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The Corroboree
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Will Rekowski aka Gomaos has died.

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now after seeing that link I understand why Coin! har har har. ;-) Just kidding man. I am sure he appreciated it somewhere deep deep down inside.

I am not sure what kind of man he was, but the most important thing is that he seems to have been appreciated allot by this community.

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Check out the Brunfelsia bonodora "yesterday, today and tomorrow" on Gom's site.... maybe that mean it fucks you up for 3 days? haha

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i think gom would be rolling in his grave knowing people are dissing him on sab. i think we should afford the man and his family some respect in this regard.

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Why is my post negatized? That wasn't disrespectful or anything I was just saying the dude had some cool plants!

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teotz this thread isnt about you.

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i think gom would be rolling in his grave knowing people are dissing him on sab. i think we should afford the man and his family some respect in this regard.

Respect is something we all can give.

There should be more of it in life and in death.

Edited by GoOnThen

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Edit: I'm sending it in PM.

Edited by Teotzlcoatl

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Can we just leave all of the crap out of this thread :BANGHEAD2:

This thread is about Gom and the good memories

Respect

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If I ever had a problem with someone and wasn't man enough to speak up while they were alive, I certainly would hold my tongue once they'd died.. Maybe Gom praised the work done for him as much as it deserved???

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Maybe Gom praised the work done for him as much as it deserved???

 

oh man, I was going to hold my tongue, but this is just too much. Gom never said thank you for anything I did for him or for anything anyone I know did for him. But he always expected more. I often gave him money [lots of it], babysat a couple of times, gave him plants, hosted his website, had to give him tech support every few weeks because he would never bother writing it down, etc etc. he always expected things and never ONCE did he say thank you or show any appreciation. But that's OK. That's how gom was and we all knew he paid it forward somewhere else to some degree - to people who were starting out with their plant collections for example. So my problem isn't with gom in that regard. But to suggest that a FREE website was the designer's fault for not getting any appreciation is just fucking nasty of you germinator, espcially considering coin's site was a multitude better than what will was using at the time and coin had told will right from the start that design wasn't his thing [but will wanted it anyway as no one else volunteered]. I was involved in that process between will and coin and remember it well.

As for holding ones tongue now that he is dead if the issue wasn't raised while he was alive, I might point out that that is how most people ended up on his hate list. He refused to accept any criticism and solved the situations by rejecting people. In fact, anyone who is still his friend should take a good long look at themselves to see if they are comfortable with how they enabled his lifestyle and decline and if that qualifies as true friendship.

I'd suggest that people who want to polarise this thread by pointing out some idealised version of gom that did not exist are asking for others to butt in with negatives. Gom had a lot of friends, but he also had quite a few people who did not like him and they had very good reasons to not like him. While I agree that it would be nice to focus on the positives, there also needs to be some honesty here. And if someone feels they need to share an experience then they have a right to do so. Rather than attacking that person I suggest you balance things out with more good stories as otherwise more people will join in.

Will hated SAB with a passion and frequently wished me personally dead [hmmm, the irony], so I doubt he would care much about what is written here anyway. Like I said before, I don't feel that death suddenly puts people beyond criticism, but a thread like this isn't for the deceased, it is for the friends and family who are grieving. When making posts please keep this in mind.

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Am I mistaken or did Gom like a beer at one stage?

 

yes, the forums are full of drunken antics from the early years [incl many disjointed threads where the mods had to edit him out, LOL]. But it was one of will's great successes that he beat his alcoholism and is a testament to the efficacy of psychedelics in facilitating that. sadly a year or two later he slowly started replacing alcohol with other escapist drugs and more recently these had become probably just as destructive as alcohol had. I wish we as a community can learn from that as depression and selfmedication can be an acutely and chronically dangerous combination.

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Shock!!!

could say some nice, could say some bad..

about any human that has lived,right?

s'prolly neither here nor there..

especially for Gom, now.. lol

However I choose to offer and manifest ease and happiness for all concerned..

and to wish that he may rest/re-incarnate peacefully..

and or become his favourite plant in the next life : )

(And other such postiive niceness)

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So, to ridicule someone after their death is cool if they don't say thanks in life, eh?

Fuckin' morons!

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So, to ridicule someone after their death is cool if they don't say thanks in life, eh?

Fuckin' morons!

 

To tell a truthful story about someone after they have died is fine if that was a defining moment of someone's relationship with the deceased. Coin wasn't ridiculing him. Coin merely brought up Will's everpresent sense of entitlement, a trait most people would be well aware of.

