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[00:00:01] That circular way of processing time and attributing...
[00:00:17] I mean, yes, it's like doing fall through was something I've wanted to...
[00:00:26] Like it allowed me to think and talk and explore a lot of what was a huge chunk and a very
[00:00:36] transformative central chunk of my life for so many years, but I'm simply just not interested
[00:00:42] in telling that story as it happens in the real world.
[00:00:50] But I find that fiction is more useful in terms of being able to kind of circle back around
[00:00:54] and revisit things and sort of pick out what is relevant, what I do associate with
[00:00:59] something else and be able to just kind of like helicopter little elements out
[00:01:05] and plop them into a fictional world or patch them on to other characters.
[00:01:12] And I find it's a much healthier and more interesting and more fun way to kind of process
[00:01:20] a lot of the stuff that shaped us.
[00:01:22] Were you ever a journal person?
[00:01:24] Do you have anything that you can kind of consult from?
[00:01:26] You were, okay.
[00:01:28] For fall through, I used to be a true journal devotee from about 1995 to probably 2013
[00:01:41] or 2014.
[00:01:42] And a lot of it is like parenthood just kind of made it so that I'm like, oh,
[00:01:47] I haven't written a single thing about my life in three months and it doesn't matter.
[00:01:52] It's like it was one of those things where one of the best things about parenthood
[00:01:56] is how stuff that doesn't matter that much just instantly melted away.
[00:02:01] I'm like, oh, I don't have bandwidth for that kind of stuff anymore.
[00:02:05] And so basically, all of my writing and all my thumb nailing still happens in the same
[00:02:13] black cover sketchbooks that I've been using for most of my life.
[00:02:17] But it might be like when I start a new one, I'll try for a couple of days to just
[00:02:26] do free writing to be like, oh, to catch myself up for posterity of what's going on in life.
[00:02:31] And then I feel like I don't need journaling in that way anymore.
[00:02:38] As a cartoonist, I kind of feel like that may be a spot where I've finally leveled up
[00:02:42] or I'm like, I'm putting enough of my own thoughts and feelings and working it out
[00:02:47] on the page whenever I do my fiction.
[00:02:50] And it's actually not that necessary.
[00:02:53] I definitely journaled more as I was doing what became Save It For Later.
[00:03:00] But a lot of that was simply because I really did need to process a lot of what was happening
[00:03:05] during that authoritarian power grab.
[00:03:08] And then very quickly, I realized that this is something that's going to shape into
[00:03:14] something that is going to have an output.
[00:03:17] So that was sort of a hybrid in many ways.
[00:03:19] Those dates line up kind of one to one with Sufi Nun Squad, it seems like.
[00:03:25] So this was kind of a rich vein for you to go back and read those experiences.
[00:03:31] Without a doubt.
[00:03:32] Like I feel like I used to be like I was the band parent in Sufi Nun Squad
[00:03:39] in most of my bands, except my final band where the drummer was actually more organized
[00:03:45] and more connected to the rest of the scene than me.
[00:03:48] And it was nice to kind of be like, I just yell and play bass.
[00:03:52] But yeah, with Sufi, it's interesting that I've finally reached a point
[00:03:58] where I can no longer remember the exact dates and the exact bill
[00:04:02] of every show that we played, which used to be like a point of pride.
[00:04:07] And now it just no longer matters as much.
[00:04:10] But yeah, the long process of doing this definitely had to do with
[00:04:15] assembling and reassembling these increasingly streamlined lists of key moments
[00:04:20] and incidents which planted some kind of seed or resulted in some kind of larger
[00:04:26] realization about this little world that I grew up in and through.
[00:04:33] And to just kind of let them sit for long enough until I figured out
[00:04:37] whether or not they actually had a place in this fictional story.
[00:04:42] You describe yourself as the band parent doesn't surprise me at all.
[00:04:46] Like that tracks with what I know about you.
[00:04:48] And, you know, you've obviously written about your brother a bit.
[00:04:54] I wonder how much of that kind of ability to come in and not run things,
[00:05:00] but to oversee things and to make sure that everybody's OK
[00:05:04] is a product of growing up with your brother.
[00:05:08] Well, that's an interesting point you bring up because
[00:05:11] especially the older I get, the more I realize that like that's where
[00:05:17] my self-centered,
[00:05:20] youthful vision of what I want to do with my life as an 18 to
[00:05:25] 27 year old or whatever,
[00:05:28] made me less reliable as a family member and as a brother.
[00:05:34] But also somebody who didn't really I was still too immature
[00:05:39] and self-centered to really understand that I could play a role.
[00:05:44] A lot of that changed in 1999 when I started working professionally
[00:05:50] with people with developmental disabilities.
[00:05:52] And then like that, that was one of the largest changes
[00:05:56] in my entire life was recognizing that I can,
[00:05:59] I can put all this work into this as a career and as a way of life.
[00:06:05] And what I've learned from living with my brother,
[00:06:08] with my family is something to extend outward.
[00:06:11] But also, even more importantly, finally, I was ready to be a better brother.
[00:06:16] And my like just learning and understanding
[00:06:19] more about the autism spectrum and developmental disabilities
[00:06:23] really helped me kind of finally become the brother
[00:06:28] that was closer to the brother that I would rather rather be.
[00:06:34] What was the initial impetus for for taking that job?
[00:06:40] Well, actually, like I had never thought about
[00:06:44] doing a job that wasn't, you know, food service work or or whatever.
[00:06:50] Like for me, and this is like in those first few years of Sufi
[00:06:54] Non Squad touring and recording and playing shows and coming up
[00:06:58] with increasingly more elaborate ideas for the band,
[00:07:03] where Sufi was the central organizational force in my life for many years.
[00:07:09] However, so I was I was home for the summer,
[00:07:13] getting ready for a couple of tours that summer, working at a pizza place.
[00:07:17] And one of my brother's old high school friends came over to visit
[00:07:23] who I remembered from the early 90s.
[00:07:25] It was always just this nice, cool guy.
[00:07:27] And it was basically like, hey,
[00:07:31] I want to talk to you about something because
[00:07:34] I've been doing work for adults with developmental disabilities.
[00:07:39] And I think you would do really well in this line of work.
[00:07:42] And there's a performing arts and visual arts center
[00:07:46] for adults with developmental disabilities here in town.
[00:07:49] You should go apply for a job there.
[00:07:52] And as it is with a lot of things like it took him,
[00:07:55] it took this this old friend of my brother actually saying the words.
[00:07:59] And all of a sudden, I was like, wait a minute, I can do that with my time.
