Mario Machado Rosa

Mario Machado Rosa
Born on 5/3/73 in Bellflower, CA
Exited on 2/10/21 in Roseburg, OR

Mario was a case study in free will. A Taurus born in the year of the Ox he was as stubborn as a mule and much like Frank Sinatra, did everything his way. He was a flawless tortured artist and gifted with many abilities, including the one where he predicted from an early age that he would never make it to 50.

He excelled in both the visual arts and music. He was classically trained on piano not because of great desire but because his mother, Joy Rosa, recognized an inborn talent and just happened to also be a classically trained pianist and taught lessons on the side. She preceded him into the great beyond in 2007, which was something he never quite recovered from but her exit hastened his move north to Oregon to “escape from California”.

From an early age, he was drawn to the visual arts. As fate would have it, he ended up at UCLA School of Art where one particular day his interest was piqued when a fellow student, Sherry Holub, stood up in a Level 2 photo class and ripped the instructor a new one for a rather poorly thought out course outline and assigning homework more suitable for grade school children before storming out and dropping the course. Later that day, the two met in the elevator and after a short getting-to-know you period, were rather inseparable. He often used the quote by the character, Otho, from their mutually beloved film, “Beetlejuice” to describe part of their connection... “You read my mind… so few are able to read my mind… they’re just not open to the experience.” They’d spend the rest of his life together on small adventures, riffing off each other’s weirdness, enjoying a relationship few people understood and even fewer are gifted with in life, and of course, dropping obscure movie, tv, and music quotes.

His father, Tony Rosa, who loves to torture himself with manual labor and difficult jobs such as policeman in Watts California and UN Peacekeeper in 3rd world countries, once had a boat cleaning business in which he and Mario would routinely jump into the sludge-filled Los Angeles harbor for long hours and scrape boats. This would be the only manual labor Mario would do for the rest of his life, deciding after a short while that he was just not cut out for it and honestly, who could blame him there.

In around 1998, he also joined Sherry at the company she had started after graduating college, JV Media Design, after a tortuous stint of working long hours in crappy conditions doing the same thing over and over at 2 different video duplication houses. His specialty in those early days was Macromedia’s Flash animation. He had worked on a variety of projects including an interactive, horror-themed website for Paramount Parks for their Halloween events. When Flash fell out of fashion for the web, he focused more on illustration and 3D.
Besides all of the visual art he created in his lifetime, he also created a Tarot deck called the Mutation Tarot, which was spawned by creatures he saw in his dreams. His own words describing the deck were, “I knew I could make these creatures look like anything and still have them retain their intended meaning. This is the true magic of tarot. Even if we, as a people, mutate into something alien, we will no doubt be ruled by that which the tarot informs : love, life, loss, greed, desire, love, hate, evil, gratitude, judgment, etc. These concepts would still define us, even if we were all psychedelic colored, squid crab monsters.” The deck was produced after a successful Kickstarter campaign and will be reprinted as requests still come in for it.
If Mario knew you, he had a nickname for you, which often stemmed from some pop culture reference the recipient of said nickname didn’t get, but that didn’t stop him. He was a great listener who always had time, even with minor acquaintances, to let them unload their problems onto him. Many would cite that he, “always knew the right thing to say”. In his later years he talked about anything and everything, often drifting from one topic to the next like a drunken partygoer. Speaking of parties, he attended many. His DJ and electronic music name was, Dr. Mario, because he never could get away from the Nintendo reference and he was what we all called back in the day, a “beat scientist”. In the later 1990s at the height of the website mp3.com’s popularity, he had the #1 song on the platform, “Beg 4 Life” with millions of views and downloads. To this day people all over the world still talk about that song and love all of his wacky musical creations. He also loved many other genres of music and leaves behind a pretty epic collection. He especially loved Prince and was pretty busted up when that guy checked off this rock.
He hated Christmas until experiencing the low-key, no family drama version Sherry and his in-laws provided. He also enjoyed buying wacky ornaments for the tree, including a glass cobra which he always wanted displayed prominently and made sure, off-hand, to mention to his one grandmother while she was still alive just so he could hear her say in a rather mortified tone, “Oh honey, snakes don’t belong on a Christmas tree!” His other grandmother probably would have gotten the joke of it all.
He also loved Legos and Star Wars and spent a fair chunk of change buying the biggest sets the company put out from that franchise. He also built a decent amount of anime-inspired robots, all of which are on display throughout his home. If it were time-consuming, tedious, or difficult, such as complicated math, putting together Legos, designing 3D models, or fighting the final boss on some of his favorite video games, Mario loved it… unless he was being paid for it.
He had a shoe collection that we all joked would make Imelda Marcos proud, loved sashimi, raw oysters, spicy food, watching tv, his mother-in-law’s Pitzelles, blowing deadlines, cooking, science fiction, avoiding yard work, walking outside in the middle of the night listening to music, lamenting the troubles of the world, cult movies, and too damn many other things to write out.
A self-described wino, he appreciated reds from the Bordeaux region but usually settled for something along the lines of 2 buck Chuck as he was always mindful to not go into debt to suit his tastes. His mother-in-law, Shirley Holub, a force of nature and a fellow bull on the Zodiac, had a hell of a time not clobbering him over the head when he was sassy, but appreciated his intelligence, artistic abilities and the fact he loved her only kid very much. When he would show up already sauced to a weekly card game, she would exclaim, “Mario’s been eating feathers again”, to which he would deny. His father in law, John Holub, much like just about everyone who knew him, loved talking to him. Mario could chatter on for hours once he got going. He talked so much that he ran out of things to say at the end.

He quit drinking on September 15, 2020 and remained sober with the hope his health could turn around. After a couple good months, the reality was, it was not turning around, yet he remained sober anyway. Wanting no invasive treatments, his approach to death was to simply ignore it, carry on and put on a face that everything was normal when even the casual observer could see that it was not. He said he was “fine” up until he could no longer carry on a conversation. He did this as much for everyone else as himself. In his final months he also commented that others who are traveling down the path with alcohol should be wary or they’d end up like him. In his final days, he got one of the most expensive transports and room and board there is and coasted out on “the good drugs” while his other half held his hand and blasted their favorite music. He was a one-of-a-kind who was loved and will be missed.

He is survived by his wife, their two cats (Hathor and Juno), his father, his mother-in-law, his father-in-law, aunts, uncles, cousins, and too many friends to create a proper list, all of whom are grieving this loss of a life that was way too short for our collective liking. A two-page obituary really doesn’t do him justice.

"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." -Raoul Duke, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”

In lieu of flowers the family asks that you make a donation to Saving Grace Pet Adoption Center in Roseburg, OR ( https://www.savinggracepetadoptioncenter.org/new-donation-page ) because Mario loved animals and rescued their two cats from there in 2017.