Both of you STOP IT.
Do you really think Red would care? Soul, you want it done one way. Rassah, you want it another. Obviously I would have done it another way considering my version was nothing but the mere framework of the final piece. Does it matter? No. We are doing our best to honor Red and her memory. She loved writing and I firmly believe that she would be over the moon knowing a group of people she considered friends were working on a piece just for her. Soul, you might think this piece isn't correct for her, but it isn't meant only for her. This article is meant to garner sympathy and good opinions of Red in the town where the police might try to drag her name through the mud. It's a firebreak of sorts. Of course it's not going to be as personal, gender her by her proper gender. The speeding ticket was mentioned as well as the tooth in an effort to show "Hey, this person was working hard but life kept pushing them down." Don't think it matters? It does. Every time I tell my life story to someone, from the dropping college to the car wrecks to the homelessness to the walking an hour to work and back to my family disowning me for two years, all that hardship makes someone look at you differently and admire what you were doing, even if it's nothing but treading water to keep your nose above the drowning line. Those things aren't mentioned in an effort to throw mud on her name, but in an effort to show others that she was determined to rise above her past, but that life was trying to pull her back down. You say her life is more valuable because of where she came from and I AGREE. That's why those things are in there.
Anything that tells the life of someone you KNEW is going to be put through the human filter of "this person was important to me and should be painted as such." It's natural, and I've combed through it in an effort to remove anything that is overly biased. I'll probably do so again in an hour or so once I've let it sort of ripen on my mind. I'm sure if you wrote someone it would still have that tinge. All biographies do.
As for the emphasis on dirt, if you read at the quote in the beginning it makes sense. She was pushing through the dirt of life, all the hardships and addiction and shit, in an effort to rise above it and show the world what she had to offer. Yes, what she went through helped her become who she was, but without the dirt a flower can't grow. It goes hand in hand.
I will say the random mention of the far off entrepreneur was odd. It was kind of thrown in there and left me thinking "Um, okay....?"
If both of you can't stop this bickering, which is really awful to see over something in memory of Red, I just might bow out of this. It's giving it a scummy feel.
