New York City– It is our sad duty to inform you that longtime reporter and friend to chronicle.su, Frank Mason, has died.

Mason was alone in his apartment Monday when his heart stopped amid one episodic panic attack. Because of his work and general nature, Mason was prone to anxiety attacks as many as four times per week and in some instances, would not sleep for thirty six hours or more at a time.

According to paramedics who arrived at the scene, Mason told friends online that he’d been awake for over forty hours. His messages showed concern, said one EMT, for strange sensations in his chest that later turned out to be heart failure. Officials emphasized that if only Mason “had cared enough about his health,” a phone call might have saved his pointless, insignificant life.

Mason is survived by his dog, Shale, and roommates Mike Henderson and Lewis Manning. Who and where Mason’s family may be are yet to be determined, investigators said.

Writing and editing for the Chronicle, Mason was forced to live a series of compartmentalized secret lives, said fellow editor Dr. Kilgore Trout, who watched the man metamorphose from an eager cub reporter into a fractured shell of a man.

[pullquote]”There was something in his voice – something in the way he said, ‘I’ll gut you like a deer carcass!’ that made me believe him.”

Kilgore Trout[/pullquote]

“He would sometimes be really friendly online,” Trout said. “But other times, he was crass and difficult to get along with. He once threatened to kill me over an edit I made to one of his stories. And, you know, there was something in his voice – something in the way he said, ‘I’ll gut you like a deer carcass!’ that made me believe him. I changed his punctuation back to a semi-colon but later blocked his calls.”

Trout indicated Mason will be hard to replace, if not impossible, and said he planned to buy a larger room against his cabin in order to fit enough wild chimpanzees and typewriters to replicate the deceased writer’s eclectic personality.

“Probably just gonna stack them up over there,” Trout said, pointing in the direction of a pile of bloated garbage bags across which was slung a coarse red blanket, soiled and rotten. “They can lay on that while they type.”

Fans of Mason are as elusive as the writer himself. The online guestbook for Mason’s funeral was still untouched Monday evening, and is slated for deletion if it is not at least spammed between Monday and Wednesday morning, said a spokesman for St. Luther’s Funeral Services. Sources within the hacking collective Anonymous fear everything they touch and refuse to leave a digital fingerprint anywhere, even the guestbook of their unelected but rightful Messiah, Frank Mason, the infallible, unforgotten voice of chronicle.su.

See you in Hell, Frank.

-The Chronicle Staff