing with a girl who had the exact same name. We'd both log on smashed after nights out partying and stay up til 3AM bemoaning the Kates of the world together. "Drunk_Amarthion" became the stuff of Gondor legend and was alternately morose and hilarious. Different stuff began pulling us away from MUSHes within a couple years, and those late-night conversations became less common as our separate lives became richer outside of the online world, but they were always a bond. Even after neither one of us ended up with a Kate.
Josh and I got together in NYC with Joe (Sirion/Indilzar) for a belated meeting of The Triumvirate in May of 2001. I'll never forget that weekend; actually, telling my wife the story of it last night has really helped me start to cope with all this. I took the Acela from Boston to Penn Station one Saturday, got in about 1PM and walked across the street to where I'd booked a hotel suite. I'd only been there a few minutes when Josh called up on my cellphone and said he'd meet me downstairs in the bar. Naturally.
So there I was, the Aussie Rules football player and roughneck ex-linebacker walking into a Manhattan hotel bar looking for the whip-thin daredevil ski instructor. We'd both told one another what we looked like, seen pictures, so of course when I see this guy sipping a cold one at a barstool we both laugh almost simultaneously and say:
"Dude, you look nothing like I expected!"
From there the weirdness of actually -seeing- an online friend for the first time wore off quickly-- before the first beers were finished, as I recall-- and we set out to kill time until Joe got off work and would join us. Naturally, I suppose, we decided to go up to the tallest building in the city and see the world from its roof. The World Trade Center. When 9/11 hit, we were both online within hours and talking about that day and how surreal it all seemed-- WE'D BEEN THERE JUST FOUR MONTHS AGO. That was another touchstone, looking back on it now.
When we came down we settled in at an umbrella table in the WTC plaza and waited for Joe, who joined us from across the square by dashing, James Bond-style, in and out of niches all the way around the plaza borders until he settled in at our table. Almost immediately we started telling stories about the crazy people we'd all met on Elendor, jokes we'd played together and adventures we'd shared. Something about discussing this stuff over a cold beer with a couple of other outstandingly normal guys made it all seem so much more real.
We had dinner in some touristy boardwalky area-- South Street Pier, is that right?-- secured some 40s from a corner store in our hotel room for later, and then Joe took us out for a night on the town. We initially had plans to get smashed and chase girls, but after a few games of foosball at an NYU bar we left the girls alone and just kept talking. Closed the bar and kept talking. Drank our 40s and kept talking. There was a Felix Trinidad fight at the Garden that night, which was across the street from the hotel-- we dodged mobs of flag-waving Puerto Rican Trinidad fans in the hotel lobby to reach the elevator and stagger up to our suite.
The next afternoon, I had a train to catch and Josh (I think) was meeting his family. We laid out on the volcanic rocks in Central Park to catch some rays, watch some girls, and talk about the future. He was moving to San Francisco within the month and tried to talk me into moving there too. He was so full of enthusiasm-- he didn't know what he wanted to do, he just knew he wanted to do it in San Francisco. This would establish the pattern for us until the end, I guess.
By the time I made it out to SF, he was gone to Colorado. By the time I could afford to fly out to Breckenridge and get those free ski lessons he kept bugging me to take, he was joining the Navy. By the time he was on leave and telling me to meet him somewhere and party, I was getting married. We always planned to get together again one day. We had a lot of plans. I considered it an honor when he'd include me on those mass emails he'd send letting all his friends know when he was moving. It was so... unusual to have only met the guy once, to know that our best years as gamers were behind us, but to know that he was still a real friend (and thought of me the same way). He was a special kind of guy and I'll miss him a lot. That's all for now, but there'll be more.
My first meeting with Josh was actually as far removed from our later friendship as it could be. It was 1996 and I was playing Prince Imrahil in Dol Amroth, when a new squire named Arathis spent several weeks pestering me with blatantly dumb questions and trailing around behind the prince like Terrell Owens' publicist. I couldn't believe that anybody would seriously want to kiss my butt the way this kid did, and it was really annoying! Then as now, I hated sycophancy. I was caught on record saying "Arathis will be a knight of Dol Amroth over my dead body!"
Well, sure as shootin' it was all an act on his part. He was playing the dorky sycophant because someone had told him I had a massive ego and would be flattered by it. (I did have an ego, but I hated flattery.) Plus, and probably more importantly, he got a huge kick out of purposely being a doofus and watching my stressed-out attempts to be patient get more and more strained.
When we figured all this out and realized that we actually had far more in common, it was too late for me as Imrahil (slimy MUSH politicians had used my comment about Arathis to get me threatened with de-featuring, ironically, and I left the culture) but it proved the foundation of a longstanding friendship. He became Amarthion and proudly carried on the tradition of the noble house, Girithlin, that I'd founded as Thorondur. He wound up making it more or less his own before convincing me to come back to Gondor as Findamir.
