Good luck Friend

And so it came to pass, on the morning of equinox, autumn, 2009, we set forth on a journey that would enrich America and impoverish Canada. On that morning, a son of Canada, a mad biologist - a doctor of evolutionary biology, would descend to the unwashed southern masses to spread the gospel of Carlo:

Observe, hypothesize, test, repeat.

Having defended his PhD he looked south, to the National Institutes of Health, to complete his training.

Carlo is one of the few persons who lives and breathes science. For him it’s not just an occupation or an esoteric philosophy, but a way of life that can be applied to history, language, art and even Guitar Hero. During his time completing his PhD, Carlo and I became friends. Despite being a few years his senior and having worked in science longer than he, his ambition, maturity and singular focus on science often impressed and occasionally intimidated me. Indeed, his attitude impressed and perhaps intimidated some faculty. During his four years at Mac he published three (soon to be four) papers as primary author and several others as a second or internal author – more than some professors during that same period. During that time, Carlo taught himself programming, statistics, and became intimately acquainted with the minutiae of evolutionary theory. While most of us would be at the local bar on Friday pounding back car-bombs, Carlo would be deciphering the inscrutably obtuse PAML documentation just to get a jump on the week.

That said, Carlo always made time to help out and to have some fun. In the time I knew him he put in six to seven days a week at the lab, read a new book every fortnight and still managed to get in several dozen hours of video games in per week. Once in a while he even accompanied me to a metal show or out for an evening of drunken silliness.

***

Setting out on the nine hour drive, we were both apprehensive, Carlo because of the bright sparkling adventure ahead of him, and I because of my fear of being rogered rectally by bellicose border guards. Thankfully, the latter never happened. After the move, we drank bourbon and sipped potato vodka. We reminisced about the past and mused about the future. We listened to Behemoth and Between The Buried and Me and The Locust. The next day we returned the truck and I left for home. On my nine hour journey home (two stop-overs and lots of waiting) I grew a bit melancholy. One rarely meets someone like Carlo. I will miss our discussions. In a span of five minutes, our conversations could go from differential sexual selection pressure, to hyperdrive motivators, to the benefits of using the line-gun against necromorphs, to the disappearance of megafauna in Australia, to the creative use of dissonance by Psyopus.

Lately my days seem drab and uninteresting. Even though I know that we will still stay in touch, things seem a little more grey than usual. Being around Carlo, one always learned something new. Perhaps that’s what I'll miss most.

Good luck Carlo. You will be missed. Thanks for being a friend.

Carlo and I rockin’ out at our pal Ba’al-Zebub’s place on one of our numerous ‘Redshirt Phrydays’