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i would debate that he had a ever present sense of entitlement.

I never got that sense from him and I had many interactions with him.

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To be honest I haven't clicked the "tripod" link above and I'm not going to, so I can see that there is a good chance I have taken the above posts out of context, if so I am sorry, but if not, I will never say sorry.. Yeah Will did emit a very confused vibe, not everyone is the same, but some of us got him & he got some of us..

So, if I have misconstrue the above due to my ignorance, I'm sorry.

If I got it right before then, Fuckin' morons!

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Holy shit. This has been a terrible run of losses over the past 2 years.

He contributed so much back in the earlier days I remember, back when the EBA forum was alive n kicking, and some of my first ethno plants I got were through him. They are now massive thriving trees.

At least a legacy of plants throughout so much of the community will be there to for people to remember him by if they never met face to face.

I hope at EGA this year there will be a some memorial to remember him, and Adrian, just like they did for Dennis and Natasha last year.

RIP man. I know you'll be well missed.

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oh dear...I never meant to criticise him...I just never met him & so I never had any dealings with him aside from the interaction I mentioned.

I intended my comments earlier just as a raw account with the bottom line being that I never really could get a good sense of who he was (in terms of personality). And that he sent me nude photos, etc - I thought was funny/cute..he was very proud of them/that time of his life. I told him that I showed my friends those old round-cornered prints & he liked that. I think we put them as a hidden link on the website.

You could interpret me saying that he never said thanks as being a criticism but it really wasn't. I guess I should have mentioned that when I did site updates, etc, he would offer me plants if he had something new. (75% of the time I bought stuff). He wasn't rude/demanding to me - but he did expect it to get done.

I had a sentiment when I posted above, but I didn't express it very well...I'm sorry I said it so matter-of-fact'ly. Jeez, if I didn't like him somehow - why would I have spent hours spell-correcting and paragraphing (and reading) his stories? Not because it made me feel special ... I thought he was offering something really cool & I loved it when he decided to get creative and start putting stories on his website :)

The link to his site above - (ha ha woof woof woof "now after seeing that link I understand why Coin!" :P ) no, that's not the site I did. I think that is one he did himself. The one I did for him had a lot of tables in the html for layout and he got quite annoyed with me that I wouldn't teach him/allow him to edit the site himself (I tried). I did try to help him figure out how to use a html editor, I made templates for him, etc, but he got irritated that it was needlessly complicated, couldn't figure out how to install the software. I don't remember the sequence of events after that to him moving on to his own site...I seem to recall that at some stage he changed the login password on SAB and then forgot it. ?

(edit: I thought it was lost for all time but it's still here for some reason:

http://www.australianethnobotany.com/gomaos/

parts of the site are broken...also, browsers rendered sites a bit differently 7 years ago, and screen resolutions were somewhat lower!)

Anyway, I'm glad that many people who knew him, remember him fondly

Edited by coin
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coin, those pics are still online. Just change pic # to 002, 003 and 011 He was very fond of sharing them with anyone who wanted to look [some are maybe not safe for work]. The first one was posted on sab or AE too.

I seem to recall that at some stage he changed the login password on SAB and then forgot it. ?

about 10 times in 2 years. I ended up remembering his password better than him.

I am glad there are still copies of his sites around as it is all a part of the history he played a major role in.

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RIP mate, you will be sorely missed :(

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My last dealings with Will weren't good.

Traded a bottle of 100mg 5htp capsules for a plant. I wasn't sure of the legality of 5htp in Australia as it's not sold OTC here from pharmacies [or wasn't] and also I got a prescription for the bottles I imported, so with his permission I sent him the capsules in a L-Tyrosine bottle. Never heard from him again directly, only comments to others about how ineffective his new 5htp seemed to be, and how he thought they may have been fake. Upon hearing this I feel bad for him as obviously placebo effects of ones belief can be very powerful. If he thinks they're not real he's not going to get much out of them. So I cut the label from the bottle and send to him, but still I hear nothing from him.

The awkwardness of that situation, him feeling I ripped him off meant I didn't feel welcome to ever buy or trade with him again, so never did. In hindsight It's quite obvious I was being over cautious about the 5htp and should have just sent him the original sealed bottle. Sadly when I see his plants in my garden I"m sometimes reminded Gomaos decided I was one of the 'bad guys' on the plant trading scene and he likely just threw out my trade

Anyway ending positively, Brugs are a declared weed here, so you can't buy them from nurseries, many thanks to Will for the opportunity to enjoy such beautiful plants.

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