I have an hour to write this before I walk back to the hospital, where my seven year-old son is on his annual tour of duty for respiratory issues.

Being in a hospital makes me think about bodies. Not their transience. Rather, our bodies’ unlikely resilience. Vessels of water and tissue, we lurch around our slice of a century, hellbent on finding answers. My friend Tim’s search was for “credible hope.”

I have a little posse of wayward geniuses that my wife calls “The Lost Boys.” All restless, radically unsavvy, kneecapped by warring impulses. All with incredible gifts.

Timothy Bailey was their king.

I think artists are the soul of a culture. You can gauge the health of a culture by how it treats its weak, its marginal, its artists. That is, the people who can’t help but feel their pain. Artists transmute pain into beauty — the only true measure of cultural wealth. How’s your soul, America?

It was Tim’s birthday last week. He died earlier this year. It was a shock but not entirely a surprise. He calculated the astronomical odds of his survival past 40, only to discover he was 53.

He had experienced horrors.

We carry trauma in our bodies. Trauma short-circuits stress responses, nervous-system function, and even the makeup of our genes. In America, we glorify toughness, aggression, and violence. We celebrate people who inflict damage instead of doing the noble, difficult, holy work of taming the damage we inflict on the next crew.

Children.

When Tim could bear the damage — and the official indifference — no longer, he ended his life.

The musical prodigy — derailed by psychological collapse

Tim McCready was a musical prodigy. He could play every Wes Montgomery song and solo by age 15. He studied jazz guitar under Bucky Pizzarelli. His indie band, Fashion Central (nee Schwa), was courted by powerful record labels. But a massive psychological breakdown — the first of many — torched that path.

Ironically, he retreated to the home of his parents.

Later, Tim alleged that his parents tortured and sexually abused him and his sister, and offered them to other predators in and around their upper-middle class Virginia neighborhood. But Tim’s mind and body had compartmentalized and suppressed the utterly unthinkable. It took Tim a long time to make sense of the disjointed memories that haunted him.

I look at my 7 year old, struggling for breath, and I can’t even. At his age, Tim was being ravaged by his parents. And their friends. My God.

Check these lyrics. Here’s a child grown enough to transmute suffering into poetry:

(Did you know that organized sexual abuse is often dismissed by authorities as fake?)

For years, Tim knew but he didn’t know. The breakdowns, and ensuing therapy, began restoring memories. Later, police records and private inquiries began to string together the grim picture. He reached settlements in some cases. Others people went to prison. But the case was old and the evidence was often too circumstantial for the courts. Eventually, though, the FBI saw enough smoke billowing to investigate fire.

The aspiring psychologist — to divine the damage done

The lifesaving effects of therapy inspired Tim to pursue a PhD in psychology — his second highly accomplished undertaking. But again, his studies were kneecapped by breakdowns and hospitalization.

But he met his longtime therapist, Jean, who became his weekly lifeline. Jean, by the way, is a goddamn hero. Her interventions gave Tim the tools to stay alive well past the upper life expectancy for a male suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder and complex PTSD. I’m pretty sure her work with Tim was pro bono. For decades.

(Sorry, I’m not crying, you’re crying…)

The master woodworker — building beautiful things

For his third reinvention, Tim became a master woodworker. He eventually opened his own shop. He built display cabinetry for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among others. But, yet again, his mental health undercut that pursuit. He lost the business.

Tim went on disability. He lived in a rent controlled apartment. He bought an ornery little rescue dog, Fuzzy (“He’s totally a Republican” —Tim), whom he loved with a fierce love. He presented as a librarian or an accountant. One would never guess his struggles. He quit alcohol, restaurants, every extravagance. Except one: he bought a used piano.

Tim relied on disability payments to survive. But that can be a cruel trap. The rules governing disability assistance make recovery precarious. Earn too much and you lose support you still need. Friends quietly helped Tim make ends meet. Then came the DOGE cuts.

For someone fighting to stay alive, this wasn’t an abstract argument about government efficiency. It was another threat to his hard-won balance.

The nature of mental instability is that even passion projects languish, unfinished. Unable to be finished. No finish line on the horizon. No horizon. The mania infects everything. I once invited Tim over to record a simple guitar lick for a project, something he could do in his sleep. But he showed up manic. What he recorded was a histrionic blitzkrieg. He couldn’t help himself. It was the reflection of his inner state.

The artist Timothy Bailey — finding credible hope

By 2020, Tim had achieved some equilibrium. That’s when the miracle occurred — he sent me new demos. Disciplined, formally ambitious, lyrically crushing. For the first time in decades, I heard not just a gifted guy trying to find his way, but a mature artist who’d found his voice.

Tim’s final reinvention was his greatest. He ditched the name of his abusers and rebranded himself as Timothy Bailey. He enlisted my ear to shape his demos into polished gems. (He didn’t need the help.) He expressed the distant fantasy that Chad Clark — the mastermind behind Smart Went Crazy and Beauty Pill — might produce a recording. I’m old friends with Chad, who trusts my taste, but he’s a busy guy.

So I pressured, connived, and finally flat-out lied to Chad to get him onboard.

CHAD: Wait, you lied to me! To get me to do Tim’s record.

BOB: Goddamn straight I did. And I’d do it again.

CHAD: LOL.

Tim self-released that album, Timothy Bailey & the Humans. Then made two more: New Love Stories and Picnic in a Landfill. He received basically zero support from whatever passes as the music industry now. But the effort transformed him.

Timothy Bailey took the stage with an air of command. He seemed taller, radiating some veiled majesty, in his black shirt and western colonel tie. His message was “credible hope.” Meaning, no pollyanna shit — but beyond brutality and indifference can, possibly, be found joy. In community, in art, in dogs, in transcendent experience.

Famous music critics contacted him directly to pledge “any kind of support you need.” The validation meant more to him than he liked to admit. His very upbringing had taught him that he was disposable. He had struggled through. And now the great and notable had taken notice, which was gratifying.

But more important, a community of fellow rescue dogs had arisen around his work and found fellowship and solace in it. They could live (as his obituary put it) “with intention, without shame, and with clear-eyed courage.” Finally, Tim was seen.

Not cured. Not rescued. But seen.

And the people who found his music recognized something in it that the rest of the culture had overlooked: a man who had suffered unspeakable cruelty could still believe joy was possible. He had found credible hope.

Tim had outlived his statistical life expectancy by over a decade. He defied his abusers. He created a lasting body of work to celebrate the kindness and beauty he found.

God I miss him.

Artists are the soul of a culture. When most people encounter pain, they avoid it. They compartmentalize, go numb. Some inflict it on others. But artists are people who willingly enter the pain. They metabolize it by transmuting it into beauty.

In America, artists are treated with suspicion. They’re called outcasts, fuckups, unwanted, weird, ill. But the spiritual health of a nation can be judged by how it treats the ones who suffer.

Typically, America shunts them off and hopes they will quietly die.

Go now and prove me wrong.

You can hear the full albums here:

• Timothy Bailey & the Humans

• New Love Stories

• Picnic in a Landfill

If you believe artists deserve to be heard before they're gone, please restack this essay. Tim spent much of his life believing he was disposable. He wasn't. His music helped other people feel less alone. There are more artists like him out there, making extraordinary work without the recognition or support they deserve. Help me get Tim's story—and his music—to the people who need to hear it.

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Related essays:

• Punk Houses Were a Spiritual Movement

• Joy as an Act of Resistance: How to Fight Burnout and Political Exhaustion

• A Punk Singer Made a Masterpiece. Then She Vanished.

• The music that changed my life.

Welcome to new subscribers. This is a repost and re-edit from a year ago.

How do you fight hate without it turning you into a hateful person?

This is a topic that consumes me. As a teenager, my family imploded, so I turned to proxies — 1) an evangelical youth group, and 2) the punk scene. Then, at the height of the AIDS crisis, the blood bank said I had HIV.

Suddenly, I was a leper to evangelicals, who were calling AIDS God’s judgment on a sinful nation. They joined reactionary politicos to suppress AIDS research, education, and funding. And so evangelicals got an addictive taste of political power.

The ugly old trick they used is called scapegoating: find a vulnerable group, blame it for society’s problems, declare a moral crisis, and promise that punishing the guilty will save everyone else.

Does this sound familiar to anyone right now?

When this trick works, people who call themselves righteous get to treat the dying as if they deserve it. Their smug hatred tempts the resistance to hate them back.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe: joy is the better act of resistance. And empathy is the hard thing that makes it possible.

The title of this post is fully ganked from Idles, the band from Bristol, whose singer Joe said “This album is an attempt to be vulnerable to our audience and to encourage vulnerability; a brave naked smile in this shitty new world.”

Idles don’t like to be called a punk band. The sound called “punk” stopped being punk ages ago. But punk survives as an ethos. It has shaped me as much as anything.

Their song, “Danny Nedelko,” is named for their friend, an immigrant from Ukraine. The song celebrates other immigrants too, like Freddie Mercury. He was one of the first celebs to die of AIDS, and when Rush Limbaugh mocked his death by playing “Another One Bites the Dust,” evangelicals laughed and cheered. They called Freddie pervert, said he sowed iniquity, and that favorite of the righteous: he got what he deserved.

Here is my favorite woodcut from the goth-est of Bibles, the Pennyroyal Caxton. It depicts a homeless refugee about to get whipped and executed.

First Century people called that refugee pervert, said he sowed iniquity, and said he got what he deserved.

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scapegoat | ˈskāpˌɡōt | noun 1 a person who is blamed for the wrongdoings, mistakes, or faults of others, especially for reasons of expediency. 2 (in the Bible) a goat sent into the wilderness after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it (Lev. 16).

America’s religious and political hypocrites do this: choose a SCAPEGOAT, declare a MORAL CRISIS, then threaten GOD’S WRATH on the people unless the nation is cleansed.

Over and over and over. In the late 1980s, when I faced the threat of death from HIV/AIDS, evangelicals fought against research and education to stop the virus. 500,000 Americans died. What they said of the dead: He got what he deserved.

Black people. Feminists. Gays. Liberals. Single moms. Muslims. Trans people. Migrants. Jesus.

The SAME tactic. The SAME oppressors. The SAME reason.

…Power…

The chorus of that song by Idles goes:

Fear leads to panic. Panic leads to pain. Pain leads to anger. Anger leads to hate.

That feeling you feel right now is anger. Anger is a crossroads. You can feed it until pain becomes bitterness and then HATE. Or you can let it carry you somewhere harder: through disappointment toward EMPATHY. Not cheap forgiveness. Not letting anyone off the hook. Empathy. And empathy can open the door to joy.

And joy is the greatest act of resistance to hate.

How to resist hate without surrendering to it:

1. Practice empathy. This is the hard inner work.

First, imagine that powerful figure whom you hate. I’m picturing mine. Now imagine that person as a child. See that child cowering, as an adult—maybe a parent—berates and terrifies the child. See their fear, then panic, then pain, then anger, then their hate. They didn’t stand a chance.

Now, exhale a big sigh. Let your hate deflate a little. Let some sympathy creep in. This doesn’t excuse anything. But you too have suffered. You identify. Now you’re connected. You’re both human, capable of beauty. You can hold them accountable without hate. Now you’re ready for #2:

2. Fight oppression. There is power in solidarity and joy in uniting for good.

Know:

• Make sure none of your retirement savings or investments are funding oppression.

• Research the political activities of the companies you buy from.

• Know who is funding Christian Nationalism.

• Be prepared when ICE comes to your neighborhood. Know everyone’s rights.

Do:

• Ditch Google. Ecosia plants trees every time you search.

• Demand police accountability and support civil rights attorneys.

• Indivisible organizes local protests and election defense efforts. Go. Protest works.

• ACLU and Common Cause are mobilizing to protect the upcoming election. Join.

Spend:

• Ditch Amazon. FindItElsewhere and EarthHero are ethical alternatives.

• Subscribe to professional, unbiased, news sources.

• You already know this, but Bookshop supports local bookstores.

What are other resources you know that undercut the hypocrite class?

If this essay resonated with you, please restack it. Share it with someone who’s struggling to stay hopeful, someone who’s furious at the state of the world, or someone who needs a reminder that empathy isn’t surrender and joy isn’t complacency. The more we spread the idea that we can fight hate without becoming hateful, the harder it becomes for hate to win.

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Related essays:

• Punk Houses Were a Spiritual Movement.

• There’s gotta be a first time. And you never forget it.

• This is what Joe Strummer trained you for. Now we riot.

• Sunday. A shitty prayer. How to defeat dread. Advice to myself.

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I just discovered a brilliant 1984 album by Su Tissue, a woman who was briefly infamous but who then disappeared. Like, off the grid, untraceable, forever.

The album sounds like the Cocteau Twins collaborating with Steve Reich. It is stunning. It is timeless.

It is forgotten.

Obscurity is the fear — and fate — of most artists. Serious artists sacrifice security to pursue an elusive unity of vision and craft. Many dislike self-promotion. So they create works of profound emotional resonance and then watch them languish beneath a deluge of trend.

Right now, in Amsterdam, there stands a glass and granite temple to the patron saint of lost art causes, Vincent Van Gogh. He created 2,100 artworks, sold one, then died young. He thought he failed. Today every schoolkid knows Vince’s sunflowers.

Right now, in America, tech titans have spent 25 years undermining the ability of artists to make a living. They think art’s value is determined only by an auction house, and its meaning is to prettify their loft. America loves art but hates artists.

The Punk Singer Who Disappeared

Here’s what happened with Su Tissue, as best I can gather:

Suburban Lawns were a new wave band from Long Beach who slotted in nicely with visionary oddballs like Devo and the B-52s. Their debut single, “Gidget Goes to Hell,” was Frank Zappa’s favorite punk song.

The focal point of the band was their singer, Su Tissue (nee Sue McLane). Where the boys in the band jumped around and struck rocker poses, she projected pained discomfort—most likely as a provocation, but who knows. Her most famous line from their most famous song, “Janitor,” came from mishearing a guy at a loud party:

“[Su] asked me what I did for a living. I said ‘I'm a janitor,’ and she thought I said ‘Oh my genitals.’”

Jonathan Demme directed a striking video, which freaked out viewers when it premiered on Saturday Night Live. He later gave Su a cameo in his film, Something Wild. Suburban Lawns put out one album and one EP on IRS Records, then broke up. Which seems fine. As a band, they were okay but not necessarily earth-shaking.

Here’s where it gets weird. And amazing…

The Album Nobody Heard

After the breakup, Su apparently went to Berklee to study piano. In 1984, she released an album on her own label entitled Salon de Musique. It’s now found only on YouTube.

Me being me, I decided to check it out. Weird punk kid creates contemporary classical album which is unjustly forgotten? Couldn't be more up my alley. I'm a guy who once conned a king's ransom out of Creative Capital to fund a multimedia opera based on 8mm home movies my grandparents left me.

