So it is that I return to this blog I started over 1.5 years ago. Over that period, I think I've learned that I need to tap into the soul of this blog's namesake as the best way of dealing with the loss of Doug, John, and Michael. That is to say, Three Reasons was meant to be a reminder that in the face of workaday life, I should always have three reasons to pursue my passions and curiosity. That is because those three men possessed an indescribable joy and tenacity in pursuing their passions in music and creativity. And they were fueled by the joy that came in unselfishly sharing this powerful force with others.

That said, I'll try to capture moments of inspiration here. An ongoing mental drivel at times, but important documentation of my moments of curiosity.

I've found that my mind opens up most these days when I'm in a liminal state (there's some old anthro terminology for you). That is, when I'm on the way to work on the El or flying for biz. I think it's because these are times when you're among strangers and distraction is limited. Probably also because you're temporarily suspended of your contextual roles and routines: I'm not wearing my home nor my work hats.

So today I was thinking about the following:

• Using visual signature recognition software on waveforms to identify like sound patterns. Implications for everything from audiology to Pandora.com.

• Similarly, using this new type of software for sheet music pattern recognition.

• Russel Davies' blog today featured an article about how monetization of online services isn't necessary when you have a very lean organization. Craigslist (7th most visited site) not accepting advertising and having 22 employees is the poster child. So I really need to pursue social networking for loss/grieving. I don't need to worry about the business model at this point.

• Grant McCracken's blog made me realize something about what happens when hit campaigns, innovations, etc. "boom" (iPod, Dove, etc.). I've heard the Dove case invoked twice this week, once by Grant, the other by Mark Barden of eatbigfish. Having been involved with this campaign, I now realize that post-facto observers have a way of oversimplifying things -- e.g. using Dove as a case study to prove a point about branding processes they espouse. As I once heard a playwright say on Studio 360 (I'm butchering this beyond belief): 'Creativity is messy. Hamlet was a mess.' Getting to great advertising with Dove was not an easy task. But suffice it to say that SUCCESS BREEDS MYTH.
  

Tomorrow the process begins. I will see the killer for the first time. Is her bond hearing the beginning of due process or an emotional Pandora's Box for the grieving?

But now for another beginning.

In the fall of 1994 I transferred to Illinois Wesleyan University. I left behind a difficult Freshman year at Kalamazoo College complete with a bad case of acne and a psychopathic roommate who reduced three college-issue chairs to kindling in the course of a year.

Illinois Wesleyan offered hope when I was granted a music scholarship there after my mother encouraged me to hop a small commuter plane and audition in what seemed to me like a school surrounded by farm-belt country. Little did I know that farm-belt boredom would later provoke hours of senseless creativity.

Doug and I lived down the hall from one another in a utilitarian-looking male dormitory that perpetually reeked of Speed Stick and stale beer. The door to his room was the first thing that made me ponder the fellow student who lived behind it. The full length of the door was adorned with Fred Basset comic strips, yet none of that yellowing newsprint contained even the faintest hint of humor. Fred Basset was a hound whose thought bubbles personified him, yet not a single thought bubble prompted a chuckle from passersby. It was as if the writer thought that personification of a basset hound was irony enough.

Words are inadequate in the face of loss, but they are the means through which I will tell you the story of the senseless deaths of three men: Doug Meis, Michael Dahlquist, and John Glick.

Not a mere eulogy, but an often futile attempt to fit the unfathomable into my life while perpetuated forward into a new reality without them.

In some ways, this is what I would have liked their killer to have known about them before she decided to end their lives.

Sadly, my words -- if she should ever lay eyes upon them -- now take the form of a criminal punishment, a penance of memories.