M4rk Cr4ig (aka Bimble) RIP

I got a call from a Seattle investigator last night asking if I was related to M4rk Er1c Cr4ig. I said no and the investigator apologized and hung up.

After hearing more rumors today, I called the number back and got a Seattle medical examiner's office. Apparently on the 4th of August Bimble was reported dead by police, having been found by his roommate after shooting himself.

Bimble was a dear friend to many of us on this board (myself included) and his unmatched passion for music will be sorely missed. May he rest in peace.

I'm numb, totally... oh man

This is terrible and wrong. Bimble was a great ILXor and a genuine enthusiast with whom I connected on numerous occasions. Regardless of how troubled his soul was, this is a great and appalling tragedy, and I am almost in tears here.

R.I.P. bimble.
Wish you had emailed me about how bad you were feeling so i coulda done something.
I enjoyed chatz most days with you since i got to know you last year and its never gonna be the same.
At least we all know you're at peace now.
Goodbye my friend.

Bimble, you will never know what a massive internet crush I had on you and your record collection and it pisses me off that I never got to tell you that.

oh no. oh no oh no oh no.

This is really dreadful news. RIP, Mark.

this is really terrible. bimble was my first friend on this board. may he rest in peace.

This is just upsetting. Goodbye Bimble...

kate he spoke very fondly of you

Feeling so sad for him and the ones that loved him. RIP

Oh, Curtis, I feel so so so sad for you (and other friends and family).

Oh my god.... what?

no way - fuck - this is really appalling. One of the coolest posters around here - never knew he was in trouble. RIP

this is terrible. RIP.

Damn. RIP.

rest in peace, mark.

I owed him an email that I'll never get an answer to - we always emailed on early Saturday morning my time/late Friday night his. And I *didn't* this weekend coz I was at a festival.

And I just wish I could have told him that I thought he was amazing. I always thought there would be another day and another email and another bouncy exchange on the 'Cooler thread, and now there isn't.

This doesn't seem entirely real

just horrible. rest in peace.

i wasnt on aim at the weekend due to my laptop having a virus. Im guessing that he just wasnt online and if he had been he coulda spoke to others. but it doesnt stop me wishing i had been on just incase. but it seems like he wasnt online at all.

Kate, did you know he was depressed? Why oh why didnt he reach out. :-((

he did reach out, but i don't think anyone really knew what to say. i spoke with him a number of times, and i knew he was really, really sad. but sometimes i just didn't know what to say.

he was always depressed (reason why he was always drinking) but noone knew it was as bad as this. He gave no hints at all. Nothing in chatz or by email. Usually he emailed everyone he knew when he was really depressed. Usually replying or chatting on aim was enough for him.
I guess he didnt want to be talked out of it and just did it :(

Oh no. My condolences to family and freinds.

I met him last year in LA when he came down to the Part Time Punks fest. Prior to that I had sent him some CDs, and since then we'd emailed. His emails got more and more intense and personal over time, and I tried to help in the little ways I could. I wish I could've said and done more, but I also don't think anything I could've done would've changed anything. I'm watching the Factory All Stars New Order/ACR/52nd St. etc super-jam in your honor, Mark.

It seems trivial to say I thought he was troubled, just from what I knew of him here. Wishing peace to his soul.

he had a pretty large support network of ILXors who cared about him and he knew that and (as far as I could tell) was appreciative of it - I don't think there's much anyone of us could have said or done to help him come to terms with whatever emotional troubles culminated in this. And of course more often than not he seemed very positive and delighted about things.

If only he couldve told someone what he was gonna do. i just hope that he wasnt on aim looking for someone and noone was there (im sure he wouldnt have as i know he wouldve emailed someone at least)

I just wish he had been on aim and spoke to someone.

I owed him an email too because I am always tardy at the whole communication thing. I always thought Mark was too full of life to ever let the downs beat out the ups. This is just so sad. He was just so full of everything.

RIP, Mister.

I knew he was up and down but I thought he was muddling through, like the rest of us were.

I can't say "I had no idea" because I had a bit of an idea about things he was finding tough. But I didn't know he was that close to suicide. Initially when he got SB'd he was miserable, but then he said he was finding stuff IRL to engage with, and other things to do. There were other situations in his life that he'd finally started to open up about, but... I wanted to sit down and do his email justice, rather than dash off a reply, going "I'm off to Disco 3000, you'd hate it, TTYL"

And I am kicking myself because I feel like I *do* know what to say - - if I'd known he was that bad. But I did not know how bad it was.

He told chatz last week that he didn't mind being banned for a month and he enjoyed the time off ilx. He did say he didnt know if he would come back straight away. Now sadly we will never know.
His personal problems had nothing to do with ilx. But his friends on ilx did help him in the past. He was always appreciative of that.

shocked and speechless

i'm totally shocked. i obv didn't know him nearly as well as anyone here. poor guy.
i hope everyone that was close to him here is doing ok.