[00:08:04] And basically like from that job, then I moved into increasingly more
[00:08:11] like move more into individuals' private lives,
[00:08:15] like from day programs, fine arts centers and stuff into group homes
[00:08:19] and then into private residences, into job coaching and all kinds of stuff.
[00:08:24] But a lot of it was like I just simply had no idea that there was work
[00:08:27] that wasn't shit work.
[00:08:30] It wasn't like service industry work.
[00:08:32] To me, it was just like getting by.
[00:08:34] And so that was you know, I was also like I was 20 or 21 years old.
[00:08:38] So it just never occurred to me that I could spend my time
[00:08:43] at a job doing something meaningful and also do meaningful things
[00:08:47] in the rest of my life.
[00:08:48] This isn't a direct parallel, but I recently
[00:08:53] you know, I want to think of a few seconds here.
[00:08:55] Oh, sorry. Yeah.
[00:08:57] For some reason, I'm just going to turn my camera off.
[00:08:59] Hopefully that'll help.
[00:09:00] But I'm convinced that I'm getting I'm getting Fios next week
[00:09:05] and I convinced I'm convinced that spectrum knows that
[00:09:07] and is throttling my internet.
[00:09:09] Meets up.
[00:09:11] But yeah, I so, you know,
[00:09:16] I think that our politics are are fairly similar on most issues.
[00:09:20] And I had kind of a similar moment recently where.
[00:09:27] You know, I I feel like I've, you know, preach this certain
[00:09:32] certain amount of compassion and empathy,
[00:09:36] but wasn't really living up to that
[00:09:41] from the standpoint of like, you know, I'm not doing
[00:09:44] like volunteer work.
[00:09:45] And so so toward the end of last year,
[00:09:48] I started volunteering.
[00:09:49] There's a food pantry where I am in Queens, like a couple of blocks away.
[00:09:53] And it was it was that thing of like.
[00:09:56] I don't know why I didn't why why why didn't I do this,
[00:09:59] you know, six months or two years ago?
[00:10:02] And for me, part of it was this I love it, by the way,
[00:10:05] and part of it was this worry that it was going to be sort of like
[00:10:09] depressing, you know, that that this is my free time
[00:10:12] and it's going to be going to be a bummer.
[00:10:14] But it turned out to be incredibly rewarding.
[00:10:18] You got I'm glad you made that step.
[00:10:20] And like a lot and I don't know, a lot of it is really just the way we
[00:10:24] make assumptions of how we would spend
[00:10:29] time that we're not spending or that we're spending in a different way.
[00:10:32] And it's just nice that, you know, we can always surprise ourselves
[00:10:36] and be like, oh, I was just wrong about how I would handle this situation
[00:10:41] or what I would get out of it or how much it would or wouldn't
[00:10:45] take away from other parts of my life.
[00:10:47] You know, those are like the actual times of growth
[00:10:51] where you're like, oh, I was wrong about that or whatever.
[00:10:54] You described the
[00:10:57] process of working on this book as as, you know, to a certain extent,
[00:11:01] processing some of those emotions in a similar way
[00:11:05] that that that your previous book was about the current moment.
[00:11:09] And I'm wondering how much of your
[00:11:12] connection
[00:11:15] or recognition of this this notion of art as
[00:11:21] as therapy, in a sense, came from that experience of working with those people.
[00:11:27] Let me think.
[00:11:31] I don't well,
[00:11:35] I think you could make the argument that yes,
[00:11:42] that this is something that's like a real kind of like slow,
[00:11:45] slow burn, slow crawl,
[00:11:49] creative evolution that might go all the way back to
[00:11:54] the kinds of changes in perspective and sort of my re-education process.
[00:12:01] And by that, I don't mean that in like a like a totalitarian communist.
[00:12:06] But like my my post collegiate
[00:12:09] working as a professional reading and, you know,
[00:12:13] reading up on my field and working with people with disabilities
[00:12:17] during the period of time where I was writing and drawing Swallow Me Whole,
[00:12:22] which was I was trying hard and I succeeded in it
[00:12:27] not being directly influenced or inspired by
[00:12:31] the people who I I worked with at the time.
[00:12:34] However, yes, that was sort of the major theme
[00:12:37] of those mid 2000s years while I was working on that first graphic novel.
[00:12:44] Simply like so much of my awareness
[00:12:47] was shifting and expanding, but people but
[00:12:51] developmental disabilities were becoming
[00:12:55] a new center of my life.
[00:12:58] And I feel like
[00:13:01] to change, I don't know, like I feel like as as my path
[00:13:05] in doing my solo work continued, the next big shift was come again.
[00:13:10] Actually, it was
[00:13:13] this where I sort of leveled up by like leaning more into genre
[00:13:17] and being comfortable with it, embracing it, but recognizing that like,
[00:13:21] OK, now like I'm a new parent,
[00:13:24] like I've sort of like left the full immersion
[00:13:29] into the punk underground and I've been like embraced and accepted
[00:13:32] in this new, very similar creative community of indie comics.
[00:13:37] And that feels great.
[00:13:38] But a lot of the questions and reflections that I was working out
[00:13:41] about changing ideals and changing a lot, you know, the ways our lives change
[00:13:46] and all that being OK,
[00:13:49] a lot of that got worked out in the book come again.
[00:13:53] And so once I finished that, I was like, oh,
[00:13:56] this is the strength of fiction for me, like as I hopefully grow
[00:14:01] to become a better writer so that I can actually like rise to this challenge.
[00:14:08] You know, again, with the exception of Save It For Later,
[00:14:10] this this is really proof of concept that I can work all this stuff
[00:14:15] out on the page and it doesn't seem like this navel gazing
[00:14:20] thing that is all about me working out my stuff on the page.
[00:14:24] And in fact, like, that's not that's not unique.
[00:14:27] That's that's the role of fiction much of the time.
[00:14:30] So I think, yeah, when I jumped into doing Fall Through,
[00:14:33] I was very much of that mindset.
[00:14:35] But at the same time, once I had had most of the story
[00:14:40] written out and worked out,
[00:14:43] except for like surprises that popped up along the way,
[00:14:46] that's when the world shut down.
[00:14:47] And so there there are then these extra layers, not only like
[00:14:52] this part of my this era of my life that I was no longer as closely connected to,
[00:14:57] but then realizing as I was beginning to draw the book,
[00:15:03] how much of the world inside fall through revolved around
[00:15:08] this other thing that had been yanked away from all of us, which is just
[00:15:13] people breathing on each other and sweating on each other
[00:15:17] and touch dreaming those quarters.
[00:15:20] Yeah. And like being invited into strangers basements
[00:15:24] in a non creepy way to like go listen to people yell their hearts out.