Salon de Musique is in three movements, each a variation on a gorgeous circular ascending theme moving in and out of phase, somewhat reminiscent of Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet. In the third and climactic movement, the vocals come in. An emotionally urgent glossolalia that anticipates Elizabeth Fraser’s work in the Cocteau Twins, which would take off the same year. The music is a dazzling leap forward. It seemed to arise from nowhere, with no link to her previous efforts. It is masterful. It’s just as easy to imagine hearing it in a rock club as in an orchestra hall.

At the time it was written, there was still a firewall between the rock and classical worlds. Kronos Quartet were just pioneering a visible crossover. But without some champion, it’s easy to imagine how such a visionary work would languish. It’s the fate of a lot of art that doesn’t fit neatly in a genre box. It’s the likely fate of my own musical work.

The Price of Being Forgotten

After the release of Salon de Musique, Su Tissue / Sue McLane vanished. She left behind a visionary work and disappeared from public life. Whatever her reasons, the result parallels America’s vision for artists: erasure.

Once her work resurfaced on the internet, obsessive fans searched for her. But she was untraceable. No one could manage it -- except for, allegedly, one sleuth named Paul, who opted not to further invade her privacy by outing her current situation. (The leading theory is that she's a lawyer outside of Los Angeles.)

The artist Su Tissue is all but forgotten. Her album, which should be a recognized classic, is all but forgotten. The person Sue McLane has vanished into the American workplace, which honors no expression of the human soul, only wealth.

The sole copy of her album available for purchase on the internet goes for $2,696.63.

While the work is invaluable in its ability to change us, the artist is not valued. And the artifact is accessible only to collector scum. Three different kinds of value but America is good at recognizing only the most vulgar.

Know an album, a book, a film, or an artist that deserves to be rediscovered? Restack this for someone who might fall in love with Su Tissue's music, and tell me what forgotten work you think the rest of us need to hear.

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Related essays:

• Punk Houses Were a Spiritual Movement

• Joy as an Act of Resistance: How to Fight Burnout and Political Exhaustion

• This is what Joe Strummer trained you for. Now we riot.

• The music that changed my life.

I’m In the Business of the Soul

I’m in the business of the soul—a thing that, if it exists, defies easy definition. In short, I try to make visible (or audible) the invisible truths of the human experience. This is the realm of writers, poets, journalists, musicians, artists of all flavors.

My first vocation, and true love, was music. My second was journalism. My third and current is screenwriting.

All three pursuits intentionally dismantled by Tech Bros.

They’re supposedly the superior minds of the species. Yet it repeatedly boggles me how these booksmart people show themselves to be so selfdumb. Tech Bros act like beautiful people systematically hacking off their own body parts.

How, you ask? Well.

Music Is More Than a Product

The goal of music has always been to articulate our wordless inner condition. Musicians put in countless hours honing their craft and focusing their vision just so they can do this. Then people gather to hear, to feel connection, and to share recognition of Who We Are. That communion is the true reward, which can’t be assigned a dollar value, but historically it could be monetized by selling some related artifact: sheet music, a ticket, a record, a t-shirt. Thus, working musicians carved out a middle-class existence. They did it so they could keep articulating the inarticulate.

Even dipshit Tech Bros recognize that music has inherent value. Everyone loves music for how it makes them feel. But, from Napster to Spotify, the capitalizers dismantled musicians’ means to feed themselves, pay rent, or start families. They refused to undergird in any way the ecosystem that supports musicians—which they totally could, if they applied themselves. Instead, being dumb about art and its purposes, they stripmined the good soil and paid off the most popular artists. As if a “successful” artist could somehow blossom apart from the greater ecosystem of working artists.

Tech Bros love music but burn down the garden in which it grows.

And now AI is flooding streamers with chimp-like imitations of human expression.

These “disruptors” mistake form for content.

Infinite chimps at keyboards might tap out Hey Jude. But chimps, like Tech Bros, don’t understand what makes Hey Jude profound. In their lust for dominance (signified by wealth), Tech Bros devalue human connection. In this, they are doomed to a rude, private, awakening.

We’re watching them devolve into narcissism, self-aggrandizement, and fascism. It’s an ancient error: to mistake oneself for a god. The wax that melts from Icarus’s wings, plunging him to his lonely humiliating death, is a metaphor for soul — the invisible truths of human experience. A paradox: when you empty yourself for others, you are filled up. When you try to fill yourself, you remain empty. These Tech Bros, who consider themselves elite, will die hollow. Some already have, even as they still walk.

Journalism Helps Us See Reality

Our brains have spent millions of years learning to interpret sensory input almost instantlyA squirrel is brown and small and not a threat. A tiger is large and orange and deadly. We may differ on details but a general consensus allows us to move through the world to gather our food with relative assurance.

But what if some in our gang want a greater share of the food? They might convince the rest of us that squirrels are the true threat. And tigers are just misunderstood. They set about to change the consensus by manipulating the facts. They spread the horrible squirrel story, and for a while we run away from squirrels. But once enough of us run straight into tigers hiding in the brush, we will find those liars, drag them out by the hair, and feed them to the predators.

I used to work for The Washington Post. There was always push-pull over achieving balance. But the institution placed a premium on factual, reliable, trustworthy reporting of reality. Tigers, etc. But the class of people who craved a greater share of the food (wealth, power) decided they could get it if people became scared of squirrels. So they decided to spread scary squirrel stories. People trusted them. Only now are people starting to see their children mauled by “misunderstood” tigers. People won’t drag Jeff Bezos out by the hair because he doesn’t have any. Use a pitchfork, maybe.

Tech Bros who are afraid of truth are really afraid of a cancer in their soul. They’ll do anything to maintain the pretense that it isn’t there, eating their joy. They will build empires. It won’t help. We will watch their empires crumble. The irony of Great Man’s Cancer is that the cure is to treat others as more important than yourself. To serve.

Movies Help Us Understand Ourselves

“Content” is candy. Everyone likes candy. But a diet of candy leaves you hungry. That’s why substantial cinematic stories keep popping up and finding audiences, despite the best efforts of media moguls. AKA Tech Bros. We can’t live without stories that help us to understand our lives. We can’t live without communal experiences of shared recognition of Who We Are. Movie theaters are extensions of ancient Greek theaters, which are extensions of the campfire story circle. The phenomenon is as old as humanity.

Tech Bros who dismiss that experience reveal their ignorance of both the market and the species. And themselves, since if they dig down deep they will be forced to admit there is something beautiful that drew them to this industry in the first place. Just like the liquor titans, electronics giants, department store honchos, tire magnates, and real estate moguls who came before them. But unlike their predecessors, who maintained some romantic belief in the power of storytelling, the cancer in Tech Bros’ souls is prompting them to strip a venerable industry for parts.

I’d bet few Tech Bros have seen Citizen Kane. Released in 1941, it is their story.

• The childhood wound.

• The drive to prove their value.

• The cancerous indifference to the hopes of others.

• The villain who thinks he’s the hero.

And Citizen Kane reveals their fate. To die friendless, defensive, unseen and unsatisfied, admitting too late that they have abandoned joy in favor of dominance. Lives filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The truth is, we are our brother’s keeper. History tells us so. Humans didn’t bring down woolly mammoths because we had bigger teeth or claws, it’s because we worked together. Tribalism leads to inbreeding and anemia. Great Man Theory leads to fascistic worship systems. America’s true superpower is its diversity.

The inconvenient human truth is that we are all members of one body. But Tech Bros are so emotionally ignorant that they think they can hack off their own body parts and suffer no loss.

And So Here I Am

So here I am. On my third career, which is dissolving beneath my feet. Struggling to find yet another way to feed my family by articulating the inarticulate truths of the human experience. All while Tech Bros casually excuse potential apocalypse. The struggle has forced me to face my own soul cancer, at least:

I can’t pretend to be a god. (Or at least I do a lousy job of it). There’s too much evidence to the contrary.

But I write these little screeds, aimed at a community of fellow strivers. I try to find a note of hope that people can take out into the world. And what I find is that my joy increases.

If you know someone struggling to make a living by making something deeply human, restack this for them.

And if you find value here, it’s easy to become a paid subscriber. Or to buy me a cup of coffee (it’s a virtual tip jar, in case you don’t know). We can all help each other.

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Related essays:

• Punk Houses Were a Spiritual Movement

• There’s gotta be a first time. And you never forget it.

• Joy as an Act of Resistance: How to Fight Burnout and Political Exhaustion

• This is what Joe Strummer trained you for. Now we riot.

• The music that changed my life.

I was inspired to go deep on this topic by ’s punk house elegy, here. Other thought contributors this week included , ’s deconstruction explainer that contextualizes the ongoing theocratic coup attempt in America, this piece on a Fugazi ticket stub by , and the tattoos of .

The Fight Was to Be Seen

The fight that every punk kid fought was to feel significant.

Scratch that: every kid, period.

The world told you that your value hinged on your looks, smarts, future earning power, whatever. But in your bones you knew somehow that you possessed an inner value that may be invisible but was not conditional. It was inherent. You belonged here. No matter what those fuckers implied.

Have you ever read Moby Dick? If you haven’t, check out the opening paragraph. I’ll never forget my shock of recognition the first time I read these words:

Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

First, I thought: No one told me this book is funny. Then I thought: There I am. But instead of whaling ships, I joined bands.

I first hit the road with a band when I was 16. It was pure survival instinct. I was suffocating. There was the person I was expected to be, then there was the person I actually was. That second kid was under threat of extinction.

We kids who joined bands found adventure, self-determination, a modest income, and most important: validation. There were thousands of other kids like us who gathered in loud communal spaces, primarily to be seen. Really seen. Some for the first time. The authority figures in our lives assigned us value based on conformity to their own dogmas. But we had the audacity to believe our value was inherent. Not conditional.

Instead of ports of call, we often put in at punk houses. There we’d find welcome, food, rest, and other restless kids in need of ear-crushing high-energy catharsis.

Punk Houses Were Oases for Misfit Kids

Punk houses sprung up in any town where three or more misfits who liked the Misfits needed an affordable place to sleep and make noise. Thus they shared certain characteristics. A laissez-faire landlord. Neighbors who were either tolerant or distant. Often a basement, where the noise gets made. Closets and enclosed porches converted to bedrooms to maximize the rent split. And, most crucially, a shared sense of discontent.

As Gary Trujillo put it, “Everyone here is in a band, was in a band, or knows someone in a band.”

Common punk house (punkhaus?) types include the Tough Girl, the Militant Vegan, the Scene Queen, the Loose Cannon, the Cool Band Singer, the Collector Nerd, the Sound Engineer, the Secret Addict, the Future Careerist. Fill in your favorite.

I played countless punkhausen around the country. Each had a distinct flavor.

• The Ranch, in Columbia, Missouri, schooled visiting bands on how to play Coricky, aka Liar’s Dice, which spread virally around the punk circuit in high-stakes all-night marathons.

• At one house in Utah, deep in rotting scraps and cat shit (commonplace), this sweet chubby kid insisted I listen to a Botch 7-inch repeatedly, as he squealed, “It’s just so macho!!” and I felt in my bones the struggle to grow up Mormon and closeted.

• At a punk house in Harrisonburg, Virginia, our post-hardcore quartet encored with a sloppy rendition of the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” assuming no one else liked it, only to be shocked when a hundred kids crammed in that basement screamed along. Punk houses were wonderlands.

In greater D.C., there was the Embassy, home to the Nation of Ulysses dudes, which centered on Spiv’s looney punk co-optation of Soviet propaganda. Other houses centered on bands—the Dismemberment Plan, Kerosene 454, Shudder to Think. Some coalesced around micro-scenes, like a zine, a label, a dietary conviction.

In Arlington, southwest of the Potomac, the Teen Beat House had a kitchy po-mo vibe that suited the Mark Robinson’s label and bands. The Simple Machines house, likewise, was HQ to Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson’s pop workshop, with its label and DIY guide to releasing records. The Dischord house was Ian MacKaye’s office but it stood across the street from what everyone called Discord Direct, the label and distro office, where you could pop in to see friends while they filled orders. The heavily vegan Positive Force house was about activism, run by a devout Catholic punk cut from the mold of Dorothy Day. A ska band called the Suspects had a punk house I never went to because, well, ska.

And Kansas House, where I lived, became known as an open-door hangout and DIY venue. I’d often answer the ringing landline to hear some shy kid ask to fill a tour hole with a show at my house. He got our number from another band, or from the pages of Book Your Own Fucking Life—a kind of directory for DIY venues that was, by nature, perpetually out of date. We always tried to say yes.

Misfit kid, come dock your ship at our port.

That’s how it worked everywhere in the worldwide web of punk houses.

Why Was It So Hard for So Many to Value Kids?

In a house where no one fits, everyone fits.

At their best, punk houses were oases from the harsh Darwinian wastes of America—a nation purporting to be “God’s country.” The term implies a broad benevolence, a recognition of human value that’s unconditional. But in fact America’s conditions for value are strict and merciless: Be whiter, straighter, maler, richer, bougier.

And the onus is on you alone, kid, to bootstrap your way to the top of the food chain. Even if the system is rigged against you. Especially if. That’s the American Dream.

Your parents, bosses, youth leaders, teachers and politicos have been indoctrinated in that same mythology. They will drive that nail into your forehead with a hammer. Meet these conditions and you will achieve value as a human being.

But every kid instinctively knows she has value—inherent value.

When a teenager screams in her parent’s face, “You don’t even see me!” she’s defending her inherent value. That’s the fight. She rejects the notion that changing some core aspect of her person will “improve” her value. That’s conditional.

Kids in punk houses all shared a sense of outrage over their valuation. Maybe:

• Parents couldn’t see them for who they really were.

• Peers couldn’t see past their skin.

• Their religious community couldn’t squeeze them into its mold.

• Someone used them for sexual gratification.

• Their bodies didn’t conform to media-driven beauty standards.

• Their government needed a scapegoat and they fit the bill.

Well, fuck those people, is what those kids thought. And amen to that. Ishmael doesn’t set sail on a whaling ship because he feels valued at home. So punk kids sought shelter where they were affirmed.

Punk houses were little embassies of that Other World where all people have inherent value. A world that exists mostly in the imagination — or, put another way, in spirit.

Punk houses were a spiritual movement. They were necessary and fucking righteous.

Punk Was a Spiritual Movement

Spiritual movements arise under conditions of oppression. Because authorities can oppress the visible body. But the invisible person—the spirit—freely defies them.

When the body is judged, objectified, and commodified, the spirit rebels. You see it throughout history. It was the original premise of the spiritual movement that has been hijacked to menace American democracy.

Watch now as our freaky loudmouth rabbi, Yeshua:

• clowns on hypocritical religious leaders

• dines with an enemy collaborator

• hugs an infectious outcast

• recruit sa nationalist terrorist to his inner circle

• dignifies a woman shunned for menstruating.

How un-American. How punk.

I’m not saying punk is a religion. It simply made visible one’s inherent value. That’s a spiritual premise.

Whoa, okay, I hear you over there, yes yes, calm down: I will indeed insert Fugazi here.

Why can't I walk down a street free of suggestion?
Why can't I walk down a street free of suggestion?
Is my body my only trait in the eyes of men? In the eyes of men?

