I started this site because Dean Ripa was my best friend for ten years, and I'm not ready for the world to forget him.
Dean was the kind of person that if you wrote him as a character in a novel, your editor would send it back and tell you to tone it down. He studied painting with Salvador Dalí. He sang jazz with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. He spent decades prowling the remotest jungles on earth alone, hunting some of the most dangerous snakes alive ,and he dragged his typewriter with him everywhere he went, writing six to eight hours a day whether he was in his studio in Wilmington or knee deep in a Central African swamp.
He was the world's foremost authority on the bushmaster snake. He survived fourteen venomous bites. He was the first person to successfully breed several bushmaster species in captivity, and his accounts of what those bites actually felt like remain unique in the medical literature. His life's work was a 585 page opus that challenged things scientists had believed for generations.
When Dean died, the Cape Fear Serpentarium his life's work in physical form was gutted. A lot of what he built and wrote and observed came dangerously close to just disappearing.
He once told me that you could describe the whole world by talking about a dollar ninety eight plate of catfish. Everything was a window into something larger if you were willing to look.
I found Bill Burrough, his literary executor, the recently departed James Grauerholz, Alfred Korzybski, Cosmology, Scientology, Herpatology, and much more.
I simply cannot thank anyone else for helping me open up to the world we live in than Dean.
When my phone rings, and I have yet to see who's number is on the display, I live in a liminal space that I'm going to see Dean's number, and when I answer, I'm going to hear that phrase that meant so much to me then, and I'd give anything to hear it just one more time, "Hey Buddy Boy, do you want to go eat with us?" When my phone rings, as it has for these 9 years, I still look.
This site is my way of making sure people can still look.
Lenny Burton