Punks tend to wear all black anyway, so it’s almost easy for us to dress for funerals. Except most of us don’t own nice clothes and some of us don’t know what gendered costume we’re supposed to wear.

We did what we could.

At the gravesite, while Will laid waiting to be put in the ground, our friend Jesse from Severed Fingers played Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on guitar. All of us sang along, crying. The pastor — who didn’t know us, didn’t know the family, didn’t know Will — must have been confused. Not an hour earlier, he’d been trying his hardest to maintain the proper balance between speaking to us respectfully and patronizingly about God, and we weren’t having any of it. Yet there we were, earnestly singing Hallelujah.

Cohen’s version strikes at what’s true about God and Death and all those other words that may or may not deserve capital letters. That day, it was our atheist prayer. I don’t really care too much what the pastor thought of us.

One friend, face wet with tears and guitar in hand, got off the stool and joined the rest of us while another friend was lowered into the ground forever.
Continue reading If I Die in Raleigh →

If elves were real, they’d be whimpering, anxious wrecks, too wracked by fear to leave their towers or trees. For an immortal, no risk would be worth taking. A plague, a stray arrow, or an angry bandit might rob a human of fifty or eighty years. The same might rob an elf of the lifespan of the planet.

I was a nerdy, anxious kid. I’m a nerdy, anxious adult. I spend a lot of my time thinking about even my mental health in terms of Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings.

Elves, as popularly understood, can live thousands of years, watching mortals grow old and die like we might watch the leaves on trees turn color and fall. When I was younger, I idolized elves. Now? I pity them.

Avoiding danger is a self-reinforcing behavior, a behavior that elves would have centuries or millennia to perfect.

“Parent, what is death?” an elf kid might ask one night, in that gender-neutral language I figure elves probably have because that would be awesome.

“It’s the end of everything,” the parent elf would say back to their kid, tucking them into bed under a blanket of moss or unicorn wool or some bullshit like that. “But don’t worry. You’re an elf, you get to live forever. As long as you never slip up ever. Sweet dreams!”
Continue reading I Pity the Immortal →

Content Warning: misogynist violence

It might be that the anarchist traveler scene died when Sali died, on September 15, 2008, as summer gave way to autumn. It was two weeks before her twenty-first birthday.

It might be that the man who killed her marked the end of a way of life.

There were probably hundreds of us in the early-to-mid aughts, us crusty anarchist travelers. We hopped freight trains and we fought the state. We ate out of trash cans, we shoplifted and scammed corporations. We stole photocopies from Kinkos to disseminate our zines, we broke into empty buildings to sleep and throw parties and convergences, because fuck capitalism and fuck asking permission from the system we detest. We worked hard, fought the State tooth and nail, and interwove play into everything we did. An endless summer.

There was no future in it, of course.
Continue reading September 15, 2008 →