Awful, awful news. Please rest in peace, Bimble, and my condolences go out to all the ILXors here who knew him and were his friend.

he loved music so much. i will listen to kate bush in his honor tonight.

Yeah, sorry, this...

His personal problems had nothing to do with ilx. But his friends on ilx did help him in the past.

I wasn't trying to imply that his SB was anything to do with it. It was more like, he did actually seem like he was getting some perspective on things without ILX squabbles as a distraction.

he will be thrilled to meet tony wilson and ian curtis at last. I hope they appreciate him.

This is really grim news. RIP, Bimble.

aw surm. that's a great tribute.

His last email to me was about Def Leppard's "Photograph." I never read it until now because I hardly ever check my gmail account :/

RIP.

(No worries Kate, I think we understood what you meant, or at least I did.)

yeah I knew what Kate meant too. I was just pointing out that bimble had got over being temp banned.

RIP

We last exchanged emails a couple of weeks ago; his were increasingly overwrought. I knew he was in the grips of something awful, but didn't know him well enough to intervene. I pegged him as a decent guy with a massive chip on his shoulder who needed good friends. I'm sorry about it now.

not sure that was ever really his favorite but tonight I'll play Cale's Caribbean Sunset - pretty much epitomized the way he could contagiously gush over certain songs

jesus christ, this is so fucking sad. he had such enthusiasm! to put it mildly. aw, this sucks.

I just realized that I bookmarked and occasionally perused his blog.

He always seemed v intense and troubled but I didn't know he was in such a bad way. I loved his crazy enthusiasm for every song that grabbed his attention at any hour of the day.

RIP Mark. Always more goth than us.

man, this is sad. RIP.

I never got around to listening to this band from Worcestershire he sent me, the Dancing Did.

I chatted to him on AIM about 2 weeks ago and he seemed better than he had been over the past couple of months. But I guess that's how it works sometimes with depression and suicide. I'm just in shock at the moment.

I react to music much like bimble did. I try vainly to couch it in eloquence, but inside me, it's basically that quote M@tt just posted all the way.

Argh. The first anniversary of an old friend's suicide is in a couple of days...

eh i wish i could talk about some things with mark right now . but i guess it's just a bunch of studied bullshit so fuck it all

it's fucked he's not around anymore...

looking through old bimble stuff today, emails and threads and such. i wish i had known how bad off he was. i was always so frustrated with him for forgetting entire conversations we had had or w/e, and especially him thinking people were against him that weren't. if i could go back in time i'd just take it in stride, mark.

i found an old post where i jokingly asked him who the people who hated him in seattle were, and it makes me feel terrible. i remember in chat he claimed that there were seattle posters who were against him. i just flat out was certain that no one in seattle hated him and was trying to get him to realize that. looking back i feel awful about stuff like that, because with hindsight i'm sure he thought there were tons of people that were legitimately out to get him. but everyone liked you bimble, even when you were frustrating, and obv everyone still loves you and misses you, bimble, and thinks about you every august.

(especially, but more often than that of course)

Aw. I was just thinking the other day how much better the upcoming Kate Bush poll would be with him in the mix.

nothing could reassure him sadly. But plenty tried. I just wish he had spoken to one of us when it got too much for him. I miss him. Chatz was never the same and partly the reason I stopped going in it was because of that.

otm xp

As you say, plenty tried and its very sad. But would any ilxor have made that difference? We can't know..

% found his blog/dl site by chance its still 'live' but not 'current' obviously

and no sense of anything wrong either...

i was googling for his old nom de plume and google said:
Did you mean: bimble is more cute than you?

This is a fallacy that people often thing, when they are dealing with someone who is mentally ill: hey, if I could just *talk* to them, I could explain how their thinking is flawed, and that this delusion that they have, it isn't true, and if I could just find the right words, I could make them see this.

But that isn't the way it works. That mental illness, depression, paranoia, it's this thing that eats you from the inside out and turns truth into lies and lies into truth and there is no way to just ~explain~ these things away because they are not rational, that's what makes it sickness.

I guess what I'm saying is, don't beat yourself up for what you did say or didn't say. It is a horrible thing that he took himself away from us like that. But it's impossible to know what might have made him feel differently or not do it.

otm

i had a suicide in the family last week and that's how i've seen it.

Oh god I'm so sorry Gukbe.

you're totally right. and i should be more mindful of that coming from a fam pretty rife with mental and emotional problems. i feel like everyone knows theres nothing you can say to "fix" the problem, but for some reason it's difficult to not try in vain to do it anyway.

xxp

im so sorry.

Thanks, but it's alright. The pastor at the memorial (though the deceased was an atheist so it was a bit strange) actually said something very similar to what WCC wrote. Outside of physically being there to knock the pills out of his hands I know I couldn't have made a difference.