[00:15:30] And and so, you know, for in a lot of ways,
[00:15:33] especially just like physical proximity and physical contact.
[00:15:37] And you can really I mean, you can really see it on the page.
[00:15:40] Like I started getting into just like mixing up white ink every day.
[00:15:45] And there are just like thousands and thousands of droplets of sweat
[00:15:49] and breath droplets throughout the book.
[00:15:51] That is my pandemic therapy process on the page.
[00:15:55] And it just really allowed me to kind of like, you know,
[00:15:59] people are afraid they're going to they overuse these kinds of terms.
[00:16:03] But people are still they still haven't unpacked their pandemic baggage.
[00:16:07] Like, yes, it allowed me to mourn the loss of those spaces
[00:16:12] and the loss of that way of relating to other human beings.
[00:16:16] And if it weren't for drawing fall through,
[00:16:19] it would have been much more difficult to get through 2020 and 2021
[00:16:25] before there was some kind of return to that kind of intimacy.
[00:16:29] On the flip side, saving for later must have been very difficult
[00:16:34] in some ways because there's a sense in which you are almost kind of wallowing
[00:16:39] in the world falling apart in real time.
[00:16:42] Yeah. And like save it for later process
[00:16:46] was absolutely nothing like any book I've ever done before
[00:16:51] and probably never again.
[00:16:54] Yeah, basically like by the beginning of 20,
[00:16:59] by the end of 2017, I recognized that I had all of these
[00:17:06] these moments and these these changes
[00:17:09] that had happened in my private life or in my family's life.
[00:17:12] You know, stuff that's now documented in the pages of the book.
[00:17:16] But the impetus for turning it into something was recognizing
[00:17:19] that these were not unique experiences to my family necessarily.
[00:17:25] That, in fact, just one year into
[00:17:30] the previous regime, people had kind of bottled up
[00:17:34] and like whether as people being like, oh, we don't have enough bandwidth
[00:17:38] for talking about like the personal aspect of what living under this
[00:17:42] authoritarian power grab is like or what it's doing to our kids
[00:17:47] or to us as parents or adults or neighbors or whatever.
[00:17:51] But recognizing that people were already kind of shutting up and normalizing it.
[00:17:55] And so my idea was actually
[00:17:58] to make this book as quickly as I possibly could.
[00:18:03] I wanted it to be like 96 pages and finish it in six months.
[00:18:07] And I remember like talking with my agent about it at Mocha in 2018.
[00:18:13] And then I went back to my hotel room or something,
[00:18:15] and I wrote the first 40 pages of it just in one sitting.
[00:18:20] And I was like, I may actually draw this book in six months.
[00:18:24] And thankfully, you know, like that that I also evolved past that.
[00:18:30] But it was very much a real time creative process,
[00:18:34] because once I really got rolling, then I had to acknowledge
[00:18:37] just how constant the upheaval and the chaos was
[00:18:42] and recognizing that when your kids are growing, you know, like
[00:18:45] I started that book when my my older kid
[00:18:50] was five and then finished it when they were almost eight years old.
[00:18:56] And or maybe, yeah, maybe they were eight.
[00:18:58] But like so much can change in three years or two and a half years
[00:19:03] along that along the way.
[00:19:06] And so, yeah, it was a very different kind of like
[00:19:10] truncation and acceleration of time for that book.
[00:19:13] Time passes differently when monitoring children, you know,
[00:19:19] it's really easy to lose a decade and then you see somebody's kid
[00:19:23] who you haven't seen in 10 years and you realize like
[00:19:26] exactly how much time that is without a doubt.
[00:19:30] And the fact that
[00:19:33] and this to tie this sort of back into the the
[00:19:38] sci fi and like scientific theory in fall through, it's funny that
[00:19:44] especially when you're encountering other like friends
[00:19:48] and acquaintances who are also parents.
[00:19:50] And it's like you've both been in these bubble universes
[00:19:54] or you're both been living these separate lives at different quantum speeds.
[00:19:59] And so it's hard like everything seems normal to you
[00:20:02] with how you've experienced your life.
[00:20:04] And either you feel like sometimes you get this feeling like,
[00:20:08] oh, this old friend of mine has changed so much or be like, oh,
[00:20:11] their life must be pretty stagnant.
[00:20:13] Nothing's really going on when that's never the case.
[00:20:16] It's like the same always applies to you
[00:20:19] when someone else is seeing you for the first time and forever.
[00:20:23] Is that that sense that, you know, that you yourself
[00:20:27] are the are the constant in terms of like the way time passes
[00:20:31] and the way you flow through the world.
[00:20:34] But, you know, just like some major relativity business going on.
[00:20:38] That was that was an unexpected element, I will say.
[00:20:42] And there's a lot in this book that I think you're probably
[00:20:45] just a little bit older than me, but there's a lot in this book
[00:20:48] that I really related to on a personal level growing up in the East Bay.
[00:20:54] And, you know, we had like Lookout out there and went to Gilman
[00:20:57] and then they went to school in Santa Cruz and we put on house shows.
[00:21:01] But there's.
[00:21:03] There's I just I don't know if this is an aside
[00:21:05] or maybe this ties back into sort of the sci fi mystical element of the book.
[00:21:10] But the story of her.
[00:21:15] Going coming to town and trying to find William Burroughs
[00:21:20] was something like that I found so deeply relatable.
[00:21:27] I hear you.
[00:21:28] Well, what's wild is not only is the the setup for all of that true,
[00:21:36] not for me specifically, but in terms of like
[00:21:39] the American punk community.
[00:21:42] William Burroughs until he died, like from the late 70s
[00:21:46] or early 80s until his death in 95 or 96,
[00:21:51] lived outside of Lawrence, Kansas, and and was known
[00:21:56] to just at random infrequently just appear
[00:22:01] at underground shows.
[00:22:03] But famously, one of the first
[00:22:07] punk venues in the American
[00:22:11] in the American expanse was this kind of like outhouse
[00:22:14] in the middle, like on the edge of a cornfield outside of Lawrence.
[00:22:17] It's a real place.
[00:22:19] Chris Stein writes some really great stuff in a bunch of his photography books
[00:22:23] about going and playing at the outhouse or just visiting in the outhouse,
[00:22:28] even like in the 80s recuperating there through his illness.
[00:22:32] But bandmates and Suvi Nunn Squad, like we had a whole Kansas City contingent
[00:22:36] who went to went to Kansas City Art Institute
[00:22:40] in the mid 90s and sort of a major thing was like,
[00:22:44] Oh, yeah, I was at this 24 hour diner, the Jayhawk last night.
