RIP LJW

Above, a playlist I made from last.fm scrobbles for my cousin's funeral


As the youngest of three, I didn’t have younger siblings to chase around and terrorize, but I did have a gaggle of cousins. When we were young, we were all pretty close and played together routinely at family gatherings as an ensemble. Though Lucas was not the closest in age to me, I found myself paired with him far more often. Even though our personalities were wildly different and he did things like, as a three year old, try to smash a telephone into my face, foreshadowing his eventual lifelong love of pro wrestling- the closest thing resembling a sport he could tolerate, I felt a strong bond with him.

There were awkward tween and teen years where we barely conversed, but only because we seemed to be operating on different wavelengths, not different altogether frequencies. He was discovering and celebrating the musical canon when I was looking for inroads to defy it. His Kevin Smith and Moby phases came a bit later than mine, but he was also 6 years younger. But once we had both reached adulthood, I think we were able to connect again on an even plane.

Sometimes, I think the connection I felt was somewhat aspirational since I just liked and respected Lucas and felt like we were both the outcasts of the family. We both retreated into pop culture and wrote about it at length, obsessed over ephemera and minutiae and were fascinated by the parts that were seemed hidden or obscured by an excess of light elsewhere. I’d venture that this came from a similar incentive on both ends- an escape from our families or the structures and barriers that had seemingly been put in place by them. But while in my case, it was a sort of banal but ultimately harmless nuclear family structure and the flattening, nullifying impulses of the suburbs that made me seek hidden solace in the fantasy world, for Lucas it was a legitimately difficult home life. Struggling against these circumstances, I’m sure the comfort of the new worlds presented within film, TV, music, et al. seemed too enticing to live anywhere else. We were both relatively introverted, but whereas I can barely string together a sentence without writing it down first, Lucas was careful and well-spoken off-the-cuff when he wanted to be, with a sharp and clear-eyed memory. He was also funny as hell when he wanted to be, which was surprising since he otherwise carried with him a kind of persistent gravity and pathos, a sort of lingering sadness that didn’t seem like it could be quelled, but which was offset by moments of pure joy.

Lucas’s goal was always to be on the radio, an experience he fell hard for when he worked at his college radio station. When he moved out to LA, he asked if I knew anybody in radio. I didn’t, but tried to put him in touch with some media contacts that I don’t think he ever reached out to. I imagine he was disappointed to find that on-air talent jobs in radio were few and far between, didn’t exercise much autonomy in music selection, and didn’t really pay squat. I’d found this out myself while working in promotions for Cumulus Media adjacent the popular local radio jocks right out of college, one of whom a thoughtful and sensitive Husker Du fan reduced to building a kind of sub-Howard Stern persona and hawking Whitesnake tickets at car dealerships for aging sports dads. I too hosted a college radio show, both in college and after, which was a blast, but I found it odd that this was Lucas’s focus since I think he would have been disappointed in the disconnect between what radio could be and what it actually was. My major passion, writing, had become largely decommodified in the push to digital. After attempting to freelance for some time and conferring with fellow writers on what life looked like for the average writer, living hand-to-mouth and chasing down publishers for meager paychecks, I made the choice not pursue the hardships, uncertainty, and strain of that path and settled in to a 9 to 5. Lucas chose the difficult path.

Living and working in a husked out industrial shell of small town America in Upstate NY, he was resolutely miserable and I encouraged him a number of times to just pick up and go (as Amanda and I had done), but money was always an issue for him, way moreso than it ever was for me. It took him a while to cull together money from vulture lawyers looking over the estate of his father, who passed away in 2013, but when he did he embarked off to Los Angeles. It doesn’t seem like Lucas ever landed on the radio, but he wrote, did some standup comedy (training with Second City), and collected odd jobs, assisting on projects like the Turner Classic Film Festival and the Razzies. In the meantime, he made a go of freelancing, getting the opportunity to interview Tommy Wiseau and watch/comment on hours of archival TV for work, things that must have been akin to those moments of pure joy alluded to above. While I have other family who have gone into media, Lucas’s drive was creative. He either didn’t see much value in the other kind of work or knew it wasn’t for him, even if it meant money would continue to be an issue. And with him gone, that seems to leaves me alone in the family as the other one (that I knew of) for whom creativity and imagination is more important than professionalism or other traditional measures of success.

