The Rude Pundit is responsible for my finally meeting Steve. Lee had just released the CD of his awesome one-man show and he threw a party to mark the event.

At he time I was a homeschooling mother of two and sometime consultant so I had barely any time to drop by. Lee said the magic words : Steve is coming.

O. M. G.

Having the opportunity to meet two of my superheroes in one night was too good to pass up and so I begged and implored the patriarchy at home to release me. As fast as I could, I oiled myself into a pair of jeans and scooted to the West Village.

When I got there once I gave a big hug to Lee I jumped all over Steve and to say he was a bit taken aback but loving it is not to be off the mark. I needed to let him know how much he meant to me as a writer, as an activist and as a blatina. I needed to cram as much in as little a time and thusly went to town.

Believe it or not, he blushed.

Steve was a muscular writer but in person he was could be quite unassuming. "Stop it!" He said it many times and so after the fangirlishness susbsided, we just shot the shit.

At that time neither of us had medical insurance --an issue of which we wrote about occasionally. I knew he had problems with his kidneys but once he told me the litanny of ailments he had and I told him ours, we had a bit of a bitch fest about doctors and money and the whole 'culture of health' in this country. I gave one last hug for good measure, hoping it would not be the last.

It was.

When you're one of the few black kids in the block you immediately strike a rapport online. That has happened to me with people from both the left and right. Steve took it to a whole other level with me by not only giving me advice but encouragement.

When I got slammed with an astronomic bill by my then web host after culturekitchen got attacked by comment spammers, Steve was there to throw a couple of bucks my way. Which, of course, got recycled later on during one his notorious fundraising weeks. We actually did this a couple of times --we recycled to each other our donations.

One day I threw a bit of a tantrum and threathened to quit blogging and there was Steve telling me, "Are you nuts, we need you."

When I couldn't see the end of the tunnel before launching The Daily Gotham, Steve was there to tell me everything was going to be alright.

Steve and I are the same age, but to me he was always a big brother. He was someone I looked up to for inspiration.

Steve not only made blogging look easy with his obscenely long posts of quality news dissection. He made it easy to be black online. And that's what made him so brilliant, that he never, ever gave up on his negritude.

There's a lot of us negros and latinos online but on the political side of the spectrum and 5-6 years ago, not so much.

There was George Kelly. Then a guy obssessed with web design and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Uppity Negro, aka Aron Hawkins. It was either 2003 or 2004 when I think I found Steve along with Oliver Willis, Pam Spaulding, Earl Dunovant, Nichelle Stephens, Louis Perez and so many others.

And it was Aaron's untimely death that cemented for me the sense of a community not just within the melanin-enhanced part of the blogosphere. Aaron's death highlighted a new kind of 'race' writer that uses these "tubes" and these technologies of the internet to become dynamic, diverse and global without need to trascend or leave behind the essence of our skin.

For years, I tried to come up with a new way of describing them. Somewhere I have an email I am sure Steve sent --and that's only because the shorter his emails, the more hilariously perceptive they were. The email said something like : "Digital Ethnorati? WTF. I like."

The last I heard from him was after the white bloggers in black Harlem debacle. Then after what seemed like a moment or two, he was in the hospital.

I actually bumped into Jenn, his partner, one morning on 34th Street. She didn't recognize me (I had met her last year at a party) and as she was running late, her confusion was even bigger. Politely she said Steve's health was complicated but making progress. I bid her adieu and asked her to give him a big kiss and hug for me.

Now he's gone.

We've dressed culturekitchen and The Daily Gotham de luto and the sites will remain in mourning garb for the next week.

Hopefully by next Sunday I should have stopped crying.

Adiós querido amigo. Eres una de las razones por la cual 'blogueo'. Que la pases bien en el eterno.

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