Brent Hinds Is Dead, Long Live Brent Hinds.
Everyone we know or love is dying and the reality that we're not getting out of this late-stage morbidity alive leads to a crushingly clear conclusion: we're finished. So, uh, HAVE A NICE DAY!
When you chronicle sorrow, it starts to become the norm that sorrow is not as much a feeling as it is an attitude. There is love as it is present and then love as it is absent and depending on where you are on the great arc of life you’re living with one even as you’re most assuredly dying with the other. Ignore it and take the thrill ride to nothingness or embrace it and ruin the run to oblivion.
But the fact remains: this mortality thing is merciless.
Brent Hinds, the 51-year-old recently departed founding member of the group Mastodon dies in a motorcycle accident. I did not know the man outside of his outsized influence on friends of mine who either played with him or loved him from having played with him. Their sorrow, in postings, and texts to me, is deep and heartfelt, and it breaks my heart.
“Man, if I had known I was going to feel like this…” a musician friend of mine in the latter stages of a fractious separation from the mother of his kids, as well as his two kids, lamented in a phone call a very specific kind of horror related to this kind of loss. “…I never would have had them.”
It hung in the air, this anti-life sentiment that countered the well-worn adage about it being better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.
That is, what I know now is the sum total of lives now lived well beyond surprise. And still I am surprised, because still there is all of the heart-rending sorrow. Both for what was and what will be…
“Bullshit,” I said. “What we’re in love with, what we live and die for is, the absence that defines the presence of greatness in our lives. The more keenly we feel its absence stands in tribute to how great its presence was.” But the phone line had gone dead which, without a doubt, had made my point twice.
The point being this ride only ends one way. In fact there’s an army of the dead who can attest to this. The last few years being especially tough in that it seems death works in clusters. So from Albini whose death was a total surprise for many to Al Barile whose health struggles, as well as his postings about his impending death made it much less of one, are fellow travelers. Known ones.
Beyond that from the pantheon of known associates there’s been Darren Peligro from the Dead Kennedys, Monte Cazazza who told me he was going to die well before he should and he did indeed die well before he should, my father whose death went unmourned by me, Erik Wunder from Man’s Gin, Steve Shaughnessy, and maybe most disturbingly, a few lovers. That’s before we even start to catalog the punk rock dead whose deaths stretch back to a time when death seemed a distant possibility: David Skilken, Leon, Lazar, Dave Insurgent, all NYHC mainstays.
While the manner of death can sometimes shape the sorrow: accidents seeming much more unfair than health issues. Health issues seeming much less horrible than murders. And suicides seeming sadder than all of the above. They’re all starting to add up and with a birthday for me coming next week, adding up in a way that weighs a lot more than the sum of its parts.
That is, what I know now is the sum total of lives now lived well beyond surprise.
And still I am surprised, because still there is all of the heart-rending sorrow. Both for what was and what will be, and what we knew was coming. Even more disturbing is the clarity that accompanies a lot of these exits. You might sometimes imagine death creeping in on softened feet, a fever dream of confusion on exit but the more you live and pay attention to the deaths around you the more impressed you’ll be with the absolute clarity that accompanies many deaths.
[T]he last thing we’ll figure out is that the beast that’s running everyone else around us down, is running us down too.
Miriam wrote me that she was dying. After an early life that involved violent sexual abuse at the hands of a totally unrepentant uncle, semi-sanctioned by a mother who through some bad turns around the Summer of Love had ended up just another among the hippie homeless. Her homelessness had caused her to seek shelter with her mother and her mother’s favorite son, the raping uncle.
On her own mother’s death bed Miriam said her mother apologized profusely for the now-just acknowledged years of rape of both of her children. Miriam remained bitterly amused but forgave her mother. Then Miriam herself got sick, cancer.
“I’m dying Eugene…” She had written me and then she did just that. She saw it coming, knew it was coming and after a life of misery a death of the same without any lack of clarity to soften the blow. Clear-eyed it came for her, and decades later she comes to me. Usually in half-dreams, the erotic elements that had marked our time together, totally absent. Because it feels…weird? To sexualize a dead woman? Sort of.
But it’s more that her life, marked by poverty, privation, rape, and struggle right up to its very end in her 30s, seemed to embody the spirit of the age in miniature. We’re a death-loving culture and we love our dead more than we did when they lived and after writing obituaries I had decided I’d write no more…these tributes to really our own panic regarding finitude.
So sure, people will keep dying, more in the next few decades I am sure, and sorrow will accrue around them and all of my moments with them, and surprise will catch us, or it won’t. But the last thing we’ll figure out is that the beast that’s running everyone else around us down, is running us down too.
So I’m living life with a death plan, the key being to make an obituary unnecessary. It should be and will be known exactly why and how this story will end. At least that’s my foolish “hope”. Until then?
Well, to quote Little Richard we have got to just…rip it up.
Well, it's Saturday night and I just got paid/Fool about my money, don't try to save
My heart say "Go go, have a time"/'Cause it’s Saturday night and I'm feeling fine
And though this is not the song, the spirit of it is perfectly embodied here. So, now, go forth…have a time, and fuck shit up. The dead wouldn’t want it any other way.
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