After the initial shock of hearing he had died, that’s the feeling I can’t shake- that he left me alone in the family, or even moreso, that he himself was alone on the west coast and needed me. Maybe not me, but someone. Either way, I wasn’t there. He abruptly shut off social media at one point and I didn’t have his phone number. With the pace of life, I wasn’t able to keep up, which is a shitty excuse.

We still don’t know how he died, and it’d be stupid to speculate on what happened. The only important thing worth mentioning is that he was 29 years old and 29 is too goddamned young to die. It’s probably stupid for me to think in these terms too- who am I to know what he needed- I hadn’t talked to him in years, but Lucas was the first person I remember knowing as a baby. I watched him grow up and live his entire life. As an adjunct older sibling, I modeled interactions of how to play with younger kids and see shades of my son in those moments (Lucas and Oliver both love(d) Michael Jackson). My aunt would always me pictures of him, which I kept on my bulletin board, like a little brother I was proud of. And when I first got deep into writing in middle school, I would name almost all of my main characters Luke, because the name to me epitomized cool.

I regret not hanging on to that relationship tighter and I regret not coming out to visit him, when I know that would have meant something to him. I regret not being able to collaborate with him, to be creative in some capacity, or just encourage him to do a podcast or something like that to just let him know I though his voice was valuable and worth listening to. It’s too late to do that now, so perhaps writing this is the best I can do.

Below is a remnant from when we did collaborate- ages ago- on a song called “Jacolyte”, which I remember as being a theme song for a (imaginary?) pro-wrestler of some kind. The tape it came from credited the band as ORG, which still sounds like a pretty rad name for a band. It features myself on keyboard and Lucas on vocals. When I sent it to him around 2 years ago, he said it made him “unbelievably happy” and I’m gonna severely miss not having someone like him in my life.

A1 to A24

Twenty Musical Releases from Twenty Eighteen that I like in relatively descending order:

Tirzah-Devotion
Amnesia Scanner-Another Life
Charli XCX-Pop 2
Jenny Hval-The Long Sleep EP
Sophie -Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides
Oneohtrix Point Never-Age Of
AJA- AJA
Palmbomen II-Memories of Cindy
Let's Eat Grandma-I'm All Ears
Lolina-The Smoke
Shygirl-Cruel Practice EP
Grouper-Grid of Points
Various-Black Panther OST
Summer of Haze-P A C I F I C A
Janelle Monae-Dirty Computer
Pusha T-Daytona
Florentino-Fragmentos EP
Johnny Greenwood-Phantom Thread
Antonio Mendez-Highland Drive
DJ Taye-Still Trippin

Ten Television programs from Twenty Eighteen that I've liked in relatively descending Order

Atlanta 

Lodge 49

High Maintenance   

The Good Place 

Glow

Pose

Corporate 

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace     

Barry

The Handmaids Tale

Five films from Twenty Eighteen that I've enjoyed in relatively descending order:

Sorry to Bother You

Hereditary

Isle of Dogs

Annhilation

Black Panther

Forgotten

Never forget that on 9/11, the country with the world’s largest military apparatus several times over with the world’s biggest intelligence gathering systems, failed to recognize or prevent an incoming attack on the American people by a previously ragtag group energized into international collusion by the U.S.’s massive sanctions program that killed roughly a million people in Iraq and motivated by the U.S.’s continued support for Israel’s apartheid settlements in Palestine. Never forget that no one was ever punished for this massive blunder, or that Richard Clark was the only one who ever even apologized to the victims for failing to protect their families. Never forget that families starved and people went without healthcare to pay for this military state that didn’t wind up making us any safer.

Never forget that the architect of the murders was partially radicalized and trained by the CIA to fight Soviets in an imperial tit-for-tat over an Afghanistan looking towards communism as one potential direction to go post-monarchy. Never forget that The Taliban offered to hand Bin Laden over but the Bush admin didn’t agree to their terms and had assumedly already cashed the checks paid to their defense contractor buddies so they proceeded to assault Afghani civilians. Never forget that because of the thirst for an assault, Bin Laden escaped over the Pakistan border and was able to evade capture for years.  Never forget that this war is still not over and it’s now in the hands of the world’s tallest infant who thinks he can privatize it. Never forget that Al Qaeda colluded with members of the Saudi Government and no interrogation or assault was ever conducted on what continues to be a strong US ally, currently busy carrying out their own atrocities in neighboring Yemen (a similar invasion into oil-rich Kuwait prompted the first Gulf War).

