In memoriam: Eric Koolich

I learned just as I was leaving for my trip to Japan in early June that Eric had gone missing. The events that unfolded occupied my mind for pretty much the entire trip. It's really sad to see Eric go, he was always an interesting part of the group. It's hardly set in actually because I've grown used to not seeing you all every day, but I think once I'm back in Washington, it'll start to sink in that he's gone and I won't see him soon.

If you had said X number of people in our graduating class would be dead before the 10-year reunion, I would probably have been able to fill out a shortish list of names, but there's no way Eric would have been on that list. The guy lived a really careful, well thought out life which in some ways admittedly annoyed me and in some ways was kind of impressive.

I first met Eric in high school, shortly after he moved here. I only really knew him through the part of our group dubbed as "The Asians," so we never really directly associated until college. He didn't really gel with parts of our group; not to say he wasn't accepted, just that he wasn't someone that everyone wanted to hang around with all the time. Eventually, our group of friends split up for college and those of us that stayed behind kind of banded together. Part of that involved Eric becoming a bigger presence in the group. He spent a lot of time at the UW interacting with people besides me and I spent most of my early college years tied down and busy at SCC, but when I moved to Seattle University, we started to talk more. Eventually, when I began playing League in 2012, we started to talk a lot more.

I had the chance to talk with Eric a lot about this and that and everything in between. He was a really strange guy at times, almost coming across like a robot that needed case by case programming on how to act in certain situations. At other times, it seemed like he knew what he was doing. One thing he always did was check for help from real people whenever he had a problem. As someone who grew up in the generation of the internet, it annoyed me a bit that he would often ask for advice on stuff when I felt that it was something that could be easily googled, but now that I think about it, he was not only getting genuine feedback that he could trust, but he was able to use those dialogues as a way of staying in touch, and that's pretty cool.

We also talked a lot about life philosophies and whatnot, conversations that sometimes kept us up for several hours late into the night (because his parents wouldn't let him play League late, but they would let him chat on Skype until the wee hours of the morning). To describe his life philosophy in detail would be difficult and I don't think I would be 100% correct, so I can't really do it here. But to put it kind of simply as I understood it, Eric was one of those guys that hated being static. He always had to be learning a skill or improving himself in some way. It seemed to be really all he knew. I enjoy taking my breaks now and then, but Eric never really took any. I mean it when I say the guy was practically a robot.

More recently, Eric began to work the social game. He started going out with people and I got to hear about a lot of his experiences (mostly drinking experiences and whatnot). Even while he was going out and trying new things on his own, he would still occasionally ask people for advice and whatnot. For me, computer advice shifted to drinks advice and stuff like that. It was cool to see him starting to live it up as I would put it. Judging from what I saw on Facebook, he met and talked with a ton of people often. I think that was something cool about Eric is that in places where I would probably be too bashful to start up a conversation, he would just start one up like it was no big deal and would keep going. I'm not sure to this day if it was because deep down, he was an outgoing person or whether he had no social inhibitions (or maybe those are the same thing), but it seemed to be something that did a lot of good for him. He began to build a huge amount of contacts and before I knew it, he was bragging about the awesome job offers he had coming his way. In fact, as I understand it, the Monday after he was found, he was supposed to have started a job. That's what really makes this so sad, but I guess there's really no good time for anyone to die.

It's hard to pick a favorite memory with Koolich, but I'll always treasure the advice he gave me on League. He's had a big effect on my soloqueue mentality. He duoed with me only a handful of times, but he always watched my stream and helped me out a lot. Because of him, I don't get mad in chat and rage at people about 95% or more of the time. I think that doing that has allowed me to focus on my own skill, which has been helping me improve. The last time I talked to Koolich was in League chat and that exact conversation is of course lost forever, but I know it was something mundane and to the effect of "Why aren't you in mumble" and "Hey wanna play ranked 5s later?" and "No sorry I'm playing with some other people." I should quickly mention that I liked that he tried to give everyone equal time playing with them in League, even if that meant sometimes he stopped us from being able to play ranked 5s. Anyway, the last conversation with him where I have a log of it is on Facebook. I was lamenting the unlikeliness of getting into gold at the rate I was going and he encouraged me that Keir and I would surely make it to gold. I'm definitely determined to do it if for no reason other than to prove him right.

So one last time I'd like to throw a thanks out there to Eric Koolich for all the good memories. There were some weird times, some great times, but at least they were all pretty memorable. Thanks for all the memories, man.

In memoriam

It's really terrible that I have to make these types of posts, but I guess that's just the pain of getting older. I'm making this post just to start off a new label that I'm going to make. I'll be using it to write things about people I/we've lost to remember them by. The first post will immediately follow this one.