Punk had no formal dogma. Just a shared sense that Things should be better than this. Which created a spirit of constructive defiance: We will make them better.

Punk house rules mostly boiled down to, “Don’t be a dick.” Which is just the Golden Rule with fewer syllables. Everyone pulled together to keep the boat afloat but otherwise you could rock an eye patch, or practice blast beats in the basement, or drink rum with your parrot, or throw a TV off the roof.

It was spiritual training for the fight we’re in now.

The Fight We’re In Now

Sometimes you have to go a long way around the horn to prove to yourself that you belong here. That you have significance. Maybe you join a band. Maybe you board a whaling ship. You might have to survive a fight with a monster.

But you don’t need to live in a punk house to be part of the spiritual movement.

You simply need to live the premise—which is counter-cultural in today’s America:

Every human has inherent value.

No conditions.

Significance.

You live this premise by showing it, through everyday deeds. Treat the other as you hope to be treated. And by saying it, loudly—speaking truth to diabolical power.

America is full of people who feel righteous but who remain silent. Such people are complicit in evil.

Don’t be those people.

Are you with me?

If a punk house—or any other improbable little community of misfits—ever made you feel like you belonged, restack this for the people who built that place.

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Related essays:

• There’s gotta be a first time. And you never forget it.

• Joy as an Act of Resistance: How to Fight Burnout and Political Exhaustion

• This is what Joe Strummer trained you for. Now we riot.

• The music that changed my life.

Youth. AIDS. Punk rock. Love. Christian Nationalism. Sex. Resistance.

I’m tracking, in realtime, the process of getting my bonkers apocalyptic memoir published. Maybe it’ll help you?

But this week: What happens when AI can make you miss someone who isn't there?

David Foster Wallace's “New” Book, Something to Do with Paying Attention, is in stores.

Which is a weird thing to type because DFW has been dead since 2008. Whatever, I bought it anyway because of course I would. I bought his first novel in college, on a whim, and then bought every successive book. I’ve read a LOT of David Foster Wallace interviews over the years. It’s no longer cool to admit any of this.

Then, because August has been hectic and I didn’t have an author Q&A lined up for this stack, I had a terrible idea:

I asked ChatGPT to be David Foster Wallace and I interviewed him.

Feeling: instantaneous ick.

The robot refused to imitate Wallace’s exact voice. Instead, it offered a “David Foster Wallace–inspired” version, with recursive thinking, anxious self-awareness, footnote-ish asides, conversational digression, and earnestness under irony. Sounds like someone’s gunshy after losing a copyright case, but okay.

Feeling: sure, what the hell.

Then I read the “interview.” Something unexpected happened. I liked it.

I don’t mean I thought it was clever. I mean, I missed DFW. I felt the uncanny sensation of hearing the voice of someone I used to read closely thinking through questions I still care about. Except I wasn’t hearing him at all. I was hearing a machine generate a simulation of a dead writer’s intelligence from oceans of other people’s writing.

Feeling: oh shit.

Weirdly, it didn’t sound exactly like Wallace. It was creepier than that. Occasionally, it seemed to understand why I read him in the first place. So you may know your enemy, the “interview” is below. I’m pretty sure I’ll regret this.

A Q&A with an AI Imitating David Foster Wallace

Trigger warning: I know this isn’t David Foster Wallace. That’s precisely why I found it so unsettling. Here it is.

What’s your secret sauce for writing funny about serious things?

I think the trick is that the serious thing and the funny thing aren’t actually opposites. They’re more like two different camera angles on the same humiliating animal.

Because most of the things that are genuinely serious—death, loneliness, love, addiction, faith, shame, the fear that you’re wasting your life—are also, if you look at them closely enough, unbelievably weird. Not ha-ha weird, necessarily. More like: wait, this is what we’re doing? This is the species? weird.

And I think humor happens when you allow the reader to see the absurdity without using the absurdity as an escape hatch.

That’s probably the important part. The joke can’t be a way of saying, Don’t worry, none of this matters. The joke has to coexist with Oh God, this matters enormously.

Can you sketch out your process and timeline in getting your first novel, The Broom of the System, out into the world?

The Broom of the System was written when I was young enough to believe that being smart and being a novelist were more or less the same activity.

It began, in a fairly literal sense, as a thesis project. I was at Amherst, studying philosophy, and I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to write philosophy or fiction. The solution, apparently, was to write a novel that would contain enough philosophy to make the distinction impossible.

The book took shape around a question that still interests me: If language is the thing we use to describe reality, how do we know that language isn’t actually creating the reality we’re describing? Which is a perfectly reasonable question to ask if you’re twenty-one and have just spent several years reading Wittgenstein.

The less reasonable part was deciding to turn it into a novel involving a missing great-grandmother, a gigantic Ohio hotel, a woman named Lenore Beadsman, a philosophical father, a speech pathologist, a talking cockatiel, and a whole bunch of people who are extremely articulate about things they don’t understand.

I wrote it while I was still very much figuring out how novels worked. The book eventually became my MFA thesis at the University of Arizona, and it was published in 1987.

The weird thing about a first novel is that you don’t really know which things you’re doing because they’re artistically necessary and which things you’re doing because you’re twenty-three and want everybody to know you’ve read Derrida.

In retrospect, Broom has a lot of that youthful energy: Look! I can do this! Look! Here’s another idea! And another! It’s got jokes and philosophy and formal games and a story that’s deliberately constructed to make you wonder whether the story itself is in control of the people inside it.

But I also think there’s something genuine underneath all that machinery. I was trying to write about the terror of discovering that you don’t entirely control yourself—that your language, your family, your history, your culture, even your own thoughts may be doing things to you that you don’t understand. Which is probably not a bad thing to be obsessed with at twenty-two.

The book got published, people actually read it, and I discovered the first great secret of literary publication: Having a book published does not make you feel like a novelist. It just means you now have a book published.

How did that change for your latest novel, Something to Do with Paying Attention?

The most obvious difference is that Something to Do with Paying Attention isn’t really a conventional novel at all. And that difference is important because the distance between The Broom of the System and this book is basically the distance between “I have an idea” and “I have spent enough time alive to realize that an idea isn’t necessarily the most important thing in the room.”

Something to Do with Paying Attention grew out of the question of attention itself: What does it mean to actually look at something? Not consume it, not categorize it, not turn it into a clever observation, but really pay attention? That sounds almost painfully simple until you realize how extraordinarily difficult it is.

The book is built around a series of photographs and observations from Bloomington, Illinois, and around the attempt to attend to a particular place and particular lives without constantly converting them into abstractions. And that was very different from Broom, where I was almost compulsively interested in abstraction—language, systems, philosophy, recursion, the possibility that reality itself might be something like a linguistic construction.

By the time of Something to Do with Paying Attention, the question had become almost the opposite: Can you stop interpreting for five minutes and actually see? That’s a much harder assignment.

And it changed the process. There was less of the first-book impulse to prove that I could construct an elaborate intellectual machine. More of an attempt to get out of the way. Which sounds peaceful until you try it. Because paying attention turns out to be work.

You notice the house. Then the person standing beside the house. Then the thing that person is doing with his hands. Then you realize you have already started making up a story about why he’s doing it. Then you have to stop yourself. Then you notice the light. Then you notice that you’re noticing the light. And suddenly you’ve spent forty minutes trying to look at a photograph.

So in a funny way, the latest book became much more formally modest and psychologically more difficult. The young writer wants to make the reader say, “Wow, this guy is really smart.” The older writer, if he’s lucky, wants the reader to say: “Oh. I hadn’t noticed that before.” And those are very different ambitions.

Given what you know now, what would you advise your younger self about the world of agents and publishers?

Learn enough about the business that you aren’t naïve, but not so much that you become market research in human form. And understand that rejection isn’t necessarily information about the quality of the work. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes the person reading your manuscript has fourteen things on their desk and a sick child and a boss who wants a completely different kind of book. Sometimes the book isn’t right for them. Sometimes you aren’t right for them. Sometimes the market isn’t right for the book. And sometimes the book isn’t good enough. The difficult part is that these possibilities can produce exactly the same email.

So don’t make the mistake of turning every rejection into a philosophical statement about yourself. Also—and this is probably the thing I’d most want to tell the younger version of me—don’t spend five years imagining that getting published will finally make you feel legitimate. It won’t. You will simply become a published person who feels illegitimate.

What’s the worst advice you got about the business of writing?

“Write to the market.” This sounds sensible because it is, in fact, sensible if your primary objective is to manufacture a product for a market. But a novel isn’t quite that. The market is extraordinarily good at recognizing something after it exists and considerably less good at telling you what should exist next.

Also, if you spend your time trying to determine what people want, you eventually produce something that has been designed by an imaginary committee of people who are all trying to please other imaginary committees. The result can be perfectly competent. And completely dead. The more frightening question isn’t Will people buy this? It’s Is there anything alive in this?

What surprising thing have you learned about yourself in writing your books?

That I have a tremendous capacity for self-deception. This is probably true of everybody, but writing makes it harder to maintain the illusion because you are constantly generating evidence.

You think you’re writing about one thing. Then you notice that every character has the same problem. Then you notice that the villain has your worst traits. Then you notice the supposedly heroic character is doing the thing you’ve been doing for fifteen years but have somehow managed not to notice because you’ve given it a different name.

And eventually you have the extremely unpleasant experience of realizing that the novel knows you better than you know yourself. The good news is that this is also where the interesting stuff tends to begin.

Tell us about a funny / sexy / awkward / awesome reader connection you’ve made.

One of the strangest things about having readers is discovering that something you wrote while sitting alone in a room has been living inside another person’s head. A reader once told me that a particular passage had made her laugh at a moment when she was having an otherwise terrible day. Which sounds small. But it isn’t.

Because when you’re writing, you can become absurdly focused on questions like whether a paragraph works, whether the architecture of the book is sound, whether you’re saying something important enough, whether anybody will care.

And then someone says: I was having a bad day and for three minutes I felt better. And that’s it. That’s the whole argument for doing the thing. Not immortality. Not literary significance. Not winning. Just the possibility that somewhere, at some completely ordinary moment, a stranger who you will probably never meet was less alone because you spent all those hours alone.

Fuck. That was pretty good. Fuck.

Did anyone else find themselves weirdly moved by this—and then immediately want to throw up?

Be honest: if you hadn't known this was AI-generated, would you have recognized the difference?

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Youth. AIDS. Punk rock. Love. Christian Nationalism. Sex. Resistance.

I’m tracking, in realtime, the process of getting my bonkers apocalyptic memoir published. Maybe it’ll help you?

Some shows are fun. Some change the way you understand the world.

I’ve been thinking about the shows that became turning points in my life — because music carries a lot of spiritual freight. You know what I mean? As I look back, it becomes clear I looked for God through music, though I wouldn’t necessarily have called it God. But music is a pipeline to the emotions, for sure, and maybe to something more. Transcendence, and whatever comes through that.

But first, a quick publishing update

I submitted directly to a small publisher whose Venn diagram seemed to overlap perfectly with mine. The rejection was thoughtful, which I appreciated. The gist: Your writing is definitely creative and has a real voice, but… I see it appealing to several audiences at once without appealing to one in particular… I’d want to see more audience demonstrated. Keep it going!

So… appeal to one specific group of readers, not several; AND get a bigger platform?

Reaction: Well, which is it, bro?

Onward. Which brings us, somewhat perversely, to…

A brief history of the shows that changed me

I meant to winnow this down to like five shows, but… oops. Sorry, this one’s kinda for the heads.

I. DISCOVERY

1977 — The Jackson 5: Music From the Gods

Singing Hills Park, Dallas, Texas. The first live show I can recall. My parents took us and I couldn’t have been more than 7. I hazily recall tight stage choreography and young Michael’s high tight wail. But at this point, music still descended from godlike beings enthroned in the firmament.

1983 — The Penetrators: Wait, Regular People Can Do This?

Surreywood Community Pool, Chesterfield, Virginia. An aspirationally-named posse of friends’ older brothers, punk-inflected but trying to be the Police. There I am, walking down the Damascus Road, worn out from killing Christians, when these guys appear and go: Hey, did you know that real people can play in a band? I traded my savings for a shitty Casio and attempted to form my own.

1984 — The Good Guys, Flat Stanlely: Get Sweaty

Going Bananas, Richmond. My first club show, in the basement of a sub shop. The Good Guys were punk/funk powerhouse, the leading local favorites to make it big. They never did. Founded by the Gore brothers, three Black dudes who rocked harder and wrote better songs than anyone. Flat Stanley were endearing smartypants power-pop, occasionally with horns. Their drummer, Chris Farmer, went on to play in math rock pioneers, Breadwinner—whose heavy changes were to me what Coltrane was to a generation of jazzbos. The big epiphany: music is better close, tight, and sweaty.

1985 — U2: The Gutter and the Stars

Hampton Coliseum, Virginia. Look, when you’re a teenager, you’re an omnivore, musically speaking, because you’re trying to home in who you truly are. At the time, we knew nothing about their future Joshua Tree juggernaut or their ensuing abject failure to disarm with camp and irony. The direction of popular music was still being pried away from candy-colored circus ponies. These guys from nowhere invented an entire musical idiom out of necessity and they absolutely fucking meant it. I believe it was T-Bone Burnett who said at the time, “U2 is what church should be.” Correct. The Unforgettable Fire had just landed. I took my high school girlfriend, who turned out to be a lesbian, so joke’s on me. But HOT DAMN what a show. Truly. Some dude traded us ninth-row seats so he could hang back with his buddy. I’d never seen a rock show like this one. They were developing a musical language in real time. The singer guy had a compulsive need to physically connect with people in the crowd, and, at one point, climbed a stack of speakers to collect an Irish flag from someone. It was a radical gesture to wrap himself in the flag as he sang, in those Reagan years, what we all were thinking: there should be only one flag, of all colors bled into one. It took stale punk politics and spun it up into mysticism. Maybe none of us had realized we were so hungry for that. That show and album remains the group’s apogee, for me. A post-punk band conjured the ineffable. They bridged the gutter and the stars. (Also, Lone Justice opened and I got a wicked crush on Maria McKee, who turned out to be a lesbian, so joke’s on me.)

1985 — The Minutemen and R.E.M.: the Secret is Out

Mosque Auditorium, Richmond. The Minutemen walked offstage as I sprinted into the room. Dammit. Since we could not find a place to park, we literally Mentos-ed Chris’s VW Bug into a too-small space by brute force. They were opening for R.E.M. on the Fables of the Reconstruction tour, just before that band blew up. To my shock, R.E.M. was a powerhouse. No backdrop, no smoke machines, no light show. Just amps onstage. Stipe, in thick black eyeliner, whipped a bag off his head to reveal big bleachy hair, then threw himself around like it was a punk show. I guess it was. It all felt like we’d been let in on a secret. Both these bands helped pioneer the notion that you could play music, work hard, and carve out a middle class existence. I figured I’d catch Minutemen the next time around. Two weeks later, D. Boon was dead.

