I Didn't Belong in Art School

the beginning of a memoir

I’m going to use this space to write a memoir, because why not. My memory isn’t getting any better, so might as well do this now. I figure I’ll do a chapter at a time and see how it goes.

First, though, updates:

I’ll be at Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair in Asheville, North Carolina from August 11-13th 2023. I’ll be tabling with my press Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. On Saturday August 12th, 3pm at the West Asheville Library I’ll be presenting “A Halfway Concise History of Anarchism,” and then that night at the after party I’ll be playing as Nomadic War Machine. The bookfair and talk are free, and the show is $10 but no one turned away for lack of funds.

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I Didn’t Belong in Art School

My life began, truly began, when I dropped out of college to join the movement. To become a squatting, train-riding, hitchhiking, treesitting, dumpsterdiving crust punk committed to direct action and the overthrow of capitalism, the state, and all systems of authority.

That’s how I used to conceive it anyway. For a decade or more, it felt like my life had a clean break. There was a before, which didn’t matter, and an after, which did. I don’t see it that way now. Now I can see my early anarchist life as another period of my life, one that I’m proud of, but no more core to who I am than the nineteen years that came before it, or my life now that I own a house in the mountains and suspect that the larger part of my life is behind me.

But this is a story of that wild decade, where I was a raw nerve, filling myself with life and love and pain, so I’ll try to think a bit how I felt then.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling pithy, I say that I dropped out of school to ride trains and overthrow the government, and that I wasn’t very good at either but I got a lot of stories out of it.

First though, I went to college.