[00:22:48] And it's like three thirty a.m.
[00:22:51] Who shows up? But William Burroughs.
[00:22:53] And he's like, you know, 80, 80 years old.
[00:22:57] And then hearing just the like this is where like
[00:23:01] the other theme of just the way that the mythologizing
[00:23:06] of a community's history happens very organically.
[00:23:09] And it's rooted in these actually crazy occurrences and coincidences.
[00:23:14] But in order to turn it into a story that that is woven
[00:23:18] into the larger subculture or whatever, eventually gets a little flattened,
[00:23:23] a little simplified, gets mythologized and heroized.
[00:23:29] I wanted to put Burroughs in there also because he's like
[00:23:33] probably killed his wife and he's pretty messed up, dude.
[00:23:39] So for those people who don't know, they were playing a game of
[00:23:43] he called it William Tell and he shot his wife. Yeah.
[00:23:47] So like he has many very, very sketchy marks against him.
[00:23:53] And I enjoy just sort of like the hero worship
[00:23:57] in the and the sort of like idealistic vision that Diana
[00:24:02] is one of the dueling main characters has regarding
[00:24:06] what she feels is Burroughs creative role as it relates to her.
[00:24:10] And so she's able to ignore all of these things
[00:24:15] because she sees like the opportunity to be in the same physical space
[00:24:20] as him for one time only as something
[00:24:24] that has like cosmic significance.
[00:24:27] And it makes absolutely no sense to anyone else.
[00:24:30] And yet it's what an entire leg of a tour was booked around
[00:24:34] the one in a million chance that that Burroughs would actually
[00:24:38] show up at the show.
[00:24:40] In terms of this getting back to this idea of processing in real time,
[00:24:45] I'm wondering if a book like this that, again, is tied to a very specific
[00:24:49] moment in time and that's tied to a very specific part of your life, whether
[00:24:56] to a certain extent it was necessary to have distance to write this.
[00:25:01] Without a doubt, I think.
[00:25:05] You know, like the earliest seeds, the one like when I tried
[00:25:08] to actually write something that was more of a personal reflection,
[00:25:11] that was like back in 2007,
[00:25:14] right, like a year after Sufi Nun Squad was defunct.
[00:25:19] And then the timeline of this is like this is over a decade
[00:25:24] in the making, like in 2013, I created the band Diamond Mine
[00:25:30] for what became Come Again, which I was just writing at the time.
[00:25:34] And I had a decade ago.
[00:25:36] And so like I knew they were Arkansas's fictional first punk band.
[00:25:41] And that led me down a bunch of rabbit holes that are
[00:25:45] that relate to fall through entirely, but each one is quite a long journey.
[00:25:50] But basically, like from there to actually realizing
[00:25:55] that it was OK to finally on, you know, open up
[00:26:00] the luggage, not the baggage, but the luggage
[00:26:04] that had a lot of experiences that I had in and with bands
[00:26:08] and as part of my hometown scene.
[00:26:12] It was probably a good six or seven years before I was like,
[00:26:16] I think all of this is one book.
[00:26:18] And I feel like that happens a lot.
[00:26:20] I'll get, you know, a strong specific idea
[00:26:26] that I that's the big idea for some book.
[00:26:29] And I'll start kind of like working with it
[00:26:31] and waiting for characters to emerge.
[00:26:33] And then I'll have some other idea and it'll take, you know, two or three years
[00:26:37] before I realized that both of those ideas are the same book.
[00:26:41] And so I had to like I had to merge several ideas
[00:26:45] over the course of several years before I realized they were all pieces
[00:26:48] of the same puzzle at the same time.
[00:26:50] Was it clear? Because again, this was such a formative time for you.
[00:26:54] And and, you know, and it is the kind of thing that I
[00:26:59] think does need to be preserved because there are so many elements of this
[00:27:02] that just don't exist in society anymore.
[00:27:06] I was thinking today I got I got
[00:27:10] I got an ad on Instagram or Facebook for a
[00:27:16] an igloo thermos or
[00:27:21] like an igloo container
[00:27:23] branded with dookie on it.
[00:27:25] Oh, wow.
[00:27:26] Dookie igloo.
[00:27:27] And I was just thinking about how.
[00:27:30] You know, when when Green Day signed to a major
[00:27:33] that they were not allowed at Gilman anymore, and that was this big deal.
[00:27:37] And just how much society and and this idea of things
[00:27:42] like selling out has just completely for better
[00:27:45] and for worse kind of evaporated in the meantime.
[00:27:48] Yes, without a doubt.
[00:27:49] And like what's funny is like there are a lot of touchstones
[00:27:53] like that, that I like there are some that I intentionally avoided
[00:27:58] because I thought they were.
[00:27:59] Well, really, it's like I wanted to make this a short book or short for me.
[00:28:04] And so I was like, some there are some things that didn't
[00:28:07] that I didn't bring up at all that were so instrumental in
[00:28:12] the forging of this era, like the release of Nevermind plays no role
[00:28:17] and is never mentioned in.
[00:28:19] But yet it was this huge catalyst.
[00:28:23] And sort of like the second wave of that was when Dookie came out,
[00:28:26] was sort of like pushed the anti-corporate DIY underground
[00:28:31] even further underground and sort of started the process of us eating our own,
[00:28:36] which has an extra layer of meaning for us in Little Rock, because
[00:28:42] Green Day, the full touring version of Green Day
[00:28:47] for many years was 40 percent people from Little Rock.
[00:28:51] And like Jason White, the other guy in Green Day,
[00:28:54] the second guitarist, he was in Chino Hoard and many other bands in Little Rock.
[00:28:59] So like the opening quote to the book fall through is a quote from Chino Hoard.
[00:29:05] And so it was a very weird dynamic to be locally,
[00:29:12] you know, just so proud of our friends and like the kids
[00:29:15] who are a couple of years older than us, who started finding
[00:29:19] their place across the country and then like settling into this wild success
[00:29:23] and staying humble and staying great.
[00:29:26] But sort of coupling that with this larger,
[00:29:30] you know, like seething tension and reactionary attitude
[00:29:34] across the world of punk, but America in particular.
[00:29:39] And a lot of it was was, yeah, like youthful posture,
[00:29:42] you know, posturing and stuff.
[00:29:45] And the good thing is that I think, you know, like virtually all that melted away
[00:29:50] and people realize how like what nonsense so much of it was.
[00:29:56] And a lot of it's because like, yeah, you just have this
[00:29:58] this like very incorrect inflated idea of what any degree of success means.
[00:30:05] But even like 10 years later, it was really like sad and frustrating that like
[00:30:12] on Sufi's last tour, we played some shows with Against Me.