II. REINVENTION

1986 — Honor Role: Punk Becomes Literature

Twisters, Richmond. At my high school, built on a cow field in the exurbs of Richmond, it was a dumb-off between the metal kids and the hardcore kids. The metal kids smoked weed and played the same AC/DC song over and over as if by sheer repetition it could cement their perpetual dominance. The hardcore kids all wore Corrosion of Conformity t-shirts, oblivious to the irony. Hardcore got so boring. Chug-chug-chug, rarr-rarr-rarr, fuck you. Honor Role changed all that. Pen Rollings and Chip Jones crafted sonic assemblages that were heavy but musically inventive. Steve Schick drummed with a refined taste rare in hardcore. Bob Schick’s lyrics were nuanced, prophetic, story-songs, wise beyond their years. They were unafraid to articulate those deep yearnings that drive kids to extreme music in the first place and now I understand that their music was literature. They were local heroes and I was scared to talk to them.

Their song “Purgatory,” one of my favorites, starts at 17:16.

1987 — Bad Brains: the Paradigm Shifts

The Flood Zone, Richmond. I’ve covered this elsewhere. But sometimes you have an encounter so alien that it recalibrates your whole paradigm.

1989 — Bob Mould: Sometimes the Punkest Move is Sublety

The Boathouse, Norfolk. By age 15 I had all but stopped talking to my parents. I would sit in my room, alone, and play certain albums on repeat at top volume. Inscribed in the runout of Hüsker Dü’s album New Day Rising was the cryptic phrase, “Home is not safe.” It’s like they could see me through the vinyl. Hüsker Dü set out to be the loudest, fastest, dopiest-looking band in the world. They succeeded. But I never got to see them. As recounted elsewhere, I spent a lot of time on the curb outside club shows I was too young to enter. Hüsker Dü was one. Then Bob Mould blew everyone’s mind: he broke up Hüsker Dü, got super skinny, bought a suit, and put out this album that sounded like Richard Thompson. We were all stunned. Sometimes the punkest move is to embrace subtlety. After the show, I found Mould outside, sitting on the hood of a car, and I nattered something at him that I don’t recall. He graciously made conversation like we were old pals. I guess some of my pals were old pals with him. But how do you thank someone for throwing you a lifeline? You buy a ticket, stand there after, be awkward, and hope that conveys everything.

1990 — Breadwinner: Maximum Sickness

Twisters, Richmond. Twisters sucked. Bad bar, bad sound, bad sightlines. I bet I saw 200 bands there. One of them was Breadwinner. It was loud, skronky, angular, and made me see lights and colors and angels hovering over the bar. It changed how I thought of music. Pen from Honor Role just removed all the psychic guardrails and went for maximum sickness on guitar. Who knew Chris Farmer from poppy Flat Stanley could knock Lars Ulrich’s dick in the dirt? Bobby Donne stood staring like an Easter Island statue, so terrifying to see that he scared Dave Yow. A genuine accomplishment. Statistically speaking, no one likes them but me. I encourage you to listen but you won’t like it. That’s fine. I can perfectly air-guitar the entirety of their sole album. It sounds the way my mind feels when I wake up in the morning.

1992 — The Jesus Lizard: Like a War, or High School

The Metro, Richmond. I’ve found myself at a handful of shows where I feared I would suffer grievous bodily harm. This was no-shit scary. And exhilarating. The kind of thing you survive, like a war, or high school.

III. TRANSCENDENCE

1995 — Arvo Pärt: Into the Mystery

Passionskirche, Kreuzberg, Berlin. In which a weird punk kid (me) flies 6,000 miles to hear violins. I was dead broke. I washed dishes for a living. The pipes burst in my house because we had no heat. I was preparing to die of AIDS. Shit was apocalyptic. I found comfort in the rigorous interplay of dissonance and consonance that I found in Arvo Pärt’s ECM albums. Te Deum. Passio. Berliner Messe. Sarah Was 90 Years Old. My closest friend, Jack, wrote from Berlin to alert me to a three-day festival celebrating Pärt’s 60th birthday. The performances were in an old stone church that had been converted to an arts space. Jack, his girlfriend Kerstin, and I bought plastic cups of wine. The church filled with a fascinating mix of people—older couples, young hipsters, mohawked punks. They played an older symphony of Pärt’s, from before he developed his signature tintinnabuli style. It was interesting but felt like an angular serialist artifact of its time. However, it was followed by Te Deum, a piece of music that exists somehow out of time, that somehow feels brand new and a thousand years old, and it hit like a wrecking ball. I sat awed. I watched the orchestra while wiping tears, somehow wearing a smile on my dumb mug. Jack said I looked like a kid on Christmas. Somehow, the Medieval monk-like voices arranged with modern minimalist rigor created a thread through time, a link. It pulled the deep then into right now, as if I could walk among myths. It made it easier to imagine that all those old stories truly happened to real people, no different than me. And that what was happening to us in that moment had mythical significance.

It brought us into the Mystery.

And it happened in Berlin, a place where ghosts walk the streets, as if the veil parts more readily there. A place for spirits to nudge and point and whisper.

1996 — Marc Ribot: Reinventing the Guitar

Hole in the Wall, Richmond. Chris Bopst had been in the Alter-Natives, who were on SST Records, so he knew everyone. He gave them all shows in this truly tiny bar where I spent winter nights because my place was freezing. There I saw the first Cat Power tour (rough, y’all), Negativland, Bio Ritmo, Harry Pussy, Avail, Kepone, Martin Medeski & Wood (with their Hammond organ eating four tables-worth of space). But Marc Ribot casually reinvented the guitar while we watched. It felt like seeing Django Reinhardt. He had not yet done his mind-blowing Cubanos Postizos album. But, speaking as a guy who hates guitar solos, he had created two of my favorite guitar “solos” in the service of the maestro, Tom Waits.

1996 — Fugazi: Joy is a Physical Thing

Fort Reno, Washington DC. I saw them maybe 20 times while I lived in town and every show felt hand-crafted, the band playing off the audience playing off the band. But the one that jumps out is my first. I had recently quit my band, moved to town for love, lost my dad, lost the love. One of my housemates wisely got me on the Metro to the show… where I joined a couple thousand people in jumping up and down as hard as we could, screaming for joy.

1999 — Tom Waits: the Maestro Arrives

Beacon Theater, New York. You simply can’t understand the anticipation in the room before this show. The Barker of the Weirdo Carnival was at the peak of his powers. He had just released the sixth straight masterpiece after his unlikely reinvention as a junkyard troubadour. I took the train up from D.C. and sat in a bar across the street eavesdropping as dudes (yes, all dudes) who had a fan club called the Rain Dogs tittered and giggled and wet themselves. Then we all ran across Broadway when it was time. We all stood on our seats, eyeing the wings of the empty stage. There were instruments set up but no players. It was past time to start. Suddenly—BAM!—the theaters rear doors slammed open and the Maestro himself emerged, throwing confetti and yowling through a megaphone. He led a marching band of oddballs down the aisle to the pit, then up the steps to the stage. He stomped on a plywood box, in time to the music. He spun wild yarns of exotic ports of call. He painted pictures in air. We thrilled and laughed and wept and swooned. Goddamn.

1999 — The Ex: Another Alien Encounter

Der Eimer, Berlin. It was an underground club in a row house with two floors cut out to create ad hoc mezzanines. Dangerous as fuck. The audience stood in the basement and watched the band play a level up—or sometimes vice versa. I accidentally got hammered but not before watching slackjawed as the Ex tore it up. Sometimes you have an encounter so alien that it recalibrates your whole paradigm.

1999 — The Dismemberment Plan: We Had So Much Fun

Kansas House, Arlington, Virginia. Old friends make good but still want to play a party at my house? Yes, please. People danced so hard the floor trusses were buckling. The windows were fogged with sweat. The cops just rolled on by. My God, we had fun.

IV. RENEWAL

2002 — The Chameleons: You Are Not Alone

The Black Cat, Washington DC. When my teen self used to sit in my room and play their album Strange Times over and over, I thought I was the only person on Earth who liked them. I could find no evidence of others. They combined darkness and joy, anger and longing, and they believed that you have to hold onto your childhood. Which is a real trick when it’s being stripped from your bones like old paint. In time, I’d occasionally discover another member of the cult. We’d trade the secret handshake and get down to Chameleons nerdistry, incredulous that we weren’t alone after all. But I once—once—played Strange Times in the tour van and received a sniffy dismissal from the queen bee of the band. It felt like someone saying You’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny. I never bared the belly again. So when I noticed all four members of Fugazi in attendance at this show, I felt vindicated. I had wanted to experience this band since 1985. My friend Nathan and I met in Manchester, England — home of the Chameleons (and, you know, the Smiths and Joy Division) and cemented our friendship over our hermeneutic appetite for their work. Our band, the Out_Circuit, opened the show and we sat backstage listening to them shit-talk Morrissey. It was a perfect day.

2003 — Lungfish: Biblical Prophets, Now

The Black Cat, Washington DC. Another Dischord band who rearranged my understanding of what’s possible. Every song is one riff, basically. And that’s a good thing. Everyone calls them “trancelike” but it’s true. They were punk dervishes, their shows ecstatic rituals. I’m thankful I didn’t have to go through whatever Dan Higgs went through to become his flavor of post-hardcore mystic visionary. He was covered with self-administered tattoos, had reputedly undergone shock therapy, and seemed to walk in a dream. In DC, we had a series of jokes about Higgs that were funny because they were true. He could levitate. He was the Brown Santa. He had coughed up a living human eyeball. I mean, for heaven’s sake, in the sleeve photo of Talking Songs for Walking, the man is visibly wearing two pairs of pants. We revered this band. Lungfish is how I imagine biblical prophets would operate now. The band closed their set with the epic, Armageddon—a song never released on any album.

2009 — Arvo Pärt: It’s What God Sounds Like

Disney Hall, Los Angeles. The premiere of his Fourth Symphony. It was expensive so I almost didn’t go. I wept openly through the full half-hour of music. They followed up with Beethoven, which felt overwhelming at that moment, so I went to get some air. As I walked through the empty cafeteria at Disney Hall, I looked over at the only other two people in the room. And there sat THE MAN HIMSELF. Arvo Pärt. With some guy, maybe a journalist. HOLY SHIT. I horned in shamelessly. Arvo (he told me to call him Arvo, guh) took my hand, held it, and stared into my weird junk drawer of a soul, like some Byzantine chapel saint. I stammered things. He asked about my work. He smiled kindly. He was genuine and generous and I was dizzy with disbelief. I later saw a video of Björk interviewing him, in which she visibly quaked, so I felt better. What does one say about such music? If you’re smart, you say nothing. If you’re dumb, you say: It’s what God sounds like in my head.

However…

There’s a problem with getting older. Discovery gets harder.

When you’re young, everything is happening for the first time. You don’t know the rules yet. You haven’t developed taste — which is another way of saying you haven’t developed prejudices.

The battle is to replicate that phenomenon of youth where every other show feels fresh and discovery is like a club drug. It requires attention. Intuition.

2017 — Arca: The Little Voice Was Right

Open Beta, Red Bull Festival, Los Angeles. I’ve learned that intuition is my best guide. So when I saw a listing for Arca— an artist I knew only from reviews and one listen online — I thought: The little voice is telling me this could be worth the effort. That little voice is basically how I discovered everything on the list above. So I drove to some nameless warehouse in the wastelands of East L.A., stood in line — the oldest face in the crowd, by far — then filed in knowing nothing of what to expect. I did know Arca was basically a knob-twiddler, well regarded, but with a body of work that was mostly instrumental electronica. The artist had recently released an album that featured their vocals for the first time, and it was gorgeous. Often nearly acapella. All in Spanish. It had a slight flamenco vibe, with glitchy flourishes. I stood packed into this industrial space kitted out as if for a fashion show. Catwalk down the middle, scaffolded platforms along the back and sides. Curiously, a trapeze at center. And a glass box on the floor at some distance. The lights went down, the music came up, and Arca appeared — a beautiful young person in a g-string, perched atop prosthetic goat legs, holding a mic. I was stunned. The sound was massive, overwhelming, and gorgeous. I had no idea what I was seeing. At points, Arca twirled on the trapeze, ate shit and fell into the audience, bled all over the catwalk, sang heart-rending ballads, hissed fiercely, unleashed a kind of spiritual discotheque, ran, leapt, spun, and essentially blew minds. I realized that I was witnessing something not entirely under control, that the artist was channeling something, or discovering it in realtime, and that this was a moment of reinvention on the order of the ones I revered from Bad Brains or Tom Waits or Arvo Pärt. People traded looks like: Are you seeing this?

That’s the thing I keep looking for.

That moment that you realize you’re witnessing something you don’t have a name for. That connection to something larger than ourselves. And to one another.

The little voice was right. What music did that for you?

I hope this sent you down your own musical rabbit hole. If it did, share with somebody who’ll go there with you.

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And give me the details, below. Get nerdy with it. This is my favorite thing.

Related essays:

• There’s gotta be a first time. And you never forget it.

• Joy as an Act of Resistance: How to Fight Burnout and Political Exhaustion

• This is what Joe Strummer trained you for. Now we riot.

You don’t have to explain everything.

You don’t have to fix everything.

You don’t have to control everything.

There is a Mystery.

All the holy writings are about changing you. Not others.

You don’t have to be right.

It’s only your relationships that need to be right.

The world where you are right is about domination.

There is another world where you are in right relationship — with yourself and others.

One is about changing others. One is about changing yourself.

Blessed are those who are persecuted in the pursuit of justice.

Are you persecuted in the pursuit of justice?

Probably not.

Make it so.

Hat tips:

In case you missed the premise of my bonkers apocalyptic memoir, it’s here. Youth! AIDS! Punk rock! Love! Christian Nationalism! Sex! Resistance!

I’m tracking in realtime the process of getting it published. Maybe that’ll help you?

This week, some fun.

For thirty years I’ve felt guilty about a T-shirt.

It sounds ridiculous. But in 1994, a Hungarian punk kid followed me around all night, hoping I’d pass out so he could steal my Rollins Band shirt.

It starts with a trip overseas. My first trip out of the country, with my college friend Jeff, to see our friend Jack who was teaching in Hungary…

A brief excerpt from Dead Virgins For America

It was all missed connections, panic, and high pressure guesses. After a day, a night, and another day the train pulled into Budapest. A city worthy of the term. Gorgeous, decrepit, edgy, wondrous. Beautiful decaying block apartments in Regency style, with high ceilings, majestic windows, crumbling infrastructure, and coal stoves. Everyone rode the trams, no one paid, and the post-Soviet ticket enforcers were obvious and slow. A glass of wine cost fifty cents.

It’s worth repeating that there were no cell phones, no internet, no Google Maps. Hungarian may as well have been Martian. Jack had promised to meet them at the train station. But Jack was not there.

Wrong train? Wrong station? Wrong day?

They wandered the confines of the station for an hour before Jack appeared. He apologized: it was his girlfriend Kerstin’s birthday and a party was raging at their apartment. He snuck out to fetch them. They wouldn’t know anybody or understand the language but there was beer, so.