This brings us to about 1998. Josh and I, together with Sirion/Indilzar, were about the only people in the entire world who thought Dol Amroth was a cool place to role-play, and we started getting a trifle militant about it. We all read "Peoples of Middle Earth" and campaigned to get Imrahil's sons added as feature characters in Gondor. (That effort finally paid off later that year when Josh was awarded-- and properly, because he deserved it more than anyone-- the role of Prince Elphir.)
Josh called us "The Triumvirate" (we also had a shared passion for the Latin language and ancient Roman history) and we essentially became our own little club. From that foundation, chivalrous roleplay really flourished in Elendor's Dol Amroth and would reach its apex in the early years of this century. Everyone who's ever played a Swan-Knight in Gondor, well, you can thank Josh Gross for that.
We talked about other stuff too, became about as close as I can imagine you can be with a friend online. He told me I was the older brother he never had and I called him the younger brother I should have had. I remember when he was graduating from college and agonizing about his friendship with a girl named Kate, who he thought he wanted to be more than friends with. I was going through the exact same thing with a girl who had the exact same name. We'd both log on smashed after nights out partying and stay up til 3AM bemoaning the Kates of the world together. "Drunk_Amarthion" became the stuff of Gondor legend and was alternately morose and hilarious. Different stuff began pulling us away from MUSHes within a couple years, and those late-night conversations became less common as our separate lives became richer outside of the online world, but they were always a bond. Even after neither one of us ended up with a Kate.
Josh and I got together in NYC with Joe (Sirion/Indilzar) for a belated meeting of The Triumvirate in May of 2001. I'll never forget that weekend; actually, telling my wife the story of it last night has really helped me start to cope with all this. I took the Acela from Boston to Penn Station one Saturday, got in about 1PM and walked across the street to where I'd booked a hotel suite. I'd only been there a few minutes when Josh called up on my cellphone and said he'd meet me downstairs in the bar. Naturally.
So there I was, the Aussie Rules football player and roughneck ex-linebacker walking into a Manhattan hotel bar looking for the whip-thin daredevil ski instructor. We'd both told one another what we looked like, seen pictures, so of course when I see this guy sipping a cold one at a barstool we both laugh almost simultaneously and say:
"Dude, you look nothing like I expected!"
From there the weirdness of actually -seeing- an online friend for the first time wore off quickly-- before the first beers were finished, as I recall-- and we set out to kill time until Joe got off work and would join us. Naturally, I suppose, we decided to go up to the tallest building in the city and see the world from its roof. The World Trade Center. When 9/11 hit, we were both online within hours and talking about that day and how surreal it all seemed-- WE'D BEEN THERE JUST FOUR MONTHS AGO. That was another touchstone, looking back on it now.
When we came down we settled in at an umbrella table in the WTC plaza and waited for Joe, who joined us from across the square by dashing, James Bond-style, in and out of niches all the way around the plaza borders until he settled in at our table. Almost immediately we started telling stories about the crazy people we'd all met on Elendor, jokes we'd played together and adventures we'd shared. Something about discussing this stuff over a cold beer with a couple of other outstandingly normal guys made it all seem so much more real.
We had dinner in some touristy boardwalky area-- South Street Pier, is that right?-- secured some 40s from a corner store in our hotel room for later, and then Joe took us out for a night on the town. We initially had plans to get smashed and chase girls, but after a few games of foosball at an NYU bar we left the girls alone and just kept talking. Closed the bar and kept talking. Drank our 40s and kept talking. There was a Felix Trinidad fight at the Garden that night, which was across the street from the hotel-- we dodged mobs of flag-waving Puerto Rican Trinidad fans in the hotel lobby to reach the elevator and stagger up to our suite.
The next afternoon, I had a train to catch and Josh (I think) was meeting his family. We laid out on the volcanic rocks in Central Park to catch some rays, watch some girls, and talk about the future. He was moving to San Francisco within the month and tried to talk me into moving there too. He was so full of enthusiasm-- he didn't know what he wanted to do, he just knew he wanted to do it in San Francisco. This would establish the pattern for us until the end, I guess.
By the time I made it out to SF, he was gone to Colorado. By the time I could afford to fly out to Breckenridge and get those free ski lessons he kept bugging me to take, he was joining the Navy. By the time he was on leave and telling me to meet him somewhere and party, I was getting married. We always planned to get together again one day. We had a lot of plans. I considered it an honor when he'd include me on those mass emails he'd send letting all his friends know when he was moving. It was so... unusual to have only met the guy once, to know that our best years as gamers were behind us, but to know that he was still a real friend (and thought of me the same way). He was a special kind of guy and I'll miss him a lot. That's all for now, but there'll be more.