November 11, 2025

Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1615

Farewell to Annie, my beloved friend.

(Originally mis-numbered as 1604)

Good morning. Holiday. Just back from dropping Jane off at Tae Kwon Do camp. $67, six hours. Best all-day camp deal around. Take that, Boston and New York. $67 all day camp.

This will be a hard one to write. Yesterday afternoon, one of my longest and best friends, Annie Smidt, passed away due to complications from cervical cancer. She’d been in the hospital for a few weeks for some kidney trouble.

Many of you who read this will have known Annie, and many more will remember her as the woman who sang in my band, who played at my wedding.

I didn’t really worry too much about the recent kidney problems. She’d had this kidney trouble for a while over the summer and when I saw her late in the summer she seemed on the mend. And they had done a procedure they were optimistic they would fix things. Even when her husband Bill let me know a few days ago that she had gone into the ICU with sepsis, I still kinda figured she’d pull through. I’ve never been super optimistic about the cancer — it’s a particularly tough form of cervical cancer and they did not catch it particularly early — but I was confident she had a few years left, at least.

I’ve been dreaming all month of texts I was sending Annie. Bill told me she wasn’t really processing them and I didn’t send any of them, but now I regret it. Death is such a bitch. You can keep telling them what they mean to you right up to the end and it still doesn’t feel like enough.

I have the luxury of knowing the exact date I met Annie. Because our mutual friend Mike brought her to see the Cure with us, May 20, 1992. Probably the worst Cure setlist of all the times I’ve seen them, who ever needs to see “Doing the Unstuck” live. But it was my first, they played “Figurehead” and I got to meet Annie. I knew right from that first drive that she was someone unique.

We’ve been close ever since. We started our first band together in, god, maybe 1997? But before that we had started our first design studio, designed a record cover together for the long—lost, vastly underrated Boston band Big Monster Fish Hook, and brought the legendary UK goth band Cindytalk over to America for a US tour. Here is a picture of Annie looking very goth sitting at the feet of the Jolly Green Giant statue in Blue Earth, MN, 1996. I feel it important to contribute this picture to the Annie’s public record.

In 1997 or so we started a band — the early years are hazy to me now but I think it started out with me, Annie, Mike, Craig and my sister Val? Yes. That is right. Then mike left, moved to Indiana, then Val left, then Vicky joined for a while, then Aug replaced Vicky. The band name went from Pigmonkey to Transportation and settled into Rockets Burst from the Streetlamps in, mmm, gonna say 1998 or so.

By 1998 or so, as Aug said last night when I broke the news to him and Craig, there was a period of several years where we spent every single evening together. Band practice was, god, like two, three days a week, we’d play for hours, go to the Model afterwards with whatever cash we could scrounge up. Every other night was a show or Man Ray. If there as nothing to do, we’d just go sit at the Model.

But it was so much more than that. Annie really taught me how to be an adult. You know how you guys are always going on about “wow god how do you do so many projects how do you get so much done?” Annie. Annie taught me about design — literally wrote a textbook on design just for me, I still have it. Made me read my Bringhurst. She was vastly knowledgeable about so many things, especially historic. Would routinely, even this year, write me and gently correct me on some incorrect fact I spouted off.

She had a prodigious work ethic, and the vast majority of it was civic- and charity-minded. For a full decade or more she worked closely with the Gates Foundation and Harvard, taught me all about drug-resistant tuberculosis in Russian prisons, a decade before John Green told the world about Tuberculosis. She would probably object to listing this as a “good” she did, it was “just a job,” but Annie was every bit as talented and smart as me on design, business, and the like, and she could have absolutely founded and run Barbarian had she wanted to be as cut-throat. Even now, the bulk of her design work is for assorted artistic and civic organizations around her beloved adopted home of Salem.

She was witty, she was kind, she was hilarious, she was vastly intelligent, she was a true polyglot: not one of these absurd Silicon Valley shadows of one.

She was an amazing artist, designer, musician, singer. She has a VHS tape of Galaxie 500 playing at her high school that no one has ever seen. We met Cher together at a goth clothing store in Toronto. Me met Levar Burton together. We met Layne Staley together. Roz Williams. One of the McDonald’s Monopoly scammers. We saw a space shuttle launch drunk at 4AM. We discovered the meaning of life at a suburban Atlanta Waffle House and forgot it. We have been to 34 states together. She was still rock touristing up till the bitter end, going to far, far more rock shows than I could these last few years. Her and Bill were still routinely recommending bands and records to me, both over the internet and on our annual visit to the Salem record store, most recently the phenomenal post-rock band Ranges.

We fought for almost a single straight year of our thirty-two-year year friendship, made up, and never fought again.

Her amazing husband Bill is obviously bereft, and will be thinking about memorial services more when he’s had a bit of space to breathe and recover. I have obviously offered my help, and will keep you informed. I looked on Facebook yesterday Annie and I had well over a hundred mutual friends spread across the country and spread across the decades. Been talking to a lot of them in the last day, but there are so many more out there. I’ll probably spend most of the week texting photos I have of Annie with assorted friends.

I cannot convey what an impact Annie had on my life, the decades of intense artistic pursuits, commitment to a life of truth and meaning. She was an amazing person and I will miss her forever. These last few years, I’ve been making a point of taking a day out of every Boston trip, three times a year, to spend time with her. And two years ago, my family spent a week up in Salem to see more of her. But it still feels like it wasn’t enough. I thought I would have Annie in my life my whole life. There will be a giant whole without her.

Here’s a playlist of all the Rockets songs that Annie sings. Annie had, not too long ago, set up a web shop of Rockets merch — our fist merch ever, some 20+ years after the band broke up. I was so thankful for it, my daughter loves her little Rockets squirrel shirt.

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Thanks for reading.

And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!

Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.

Agency: The definitive guide to starting a consultancy

The Economics of Star Trek

Man Nup: A Groom’s Guide to Heroic Wedding Planning