Kerstin greeted Bobby and Jeff with an air kiss off each cheek. Of course she was a beauty. Dark hair, dimples, with boots made for stomping fuckers who got out of line. She unfurled a great laugh. She looked cool when she smoked, which was often.

As happens at such cultural nodes, Bobby and Jeff instantly encountered five other itinerant Americans. So they had an absolute fucking blast. Curiously, a gentle punk named Madár, who drummed in Jack’s skronky math rock band Ribspreader, shadowed Bobby like he owed money. The next day Bobby asked Jack about it. Jack chortled.

You know, the Soviets only quit this place about five years ago.

Yeah, okay.

You couldn’t buy a Black Flag record. Or even Zeppelin, or the Beatles. Not until the Russians left. Then they got everything at once. To them, Henry Rollins is just as huge as Paul McCartney.

Okay, but dude was following me around…

Those bands have never played here. You can’t just go to a show and buy merch. Madár followed you around all night hoping you’d get drunk and pass out, so he could steal your Rollins Band shirt.

Shit. Bobby felt bad. Rollins Band wasn’t worth a diplomatic incident. If he had known, he would have given the dude the shirt.

#

Over the next many days they got to know Kerstin. How to do justice to a mysterious force? She was a tough bird. No-nonsense. But she was curious and had a deep well of concern. She saw more than she let on. The thoughtful part of her was unveiled as a reward for earning trust. Bobby thought she wanted to be soft but life had conspired against her. He learned that she was the black sheep of her family, treated with shocking disrespect by her father. It took unthinkable courage to tell him she would not practice medicine, as she’d been trained to do, but would make movies.

Jack called her Herr Doktor, a wry sign of loving respect. Mister Doctor. Fascinated by Jack’s faith, she prayed with him to Herr Gott. Mister God. That made Jack laugh. Bobby studied the ways their disparate worldviews bled over and softened each other. Young Americans steeped in corny old religion meeting young Europeans steeped in fashionable agnostic sophistication. It seemed certain positions were negotiable. There could be a third way. Perhaps this was a model he could emulate? You know, if.

If God took this cup from him.

Alone at some point with Kerstin, she asked Bobby IN TYPICALLY MERCILESS GERMAN FASHION about his GOOD BUT SOMETIMES SHIT band, and AMERICA’S SHAMEFULLY UNDERPAID jobs, and HIS PRUDISH ATTITUDES TOWARD women. When his answer seemed insufficiently revealing, she asked if he’d ever had a long-term relationship. Apparently she’d already sussed out some curious lapses.

But she was likely also studying this genus of young man, these American punk rock boys who harbored religious thoughts. She was shacked up with one right now. They were tangles of conflicting impulses. Maybe with study she could unravel the snarl.

Usually women like Kerstin wouldn’t even try. So many times Bobby met some fascinating bohemian woman, connected over some niche interest, then felt the air between them ripple with possibility. But circumstance would force a shy confession of, you know, faith. He’d watch her face fall as the fantasy crumbled. Here was no urbane sophisticate, he was just another superstitious bumpkin.

But those were the wages of conscience. Don’t pretend to be who you aren’t. Don’t lie about who you are. Don’t kill people with sex.

Even if Kerstin learned something, it’s doubtful she retained much. Jeff and Bobby ran their hosts ragged. Booze was cheap. Bars closed at dawn. There were new raucous bands playing in Cold War bomb shelters and everyone was young and beautiful. Maybe Kerstin and Jack had to work in the morning but they could be bribed with one more drink and a dare. They spent a week hung over.

Jack and Kerstin taught them the game of dodging the tram cops. Unlike America, buses and trains had no turnstile. Just hop on. No one ever punched their ticket. It was an honor system enforced only by a roving band of hangdog men in armbands. Jack or Kerstin would notice the tram gestapo and nudge their guests in the other direction, sweating for a chance to exit before they got fined. The whole city was a game.

The fourth-floor apartment was decorated with Jack’s whimsical drawings and Kerstin’s handmade finger puppets, with furniture salvaged from the street. There were guitars, an electric bass, and a clarinet Jack found in a secondhand store. It had high ceilings and low square footage, so every free space was crammed with two lives’ necessaries. The recent influx of foreign cars with alarms meant an all-night barrage of whoops and shrieks, all identical, allowing no clear indication whose vehicle was, in fact, not being stolen.

The guests slept late on the couch and floor. Jack and Kerstin would slip out to work and leave coffee and bread. Jeff rose before Bobby and sweated to memorize useful Hungarian phrases. Which is not like brute-forcing some French or Italian. It’s not a Romance language. There are no cognates. The tongue closest to Hungarian is Korean. This was Jeff’s idea of fun.

One night at an underground bar called Tilos (tr: Forbidden!), Jeff insisted on trying out his Hungarian on the pretty waitress. God knows how much cheap wine was imbibed by that point. What he thought he said to her was:

Hello, I would like some water.

Except he blew a single key syllable so what he actually said was:

Hello, I love you.

Jack and Kerstin about fell on the floor in hysterics. The waitress spun on a heel and disappeared. Jeff blushed and hid his face. Eventually he got his water and the rest got a night that they talked about for years.

Jack had learned a language. He’d found a job. He’d made a bunch of foreign friends. He had a band. He’d fallen in love. If Jack was the experiment group, it sure looked like the experiment was working.

In Hungary, Bobby wasn’t a leper. No one wished him dead. There was no Cowboy Jesus shooting down sinners in a righteous rage. He might be a short-timer but he was really living.

And now back to our fun present-day yarn

My world had expanded. I was slightly less provincial, slightly less Americanist. And, in a weird twist of conscience, I felt like I owed a debt.

Jack loved to recount the story of Madar shadowing me, hoping I’d get drunk and pass out, so he could steal my Rollins Band t-shirt. I always felt bad that I didn’t realize what it might have meant to a guy living there at that time.

I’ve been back to Budapest twice. Once, circa 2000, when the internet was still young and social media was still a few years off. I had no good method to reconnect with anyone I had met on the previous trip.

Then I visited a third time—last year, in 2025. My family spent five months living in Budapest for work. Now, every human in the world is too connected for our own good. I messaged Jack to tell him. I wanted to tour half-remembered locations that had become mythical in my memory. He helped me map key spots and pin them down to street addresses.

The train station.

His old apartment.

The bar where Jeff accidentally declared his love to the waitress.

At some point I asked if he knew what ever happened to the Hungarians I met during my first stay. Jack still kept in loose contact with most of them via social media. He went through the list and finally told me, “Madár still lives there and works at the same record store. And now he speaks English.” I was floored. I had to see him. Even though I was sure he wouldn’t remember me. Why would he?

It took a while to work up my courage. I scoped out the store. I thought about what I would say, how I would jolt his no-doubt expired memories. And, most important, I bought him a particular gift that I hoped would warm him to me.

One day, I swallowed hard and entered. It’s easy enough. It’s the oldest joke in the world: A guy walks into a record store… There’s no punchline because it never ends. The store was a tiny space in a touristy neighborhood that had once been cheap. There were two guys working. One bore no resemblance. The other… honestly, I had no idea. I barely had a mental picture of the kid from 1994. So I asked, “Hey. Are you Madár?” Smart, right?

He looked at me askance, like I was someone he might owe money. But then I delivered the haymaker: “Did you used to play in a band called Ribspreader?”

Then he knew it was a setup. An American walks in off the street and asks about his math rock band from the 90s? I think he actually looked around for cameras. Cautiously, he replied that he had, in fact, played drums in a band called Ribspreader. And how did I know that? I told him I’m a friend of Jack’s. We met before. At a birthday party for Jack’s girlfriend, Kerstin, like thirty years ago.

Then he surprised me. He remembered my name. He lit up, asking about Jack, about me, about what I was doing there. I filled him in. Then he wandered into a memory: “Did Jack ever tell you about that party? I watched you the whole night. I hoped you would fall asleep so I could steal your t-shirt.” I threw my head back and laughed. Jack loves that story, I told him. There was some discrepancy over whether it was a Rollins Band (a little dorky) or Black Flag t-shirt (much cooler). But I’d never owned a Black Flag shirt. I am, you see, a little dorky.

I told him I felt bad, that had I known I would have given him the shirt. Then I took off my backpack, reached in, and pulled out that very t-shirt. (Okay, a replica, but actually from 1992.) A gift for him, long overdue.

Finally, I had set history aright. Only in one tiny way. But every repair to conscience makes the whole stronger. Now he laughed. He hugged me. Then, in rapid-fire Hungarian, he explained the whole crazy-looking situation to his boss.

I discovered that his old band with Jack, Ribspreader, had become semi-famous. They helped catalyze the underground music scene—previously forbidden—after the Soviets left. He showed me an extensive writeup (with references to “the American,” as in Jack) in the definitive history (volume 2!) of Hungarian punk, below.

I spent a long time talking with Madár and his boss about Ribspreader, favorite bands, the local music scene, great shows we’d attended, Jack’s other Hungarian friends, their own Trumpy autocrat Viktor Orbán, Hungarian politics, the depressed state of things outside the city, our families, our jobs, the many bands we’d played in.

And, of course, before I left—with a date to go out for drinks—I had to get a photo to send to Jack.

Memoir is about connection. I knew I could not leave that city without reconnecting with Madár, whom I had jilted in a tiny way by failing to get blackout drunk. It made for a good story but in my mind there was this grain of unresolved conflict. It rubbed me the wrong way. Now resolved, and a friend made, I feel a bit more balance in my little slice of history.

It’s easy to press “like,” to restack, and to share this with someone. Thank you!

Related essays:

• Sunday. A shitty prayer. How to defeat dread. Advice to myself.

• There’s gotta be a first time. And you never forget it.

• This is what Joe Strummer trained you for. Now we riot.

• A song has the power to write history.

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Buy me a cup of coffee?

In case you missed the premise of my bonkers apocalyptic memoir, it’s here. Youth! AIDS! Punk rock! Love! Christian Nationalism! Sex! Resistance!

I’m tracking in realtime the process of getting it published. Maybe this will help you too?

This week’s agent query near-miss:

Bob,

I have thought long and hard about your pitch and now your query. I don’t have the bandwidth to take on your memoir. I represent an overlapping just-published book. [The author] worked on it for 20+ years. It took us 7 years to find a publisher for a next to nothing advance. Great reviews & launch but I don’t think I can do it again, I am a one person operation. I have maybe 5 more years. I want to do the books I have to do.

Stick to your guns.

I wish you the best of luck.

[Agent]

Onward…

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of Tiny Memoirs. (The first three are here, here, and here.)

David Foster Wallace called writing “one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.” He filled out his list with poetry, music, sex, and religion. Especially in times such as these, there is power in sharing our struggles. But it helps to understand how to write them down. Those are the twin reasons I started soliciting Tiny Memoirs from people.

Below you will find a powerful story. I’ve put numbers at key story turns to demonstrate how to create a satisfying story progression.

1. The Plan — ordinary life with conventional hopes.

2. Rumblings — that hint that something is coming.

3. The Event — that changes everything.

4. The Ripples — where the protagonist reacts, struggles to adjust, then makes a hard proactive choice that meets resistance.

5. Blindsided — the lowest point, tempted to quit.

6. A New Plan — where the protagonist synthesizes the previous approaches into a new proactive plan.

If you have a story you want to tell (or, more likely, are scared to tell), I encourage you to click here and answer the prompts with 2-3 sentences each. Then ping me (for some reason the survey doesn’t notify me). You’ll see for yourself how the story structure works. We’ll kick it back and forth until you’re happy, and then publish it.

Anonymity is always an option in publishing these Tiny Memoirs. Since this week’s involves sensitive matters, real names and identifying details have been changed.

As always, the purpose of sharing here is to deepen empathy. Sit with the story. Imagine it is yours. Constructive comments are encouraged. Inflammatory ones will be deleted. Practice being a good neighbor.

“I Didn’t Expect the Death Threats”

By Anonymous

[1.] I came of age right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time, a big book was Francis Fukayama’s “The End of History,” which argued that the post-Cold War world had settled on liberal democracy as the final step in humanity’s political evolution. At the time, I believed it. Why not? I grew up in a stable, upper middle-class, white household. My political views were formed in our liberal Protestant church, where a youth pastor taught me about liberation theology, and my parents were supportive. While still in high school, I protested for abortion rights. Later, I volunteered with the Democrats and protested the wars in Iraq – all of them – and Afghanistan. I was a well-meaning, if naive, U.S. liberal.

Still, I didn’t think my life would be directly connected to global events. I saw my life unfolding as someone who would work for justice but not really have to sacrifice much. I trained as an academic and teacher. I hoped to find a life partner. Regular hopes. But when I lived in Germany for a year, during the Second Intifada (circa 2000), I read news that was very different than what people in the U.S. were reading. There, I met people who politely hinted that I had not been given accurate information about the world. I had no real idea of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict after 1948. I assumed that Palestine was an equal force fighting with Israel, like a war between two nation-states.

[2.] So I didn’t understand the stakes when my cousin signed up to be a human rights observer in Palestine. Before she left, she asked me to be an emergency contact. Sure, okay, going overseas, fine, I’ll be a contact. This was in the run-up to the Iraq War, so people were on edge. But once she started sending emails about what she was seeing, I realized she had entered a dangerous situation.

[3.] My cousin worked in Gaza. As a human rights observer, she documented violence against civilians during military actions, in order to serve as a form of deterrence against them. The only thing that should matter is that she was a U.S. citizen with legal permission to be there. But other key facts are that she was tiny, a woman, equipped with a blaze orange vest and a megaphone, and unarmed. The Israeli Defense Forces were demolishing homes of civilians. My cousin moved in front of a home, waving her arms, to alert them that a family with small children was inside. In response, she was killed.

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[4.] My first reaction was shock. Just utter shock. My witty, passionate, cousin—a senior in college—was dead. Murdered by soldiers. I awaited the wave of outrage from Americans that a U.S. citizen had been killed—by war machines paid for with U.S. tax dollars. The outrage never came. Then I was shocked anew that my country was not going to come to her defense. In retrospect, it was incredible naivete.

I had just completed my PhD. All my school friends had graduated and moved away. I had started a new job in a K-12 school that was in a pretty conservative area of my southern city. I had a pastor who was responsive but, overall, most people didn’t get it. Generally, people didn’t understand the Israel-Palestine situation. So they were sympathetic but in the way one would be if my cousin had been hit by a car. It was sad to them but they weren’t angry. They received it as a tragedy—not as an injustice and a crime. So I was alone with my shock, without a solid friend circle on the ground.

I found myself facing a choice—how to respond? I heard about a protest organized for Palestine, so I went to pass out handbills asking people to urge their congressional representatives to investigate my cousin’s death. The organizers immediately understood that my story was important and handed me a megaphone. Not unlike the megaphone my cousin shouted through before she was killed.

