John Won

March 20th, 2006

Hello Dear Friends of John Won;

I worked for and with John Won at his Company, HCI, Inc. at 324 Datura Street, West Palm Beach, Florida from Sept 2005 through Dec 2005. I worked very closely with him for many intense hours daily, working on putting out proposals for IT work for many of the large federal agencies to obtain government contracts.

John was a fabulous, kind, private, funny, extremely bright young man. And I miss him very much. His mother, called me in January on my cell phone as I was the last person to speak with him as he was getting on the plane to go to Las Vegas for the New Years.

I have stayed in contact with Mrs. Won and she has organized a memorial service for John. It will be on March 25, 2006 at 10:00 AM at the Palm Beach Atlantic University Chapel on the corner of Olive and Okochobee actually (901 Olive.)

Please make every effort to attend this service and bring along others who knew him as well.  We will remember our beloved John in a very beautiful setting and get to meet his wonderful mother.

Thank you,

Richard Koppe
Cell Phone: 561-315-3570

Too Long

March 18th, 2006

Well, it has been too long since I have posted much of anything, and my Inbox is overflowing with requests. Well, the latter clausal component is fraught with perfidious  commentary, whereas the foregoing literary portion approaches verity. Thus, I shall shun the latter and embrace the former in the portion of remaining text which languishes dormant, waiting to be created, to be realized, to be given life. And so….

The late Malcom Muggeridge, the renowned British journalists and late convert to Christianity, once said something like this: "Writing is not hard. You just sit down at a typewriter, slit both wrists, and bleed to death." Similarly, when asked if he liked to write, Dr. Paul Rees said, "I like to have written!"

Francis Bacon said that writing makes an ‘exact man’, and that seems self-evident. But it also can make a dead man, or a young man more dead. For life is always ebbing away from the moment of birth, and the difficult things in life, like writing, increase the speed of the ebb.

This is not to say that work and drudgery are bad, only that they are integral to life and that to live in this fallen world means to be dying. I will leave the amazing mystery of life’s joys — which include hard work — for another post.

For the record, I enjoy writing most of the time, though I enjoy far more reflecting back, already ‘having written’. But, as my friend Daniel Koehn reminded me last month (borrowing from Lewis I think): "The most important part of writing is in applying seat of pants to seat of chair."

My life mentor, pastor, and ‘father-in-the-gospel, the Rev. Lorin Miller, once reminded me of the same truth when he said: "Inspiration is 95% perspiration, you know."

So, for anyone who is wondering where this is headed, the answer is (almost) that I do not know. Blogging and the ocean of modern publishing has diminished the quality and respectability of writing. Thus this blog is a mere musing, an attempt to be in the classical essay mode which indeed does, as I understand it, meander a bit, looking for the proper ending. And, when chair time is over, one may have to end where one ends and leave it at that.