John Ekdahl was my best friend. He died today of cancer, at 47. I know that some of you knew and loved John, so I thought I’d let you all know. I have set up a GoFundMe for his family, which is linked in this tweet. John and I “met” on Twitter about 13 years ago, and then, a couple of years later, met in person at the 2014 NRA Convention in Indianapolis. We quickly realized that we had a lot of the same interests—technology, amusement parks, baseball (we were both Yankees fans)—and soon started texting about everything and nothing. In 2015, when I published my book, the first stop on my promotional tour was in Jacksonville, where John lived. I asked him which hotel I should stay at, and he said that, instead, I should stay with him and his family. So I did. From that moment on, he and his wife (and their two kids—one of whom had just been born) became my closest friends. When, in 2017, my wife and I decided to move to Florida, John barraged me with propaganda about Jacksonville, and invited us to stay for a few days so that he and his wife could show us around. We were sold. John was like that. For the first few years after I moved to the United States, I wasn’t into the NFL. In 2016, this started to change, so John began a remote campaign to turn me into a Jaguars fan. “Jags are on,” he’d text apropos of nothing on a Sunday, even though he knew that, from Connecticut, the chance of my getting the game was close to zero. As part of this effort, I got weekly AFC South updates, a series of memes about Blake Bortles, and an introduction to the perfidious cabaret act that is the Tennessee Titans. John even invited me down to see a game against the Colts—which the Jaguars won 30-10. In my first real season as a fan, the Jaguars made the AFC Championship game, and were minutes away from making their first Super Bowl. After I moved down to Florida, John and I bought season tickets together, which we kept until the end. I had hoped devoutly that the Jaguars would make the Super Bowl this season—which was destined to be John’s last. During the pandemic, John and I started a business together that, relative to our expectations, did pretty well for a while. As is typical, most of our ideas didn’t pan out, but that didn’t matter. We had fun coming up with them at the bar, adding “just one more drink” to the tab to make sure that we hadn’t missed an angle or forgotten to write something crucial down on the back of an increasingly ragged napkin. I am 41-years-old and, with the exception of my wife, I’ve never met anyone who was easier to talk to than John. If we went for lunch, we’d go for hours, chatting about sports and rollercoasters and our kids and the new iPhone and the unforgivable changes that Disney made to Epcot in 1999. I shall miss that immensely. There was one thing we didn’t talk about: At no point since his diagnosis, did John and I ever acknowledge with each other how serious his condition was, or that, all things being equal, it was likely to take him before his time. From the start, it seemed that John silently picked me to be the person with whom he could pretend that everything was normal, and I fulfilled this role until the last. Even when things were clearly terrible, we’d make plans—to take a trip to New Hampshire with our families and friends; to ride the new rollercoaster at Epic Universe; to go to opening day at the new Jaguars Stadium in 2028; and more. The last time I saw him, I said the same thing as I said every time I'd chatted with him over the last 11 years: "Talk to you in a bit."