[00:30:14] And that was right before they signed to a major label.
[00:30:19] It was like in 2006, but they were already getting their tires slashed
[00:30:24] at every show in America just because they went from no idea records
[00:30:30] to fat records, which was still is still an independent label.
[00:30:35] That's the no effects guys label.
[00:30:37] It's not even like epitaph.
[00:30:38] Yeah, it's like those were like really crucial moments
[00:30:43] that were like sort of marking these generational shifts, but also marking
[00:30:48] the the weakness and the vulnerability of being such a part
[00:30:53] of a creative subculture that's really like defined
[00:30:57] and maintained by 16 to 24 year olds
[00:31:01] and recognizing that you don't have to play by a 16 year old's rules anymore.
[00:31:06] Once you realize that these are rules set by teenagers,
[00:31:10] perhaps in another decade.
[00:31:12] This is an important point.
[00:31:13] And this is something that I think about quite a bit.
[00:31:18] How much of growing up and, you know,
[00:31:21] becoming an adult is the process of in therapy, they call them core beliefs.
[00:31:28] Like they tell you to re-examine your core beliefs.
[00:31:31] How much of it is.
[00:31:33] That process of realizing what things you were holding on to
[00:31:37] were, in some cases, arbitrary and in some cases actually perhaps harmful.
[00:31:42] Without a doubt, I'd say like as it relates to
[00:31:47] as it relates to punk, like one of the other themes that I have,
[00:31:50] Jody, the main character and narrator that I have Jody ruminate on
[00:31:55] is that is her realization that punk is essentially
[00:31:59] just what is left over that has not been rejected yet at any point in time.
[00:32:05] And that's like it's always like a rolling notion of rejection.
[00:32:11] And so whatever is not rejected in a moment falls under
[00:32:16] the banner of punk.
[00:32:19] But the fact that the ways in which I feel like
[00:32:23] that still hits me every once in a while.
[00:32:25] And to me, it's intertwined with more of like a, you know, Generation X.
[00:32:32] Like I'm still technically tail end of Generation X,
[00:32:35] but like a Generation X, Xennial
[00:32:38] dinosaur idea of like, as as as you mentioned a few minutes ago,
[00:32:43] like the notion of not selling out as an overriding ethos
[00:32:50] that is its own.
[00:32:51] It's like it's its own ends that justifies whatever needs to be done
[00:32:56] to not sell out, even if that's an undefinable thing.
[00:33:00] But yeah, like I feel like a lot of it is just like requires
[00:33:04] constant kind of reevaluation of like
[00:33:07] recognizing when you have an immediate instinctive
[00:33:11] distaste for something and sort of questioning what it is
[00:33:15] inside you that's actually finding like such an aversion
[00:33:21] to a decision or the way that something might look or appear from outside.
[00:33:30] Yeah, it's strange.
[00:33:32] I don't mean that to discredit myself, but I think
[00:33:35] I don't mean that to discount punk ethos at all,
[00:33:38] because I think a lot of that was very foundational for me.
[00:33:40] And I'm sure that there are things that I've carried with me into adulthood
[00:33:44] that that stem from that time in my life for you.
[00:33:50] How central of a role did punk play in forming your
[00:33:55] picture of the world and your political outlook?
[00:33:58] I mean, I'd say.
[00:34:00] It really I'd say what actually.
[00:34:03] Gave me a social conscience and sort of exploded my concept of.
[00:34:09] Power and inequality and stuff wasn't it was Chris Claremont's
[00:34:14] X-Men and thrash metal like just prior to punk,
[00:34:18] but like basically Anthrax and X-Men together really kicked the door open.
[00:34:24] Prior to that, as documented in my book, Any Empire,
[00:34:28] Any Empire, I had the fortune as a child of having like
[00:34:34] like my dad was always he was a career Air Force dude,
[00:34:39] but was was very cautionary about my G.I. Joe kid leanings towards like
[00:34:48] this cartoon notion of military industrial complex.
[00:34:53] But like the conversations we would have even in childhood
[00:34:57] were very eye opening and sort of made me ready.
[00:35:00] He was also my Sunday school teacher.
[00:35:02] So like when heavy metal kicked in
[00:35:07] along with like Days of Future Past,
[00:35:12] that's really when things got set on a certain course and punk,
[00:35:16] which would be the next year, eighth grade punk.
[00:35:21] I think its largest contribution at the time for changing my world view
[00:35:26] was more on the micro than the macro because I kind of
[00:35:31] already knew what was going on for me and in my limited 13 year old way,
[00:35:36] what I was interested in fighting against and fighting for.
[00:35:41] But punk allowed me to see that there were other young people in my town
[00:35:47] who were also doing their own thing and that all of these interests
[00:35:51] overlapped with each other already.
[00:35:53] So I was recognizing that like there's already this like whisper
[00:35:58] network of teenagers who are writing and drawing and yelling about stuff.
[00:36:03] And they're already meeting right now at like a hidden place in a park
[00:36:10] to yell about all this stuff and pass around their zines
[00:36:13] and sell their tapes and stuff.
[00:36:16] A lot of it was recognizing that.
[00:36:18] I never cared that I was that that, you know,
[00:36:22] it's me and three or four of my friends.
[00:36:24] I didn't feel alone, but it was recognizing that like,
[00:36:28] oh, you're definitely not alone.
[00:36:30] There is something that has already been in motion
[00:36:34] that is that is really made as a haven for this type of,
[00:36:39] you know, concerned, creative, bored, pissed off kind of person.
[00:36:46] Yeah, I often talk about this idea of sort of like finding your freaks,
[00:36:51] you know, of and find those obviously really different now on the Internet.
[00:36:55] But, you know, there is that feeling when we were growing up
[00:36:59] and coming of age before that where, you know,
[00:37:02] maybe it felt like an outcast and maybe you thought
[00:37:07] there weren't other people that thought the way you did
[00:37:10] and like the things you did.
[00:37:12] And then stumbling into that group is just such an empowering
[00:37:17] and transformative experience without a doubt.
[00:37:19] And especially like, you know, I have two kids now who are tweens
[00:37:23] and, you know, like they are now connected in limited ways,
[00:37:28] you know, through devices to their friends.
[00:37:30] And it's been like a learning experience to recognize the like,
[00:37:35] oh, when they play Roblox, which to the non parents, that's this like
[00:37:40] incredibly strange and kind of awesome,
[00:37:44] like open ended video game platform where people like build levels
[00:37:48] on their own and like.
[00:37:50] It's kind of like Minecraft.
[00:37:52] Yeah, yeah, it's it's weird.
