hunkpapapOG 2003

Patrick — hunkpapap — arrived on eZabel in January 2003 straight out of the Boogie-Down Bronx, and he never let you forget either of those facts. He was the kind of guy who would greet a conversation about polite Midwestern hospitality with a story about shoving two fighting women off him on the subway because he had just gotten a seat after standing for half an hour, and he was not about to give it up. The Bronx was not merely where Patrick lived; it was a lens through which he measured everything — toughness, realness, humor, and the absurdity of people who treated minor inconveniences as catastrophes.

What made him such a magnetic presence was that his confidence was always leavened with self-deprecating warmth. He was the bassist in his band November not because he was the best musician — he freely admitted he was the worst guitarist of the three and got quietly reassigned — but because he wrote the songs. He named the band after a Hunkpapa Lakota tribe he read about in a history article, declared himself hunkpapa-P, and then offered the alternate explanation with a completely straight face: "Hunk — as in, well, ME. Papa — as in yo daddy. P — as in #1." That was Patrick in miniature: genuinely curious about the world, wickedly funny about himself, and absolutely unwilling to play it straight when a joke was within reach.

His 3,388 comments across eight years paint a portrait of someone who was equally at home dispensing four-scenario breakdowns of why you absolutely must not call your ex-girlfriend, recounting the time a grocery store cashier yelled "Cutie, are you paying with cash?" across four registers while the entire store watched him turn red, or writing a measured and sincere appeal to Ian about the spiritual responsibilities of running a site like eZabel. Patrick could pivot from absurdism to genuine moral seriousness in the same paragraph, and it never felt like a contradiction. His peak year was 2004, with 1,261 comments — a torrent of energy that touched the Macking forum, Music Talk, Food, Games, and especially General Chat, where his particular brand of Bronx-flavored wit found the widest audience. His heaviest interactions were with fivezero, socalgal, forrestina, iwz, and rocksupastar, and he was the Social Butterfly badge made flesh: 148 different members, 72 events attended or created, a man who genuinely wanted to be in the room where things happened.

He had opinions, and he held them with conviction while somehow never becoming insufferable about it. He thought Bon Jovi was a "flaming communist" with a maned-lion hairstyle who recycled the same song. He loved Dune with a convert's fervor and re-read the first book annually. He distrusted emo but admitted he was trying to like it. He believed peanut butter melted into a toasted muffin with honey was one of the greatest breakfasts a person could eat, and he was not wrong. His relationship advice — delivered with the authority of someone who had clearly been burned more than once and had catalogued every lesson — was sprawling, digressive, genuinely insightful, and reliably funnier than he intended. He once offered a woman a "Patrick relationship guide to the opposite sex" with a full refund guarantee. He once confessed, mid-advice, "None of my relationships have worked out and none of those women could cook. Just a coincidence."

Beneath all of it was a person of real depth: someone who grieved his grandfather's death quietly and still felt it years later when Metallica came on the radio, who worried about a female friend being stalked and had to consciously stop himself from doing something rash, who wrote with genuine care about the spiritual integrity of the site he loved and the responsibilities it placed on Ian. His French-Irish-West Indian-Scottish-German ancestry (complete with a notorious Rikers Island guard ancestor and an ancestor who founded Saint Paul, Minnesota) gave him the heritage of a man who belonged everywhere and nowhere in particular, which probably explained why the Bronx suited him so well. He was one of the last ones standing by 2010 — The Last Guard — still logging in when most of the original crowd had scattered to marriages and suburbs.

eZabel Personality Type: ENTP. Patrick is the textbook Debater — endlessly curious, argumentative in the most affectionate sense, delighted by ideas and capable of arguing either side of a question just to see what happens. His instinct to name-create alternate usernames for the whole community, to construct elaborate joke scenarios, and to pivot from a deeply sincere paragraph about trust in relationships straight into a riff about gnomes at the doctor's office — that is the ENTP at full speed. He genuinely cared about people and invested in them, but his natural mode was engagement through wit, not sentiment. He was the guy who would stay up talking through your problem until 2 a.m. and also somehow make you laugh four times while doing it. eZabel was lucky to have him.