Not sure where to begin today.

My Uncle killed himself yesterday. The last time I met up with him, he was riding high with $3 Million in Rambus Stock, an intellectual property company he was about to retire from after only 5 years on the job at the age of 54. He was positive that the stock would double it's value in the next month or two, so he borrowed against the value of the stock he had so he could make even more than twice as much. He needed $6 million. The word was in the Bay Area that one simply can't retire until they hit that magic number. The stock actually lost 90% of its value, forcing Uncle Fred to take $100,000 in cash advances from his credit cards just to hold on to some of the stock and not get totally wiped out.

Uncle Fred was an aerobatics pilot when he wasn't making microchip software. Aerobatics is like ballet or maybe more like figure skating, except in a biplane. They give you a certain volume of airspace to do all your tricks in. He took me up in a two seater aircraft once when I was 22. It was like a rollercoaster ride that kept on going for 20 minutes. It was a lot of fun wearing a parachute, and I remember distinctly the instuction that if he had to bail out, there wasn't anything he could do for me and it was up to me to jump out of the plane.

I remember stories about Uncle Fred that endeared him so much to me when I was younger, and thought it was really cool to have the guts to just say whatever you wanted regardless of the social proprieties. Once he was shopping for clothes with my dad, before I was born. He didn't get any service for about 5 minutes. Then he yelled "can someone give me some service here" in the middle of a department store. What nerve! I could never do that. Another time before my parents met even, Uncle Fred went into a gas station and asked if there was a rest room. The attendant said there wasn't. So Uncle Fred went into the bay and peed against one of the pumps and drove off. I admired him for not caring what people thought about him, but my opinions changed as I grew older.

Uncle Fred had a kid when he was 24. He left the marriage 6 months after Jeffery, a cousin I know very little about, was born. He payed child support for 18 years but never visited once. My sister told me that when she mentioned Jeffery in front of his live-in girlfriend of 3 years, she had never heard of him. I think that if I had had a kid I would mention it to my significant other, but Uncle Fred didn't bother. I used to think of Uncle Fred as an older version of myself, or at least a role model for me to follow. I used to introduce my girlfriends to him. The last time, when I was with a Jewish girl, the last thing he said to me was "don't do anything I wouldn't do". He also said to me "children are a liability". He was not a sentimental man.

That's all I remember about Uncle Fred. Or at least all that needs to be said.