“CRAZY. CRACKPOT. FOOL. CRIMINALLY INSANE.”
These are words I once used to describe my schizophrenic writer, an inventor, artist, poet – and a visionary unlike any other person in this world. Today, nothing has changed, except to say he is no longer with us.
Recently the 10-year anniversary of his death – and his birthday – came to pass, and I would like to honor my dear friend, Alistair Robin Rowntree, by sharing his story with you now.
I met Robin through a Yahoo! Group of pseudoscience aficionados – talking about stuff like free energy, faster than light travel, things of that nature – well, he was so far “out there” that even these guys wouldn’t have him. “Who was that guy?” “Just some nutcase,” another said. I wanted to see who they were talking about and I found ALRart’s website
A maze of links – some of them hidden – that documented his progress through the research and development process of free energy devices, torsion fields and a very special “RINGGO STARGATE” capable of carrying humans to other, possibly better, dimensions.
So I asked him to write for us, which he immediately accepted. We gave him an avenue of pure insanity wherein our friends and readers supported him, without teasing or berating his efforts. He spoke of free love, eternal life and spiritual peace, recoloring what would otherwise be failures into endeavors of scientific purity – innocent trial-and-error. We never once questioned his integrity as an inventor – only asked for explanations, or request that he further his ideas. We shared thoughts with him and it was beautiful.
We have a running joke that ALRart never died, but that he finally got his stargate running.
During experimentation, ALRart claimed to stand in the center of his stargate where he “felt a strangeness” but no word on whether he ever perfected it. However, over the course of designing what may have amounted to a massive collection of functionless sculptures, ALRart created elaborate visual works of unintentional beauty and intricacy using glass and imaging software. After all, there was a fair deal of math involved, and he may have been crazy but he wasn’t stupid.
And that is why for the longest time we did not trust him to be who he said he was, in spite of his intensely loving personality.
And because of the great distance between us – he lived in New Zealand – he became this mythical, legendary persona, like God, only somewhat more real and he answered our questions. But even though I spoke to him over Skype, and we exchanged email, we were never fully certain ALRart was a real person. That is, until I searched him out recently to try to find out where he’s been.
ALRart loved to travel, and I hoped to see something on his website about exploring New Zealand, or to learn he’s been getting high in the attic and no longer trusts the internet. But right there in the first few links of my google search was an obituary I thought I would never see.
Around three o’clock in the afternoon, on his 56th birthday, September 24, 2010 ALRart’s heart stopped. He was diabetic and didn’t take his medicines right, and he died in an ambulance en route to the hospital. Well, that’s the official story the papers ran.
We, of the chronicle.su, know otherwise. At 3 p.m. On the 24th of September, 2010, ALRart secured his place among the stars after successfully passing through the world’s first completed RINGGO STARGATE and into a dimension where there is no more pain, no more suffering, no unhappiness or ridicule. Where there are no failures. No fear. ALRart is at permanent unending peace.
