"He's gone, and nothing's gonna bring him back."

“Now he's gone

Lord he's gone

Like a steam locomotive

rolling down the track

He's gone

He's gone

and nothing's gonna bring him back

He's gone.” Grateful Dead - “He’s Gone.”

I think people dismiss the dead as some light-fare drug band or just get way caught up in their role in 60s music history. I get it. I used to listen to the dead because of both of those cliches. Then, randomly in cubicle hell a few years ago, I really started to listen to the dead, like really hear them. They feel like the heft of the thicker air that comes with everything coming alive again with the spring rains and warmer temperatures. Their songs ooze death in the real tangible human way that the dusty country ballads that they were inspired by did. I don’t think I have ever heard a song like “He’s gone” that so perfectly encapsulates that somber, out-of-luck kind of heartbreak when your father disappears again.

When Jerry Garcia, a former bluegrass musician who lost his own father at a young age to a drowning, croons, “he’s gone, he’s gone, and nothing’s gonna bring him back,” you feel that viscerally in your gut. Officially, the song was written about band member Mickey Hart’s father running off with a bunch of the band’s money while he was the Dead’s acting manager. However, the song is opened-ended enough for all us folx with dad issues to find some solace in the ballad. Garcia’s vocal performance of the song always brought that home for me. The song always brings me back to that place when my dad would just vanish emotionally and spiritually when we weren’t on the tennis court and sometimes even when we were on the court. It was like at the flip of a switch his spirit was just snatched out his body and no one knew when it would be back.

That’s a different type of abandonment, that invasion of the body snatchers type of abandonment. It will mess with you too. I spent a lot of years trying really hard in the areas where I would see him light up to get him to show up emotionally. It would pay off sometimes with him getting really into something we were working on. Those were the some nice moments. I remember how nice it felt to feel like he was emotionally invested in what we were doing.  But, it still hurts that I had to try so hard to just be seen by my father. It hurts when you have to work as a kid to get your parent to buy in to being present with you. Cause’ more often he was gone, gone, and nothing was gonna bring him back. More often than not, you weren’t good enough, skinny enough, or interesting enough to warrant the attention.

This is just the stuff of the human condition, right? This writing is the messy work of sifting through the past and making sense of things. Me? I like to render it visible, because I want to feel the sadness that I was unable to feel at the time. This place, this essay series is where I get to have my say, because I didn’t get that chance then. This is where I get to work out how my own experiences will prompt me to do things differently. I am just trying to make sense of my place, my context in the swirling currents of chaos that I am enmeshed in. It’s prolly why I am an an anarcho-socialist. I am sick of other people telling me what to believe. I just want to work it out for myself as I try to build a more free and equitable world. As our recent Missing Witches Weaver’s coven determined, I, like any witch, just want to ordain myself as the clergy I need to traverse this spiritual path of the human condition.

But don’t worry, there are tons of folx in the stands ready to throw pot shots at people just trying to make some meaning for themselves. A lot of people rag on millennials, Bifo Berardi for one, for our hyper-expressivity, saying that it is born of the ever-accelerating consumer capitalist society that bombards us with messages to express ourselves. Right, Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan is precisely why I share my experiences of death and abandonment. Give me a break, hoss. As a sociologist, I always get a bit annoyed with when people try to boil down anything to one structural force, whether that be shifts in capitalist production to an information based economy (Baudrillard, Berardi) or the decline of the nuclear family (Christian right). I am an equal opportunity skeptic of these one-sided, silver bullet-esq arguments, because they are more about making careers and achieving political agendas for their creators than they are about advancing our common understanding of reality and out place in it. Don’t ever trust someone who is trying to explain anything with one explanation. It’s always more complicated.

If folx are trying to build solidarity amongst a group of oppressed folx, I don’t see any problem with using simplifying explanations to identify a common ally. This is precisely why, “we are the 99%” and “Black Lives Matter” were such resonant rallying cries. There is something very different about a group of people coming together as a class of oppressed people and recognizing they can be stronger building solidarity together. What I reject is the people trying to set the world on fire to aggrandize their own name and profit off of collapsed 2D theories of the world. Like, I get that even old white dudes writing theory gotta eat, but can y’all just do better? Just try ok? Glob, imagine if you coulda been on the tenure clock when critical sociology was popping off. All you gotta do is say, “like, look, corporations are actually pretty awful for a, b, and c reasons,” and you woulda gotten a job for life. Ahh, what a world the old white men inhabited. 

I just think that I don’t even come from the reality they are talking about. My hyper-expressivity is rooted in being raised in a failed state that held out a dream that was all a lie. How can anyone be free when secret prisons exist where people were physically and psychologically tortured or we still have a serious problem with mass incarceration? How can anyone feel like opportunity exist when the whole game is rigged from the jump? So, I say Forget Bifo, Forget Baudriallard, Forget Foucault. Honestly, forget all the european continental theorists who lived in a different time when extinction wasn’t the milieu one was simmered in. In their place, let us scribble our own earnest, sincere notes about the darkness within and around us. Let us find our own way to collective liberation, believing that our own voices can be the catalyst. Down with the totalizing impulse of the old guard. Let it shatter into a billion subjectivities that are all interested in finding some solidarity around getting free.

