He was a wild expanse of desert brush and red mountains,
two mountains side by side without a valley in between,
the movie version of Nobody.

He was a Vegan, not a quitter.

Gene was willing start a conversation with just about anyone
about a proposal in the Smoky Mountains.

Gene was willing to date the daughter of the director
of the Baltimore Communist Party (USA).

Gene could hook up with a soldier, off topic,
and explain Kabala.

He got satisfaction from following
a bull’s-eye on wolves.

Gene was always looking for new ways of getting things accomplished.
He knew it was never as simple as just open more KFC’s and double up on the Mountain Dew shipments.

He was a good rider and a proud rider.
At the drop of a hat he’d organize cycling events or mimic sportscasters calling the Tour de France.

He’d go tell fire to get to the middle-of-the-road

Gene didn’t fear his inner old lady. He embraced her and encouraged her to drink Ensure and take calcium supplements.

If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find Gene was your classic “horse fighter,”
and could survive a car crash much better than the average American.

He would defend each molehill like it was his own mountain.

He had no pre-conceived ideas about what made for good game shows,
but believed the best type of stove to have would be a flat top range,

Some people believe that it would seem patently obvious that the wolf and the shark would have assumed some human hybrid form by now. Not Gene.
Gene was the type who would only believe what he could see with his own eyes, who wanted to handle the evidence with his own hands before he would convict someone of failing to abide by the “curb your dog” statute.

And yet, he was flexible in his beliefs, often insisting a 20 year old man could grow 12 inches in height in three months solely through hypnosis.

Gene would go the extra nine yards to help you, then mow those nine yards with his John Deere riding mower – oftentimes coming back later to plant flowers and small shrubs if he felt they furthered the landscape aesthetics of the area.

He’d give you the shirt off his back as long as it would be returned freshly laundered and without any additional NASCAR iron-ons.
He’d do a paper route in the rain for his sick son, even though he never had any children.
He’d wade through snow up to his neck to serve his friend divorce papers.

When Gene found out that a man can be jailed in Afghanistan if his beard is not long enough, he started a successful whisker collection campaign.

He was a man who would blow the whistle to get deer off the tracks and then take them out for ice cream.

Sometimes during his lifetime, people would try and put him on a pedestal,
and he’s always say “Get me down, I’m not a statue.”

He’d always thirst to learn more, and make the long trips around Europe so that he could talk with scientist, mathematicians, and bullfighters.

He was deeply interested in scientific farming and would walk for miles at great speeds.

He would not compromise on matters of principle.
He was prepared to starve to death rather than accept a scrap of bread from a loaf kept on the shelf past it expiration date.

He wasn’t the kind to flatter Neptune for his trident nor Jove for his power to thunder.
But if he liked you, you knew it because he’d show up everyday after work with a 200-page graphic novel he drew by hand overnight featuring you as an old-fashioned gumshoe in a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

He was a hairy man.
He wore leather.
When he was dressed to kill, you couldn’t even see the guns or the knives.

He was a man who would never say “No.”
In his left pocket, he carried a small rubber stamp specifically for this purpose.
And if you knew Gene well, whenever you asked him a question and he said “Hold out your hand,” well, you knew you had your answer.

I cannot capture his uniqueness in words, but I had to I’d probably say “human paladin” or “Thunderball.”

In closing, I quote Gene in his own words:
“If you measure something with a teaspoon, you will see the world in terms of teaspoons. If you measure something with an ocean, you will see how much you have left to build after whatever it is that you’re measuring dries off.”

So, as Gene would, let us go to build the things that can be measured by oceans.