I can say, without a second thought, that I never would have remained active on E2 beyond 2001 if it had not been for dannye. Everyone who knew him knew how absolutely relentlessly infuriating he could be. It also used to be said that a group of noders could not get together in real life without his name coming up. The truest element of a person's character is how real they are, how willing they are to be themselves and to not hide who they are, and how they do not change that character just to impress or attract other people. Danny was always very, very real.
That was the element that caused him to be infuriating and so much more.
When I first found this place I was bored, working nights in a theme park warehouse and needing to kill some time. I wrote and posted some complete crap, things that just jumped off the top of my head. Years later as a content editor and administrator here I would remind others that this was normal for anyone falling across a seemingly random website that asked for content. In those early days I would have things killed without comment. I would receive nasty private messages from self-righteous editors. This didn't make me want to contribute to the site in a meaningful way. Why would it? The only member of the staff here who saw what I was doing and understood was dannye. We exchanged a lot of messages in those days, with him pointing out to me that he could see from the half-assed crap I was posting that I was capable of much more. I knew I was, but the point was that I needed to have a reason to actually contribute content to a site that disrespected me right out of the starting gate.
I wouldn't have minded being told what I was posting was sub-par. I knew it was. I didn't care. Then along came dannye, an administrator in those days, and he gave me a reason to start posting things that mattered.
The thing was, dannye challenged you. And he genuinely cared about this website. He would tell you straight up how he felt about you as well as how he felt about some shit you just posted. He could insult you and everything you believed in, and I'm pretty sure most of the time he did it to see how you would react.
In 2006 we got into the online equivalent of a drunken brawl. It was on June 6th of 2006, which I remember because it was the annual anniversary of my death in 1994. Every year on that night I would get blindingly drunk. Usually I'd stay to myself, but that night was in the midst of a rather awful time in my personal life and I came on E2 and decided to pick a fight with dannye. That was the last June 6th I celebrated by getting drunk. We didn't talk again for over a year and at the urging of another noder I apologized. He told me not to worry about it and we moved on. Then he suggested I get out of the politics game, not because we so strongly disagreed with each other's views, but because, he said, I had more important things to focus on.
He was right on that count. My intensive mental and emotional involvement in the political goings on in this country and the world frustrated me and drained my energy from my that which had become my life's work. My work over the years with troubled people, which intensified with my involvement in this website, requires my full energy and attention. Since I started working for a living with troubled teen girls in 2005, the picture has slowly come into focus.
Never doubt that dannye cared a great deal for this website, its content and its people. If the defenses built into his infamous personality hadn't protected him, he never would have survived so many years here as one of its most regular patrons. He will most certainly be missed. I know I will miss him. Every time I posted something here there was always the thought in the back of my head, "I wonder if dannye will be cool with this one?" That was because what he thought did matter. And dannye's C!s were always the ones that meant the most to me.
Row, row, row your boat.