I just don’t have the fear that many associate with embracing subjectivity/hyper-expressivity. As long as you are orienting your own exploration of your experience as part of a way to untie the binds of patriarchy, homophobia, racism, classism, nationalism, there is no problem. Without that exploration though, you risk getting scammed by people trying to sell you shortcuts to wellness. But my self expression is rooted in screamo punk, druidcraft, and victorian era romanticism, not some wierd 80s Reagan jazzercise fever dream.  There’s a big difference in those two images. The first is offering self expression rooted in do-it-yourself culture and spiritual exploration (producer) and the other is selling you a way to express yourself to others (consumer). I don’t get whacked out about living in the matrix, because I spin my own wool, dye my own fiber, grow my own plants, and perform my own spells. I produce the culture I want to be a part of so I don’t have to worry about getting lost in the land of shifting signs folx are trying to sell to me. 

This whole hyper expressivity trope that is used against us is really a scam too when you think of the history of crafters and witchcraft, folx who are just making all the time and have been for decades. They have been casting spells, knitting hats, making quilts, sewing cloths, weaving rugs nonstop for centuries. This is quintessential hyper expressivity, but it is totally outside the “Just Do It” realm that the old grumpy white men argue is a psychosis of our time. I have to cackle, dear reader, because this example demonstrates how normal it has been for a long time for people to express themselves via craft and spellwork. Couldn’t one say that a producer culture interested in self-expression, story telling, and spellwork has been a hallmark of every culture worldwide for centuries? I sure think so, and my need to express myself via word and fiber comes from those lineages of craft, romanticism, and witchcraft and not Phil Knight’s advertising campaigns. 

“A naive young secret for the new romantics. We express ourselves in loud and fashionable ways.” Refused - “Refused are Fucking Dead”

Honestly, we need loud and fashionable expression that clearly demarcates a solidarity that we can all share in. We need a movement of romantics that are unafraid to express their emotions while living in our full collapse. Because, honestly, we are short on stories of people sharing how they feel about what it’s like to be alive right now. Instead, we inundated by the idiots of the world like JD Vance who was of willing to blame his own kin for their poverty in Hillbilly Elegy as if structural causes weren’t the real reasons for grinding poverty in Appalachia. Like GTFO here, hoss,  no one is buying that it’s people’s own fault they are in poverty. I am so glad he used that Ivy League education to determine that it’s individual choices that lead to poverty, instead, of just acknowledging, oh I dunno, the extractive coal economy that has taken everything from the people of Appalachia. I’m so sick of people in blazers trying to sell us answers with their corporate headshots while ignoring the grinding suffering of what it’s like to be alive right now. 

I suppose this is my avocado toast meme moment. You remember when the blazer idiots got on TV and said Millennials couldn’t buy homes because they were buying too much artisan toast and coffee. Yes, it’s the personal consumption choices and not the last 40 years of US policy that has eviscerated the social safety net and allowed US employers to destroy descent paying jobs. So folx pushed back by pointing out all these structural realities to the blazer idiots. Likewise, I’m just as annoyed by people trying to pathologize my own expression. I’m explaining what it’s like to be fatherless man trying my best to survive in a late stage capitalist, neoliberal hellscape that just wants to destroy me. There is catharsis in explaining what it feels like to be pummeled, fed to the gristmill, and scattered like dust on the wind. At least in my explanation, I can offer a people’s history that can be found by other folx looking for a reprieve from the blazers and their capitalist urge to solve the problem.

And still, you know what the blazers can’t take away from me? Beltaine and the explosion of plant awakening going on all around me. Bestill my dark, foreboding heart, the plants have emerged from the dirt and just enchanted me this past week. It’s hard to get too bent outta shape about the blazer idiots when you got these little cutie lemon balms just staring you in the face every morning. Do you nuzzle your lemon balm? I 10/10 would recommend it. Real high vibrational way to improve your mood in full collapse. Do you oogle your little yarrow buddies, who are growing up all strong and beautiful like? AGAIN, 10/10 recommend that. Growing your friends is a real powerful way to get outta the tech bros and blazer idiots obsession with talking about all of reality as a simulation (in short, that we only exist as lines of green code inside a master super computer somewhere out of our reach). I would like to pull the plug on all their monetized tech, nationalize their servers, and bring it all back online as co-operative enterprises. I mean they did steal all the tech from public sector R&D, so why not just take it all back for public use.

I also surprised myself by being able to germinate my own nettle babies in little peet moss pods. That anticipation of waiting 7-10 days for a little green shoot to come up that I can tend to like another child for the rest of the summer is the shot in the arm that I need right now. I can’t tell you how giddy it makes me to see those fragile little beginnings of life in a plant that is so f’in sacred to my fiber spells. I just have wanted so badly to be in community with nettle in that simple, ancient way: just a plant and a person communing. Ugh, its making me emotional just writing about it.

I am pretty sure you can’t code that complex of a heart-felt emotion that I have with those Nettle sprouts in cosmic 1s and 0s. But who knows, I could be fooling myself and there could be an incredible coder at the heart of it all. Yet, that still seems to me to be too much just like grafting monotheism into some technologically appropriate cloak. It seems to much like a sleight of hand where to go from chrsitian god father to technologist code father. That’s just my opinion though, hoss. But seriously, do you want to hold the same opinion on reality as simulation as that blazer idiot Elon Musk who funded his career from his family’s emerald mining operation in Zambia? Its up to you, hoss. Me, I am just gonna believe in the interconnectedness of what we call Gaia. I am going to believe in my own goddesses in my tradition that emerged from that intricate web of earth, water, fire, and air. That makes more sense to me.

All the best, dear reader.

James

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