My strategy for coping became political action. I continued to work with that group for years. I wrote op-eds. I spoke at events in support of Palestinian rights. I developed relationships with a wide range of activists, including former Black Panthers and Pan-Africanists, Communists, Anarchists, lots of Arabs and Muslims, anti-Zionist Jews, and a handful of deeply committed Christians. All people who’d been targeted for speaking their beliefs. They gave me a crash course in political education and public theology. I don’t know that this was conscious but in retrospect it’s clear I was looking for community. I made an entirely new set of friends—friends who understood what was happening in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Friends who understood what had happened to my cousin, and to me. I even found my future husband among them.

[5.] I didn’t expect the death threats. Nor the reams of hate mail. People tried to get me fired from my job. Over and over, I was told my cousin deserved to die because she was a terrorist working with Hamas. (Sound familiar?) People were committed to an illusion. I discovered the depths to which they’ll go to keep that illusion alive. The price for speaking out about Palestine became high.

[6.] But my grief was relentless. It was important to speak about my cousin and what happened to her. To be proud of her. And to connect with people who were also victims of state violence. So I told my cousin’s story, again and again. And I listened to many similar stories from Palestinians. And that’s how, over time, I began to work through my feelings of loss.

Each member of my family grieved in their own way. In the intensity of our loss, we had barely started to grasp that this event was not a rogue act. It was policy. I feel so much for the parents of Alex Pretti, who was murdered by ICE agents. The government is doing to his parents what they did to my cousin’s parents, and to me. That’s why I speak out. The wrong path is to isolate yourself, to ignore your grief.

But sustaining activism over time is hard. People come and go. They start families. The stakes get higher. I’m older now, taking care of my mother. My husband travels for work. And, for all those marches and protests, Gaza is worse off than ever before. Nothing I did really moved the needle of public opinion. Perhaps the ongoing genocide will do that. But authoritarians have taken over, and constantly reinforce politically expedient illusions, so public opinion may not matter.

In time, I passed on the megaphone. It’s hard to get people to listen: wisdom is the knowledge you gain right after you needed it. Also, I didn’t want to profit from – or feed my ego on – my cousin’s sacrifice. Nor make it about me when Palestinian families are the ones suffering.

Now, the acute crisis is closer to home. So I try to teach my students about a Nonviolent Jesus. And, when they ask, how to be strategic about activism. Together, we work to develop responses to the current domestic political situation. I feel my sense of vocation changing. I think a lot about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who taught in an underground seminary during Germany’s Nazi era. Maybe now I’m called to do something similar…?

It is an acknowledgement of the memoirist’s bravery to press LIKE. And RESTACK. And SHARE. Thanks!

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Quick updates on publishing shenanigans. One agent apologized for the long turnaround, saying she came back to read my pages twice — she passed anyway. Another agent said a similar thing. (I do appreciate an actual response. Most ghost.) I joined a pitch event on Zoom and two agents requested my materials. One seemed genuinely bowled over by the story — but then asked if it could be a graphic novel. Hahahaha ugh. I mean, sure? Except it would take two years if I had the means to pay an artist to draw it, and then I’d be no closer to selling it than I am now. So.

Takeaway: join Zoom pitch events. 100x more efficient.

“I want more life, fucker.” — Roy Batty, replicant, on his last day of existence.

I have a theory: aging with intention is the most punk rock move.

Punk demands maximum life.

The original demand made by punk was for more life (comma, fucker). In Britain, people were on the dole, cops were violent, and the ruling class was rich. Even the old curative, rock radio, spewed pompous prog fantasies of dragons and shit. Culture had been hijacked from regular people.

So punk erupted to take back the culture or burn it down. More life, or none.

Then, in America, a punk of the spirit: parents moved their kids to anodyne (white) suburbs, smothered them under materialism, bulldozed them into safe careers. All in service of the empty worship of the American god, Mammon. But kids didn’t need more things. They needed more connection. More life.

In my evangelical youth group, we were taught that Jesus promises “life to the fullest.” But evangelicals devolved into a cult of grievance, which undermined the authority of the message they were preaching. If Jesus was right, nowadays no one can hear it.

So in America, Punk was retooled into hardcore, post-punk, indie rock, Riot Grrrl, and so on. It developed a tireless work ethic. Connection. Community. A lust for the life kids were promised but ultimately denied.

We did what we had to do to grow up. But now those punks are not kids anymore. We’re all — how?? — heading into the third act of life.

Good news! The third act, as writers know, is where the hero formulates a better plan.

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Punk is not a sound or a look. Punk is an ethos.

Punk is not a sound or a look — which became cliches decades ago. Punk is an ethos. Which means its tenets can apply at any age or stage of life.

Punk values are authenticity of self and welfare of one’s community. It’s radically egalitarian. Punk resists negotiable values (aka “selling out”) and self-importance (aka “rock star shit”). It’s a yardstick to evaluate life choices amidst mercenary systems. Like, you know, this death-cult money-trench horror-show society.

Income level is irrelevant. The question is whether you control money or it controls you. Same for religion. Or education. Or fashion. Or what you put in your body.

Punk is the struggle to remain personally authentic and caring as you navigate fraught situations. Like capitalism. Or death.

Punk can save your life. I don’t mean figuratively.

My friend of 30 years, Tim, died recently. He killed himself. He had crippling mental health disorders that made his survival to old age increasingly unlikely.

He told us that. He knew the case studies and he laid out the statistics for our viewing. He made every valiant effort to live, because he loved us. But age held no appeal for him. Since he endured so much suffering, his desire to live abandoned him.

Tim distinguished between himself and the friends he called “old punks.” He said we had been well-served by our anger. It helped protect us from abuse and depression. He never had that fuck you anger in his youth. Instead, he absorbed and suppressed the trauma from the abuse he endured — sexual, psychological, emotional. (Those may be redundant.) His “old punk” friends had deflected their trauma in ways he couldn’t.

Age was a hostile country to Tim. I’m trying to embrace it. Especially since, like a lot of us, I never even thought I’d get here.

Punk aging: a case study in Henry Rollins.

It’s easy to be angry about aging, in the hope that you won’t. That’s just denial.

On the other extreme, you can give up, let go, admit defeat, and slide into senescence. That’s just defeat.

But what if there’s a third way?

My grandmother once told me, “Inside, I don’t feel any older than you.” I instantly recognized the truth in this. Our internal self-image is tethered to some ideal age. For me, probably my early 30s. But on the outside, we see visible evidence of a body moving through its life cycle. That disconnect makes the mirror startling.

I think both perceptions are true.

The guy who wrote Ecclesiastes some 2500 years ago said: God has set eternity in the hearts of humankind. The body is not engineered to live forever, yet we want that. Why? It’s a mystery — and an adventure. If punk is about the authentic self, then the most punk move is not to deny, nor surrender, but to collaborate with one’s aging body.

I think Henry Rollins offers an interesting example.

Rollins embodies the punk ethos. Sweat equity. Living low to the ground (dude lived in a tool shed while in Black Flag). He wrote books that grappled with rage, burnout, death, striving. And one day, he and his best friend were held up at gunpoint outside their Venice Beach bungalow. His friend was shot in the head and murdered. Rollins bolted, ran like hell, and lived — a permanent poster boy for survivor’s guilt.

A few years after, when I cornered Rollins to attempt a zine interview, I brought an older interview in the same rag. I proposed that I ask him those same questions again. He got angry. “So you want to throw my old answers back in my face?” Rollins’ brand was rage, after all. Somehow I thought fast enough to say, “No. I assume you’ve changed over time so I want to find out in what ways.”

He thought it over. He could see I was trying, so he brought me a cup of coffee. We had a great talk. Deep and funny. He did a full exegesis of punk dogma to show how — though he was making seven figures at that point — he put the money to noble use funding worthy projects that otherwise would go unrealized. He still slept on a mattress and owned two pairs of shoes. The money was not in control.

Cut to a few years ago. Rollins no longer tours with a band. He does shows that began as “spoken word” and evolved into something closer to standup comedy. His entire persona underwent an obvious shift. The intense, coiled, intimidating guy had given way to happy, enthusiastic, “Uncle Henry.” He’s aware of the dissonance. He drily explained, “Maybe the testosterone level is starting to fade, as my hair can’t get any whiter. I still hate men and want to fight them but, knowing that any 16-year-old could kick my ass, I have to remain peaceful.”

But that’s just it. He could keep up the intense toughguy act. Or he could retire. But his inner reality told him something different. So he collaborated with his body. He’s still true to himself but in new ways.

It’s the most punk move he could make. Be true to himself even as his “self” changes.

When Ian MacKaye’s son was born, I sent him a note to wish the family well. His reply included an assessment I think about often: “Things feel as they should be.” He took the measure of a fraught situation and found his choice felt true to his values. He was in uncharted waters but the boat felt balanced.

Punk is mostly about choices.

Often, the punk move is taking the hard way. It’s harder to keep shows cheap, to make them all-ages, to put women at the front. Well, it’s hard to remain engaged as you age.

Some of my own punk-inflected choices:

• Refuse to become irrelevant

• Dare to be the old guy/gal at the show

• Listen to your inner voice and recalibrate accordingly

• Get used to your aging face

• Believe that this process is natural and okay

• Defy the moneyed powers that glorify youth — for exploitation, mostly

• Embrace the late-life reinvention

• Maintain your body with a sense of grace

• Love your music but take the new stuff seriously

• Follow your curiosity to deep places

• Don’t let money make your decisions for you

• Add colors to your emotional palette

When the outer and inner self is in balance, it frees us to pay attention to others. To cultivate community. To support the scene.

Simone Weil wrote, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say: ‘What are you going through?’” Your hard road makes you capable of it.

The young and beautiful will go on reinventing the wheel — as if Plato’s ideals had escaped some library book and were walking around vaping. But you know them. You were them, once. They barely see you and likely think you have nothing to offer them. That’s okay. Your rage has made you gentle. Given you an appetite for more life. Pushed you toward a better plan.

In the same way Ian or Henry can take a stand that ripples out into their scene, so can you carve a path for the ones soon to follow, endowing them with more life, comma, fuckers. Simply by remaining in it.

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I’m stoked to have an essay featured on the New Evangelicals stack! Check it out.

The New Evangelicals

That Time Jesus Killed Me

You’ll be dead by 30. That’s what the letter said, basically. The letter was terse, clinical, definitive, impossible. This is how I heard it in my mind…

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4 months ago · 1 like · The New Evangelicals and Bob Massey

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Hello, friend.

This Substack started out as a place to flog a memoir, Dead Virgins For America. It’s a pretty crazy story that wrestles with punk rock + Jesus + AIDS + Nationalism + Sex + Apocalypse. A comedy, obviously.

I wanted to track in realtime my publishing efforts, in hopes that would be useful. But the mission crept towards something else. Now we wrestle with angels here.

If you’re new to Dead Virgins For America, read these first:

Spirituality — in the most Punk Rock Sense of the Word

• Aging is the Most Punk Move

• Punk Houses Were a Spiritual Movement: What Fugazi, Moby Dick, Jesus, and Ratty Punk Houses Share—the Radical Belief That Every Person Has Value.

• Joy as an Act of Resistance: How to Fight Burnout and Political Exhaustion

• Sunday: A Shitty Prayer — How to Defeat Dread. Advice to Myself.

Creativity — as an Act of Survival

• Watch a Writer Bet on Himself: #001

• Watch a Writer Bet on Himself: #023

Interviews — with the Raddest of People

• Ryan O’Connell on “Special,” Disability, and Queer Storytelling

• James Spooner on Vulnerability, Afro-Punk, and DIY Storytelling

Community — a Series of Tiny Memoirs, Published Anonymously

• Tiny Memoir: #001

• Tiny Memoir: #003

Whatnot — Some Mashup of All the Above

• Thirty Years Later, I Finally Gave Him My T-shirt: Budapest, punk rock, and paying a debt that existed only in my conscience

I currently work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. But I’ve also been a journalist for The Washington Post and others. I’ve composed scores and an opera. I grew up recording and touring in loud arty punk bands.

I had reason to think I’d be dead by 30. As a teen, I thought Jesus was the most punk rock bastard I’d ever encountered. My family was a violent trainwreck. I’ve had to teach myself kindness, self-control, and empathy. It’s an ongoing process.

These are the pillars of our work here. Please comment, subscribe, share.

Publication archives.

THANKS: The person you are now was not fated. The you that you are exists against all odds. You are greater than the sum of your genetic code. Where both nature and nurture fell short, you exceeded expectations. You built yourself.

But not for your self’s sake. That’s the way of monsters.

It cost you. At every turn. More than anyone knows. You could have gone the easy way, the indulgent way, the selfish way. No one would fault you. Me, me, me is the accepted way. But you envisioned something more meaningful.

No one will inventory your sacrifices and assign the proper values but everyone will sense their aura, surrounding you, instantly. When you are gone, the aura will remain, assumed by the people near you.

HELP: From here, inside the monstrous system, it’s hard to map a way out. The system rewards the depraved. But there is a path. We are training our eyes to see.

BLARGH: Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Friend’s Day, Mentor’s Day, Helper’s Day, Sponsor’s Day, Partner’s Day, Artist’s Day, Writer’s Day, Dancer’s Day, Dog’s Day. Goodness is a struggle.

The monsters fear that struggle.

AMEN.

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Related Sunday shitty prayers:

• How to defeat dread — advice to myself

• Fear is the mindkiller

• For the suckers

In case you missed the premise of my bonkers apocalyptic memoir, it’s here. Youth! AIDS! Punk rock! Love! Christian Nationalism! Sex! Resistance!

Yesterday, by some kismet, I was wearing a Sinéad O’Connor t-shirt when her song “Black Boys on Mopeds” (covered by Fontaines DC) came on the radio. A song that has been covered by at least 20 other artists, including Phoebe Bridgers and Sharon Van Etten. Right after I read that Jacob Bannon from Converge cited her as lifechanging. So I thought: Someone’s telling me I better write this.

The long and happy lives of the prophets

There’s a story behind the song. (Annotated lyrics here, well worth reading.)

In Britain, as in America, Black people operate under the white presumption of guilt. In 1989, London police saw a Black kid named Nicholas Bramble riding a moped. Since he was Black, they assumed he had stolen it. They gave chase. Panicked, the kid crashed the moped — which he owned — and died.

The police got a pass. This was far from an isolated incident. It was a pattern.

“Remember what I told you: if they hated me, they will hate you,” goes the song’s layered allusion — to a black boy murdered by police, to Sinéad’s young son, to her own provocative activism, to Jesus’s warning for his little band of subversives.

In her most infamous protest, Sinéad went onstage on Saturday Night Live and tore up a photo of the Pope. The act was instantly condemned. And widely misunderstood.

I remember the religious folk around me took it as a rejection of faith. In reality, it was a rejection of the literally patriarchal system that shielded clergy who abused kids—a fate she herself had suffered. But prophets get no honor. Years ahead of the news cycle, she was threatened, reviled, mocked (by Madonna, even!), and smeared.

Remind you of anyone?

In the song, the nation’s leader expresses horror at a foreign government’s murder of citizens, but is unmoved by the same thing in her own country.

(Remind you of anyone?)