[00:37:53] And like at first, like the alarm bells really went off.
[00:37:57] But recognizing soon enough and like, oh, they're actually
[00:38:01] hanging out with their real friends through this medium.
[00:38:07] And they're having social engagement and making real connections
[00:38:11] and being creative.
[00:38:14] And so like it is interesting to like
[00:38:18] by placing the story and fall through in 1994.
[00:38:23] I mean, not only was that like the pivotal year of my youth,
[00:38:28] though I was, you know, I was like a 16 year old in 94.
[00:38:31] So, you know, I was a generation, a punk generation younger
[00:38:35] than Diamond Mine are in the book when they're going on tour.
[00:38:39] But like a lot of my books,
[00:38:43] they are they are often placed in settings
[00:38:47] in which I still don't have to worry about cell phones and the Internet.
[00:38:51] And and like I knew going into this book initially,
[00:38:58] like I was going to have this band continue to be from 1979.
[00:39:03] And I was like, OK, so for this story, I want it to be closer to my era
[00:39:07] so that we have this kind of like.
[00:39:10] Hardcore network that would have started around 79 or 80.
[00:39:14] So I'm like, what if I make it take place in the mid 80s?
[00:39:17] And it's like at the end of Diamond Man,
[00:39:19] Diamond Mine's long tenure as a band.
[00:39:22] I was like, I still don't really connect with that very much.
[00:39:24] And this is where I like this is where I wind up reverse engineering
[00:39:29] important parts of the plot in order to work around the limitations.
[00:39:35] Like I painted myself into a corner by having this band appear
[00:39:39] and come again in 1979, and they didn't really make sense in the setting.
[00:39:45] And that was the point.
[00:39:46] They're like playing at a farmer's market in the Ozarks at 10 in the morning.
[00:39:51] They look like these miss these maladjusted hippies,
[00:39:54] jocks, cowboys and like roller skaters.
[00:39:59] And that's the way Arkansas punk is kind of because we're Arkansas.
[00:40:04] But I was like, they don't fit in their time.
[00:40:07] But I was like, why don't I just make the whole deal
[00:40:10] that they don't fit even within their world of misfits?
[00:40:14] So I'm like, why don't I just plop them down in 1994
[00:40:18] and and I will figure out what makes sense about the fact
[00:40:23] that they don't make sense, like the lack of internal logic by their existence.
[00:40:28] And I was able to kind of build up from that.
[00:40:30] So I route I rooted them so that like, yeah, they really do exist in in 94.
[00:40:36] They just don't fit for the time.
[00:40:40] And then I go from there and I'm like, oh, it's because I've already
[00:40:43] like flattened my idea of what punk was even in my own era.
[00:40:48] Of course, they fit like not everybody at the time was just like
[00:40:53] looking like they were from the pages of Maximum Rock and Roll or Heart Attack.
[00:40:58] But yeah, there's a lot of like problem solving and reverse engineering
[00:41:03] that kind of helped me stay in a sweet spot so that I still didn't have to worry
[00:41:07] about certain kinds of connection, contact technology.
[00:41:12] I know I'm running out of get out of jail free cards about that at some point.
[00:41:18] But, you know, we'll see.
[00:41:20] We'll see how long it's going to take before I have to have an Internet
[00:41:23] connection in one of my books.
[00:41:24] You're definitely brushing right up against that in the time frame
[00:41:27] that this book was set up. Yeah, I think this is one of those
[00:41:30] realizations that I had recently and in hindsight, it's really obvious.
[00:41:34] But I read Penny Rimbaud's book The Last of the Hippies.
[00:41:37] Have you read that? No, I haven't.
[00:41:40] I've read the Kras book.
[00:41:42] Yeah, which is great.
[00:41:44] But I haven't read the last of the hippies.
[00:41:47] Yeah, it's just yeah, I think it's P.M.
[00:41:49] Press like like the Kras book.
[00:41:51] And it is really what it is is an extended version
[00:41:56] of the liner notes from the first Kras record.
[00:41:59] And it's discussing can't remember the guy's name, but it's just
[00:42:03] it's discussing this hippie who, you know,
[00:42:08] was friends with Penny, who threw on this and he put on this annual
[00:42:13] like event at Stonehenge every year.
[00:42:16] It's the first time I really recall seeing
[00:42:20] somebody who is, you know,
[00:42:23] about as punk as you can get being in being in Kras.
[00:42:27] Acknowledging how closely the punk movement was tied
[00:42:31] to the hippies and how it's wrong out because like there's this idea
[00:42:36] that punks hate hippies, you know, the dead milkman were big pushers
[00:42:39] of that concept.
[00:42:41] And yeah, it's funny that like
[00:42:46] I don't know, like reading the
[00:42:48] I'm trying to read the exact title of the Kras book that I read.
[00:42:50] It has an orange cover.
[00:42:53] Is it story of Kras? The story of Kras. Yeah.
[00:42:56] So like I was so fascinated by that book and it was
[00:43:00] it was so heartening and validating because, yeah, in exactly
[00:43:05] the same way that you were saying, so much of the book was basically
[00:43:09] like bluntly being like, I personally have never been an anarchist.
[00:43:15] Like I identify with a kind of like, you know, democratic socialism.
[00:43:20] We were hippies.
[00:43:21] We lived. Yes, Dial House is a commune that is still alive
[00:43:25] today. But you're like the pre-Kras pre-punk
[00:43:29] art band exit that I think played those festivals you're talking about,
[00:43:34] even in like 71, 72.
[00:43:36] It's fascinating to hear that these are direct, like to think that Kras,
[00:43:42] possibly the first actual real punk band in our modern understanding
[00:43:48] is a direct extension of the peace movement and the hippie movement
[00:43:52] and really like getting diving deep into first wave American punk.
[00:43:57] I mean, that's like besides like the amorphous, undefinable nature
[00:44:02] of what links all these bands together sonically and philosophically.
[00:44:06] It's just the notion that there is a straight continuous line
[00:44:10] from hippie down into what becomes punk and like Aaron Comet bus in
[00:44:16] I think issue 53 or 55 or something
[00:44:21] has a great Berkeley centered issue that connects
[00:44:27] like everything on Telegraph Avenue with.
[00:44:31] Punk, the peace movement, underground publications in America
[00:44:36] and comic books and presents it as a single continuous
[00:44:40] tree that spreads through time. It's amazing.
[00:44:44] Sure, I've got that copy of that somewhere.
[00:44:45] I'm going to have to go back and reread that because, yeah, that that is
[00:44:48] that's like precisely my wheelhouse for sure.
