My good friend and colleague Scott Lust passed away last month, aged 33. Tragically it was a fatal asthma attack that claimed him so early, something he had battled with his entire life. At any point, he could easily have been described as a writer, researcher, actor, rights activist, musician (at one point he sang on stage with Prince) and comedian, but more than any of that, he was a great friend.
As well as having known each other for over half our lives, we also worked together on several projects, most notably “Films by Surreal Road”, an attempt to utilise digital production and distribution to create independent low-budget films. That didn’t work out well enough to be commercially viable, but it was a great experience, and the test films we created, which Scott either wrote, produced or starred in (putting his acting skills to great use), still live on.
Scott was always on a personal crusade to try and right injustice, and in 2008, around the time Surreal Road switched its focus to software development, he had decided that he wanted to turn his attention to far more noble causes, such as supporting human rights, and in particular, protecting privacy in an age where the subject is becoming increasingly important and complex. So it was that he enrolled into a college and started studying for a Law degree, which he would have completed by next summer.
It’s weird to have so much of his history recorded somewhere, what with both of us having been technophiles, and his love of writing. I still have thousands of emails from him (a great many of them being multi-page monologues) going back to 2003, when we came up with the company name, Surreal Road (looking back now, I can see that we also considered such exciting names as “Pupil of Dilation” and “Bloodshot Eye”), as well as the everyday ones he sent me that showcase his special brand of dark humour and sum him up better than anything I can come up with, such as:
30/03/2003: oOPS, I just woke up two days late. It’s not entirely my fault though. I have a fucking bug or summink again and spent the last day and half stuck in a fucking dream about hamsters in pink skirts only to wake up in solidyfied sweat. Mum says its sunday but im not quite sure I believe her.
not to mention the countless voicemails he left me that I saved over the years because they were so damn entertaining. Each of these little treasures will no doubt provide me with a great source of nostalgia in the future and I’m glad to have kept them.
Scott Lust, c.2004
We will miss you.