Sinéad sings:

England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses

It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds

And I love my baby and that’s why I’m leaving

I don’t want him to be aware that there’s

any such thing as grieving.

Here’s another, less poetic, way of putting it:

America’s not the mythical “God’s country” of singing cowboys and freedom. It’s the home of white authorities who torment brown people with impunity. I love my baby and that’s why I’m leaving. I don’t want him to be aware that there’s any such thing as grieving.

…Oh, wait, did you think I was saying that? No, that was God.

Jesus has left America

In the last 25 years, 40,000,000 Americans have stopped going to church. That’s about 1 in 6 Americans. A 2023 study of 7,000 people found the major reasons to be abuse, corruption, and exclusion.1

To 40 million eyes, God’s brown son has left America.

If you are an evangelical, this should tell you something: you’re doing it wrong.

The voices of evangelical grievance are LOUD. The current authoritarian regime was put in power by evangelicals. But where are the evangelical hands that bring healing? Where is the chorus of evangelical voices that shout for justice? For kindness? For neighborly decency?

I listen for that chorus. Along with 40 million people. I hear…

…Silence.

Silence is complicity.

If you call yourself a Christian but stay silent, you are the one killing brown kids.

When I was a weird punk kid trying to survive and find my way, evangelicals gave me great gifts. They welcomed me. They helped build my conscience. They gave me tools for accountability, to keep conscience intact. (They also supported the political regime that was complicit in trying to kill me, but…) They taught me the difference between justice and revenge. They taught me about grace.

To find grace, first confess. Then repent.

One simple step that will reunite our divided nation

1. It is time for believing people to ask forgiveness of the people they have wronged.

Brown, Black, queer, trans, foreign-born, female, poor, disabled, pregnant, divorced, non-Christian, artistic, liberal, unhoused, ill, young, “wrong,” unwelcome.

These are your neighbors. Make them your friends. Save your nation and your soul.

One one occasion, a theology bro responded to test the teacher. “What must I do to get God’s kind of life?”

“Well, what’s written?”

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind. And love your neighbor.”

“Correct. Do so and you’ll discover life.”

But the theology bro got a little nervous, knowing the truth about his performance. “So… who is my neighbor, exactly?”

The teacher responded, “A nice educated white dude a lot like you was heading home when he got mugged. They stole his clothes and beat him bloody. He lay in a ditch, a mess, barely conscious—looking not so nice or educated but perhaps strung out or homeless or both. A church pastor saw but crossed the street. A nice law-abiding guy not unlike you also saw and also crossed the street. But a Black Somali immigrant took pity, wiped his blood, put him in his rideshare, and got him medical care, paying from his own pocket. Which of these people was the better American? The more godly? His neighbor?”

The theology bro replied, “But I got an M. Div. from Fuller.”

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Related essays:

• JOY AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE: How to Fight Burnout and Political Exhaustion.

• Sunday. A shitty prayer. How to defeat dread. Advice to myself.

• There’s gotta be a first time. And you never forget it.

• This is what Joe Strummer trained you for. Now we riot.

• A song has the power to write history.

I’m slammed with work this week so I’m ganking another prompt from . Next week I promise a return to funny/sad/heartfelt/loss/joy/resistance. Probably.

In case you missed the premise of my investigative memoir, it’s here. Youth! AIDS! Punk rock! Love! Christian Nationalism! Sex! Resistance!

LS: For non-fiction authors: what did you write in your book proposal about why this book needs to exist and why you’re the best person to write it? Translate that argument into a Substack post.

I, Bob, am the person to write it because I was so much older then as the kid, Bobby, who experienced the key events. I’m younger than that now. I mean, look at this sweet dummy. Thought he could be some B-grade rockstar. Or at least earn a middle-class existence in music. He thought politicians meant well. And that evangelicals would actually do what Jesus said. He was sure he was gonna die young. And my dude was actually scared that he might be one of the 144,000 male virgins from Revelation, culled to usher in the Second Coming. He thought a girl might love him anyway.

What a dreamer, this guy.

The question that drives our protagonist’s story:

Is death God’s perfect plan for my life?

Key text from my 40-page book proposal:

DEAD VIRGINS FOR AMERICA takes a darkly humorous dive into Massey’s fatalistic mindset when an impossibility1 upends his life. He’s a kid who plays in punk bands2 and sees Jesus as a radical figure3 like Joe Strummer of the Clash,4 or Ian MacKaye of Fugazi.5 But America’s celebrity evangelicals6 and reactionary politicos7 increasingly see the historical Jesus8 as an obstacle to their thirst for power. So they systematically reinvent the church9 as a vehicle for their ambitions,10 which means recasting Jesus as a nationalist savior11 who preaches grievance12 instead of grace.13 A savior who eats his young—like Massey. The AIDS crisis14 shapes the Christian Nationalist playbook for scapegoating,15 which they hone in successive crises16—until it lands them in America’s seats of power.17 But good news!18 Massey eventually loses his virginity.19 And now his book shares how to survive toxic faith, find love and kickass music, and build authentic spiritual community.20

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Key info to understand this week’s post:

In case you missed the premise of my investigative memoir, it’s here. Youth! AIDS! Punk rock! Love! Christian Nationalism! Sex! Resistance!

What if NO?

Perhaps, in a charitable moment, you’ve thought: What if DJT is an anomaly? Didn’t the GOP used to be just stodgy white dudes who enjoyed cigars, lawn jockeys, top shelf liquor, a low golf handicap?

This week I read a post by author and Smart Book Person™ that offered challenge prompts for Substack writers. I’m already directing readers to the investigative memoir I’m flogging like a swayback mule but I liked her notion to write about the most surprising thing I’d discovered while researching my book.

I have to say, when it comes to the history of reactionary politicos and evangelicals colluding to scapegoat fellow Americans, the surprises come like a gusher. But here’s the finding that came to mind.

…And! Here’s my call to action: If this makes you feel feelings—bricky, up the pole, the morbs—send it to a friend. Here’s some boilerplate text to include: “Holy shit! I thought Trump was just a lone sociopath who gamed the system but turns out these guys have been Nazis all along!”

A brief excerpt from Dead Virgins For America that includes Joseph McCarthy, sodomy, the 14th Amendment, nosy people, one actual Nazi who helped found a high-profile ostensibly Christian think tank, the misunderstood satire that launched the quote secret homosexual agenda, pro-gay marriage Baptist President Jimmy Carter, and pastors threatening to murder me and lots of lovely people minding their own damn biz.

Prison. Hard labor. A felony conviction. That’s what gays got in the U.S. before 1962. At the moment Bobby tested his friends, anti-sodomy laws were still on the books in 27 states. The last wouldn’t be repealed until 2003. There were witch hunts for gays, fueled by preachers and McCarthyism. Gays couldn’t even keep it to the privacy of the bedroom, said the Supreme Court, ruling on the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Nope. Government meant to stand over every bed to regulate behavior therein. Which is obvious lunacy. So homosexual citizens were forced to agitate for their rights to be recognized. Slowly, they gained ground as the concept of mind your own damn business was reintroduced to people who were, by no doing of their own, straight.

Evangelicals largely stayed out of politics before the 1970s. But a guy named Paul Weyrich saw an opportunity, if he could just find a catalyzing issue. His efforts to oppose women’s rights got no takers. So he pivoted to defending racially segregated evangelical colleges. But he deftly reframed his defense of racism as quote religious freedom. A constitutionally slippery tactic quickly adopted by his new movement, the Religious Right. Then he went on to found the Heritage Foundation, a powerful think tank who drove anti-gay legislative efforts through eleven administrations.

Weyrich was a character. He felt Richard Nixon was too liberal. His right hand man was a Nazi collaborator who helped exterminate Hungary’s Jews. And he loved conspiracy theories. Which is probably why he mistook gays’ push to be treated humanely as a quote secret homosexual agenda. He didn’t coin that term. Possibly he got suckered by its source, a pre-Onion satire of anti-gay propaganda in Boston’s Gay Community News, which began:

Tremble, Hetero Swine! We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lives. We will raise vast private armies … to defeat … the family unit.

I mean, actual LOL. It was a joke, Paul.

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In March, 1980, a group of fundamentalist ministers petitioned President Jimmy Carter to halt the advance of gay rights. Celebrity pastor Bob Jones III—whose segregated university Weyrich championed—claimed:

God’s judgment is going to fall on America as on other societies that allowed homosexuality to become a protected way of life.

In case his reference isn’t clear, he adds:

I’m sure this will be greatly misquoted, but it would not be a bad idea to bring the swift justice today that was brought in Israel’s day against murder and rape and homosexuality. I guarantee it would solve the problem post-haste if homosexuals were stoned, if murderers were immediately killed as the Bible commands.

Full and actual quote.

So there was Bobby, honorary homosexual, threatened with execution by a Christian activist, who’s making his appeal directly to the President of the United States. It’s not paranoia if God’s reps really are after you.

Charming as ever, Jones added that Carter, who claims to be a Bible-believing Christian, is not fit to be president and that there is no question that Ronald Reagan is the unanimous choice of Bible-believing people all over the country. Perhaps it’s just incidental that Carter supported gay marriage, citing his Baptist faith as his inspiration.

But it was Baptist celebrity pastor Jerry Falwell’s political organization, Moral Majority, who turned the electoral tide away from Carter toward another publicly professed Christian, Ronald Reagan. The organization’s TV ads suggested (with no evidence) that Carter was a traitor and no longer a Christian.

It was a pioneering move in the exploitation of religious fear to win votes. Reagan won the presidency and embraced Falwell’s positions. Including Falwell’s position that God was using the AIDS epidemic to bring an end to the Sexual Revolution, and that gay men…

…Are scared to walk near one of their own kind right now. And what we [preachers] have been unable to do with our preaching, a God who hates sin has stopped in its tracks by saying “do it and die.”[1]

The Moral Majority opposed governmentally funded AIDS research because they considered the disease a gay problem. Not only was AIDS God’s judgment on gay men, it was also quote a lethal judgment of God on America for endorsing this vulgar, perverted, and reprobate lifestyle.

Bobby was confused. It seemed almost as if Falwell did not actually read his Bible. Though that might be ungenerous. Perhaps he simply chose to ignore it.

In the first century, leprosy was thought to be highly contagious and incurable. A priest would inspect the afflicted, then declare them ritually unclean, cursed by God. People suffering from leprosy were forced to live apart from society. They had to loudly declare their presence by shouting, Unclean! Unclean! They were made homeless, friendless, and cut off from family.

In the Gospels, a man with leprosy touches Jesus. Bobby’s youth leaders told him that the man was breaking the law. Jesus’s response to the suffering man who asks for healing? He touches the man. Then he heals him. To Bobby, healing sure seemed like the opposite of Falwell’s lethal judgment.

[1] http://www.nap.edu/catalog/1881.html

Punch it. ↓↓↓↓↓↓

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Related essays:

• Sunday. A shitty prayer. How to defeat dread. Advice to myself.

• There’s gotta be a first time. And you never forget it.

• This is what Joe Strummer trained you for. Now we riot.

• A song has the power to write history.

In case you missed the premise of my bonkers apocalyptic memoir, it’s here. Youth! AIDS! Punk rock! Love! Christian Nationalism! Sex! Resistance!

I’m tracking in realtime the process of getting it published. Maybe that’ll help you?

I’m an ornery bastard, in case you haven’t picked that up. I survived the mindfuck of an HIV diagnosis. I drove a tour van around the country from age 16 to 36 to rant songs at strangers. I ran some marathons because I found the distance training contemplative. I bootstrapped my way into a gig writing for The Washington Post. I wrote an opera because the form is too good to leave to snobs. I read the Bible from cover to cover to make sure I knew the whole weird story. I jumped out of a plane to see if I could do it. I sold enough TV pilots to get into the Writers Guild of America. I defied my dad’s unholy wrath to see Bad Brains play “I Against I.” I’m hope-haunted.

But some weeks I just don’t have another publishing update / book excerpt in me.

Maybe the hardest thing is to survive to an advanced age with some sense of hope. Especially in this era where hope is under assault from all directions.

My value system was forged by the punk scene and by evangelicals. Maybe they seem opposed to you, but not to me. Both are built on the promise of maximum life.

• In both, you share a “faith”—whether in God, or in self-determination.

• The so-called Protestant Work Ethic is resonant with Black Flag’s relentless drive to play 300 shows a year, Fugazi’s DIY ethos, the vast network of underground venues / zines / record labels / punk houses.

• If you have access to resources, you are not a “radical” or a “socialist” or a “libtard” for sharing with those who have less. You are simply one part of the body, each part having different functions and abilities. Just because it’s good at chewing food, the mouth does not warrant all the nutrition while the foot warrants none. Community is necessary.

• All the money and fame and power in the world will not save you. In the words of Ian MacKaye—and Jesus: You are not what you own.

However, one of these things was willingly sold to politicians for 30 pieces of silver.

In my estimation, if you strip away the historical accretions, the values of the first century church still feel radical and diametrically opposed to everything contemporary evangelicals practice. This ronin rabbi named Yeshua—who openly loved the supposedly unlovable and only attacked hypocritical religious leaders—still seems like one of the most punk rock bastards who ever lived.

His divinity or lack thereof is open to debate, obviously. But his impact has so shaped western culture that in America we still put his current age on our license plates.

Unfortunately, American evangelicals now most visibly leverage that authority to gain dominance over others. Rather than deliver hope, which was their commission, they willfully suppress hope. Such people are, in a word, anti-Christ.

Since I am steeped in that worldview, for me the challenge is to see. To see what is plainly in front of my face. But also to see what is not visible to the human eye. Cut through the lies and jingoistic propaganda, but also scent deep truth on the wind. Somewhere, beyond what we can see right here in America, is the true truth.

That’s the challenge that drives my investigative memoir. But this space is no longer solely concerned with tracking my publishing effort. I think it needs a re-brand. So I’ve been struggling to articulate what this newsletter is fundamentally about.

Sometimes, when you’re close to a thing, you can’t see it.

Yes, punk anger protected me from abuse. Yes, religion weaponized my trust. Yes, I survived the mindfuck of HIV (through no virtue of my own). But you too have been angry, you too have lost trust, you too have survived.

There’s something else afoot here. Something that deals with our way forward.

I want to know what you—yes, you, the one reading this—value here. What sticks? What have you taken away? What do you hope to find when you open my email?

What’s the DNA of this Substack?

Quick, before distraction strikes, please type what you think my Substack is about in the comments. (Or if you’re feeling shy, DM me.) Don’t overthink it. Just whatever is meaningful to you. The thing you want to talk about here.

Thank you in advance. I need help. Your answer will mean so much to me.

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Today, a short sweet post that’s just a little bonbon for you while I spitshine some more substantial offerings. In case you missed the premise of my bonkers apocalyptic memoir, it’s here. Youth! AIDS! Punk rock! Love! Christian Nationalism! Sex! Resistance!

Dijon, “Many Times”

This is a song I’ve listened to approximately 47 times. It’s a couple years old, not brand new. But listen to this song—or, better, watch a video—and just feel the joy that burbles up from the depths and washes your day clean.