[00:44:52] Yeah, and that's really the beauty of
[00:44:55] the beauty of any creative movement is like there.
[00:44:59] There's always going to be this pressure to kind of.
[00:45:04] You know, accept a certain way of remembering or thinking about that movement
[00:45:09] and like if I had to pick like a single theme and fall through
[00:45:14] that is not relationship based or feelings based,
[00:45:19] it's that sort of ephemeral fleeting nature of creative movements
[00:45:23] where something is happening, but it's undefined in this brief window
[00:45:29] where where a free space is cleared out and it's immediately followed
[00:45:33] by the urge to kind of define and simplify things
[00:45:36] so that you can talk about them in a certain way
[00:45:39] so that people know what you're talking about.
[00:45:41] And then you like lose 70 percent
[00:45:45] of the details that actually made it special and unique.
[00:45:48] I think there's probably also a very real way in which like somebody
[00:45:52] like the Ramones was was a reaction.
[00:45:54] You know, there are these like street
[00:45:55] tough characters was a reaction to that piece and love scene.
[00:45:59] So obviously there's just a lot of different factors.
[00:46:01] You know, you use the term amorphous, which is a good way to describe
[00:46:05] like specifically that that that CBG be seen, you know,
[00:46:08] the kind of scene that unites like blondie and the Ramones and
[00:46:15] the dead boys and.
[00:46:17] But yeah, it's it is it is a really it's a really interesting.
[00:46:23] Connection, especially from a political standpoint that, you know, the
[00:46:28] the core beliefs that drive
[00:46:31] a lot of the punk ethos and the hippies are
[00:46:36] at least come from the same place.
[00:46:38] Oh, yes. So I I
[00:46:41] I met my now wife, Rachel, back in 2004
[00:46:46] when we were co-workers working with people with disabilities.
[00:46:49] And in 2005, we started our thing
[00:46:54] and very, very quickly, maybe even before we had a relationship
[00:46:58] when we were just co-workers becoming friends.
[00:47:02] Rachel is somebody who's never, ever been punk,
[00:47:05] even for a minute in her life, who is also the punkest person I know,
[00:47:11] who's like a true iconoclast
[00:47:13] and and has this incredible bullshit filter.
[00:47:19] And one of the very first like personal jabs she made at me,
[00:47:25] you know, like kind of changed the way I perceived my life
[00:47:29] at the time, where I was sort of explaining, you know,
[00:47:32] when I was like, oh, yeah, you know, like there's all kinds of punk stuff
[00:47:34] going on here in town in Bloomington, Indiana.
[00:47:37] You're probably like aware of bits of it on the fringe
[00:47:41] because it overlaps with other kinds of music and stuff.
[00:47:44] But it's not it's not the way you think of with whatever.
[00:47:47] You mansplain punk to your future wife.
[00:47:50] Well, a lot of it, as I remember being like in my mid 20s,
[00:47:54] was sort of like just talking about like
[00:47:57] potlucks, dumpster diving, food, not bombs, bike workshops,
[00:48:03] you know, all kinds of stuff like this.
[00:48:05] And then basically all Rachel said was, you know, she listened
[00:48:09] in her now I'm a therapist way, but she listened.
[00:48:13] And then she was like, oh, yeah, they're just hippies.
[00:48:17] And I was like, no, they're not hippies.
[00:48:18] And she's like, yes, they are.
[00:48:19] And your world came crashing down in that moment.
[00:48:23] And that was it.
[00:48:24] And I was like, they are hippies.
[00:48:28] I went to school in Santa Cruz, and that is like along with Berkeley.
[00:48:32] That is the apex of that of that intersection between those two cultures
[00:48:36] in a beautiful, beautiful way. For sure.
[00:48:38] You know, the great Santa Cruz band
[00:48:41] Yafet Koto from the late 1990s.
[00:48:44] I love that band.
[00:48:46] There were a lot of good hardcore bands coming out around the late
[00:48:49] 90s, early on out of Santa Cruz.
[00:48:51] Good Ruddance is probably the most famous of that school.
[00:48:58] We haven't really spoken much about about March.
[00:49:02] Were you?
[00:49:04] Did you continue to be in touch with
[00:49:07] the congressman towards the end of his life?
[00:49:10] You bet. OK, so the last time
[00:49:13] I got to see Congressman Lewis was like December 1st, 2019.
[00:49:19] We all flew out just for a day to New York City
[00:49:23] because he had already made public that he was battling.
[00:49:26] No, no, he had not.
[00:49:28] And this play this plays into
[00:49:31] this plays into the experience.
[00:49:33] So like I hadn't seen it in several months.
[00:49:36] And prior to that, like we had spent years and years
[00:49:39] literally every week or every other week
[00:49:43] meeting in some other city and basically being on an endless tour
[00:49:46] together for five years or something.
[00:49:50] So it had been a few months and he and Andrew and I met back up
[00:49:53] because New York City public schools were adopting
[00:49:57] all three March books,
[00:49:59] you know, throughout their curriculum.
[00:50:01] And it was this big deal.
[00:50:03] But when I saw him,
[00:50:06] yeah, he looked skinny.
[00:50:10] And I remember saying something dumb, but, you know, it's like, oh,
[00:50:13] I was like, Congressman, I was like, you look like you lost
[00:50:15] like 20 pounds or something.
[00:50:16] And I remember Andrew just giving me like the eyes like, no,
[00:50:19] no, not right now. And I was like, oh.
[00:50:23] And it was about a month after that, he came out publicly with it.
[00:50:28] So I actually found out by checking the news with everyone else.
[00:50:33] And then it seemed very obvious, you know, like it seemed
[00:50:37] obvious in that instant that I read the news along with everyone else.
[00:50:42] And I realized how much I put my foot in my mouth and put him on the spot.
[00:50:47] But then the world shut down.
[00:50:49] We had we had plans like I was going to take my kids up
[00:50:52] to go see him speak
[00:50:54] somewhere in northern Indiana, and he had to cancel
[00:50:57] because it was right after his diagnosis.
[00:51:01] And he and COVID was kicking up, but the world hadn't shut down.
[00:51:06] And so from that moment on, like January 2020 on,
[00:51:11] I realized that no matter what happened with
[00:51:15] with Congressman Lewis's health and his life,
[00:51:18] that our relationship needed to change.
[00:51:22] And so we still like played a role in each other's lives.
[00:51:25] And, you know, like we loved each other and we were friends or actual friends.
[00:51:31] But I realized that like it was really kind of on me
[00:51:34] to shift the dynamic entirely into a friend dynamic.
[00:51:40] And, you know, Congressman Lewis like gets lonely.
[00:51:43] He got lonely.