So sorry to hear that, gukbe.

wcc otm about external influences having no impact. thankfully i haven't had an episode for some time, but i clearly remember the helplessness and the rage and the isolation and the...dislocation? don't know that that's the right word. the feeling that whatever anyone says isn't ever going to be what you think you want to hear, because you're so set in your feelings of no-one understanding.

It makes me sad everytime i see a bimble thread on ilm and hes not there. Also every few months someone asks about bimble and someone has to explain he died.
I miss you my friend.

i cant ever say he was my friend like you AG, but damn, i do miss him on ilx ..

I saw his blog the other day, frozen in time obviously...

want to talk to you about catherine wheel right now

<3

man. i still sometimes see thread titles hit sna and immediately know he was the author, without having to open them.

Often think of him whenever I get unreasonably ecstatically hopped up on some record I've already heard 1000x. Life is so fuckin hard and if you have certain things wrong with your brain hearing music can keep you alive, but not forever

Hey man, I could’ve used you on AIM a few weeks ago. But it’s cool. I hope you’re listening to some good tunes.

catherine wheel? flower to hide is such an amazing song. probably the best shoegazer song of all times. how it s slowly opening up like a rose. and the smell is so strong and sweet. listening to that song makes me 20 years younger, everything is possible again, it gives me so much energy and strength. an unbelievable piece of music. of course you have to crank up the volume to the max to get the full power of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QTzKc472Ho

alex otmmmmmmmm

Cant believe it's nearly 6 years. So many times I hear something that I cant share with him yet I know he would love it.

10 years.

shit

Oof

Miss this dude

Goin to a suicide funeral on sunday too :(

<3

If not seen then or forgotten since (as it was for me), it turns out Drew Daniels's People Who Died: Nine Deaths from an Unfinished Decade is still up at Pitchfork.

sill miss him

Same here. Love seeing his posts of wonder and enthusiasm pop up throughout this board though, on threads unassumingly revived.

his enthusiastic posts made me feel uncomfortable at the time, they were too much over the top. somehow he made me realise that there are more important things in life than music, that concentrating and loving music too much - as a listener - is not healthy. his death was a shock but not really a surprise.

i'm sure for him music was health, as it is for many of us

that is, at least, what i get from searching this board and finding either a bimble thread or a cluster of excited bimble posts, i never interacted with him directly

I used to stay up talking to Bimble til 8am sometimes, drunk out of my mind. I'd never met someone so excited to meet someone from Worcestershire but Bimble could always find something to be excited about and that was one of things I loved about him. I can be a cynical bastard and Bimble's enthusiasm would cut right through that. I miss you Mark

Man... he was hilarious.

Someone mentioned in a reply to Stephen Malkmus' in-retrospect somewhat-eerie tweet before he learned of David Berman's passing that we've been going through the Jewish days of sorrow/disasters (not the real name, but that's the general idea as I understand it). Anyway, I don't know how all that stuff works but man the last week or so definitely has felt like there is something very wrong and shitty going on, like the cosmic santa ana winds bringing yuck vibes all around. I guess it doesn't help that it's the 50th anniversary of the manson murders, then there were the shootings, David Berman, the jeffrey epstein weirdness, etc. Living in the northern hemisphere this time of year always feels sort of "off" to me anyway, like unless you are on vacation somewheres it starts to feel like the summer has worn out its welcome and everything is just overcooked or something. I couldn't remember exactly when Mark moved on but yeah, I guess it makes sense somehow...

And they say the long cold winter does a number on your mental health.

Pictures of you just came on the radio. Makes me think of bimble each time that happens.

I wish I had been more mentally coherent when I got this phone call. It’s all a bit fuzzy in my memory. I was 21 and likely stoned and/or drunk at the time and it was just so shocking and confusing. Maybe they called me because I was a recent contact in his phone’s history. In retrospect I am a bit surprised that they shared so many details with me when I called back.

RIP bimble. just thinking of you now, and how you pointed me toward a new way of listening to music that was just about enjoying the goddamn music

Hear, hear. Can't believe it's been 11 fucking years already. I enjoy seeing his posts and threads finding their way through the board like roots, or ivy. (was he also behind your Cocteau Twins discovery?)

Miss you dude

I didn't interact much with Bimble during our overlapping times here, but I often find myself looking through old threads of bands that I'm just now getting into but should have known about long ago and more often than not, there's Bimble, singing their praises to high heaven.

There is not a week that goes by that I don't come across some great post of his on the old threads. Really wish I knew him and appreciated him better when he was here.

― kkvgz, Saturday, August 13, 2011 5:34 PM (ten years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Apparently that has been my experience for a decade now.

14 years seems like no years at all.

I still think about him sometimes. He was often extremely inappropriate with me which was sometimes too weird but also flattering. I would stay up stupidly late in the morning talking to him though anyway

Sometimes I'll hear something new and immediately think "Bimble would totally like this" - perhaps he is somehow...