I forget exactly how I discovered this. It was the usual random thing: someone’s suggestion, or a review online, or just driving while listening to KEXP. But I kept going back to it, over and over.

My favorite comment from YouTube: “I want friends that look at me the way Mk.gee looks at Dijon.” (Mk.gee is the guitarist in the black shirt. He’s considered a sort of wunderkind who has reclaimed a very 80s sound — chorus pedal, solid state Roland JC 120 amp — that we olds associate with the dated pomp of crappy New Wave bands.) And it’s true. They’ve clearly having a blast, in love with the thing they’re making.

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Above is the official video. The one I actually prefer is right here, below.

This one is the “live” version recorded from the camera’s mics. It’s an excerpt from a 25 minute film that accompanies the album. At first, it seems like the band is sitting around someone’s living room, practicing. You think: Man, that’s a clever idea to shoot a video for like $12.50. It seems they’ve been up all night playing music, maybe a little high, and Dijon can barely sing at this point. He kind of croaks out the vocals on a frayed throat but that only brings more vehemence and enthusiasm to his delivery.

But eventually, Dijon gets so worked up he tears around the table and out of the room — and then it’s revealed to be set built on a soundstage. Then you think: Whoa, wait, this a production backed my real money. Still clever, still exciting. But this is not what I thought it was. Eventually, the fervor drives him outside the soundstage. It’s almost dawn. They’ve apparently been at this not for 25 minutes but for hours and hours.

It’s a clever way to tell the attentive viewer that, while they are real and this is their exciting thing they made, there’s an external force hovering around. Some larger entity is backing them. All this authenticity is being packaged for consumption. But they, cleverly, are letting you in on it while also refusing to dress up or put on airs.

This reminds me of the pivotal scene from Mulholland Drive, where the leads, Betty and Rita, go to a theater to hear the singer Rebecca Del Rio. A voice alerts them that this is not real, it’s a recording. Play is pushed on a boombox. But the women are so captivated by Rebecca Del Rio’s performance that they forget about all that. Until she faints. And her voice keeps singing. It’s the key that unlocks the entire twisty film and it’s maybe David Lynch’s most masterful scene.

Dijon, who’s an Army brat from Baltimore, refuses to be co-opted whilst also taking their money. It’s a smooth trick, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear.

From an interview, I found out Dijon lives a neighborhood over from me. He has two little kids about the ages of mine. Like me, he works in the entertainment industry. I find it comforting that he’s so aware of the forces bearing down on him. Yet he and his friends can still get together and make songs that bring themselves—and me—joy.

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(I don’t actually have a chat. Should I? Why? What happens if you join? No idea.)

In case you missed the premise of my bonkers apocalyptic memoir, it’s here. Youth! AIDS! Punk rock! Love! Christian Nationalism! Sex! Resistance!

I’m tracking in realtime the process of getting it published. Maybe that’ll help you?

Killing our fathers. That was a focus of the final email thread between my friend Tim and me. He left the thread unanswered so he could kill himself.

He never killed his father. It was the other way around. His father and mother sexually abused Tim and his sister Julie, and subjected them to abuse from others.

My parents did not sexually abuse me. Their abuse was more subtle — until it wasn’t. Then it was physical. Tim held that my punk anger had protected me. He didn’t have that. He was a pop / ECM jazz / indie guy. The blazing solar paternal rage that I reflected like an angry moon, he absorbed.

In our last email thread, we were talking about a recent argument my wife and I managed to resolve peaceably despite growing up angry…

Here is our final email thread forever oh God…

Tim: I read your email yesterday on the stationary bike. How do people do it? It’s a rhetorical question. I flatter myself with the belief that I’ve finally become pretty good at talking through serious conflict with the people I care about. Yet, I know very little about how that’s done when the stakes include financial commitments, careers, and children.

Bob: "Stationary bike" is a funny phrase if you don't already know what that is. Talking through serious conflict addresses the fundamental flaw in my character and the skillset I'm forced to amass in order to approach anything like a normal civil life. Zero people in my family knew how to do that. It wouldn't even occur to them. It was all brute force, either physical or emotional. A lot of it is sheer repetition of learned healthy responses. Mantras, almost. But also, it involves rewiring my internal systems.

Tim: Did I say “stationary bike?” I meant stationery bike. That’s the bike I’m riding when I write out my emails to you in longhand before subsequently typing them into gmail.

“Zero people in my family knew how to do that. It wouldn’t even occur to them. It was all brute force, either physical or emotional.”

Same here. It’s almost kinda funny having to learn this stuff later. Makes one feel like an alien on a new planet. But I mean… what is love if not the willingness to learn how to listen well and manage one’s responses, even if it’s formulaic? I dunno. That’s a big part of what I figure love is. God knows that big love feelings wane quickly.

Bob: I like this picture of you riding a pennyfarthing in your coat and tails, writing missives in your flowing cursive and signing your name with a little curlicue.

It’s interesting for me to think of someone who’s natively incapable of anger as a protective response. Kinda just doesn’t compute. It’s just so instinctive to me -- though I’m descended from angry people, of course. It totally tracks with what I know of you but it’s just such an anthropological curiosity. Your answer to this will probably be something clear and obvious but… what’s that about?

Tim: I’ve probably never told you this one memory of mine. Sometime between like 5th & 8th grade. I don’t remember what had just happened, but my guess is my father had just done something terrible. I’m pacing the perimeter of my bedroom saying “I will never be angry” over and over again. Seems like I did that for a long time, at least an hour. Maybe longer, I don’t know. I think that must be when I made that tendency mostly complete.

Anger in response to my parents felt life-threatening. Julie and I both learned how to fawn in our (often vain) efforts to mollify them. But especially in the case of my father, any failure to submit totally / instantly resulted in such a disproportionate, insane reaction that it was safer to suppress any angry impulse. I mean, I’d have done that from infancy. He was monolithically brutal.

But that changed by the time I was 16. He referred to my half-Chinese girlfriend as “old yellow face,” and I called him a bigot. He started coming for me, and I watched as his face registered a new calculus — I’d have killed him on the spot. As a bully, I think he recognized the new potential for real violence coming in the opposite direction.

By then, though, I was already the kind of person who makes nice when other people shit on him. Textbook codependency. That’s a lot better now, happily.

Oddly, that realization that I could physically better him is something I’ve had to come to over and over again because I seem to forget it.

Bob: I had never heard that anger stuff before. It’s just WILD that you suppressed it successfully. Man, I would pay for ringside seats to see you beat the fuck out of your old man. I would buy popcorn and a drink. I would rent a cushion.

I cannot express to you how crazy the feeling is in my body to read “I would have killed him on the spot.” I know this feeling. I know it with such depth and precision. It is vivid. I had no idea you’d felt that. Honestly, I’m not sure I knew anyone else had ever felt that. I remember my dad seeing the very thing in me as well. He was more taken aback than anything. He actually stopped and asked me if I understood what I’d just said. Oh boy did I understand, yessir, I was right there and ready and it would have been real bad.

Tim: I once actually told my father I’d kill him, though I was powerless to do it. I’m guessing I was 11 or 12. There was a big commotion in Julie’s room. I ran over there to find her crumpled up on the ground where my father had just thrown her. Her TV had been knocked to the floor, and stuff was scattered all over. My father left the room as I entered, but I turned around and intercepted him at the top of the stairs. I said, “If you ever touch her again, I’ll kill you.” He laughed at me and went downstairs. I don’t remember what happened next.

Weirdly, I only remember feeling homicidal towards him those two times. I’m just this moment realizing that both instances were when he was being awful towards/about a girl I loved in some way. Maybe I found my rage easier to access when I witnessed him abusing other people, I dunno.

What happened the time your father saw you in that homicidal state of mind? Do you remember the circumstances?

A brief excerpt from Dead Virgins for America

The answer to that question — and a version of the last thing I ever wrote to Tim — is below. An excerpt in which our protagonist, Bobby, is fed up. He works shifts at Applebee’s. He drives a decrepit Buick. His parents do not know of his HIV situation. His mom is having an affair with her boss, Howard. He frets whether, after college graduation, he should try to patch things up with his emotionally and physically abusive parents. His evangelical friends would say yes. His punk friends would say fuck no.

Bobby agonized whether to move home. He’d faithfully gone back each summer. But as the family imploded, and common civilities went out the window, he found himself increasingly parenting his feuding parents. He had not managed to tell them. Distance, busyness, fear, and good old denial had thwarted his intentions. But Bobby’s parents told him something: they planned to divorce.

It was a death. No matter how much warning, or emotional preparation, or exhausted relief might be involved, parents splitting is a bomb drop. Bobby was gutted by grief.

He pleaded, growled, whined to God to intercede. To somehow do a minor miracle to save their marriage, their family. Surely it was just a little thing compared to all those showstopper miracles. Didn’t God promise that mountains would move for just a seed’s-worth of faith? Who has more faith than this guy, in spite of everything? Please. Please. Please.

It’s unclear what Bobby really expected. Marriage is voluntary. The truth is that Bobby was mourning. Mourning isn’t rational. Mourning aches. But he felt he had one last chance to engineer some breakthrough.

He moved home.

Instantly, he knew it was a mistake. By then all pretense was gone. It was full-on Cold War between two people forced to haunt the same abode until such time as their assets could be butchered into digestible cuts and distributed.

To stay sane, Bobby lifted heavy things, did band stuff, and waited tables until late. At home, no one seemed to eat anymore. Daddy nibbled years-old brown sugar from the bag. Ma, God knows. So Bobby ate shift meals at the restaurant and after close would buy groceries at the all-night food emporium.

The third point of their hate triangle went ostentatiously unmentioned. Howard. But a few times a day their wall-mounted kitchen phone would ring. Bobby would wait for someone to answer it. But Daddy only stared at his cop show. Ma doggedly ignored the ringing. So when he could stand it no longer, Bobby would snatch up the receiver.

Hello?

No response. The faint sound of someone breathing.

Hello?

Nothing.

Bobby’s blood would go from simmer to boil. As if anyone didn’t know who was wheezing on the other end, whom the breathing was meant for. Bobby hated this game. He especially hated what this absurd silence implied: that by feigning a bad connection or a wrong number, the caller would somehow outfox him. As if Bobby were dumber than this dumb chimp someone trained to dial. Bobby hated this game and the dipshit playing it.

Howard, if you want to talk to my mom, just say so. I’m tired of this bullshit.

Bobby slammed the receiver down. Then he shouted in the general direction of wherever Ma was pretending to putter.

Ma, tell him to stop doing that shit.

No response. From either of them. It was lunacy. This place was batshit crazy. So, still, the parents did not learn of Bobby’s situation.

Then the tectonic plates shifted. Ma signed a lease with Howard, for whom she still worked. And Daddy changed his mailing address to the ratty marina on the river where he kept a rotting Chris Craft that had a bunk and a hot plate. He picked up occasional gigs as a home inspector or substitute teacher. (Come watch a grown man get devoured alive by children!) But mostly he charged bottles of cheap sherry to his credit card.

Suddenly the house was a ghost town.

So Bobby took every Applebees shift he could get. At this point, he was a machine for serving up Bud Light and chicken tenders. He barely even noticed he was there anymore. In his car, he would prepare for his shift by blasting Bitch Magnet and Breadwinner and the Jesus Lizard, and similar spiky metallic skullcrushers. He would enter the restaurant and never stop moving. He would clock out after midnight with no recollection of his shift, just a mental blackout, like a movie psychopath. Then he would hit the all-night grocery to shop for something to fill the wasteland at home.

His inner state had long passed apocalyptic.

When he wasn’t working he was working out. When he wasn’t working out he was rehearsing. When he wasn’t rehearsing he was playing shows. Atlanta. Charlotte. Columbus. Chicago. Detroit. Pittsburgh. Portland. Burlington. But the goal was to sign to a label that would release a full album. There were rumblings, near misses, promising leads.

Ma and Daddy came and went without any flightplan. Daddy had a phone at the boat that he never answered. Bobby never learned where Ma’s apartment with Howard was located. Occasionally happenstance would find all three in the house at the same time, ships passing in the family room. Not even the old standby of Buick repair opened any doors. The stable of topics between Bobby and Daddy had dimished to three.

1. How’s the car running?

2. Talked to your sister lately?

3. Thought any more about a real job?

That window was about to close anyway. Bobby planned to sell the Buick. The band needed to replace their van.

Daddy and Ma established a shaky detente. There were logistics to discuss. Practical matters to be decided. Howard was divorcing his wife, Carol, and giving her their house, which was a few blocks away. That affected timeline and cash flow. Daddy wanted to keep all the sentimental detritus he’d been hoarding in the attic, so he needed to move it out.

Bobby struggled to imagine how Daddy would cram more than a few boxes worth on that boat where he lived. But this was Bobby’s residual naivete at work. At some point Daddy announced that Carol had agreed to let him store his hoardings in her attic. He started moving crap over there.

One day, Bobby passed Howard and Carol’s place on his way to work. As usual, he flicked it the bird. But this time, the front door opened and Daddy stepped out, followed by Carol.

They kissed. A long, passionate, unmistakable kiss.

#

When rage floods the body with adrenaline, vision and hearing diminish, while heart rate and respiration spike. It’s a strange, heightened state that’s almost like being outside one’s own body. One can actually see red. Extremities actually shake. Rational function ceases. It can happen to anyone, and anyone it happens to is capable of actual fucking murder. Bobby happened to inherit the preconditions from Daddy, which is ironic, considering the moment.

In a move as classy as it was logical, his parents had swapped partners.

Bobby had shoved a lot under the floorboards already. This was too big. He had no mechanism by which to process it. He ran. Lifted. Worked. Screamed. Flailed. Hammered on his guitar in twelve U.S. states. Nothing relieved the violent fantasies that consumed him. This was a sunburn that wouldn’t heal. There was no remedy. He felt it every time he moved.

Now the secret was open. Not that anyone would speak of it directly. No, denial still reigned. What’s the problem? Nothing’s weird here in upside-down world. At least the fucking breathy phone calls had stopped.

But even the masters of denial couldn’t pretend 100% of the time. Daddy and Ma still loved to rip into each other whenever the opportunity presented itself. It was the family’s mode of communication. Start shit, get a rise, then act like the offended party. Ramp things up, await the retaliation, then blame the victim. Finally: go for the jugular, get kicked in the head, then scream about violence. This was how Bobby had been taught to do relationship.

Bobby was in the family room. Ma and Daddy were arguing, framed by the archway to the kitchen. Who knows what it was about, it happened six times a day. They did the whole dance, stair-stepping up the rhetoric, until it was incoherent screaming. Daddy grabbed Ma by the arms to throw her around. And Bobby snapped.

YOU FUCKING TOUCH HER AGAIN AND I’LL KILL YOU.

His feral, snarling, plausibly lethal son inches from his eyeballs broke the spell. Daddy paused, shocked. He seemed confused.

Did you hear what you just said?

Bobby didn’t need to answer. Daddy released Ma. It may be the last occasion he touched her in his lifetime.

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