Never forget that the US launched a war under pretenses everybody knew were bullshit or specious or at best disputed at the time. Never forget that the major justification was an invented connection between Iraq and 9/11, based around what basically amounts to Infowars-style innuendo and rumor. Never forget that the fundamentalists in Al Queda and the secular Ba'athists in Iraq hated each other and never would have collaborated to carry out an attack as complicated as 9/11.  Never forget the Iraq war that killed at least a million people (a row of bodies that would stretch for NYC to Florida) had bipartisan support. Never forget that not one person was impeached or jailed over these massive war crimes. Never forget that Saddam Hussein had been cooperating with UN weapons inspectors and was actually reducing his weapons program prior to the invasion. 

Never forget that George Bush flippantly joked about not being able to find weapons of mass destruction at the White House Correspondents Dinner by displaying a picture of him looking under his desk, a line that got a major laugh from the fawning press. Never forget that Bush attempted to declare victory before the war had basically even begun by staging a media spectacle where Bush flew in and landed on an aircraft carrier and that propagandists would later stage the toppling of the Saddam statue.  Never forget that the Iraq war still isn't over.  Never forget that the administration used biological warfare including water and electricity deprivation, dirty bombs, and torture as regular tactics.  Never forget that the government hired mercenaries to carry out war crimes, and that the main mercenary boss now advises the president and his sister is in charge of the school system.

Never forget that the protests preempting the war were the biggest that had ever taken place in the entire world at the time, yet there was virtually no opposition to it within the legislature and there was virtual consensus of cheerleading approval across all the major news channels.  Never forget that anti-war voices were regularly silenced, cordoned off into free speech zones, and laughed off of the discourse as the bodies stacked.  Never forget the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, which argued that the US was within its rights to attack a country that had not acted aggressively towards it if it simply thought that the country may do so in the future.  Never forget that while we were destroying a country, the actual criminals behind 9/11 eluded escape for nearly a decade.

Never forget that after the towers fell and the president told people to shop, and people shopped for merchandise with crying firefighters on it, the actual first responders quietly died from preventable ailments brought on by inhaling smoke and debris and it’s now thought that more first responders will die from the environmental effects of the attack than perished in the towers. Never forget that for years the Republican Party paraded around 9/11 as a totem of their own patriotism while never assuming responsibility for any of these horrible acts, doing everything in their power to slow/redact key elements of the 9/11 commission, ripping up the bill of rights for the PATRIOT ACT, building a national security state that just happened to be friendly to personally affiliated contractors like Bechtel and Haliburton, and in the case of ghouls like Guiliani charging exorbitant speaking fees for their 9/11-based expertise. Never forget that we stayed in Iraq for years before ISIS emerged when the country could have stabilized to make sure we would have a stake in their oil industry, and that we fought a shift towards renewable energy during this period because of our investment in the region, a move that may eventually wipe out life as we know it on this planet.

Never forget that while these wars weren't quite as deadly as past ones were for US troops, this was largely thanks to modern medicine, and many returned home severely disabled, limbless, and with massive mental health issues. Never forget that veterans came home to a dysfunctional VA system that eventually became so backlogged with benefits requests that it had to start warehousing them. Never forget that those who did die were frequently put in harm’s way for no reason. Never forget that veterans’ families who spoke out against the war(s), such as the Sheehan and Tillman families, were massively red-taped or sustained aggressive character assassinations in the press.

 

Never forget that in the wake of 9/11, the US set up an indefinite detention center that rounded up immigrant and domestic Muslims and courted them off to a prison island without trial, where they were tortured and in several cases killed.  Never forget that Guantanamo Bay is still open. Never forget that the bile directed against Arab populations began almost immediately after the towers fell, with racist, Orientalist perspectives spouted ad nauseum without rebuke in the national press and on TV, spurring an unending stream of discrimination and harassment toward families of Middle Eastern descent living in the country peacefully.

Never forget that as bad as 9/11 was, we did mini-9/11s repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistans.  We bombed weddings, mosques, hospitals, roads, bridges, et al.  While it's clear our sorrow for the 9/11 victims runs deep, we've never quite come to terms with the suffering we caused in its wake or taken accountability for the devastation.  As Bush-era cronies cycle through history again as new Trump appointees or newly minted resistance heroes, it's clear that we've chosen to forget.  No matter how many times we repeat the mantra.  We keep forgetting, over and over like a Beckett play refrain.   Never forget. We’ll forget.  Never forget. We’ll forget.  Never forget.

The External World dir David O'Reilly (2011)