RIP Joe Bodolai
/When I logged into the SNL message board this afternoon, I saw that Joe Bodolai was found dead of an apparent suicide. I had a bad feeling it was going to come to this before: I actually had seen his final post posted a few days before Christmas, and it did worry me based on the finality of it all, and sent him a message.
We had been twitter buddies (for what that means) since February, and we replied and retweeted each other quite a bit since then. He had quite the life, and an unsung importance in the world of Canadian comedy: SNL, Kids In The Hall and Comics! were three of the shows he worked on. I never met the man in real life, but if going by what he left online reflects who he was, he was someone who had seen and accomplished so much, and helped so many people on their way, and was generous enough to even offer a few words of encouragement about my own writing.
He leaves behind a lot of friends that miss him (I recommend that you read Tara Dublin's post about him) and of course family and co-workers. His pain is over. We're left to make whatever sense we can of the whole thing.
Thanks for everything, Joe.
There’s a podcast called The Loudest Girl In The World, hosted by Lauren Ober. The show concerns Ober’s autism diagnosis at 42, as well as her experience dealing with this information and opening up to others about it. When I listened to it last summer, I related pretty heavily to what she was talking about. I’ve also started to make peace with how my own brain works in the last few years. It’s been a rough road, though.