I didn’t know if I should write this post or not, but I felt like it’s something that should be done, especially considering the amount of work Dan put into this blog…
Last week, Dan Harris, the co-author of Gone Meta, was killed in a bike accident. I met Dan a few years back when we were both working at a social media agency in London. He was the chilled out give-no-fucks kinda guy that everyone remembers him to be and we hit it off pretty quickly. We shared a passion for the same music (frequently having entire days of nostalgic reminiscence of music from our teen years, entire skype conversations filled with links to tracks). We often agreed on stuff concerning the marketing services industry especially though, and this is why we started gone meta – to chat about what we thought was cool and why. I wanted to make it perfect before we started, but Dan said we should just do it and work on the finesse as we went along -we never worked on the finesse!
I think that even though Gone Meta took a bit of a back seat to our careers Dan was proud of what we’d done, if not for anything else it was a place to vent about great or terrible marketing/ad campaigns. Eventually, Dan wanted to write about stuff that was closer to him and put more into his personal blog, www.gecko84.co.uk - You should check it out because I his writing and creative direction was simply brilliant on there, especially unhindered by the constraints of having to write about marketing!
Dan was the first person, really, that I saw outside of work and continued to see even when we were at different companies. I was looking forward to what we were going to get up to, to the eventual completion of all the hair-brained AND genius ideas that we’d had, to just drinking beers and chatting shit. It never occurred to me that these things might not happen.
As cliched as the saying is, Dan was immeasurably talented, smart and kind. He was an incredibly special person who had so much to give and he couldn’t give any shits about what people thought about him. He was always true to himself and the people he loved and cared about. He taught me a shitload, which I shall forever be grateful for.
My thoughts right now are with Dan’s Family, CD, all those who were especially close to him and everyone who was touched by his generosity at some stage who is feeling the pain now. I know that many, many people are going to be hurting for a long while at the loss of a lovely and beautiful man.
I’ll miss you buddy x
**Unfortunately the circumstances in which he died have created a bit of a media frenzy and for this reason I won’t be publicising this post the way we used to (‘is it live? post it to every social network that exists!’).