[00:51:44] And like a lot of people would sometimes just like not check in with him
[00:51:48] because they assumed that too many people were checking in with them.
[00:51:53] And yeah, so like once a week, I would just make sure I called him
[00:51:58] and we would talk for a while and just talk about like normal, mundane stuff.
[00:52:04] And I finally got to ask questions about his cats and everything,
[00:52:07] you know, stuff that like I was always thinking about,
[00:52:10] like higher minded stuff or, you know, we were doing.
[00:52:15] Our work stuff together, you know,
[00:52:18] and at a certain point around May or early June,
[00:52:22] it got harder and harder to get in touch with him
[00:52:25] because someone else had gained access to his phone,
[00:52:29] like a staffer who may not have his best interests in mind.
[00:52:35] And I completely lost direct contact with him
[00:52:38] as soon as this individual sort of gained access, commandeered his phone.
[00:52:45] And so it was it was very surreal and strange that, you know, like
[00:52:51] there were these moments during the beginning of the pandemic,
[00:52:53] like his last time he ever came out in public was during the
[00:52:58] like during the massive upheaval
[00:53:00] and the waves of protests in May and June 2020
[00:53:05] when he was in D.C.
[00:53:08] downtown and just getting to like show my kids,
[00:53:11] you know, these images that were coming in and just,
[00:53:14] you know, seeing like really as proof that he's,
[00:53:18] you know, he's in it to win it and he's still out there
[00:53:20] even under his incredible circumstances.
[00:53:23] And and yeah, but I I the last two,
[00:53:28] at least two months of his life, I had no direct contact with him.
[00:53:32] And that was just a real, really sad, unfortunate thing.
[00:53:36] Do you think that your kids, you know, kind of throughout
[00:53:42] were aware of the gravitas and the importance of this person?
[00:53:47] Yes. And a lot of that is
[00:53:50] like Harper, my my older kid, was born
[00:53:55] like the week I started working on March was born in late 2011.
[00:53:59] And so their life was literally surrounded
[00:54:04] by images of protest and historical images of the movement
[00:54:08] and images of John Lewis for my kids entire life.
[00:54:12] So it was probably around
[00:54:16] probably around 2015 when
[00:54:20] maybe, yeah, around 2015 sometime when my kid was able to
[00:54:24] actually make connections that the that this this person
[00:54:29] was not only somebody who I was now go who I was going out
[00:54:32] into the real world to talk about this stuff with,
[00:54:35] but the ways in which that intersected with this
[00:54:39] mass. Push to fulfill
[00:54:43] multiracial democracy and this mass push to maintain
[00:54:48] white supremacy and racial inequality throughout the 2010s.
[00:54:53] But I think one of the biggest moments there was in 2016.
[00:54:56] I was just thinking about this this morning when Congressman
[00:54:58] Lewis led that congressional sit in for gun control
[00:55:03] and Republicans had the the C-SPAN feed cut.
[00:55:08] Audio and video were cut.
[00:55:11] And so they were having to like on the spot on the floor,
[00:55:14] like broadcast from their cell phones and iPads and stuff.
[00:55:18] Electricity was cut in some parts of the chamber.
[00:55:21] But that was one of these moments where, you know,
[00:55:23] I made both of my kids come downstairs
[00:55:26] and really just watch what was happening in real time
[00:55:29] and to be able to show like a direct, simple application
[00:55:34] of the principles that I've been talking with my older kid
[00:55:37] about through the pages of March.
[00:55:40] But to see it in person, you know,
[00:55:43] mediated through the TV screen as something that was happening
[00:55:46] right this second was, I think, very impactful
[00:55:50] for my older kid.
[00:55:52] The significance of him dying when he died was not lost on me,
[00:55:57] you know, during during that time period.
[00:56:00] You know, but certainly he experienced Trump
[00:56:04] in a very real way, you know, even more than most of us did.
[00:56:08] And I'm curious if in those really not that we're out of it,
[00:56:13] but, you know, in those incredibly difficult years, whether
[00:56:17] he ever gave you any optimism that things will ultimately get better.
[00:56:24] Yes. And this is where this is where the
[00:56:30] the public John Lewis is just was just simply who he was,
[00:56:35] for the most part.
[00:56:37] He you know, he's a little bit funnier in private life
[00:56:39] and a little snarkier.
[00:56:40] But in general, like his his sincerity and the kind of like
[00:56:45] gravity, like just the the bombs he would drop occasionally.
[00:56:49] We're like, whoa, I'm in the presence of this man.
[00:56:54] Yes, like whenever he would like if we would if we would do a talk
[00:56:58] and so I would ask a question that simply had to do with like
[00:57:01] thinking in the medium term, in the long term about the arc of history
[00:57:05] and actually like, you know,
[00:57:08] successfully defeating these forces of white supremacy and oppression.
[00:57:13] You know, when he would talk to people about like,
[00:57:17] you know, a lot of his go to lines, you like if you want to tell me
[00:57:20] that things haven't changed and they're not changing, you know,
[00:57:23] come walk a mile in my shoes and I will show you change
[00:57:27] and talk about like the arc of history being like.
[00:57:31] The fact that this is not the struggle of even of a few months,
[00:57:35] a few years, but it's the struggle of a lifetime of many lifetimes.
[00:57:39] He 100 percent believed that and would privately
[00:57:43] convey that in so many words to us in these moments.
[00:57:46] Like it's where he truly like from a very young age,
[00:57:51] like as depicted in the pages of our work together, you know, like
[00:57:56] that kind of gravity and intensity was with him from like age five on.
[00:58:01] And a lot of times perseverance was like his was
[00:58:05] was his main thing when we were talking about issues is like
[00:58:07] essentially like I've seen this shit before.
[00:58:10] We're going to see it again.
[00:58:12] He wouldn't say shit, though.
[00:58:13] But but, you know, it's like, you know, like
[00:58:17] this is the kind of thing that is going to continue recurring.
[00:58:21] And we as a people are going to continue to need
[00:58:25] to remain vigilant and rise to the occasion.
[00:58:27] Like it's it is not something that is solved once.
[00:58:31] The the way of solving issues like this is continually
[00:58:36] addressing them and solving them.
[00:58:39] And for me, that's like it's such a realistic, unromantic
[00:58:45] way that has no platitudes in it that is also not depressing.
[00:58:50] It's like it's the only way forward.
[00:58:52] And so his like actual hope in humanity
[00:58:57] and hope in, yeah, like
[00:59:00] a movement that surpasses our own lifetimes
[00:59:05] is something that was so necessary to hear
[00:59:09] and so necessary to hear privately.
