anon: As a general rule, I don’t do death on the internet, but you were very much a man of the internet, for all your luddic anti-civness so much of your life was lived on screens and in code. You lived tension and contradiction. You reveled in it. You showed me new ways to embrace tension, to live with it and overcome the pathological desire for resolution, to own it so it can’t own me, that life is madness and we’re all broken and of course the things we read believe and imagine and the physical cultural social realities we inhabit are in conflict, they will always be in conflict, and we are always in revolt. Let the religionists struggle, let us heretics revolt! Destroy everything! You showed me new ways of engaging deeply with texts rather than simply reading them. You showed me new and exciting ways into the situationist labyrinth, and how their project still lives on. You helped me to craft a vision of nihilism divorced from the 19th century western european enlightenment ideology that was rebranded in an eastern european context, or from the modernist pessimism of cigaret smoking frenchmen, one that rejected that article of faith that a revolution was possible or even desirable, and recognized that the same monolithic order that gave us such notions as justice and morality also gave us prisons and nukes, that total freedom means we must destroy everything. You occupied a role in my psyche the way you did for all the other lost twenty somethings that found our way to the reading group and the publishing project, all the fatherless hot headed theory nerd fuck bois who made our home somewhere in your orbit, a role that was never comfortable to acknowledge much less talk about, but you did, despite any pretense of being peers and collaborators and accomplices you were always a father figure, and as such you helped us grow in some ways and stunted us in others, cause you were also just a grown up latchkey kid yourself, an adult child of alcoholics, a man who’d also learned to be a man from some contrived image cobbled together from the men you encountered, living and historical. Your mentorship helped me learn to be driven, to set goals and see them through, and how to think about and conceptualize problems and ideas in ways that interrogate the language and presuppositions with which one frames them. You also represented a living example of a person who could quit the straight edge subculture while retaining the lifestyle. I’d never seen anyone do it before, they all just drank, but probably what you saw on the res impacted you more than any Judge record. The way I think about my own sobriety has been largely impacted by the example you lived, and it’s been almost five years since the last time I lost my mind and shot dope. In a milieu full of sheltered rich kids I like that you and I could bond over being poor kids who knew how to fight. You taught me the right way to wrap my hands, you showed me how to hook off my jab, and how to throw a proper muay thai roundhouse kick, for years i’ve been unable to ever kick a heavy bag without hearing you telling me again and again ‘turn your hip over, more, all the way over’. Last year I cried when I read your new book. I cried cause you write like you speak, and the way you speak is beautiful, and i missed hearing you speak, i missed being with you, i cried because i love you and i worried we might just continue drifting, a process i always thought of as temporary, like we’d meet up again to do more than just drink coffee and talk, that there’d again be some tangible project we could share after such a long interval of our lives existing on such different trajectories. Someday when I stopped being too busy to do sound for the podcast, or too busy to help edit books by that weird mystical iconoclastic pedophile. Because for you, friendship was only real if it was projectual. I wish that you’d gotten to be the contemplative old man sitting on a porch in a rocking chair you described when you were talking about your guys’ plans for your post city life, that you had gotten to ‘make southern oregon your project.’ I wish my kids could have known you, that they could have benefited from knowing you the way i have, I wish you could have told little Audrey stories about the woman from whom she got her name. I wish you’d have been more capable of distinguishing between criticism from people who love you and people who don’t, you were so good at protecting yourself by routinely dismissing the one and at sabotaging yourself by reflexively dismissing the other. Your faults and flaws are many, and your strength and brilliance is humbling and intimidating. Even in your absence your specter would loom over me, when I wrote said and did things it was almost always judged against the question of whether or not you would think it’s dumb. It still does, your specter. It always will. Your impact on me is and has been significant, and I’m grateful for that. Thank you for being in my life. I love you.
Comments
- Reply
- Reply
- Reply
- Reply