Without words, there is no memorial. Without a picture, there are less tears.

With Shep (and Crew) at the Dead End. Austin, TX 2009.
Here are some words he wrote once to Josie Sumthing

"It's not a matter of how long you live. Or even a matter of how
wealthy you live. Even a scumfuck like myself can disprove the notion
that you can expect fully to live to be 23 and no more and still you
find yourself alive a couple of decades later still broke and still in
love with it all. Drink, lock yourself in a trailer with lesbians,
raise a child, eat more acid than Leary, screw your boyfriend's mom,
pick up a guitar and scream about it all, then vote republican just to
see the look in their eyes...the horror, the love..the nightmares that
we all endure...some more than others.

My point is that there is so much to this world that God created.
There's Hitler and Pol Pot and there's a Warm Gun. There's Television
in all it's infinite wisdom and there's a book about a Jew with a
messianic complex. Sanity is no longer owned by those doctors that
tortured me for years with padded rooms and drugs that make me
constipated and drool incessantly. Sanity is a fine mix of happy and
sad, psychotic and benevolent, straight and gay. Sanity is no longer
owned by the churches and governments so long as I'm on this planet. I
have and will continue to redefine this to meet my needs and the needs
of my cohorts. I thank those that came before me and will continue the
tradition of stomping on the terra until all understand the need for
art, freedom, or when the psychotic lord takes me away in it's
infinite indifference. I will steal from the rich and gnaw on their
skulls just because I can't stand another trip to McDonalds. I will
dig up the bones of Howard Cosell and make sweet sweet love to his
pelvic bone just because he deserves more love than he or his toupee
ever got. Maybe I'll just screw his toupee if I can figure out where
it's burried. It's probably in Muhammed Ali's grave.

If sanity is that guy on the Tele smiling non stop about the latest
workout, or the latest diet, or pill to keep you hard for days, than
fuck that shit. I'm in love with someone just as insane as me and that
is all I will need to get me through this."
RIP, Shep. — with David Gallows Fields, Sparrow Passero and Josie Wails. — with Sparrow Passero.

sent in by Kamikaze Kelly