I finally get to show people the cover to my upcoming book, The Sapling Cage, which will be kickstarted in June, so you can preorder it then—but you can sign up now to be the first to know when the campaign goes live.
This May Day, I went down to the triangle area of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh. Some students had booked me to give a talk about the history of May Day, then found their campus organizing space closed by the administration as a sort of collective punishment for their Palestinian solidarity encampment. Since the venue had been shuttered, they asked me to give my talk just outside of it. I did.
It was a bit odd—the press came and wanted to know if the event was related to the encampments. I told them I was a history podcaster who had been booked before any of that had started, but that the venue was closed. And that while what I was about to say wasn’t directly related to the encampment, everything is related to Palestinian solidarity. How could it be otherwise?
I had to thread the needle carefully, because I then picked up a microphone and told the assembled crowd the history of May Day, which is full of quotes that might look—a bit “outside agitator”—out of context. Like, you know, all the lines by all the martyrs about being ready to die for anarchy and socialism.
I love May Day, and it was a fantastic way to celebrate. But while I was in town, I went to visit my friend Will. Will lives underground now, or in heaven, or he’s dead. Really depends on whom you ask. I somehow believe all three at once, don’t ask me how. My friend and I, who’d lived with him together, went to put flowers on his grave and wish him happy May Day… the day he’d taken his punk last name from.
We told his parents we’d gone to see him, and they were glad we’d visited for Cinco de Mayo, which had been, unbeknownest to me, a favorite holiday of his when he grew up Cuban in Miami.
Will moved into the earth about seven years ago now, which doesn’t feel real and probably never will. I wrote this piece about the funeral for my old blog, which is offline now, so I’ll share it here. Don’t worry, it’s not about the song “Wagon Wheel,” that reference is just to troll him.
It’s strange to look back at this piece now. The way I feel about death, religion, and the afterlife has grown and shifted substantially in the intervening years, and in some ways, Will’s funeral was the turning point of all of that.
Anyway, here it is:
If I Die in Raleigh
Punks tend to wear all black anyway, so it’s almost easy for us to dress for funerals. Except most of us don’t own nice clothes and some of us don’t know what gendered costume we’re supposed to wear.
We did what we could.
At the grave site, while Will laid waiting to be put in the ground, our friend Jesse played Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on guitar. All of us sang along, crying. The priest — who didn’t know us, didn’t know the family, didn’t know Will — must have been confused. Not an hour earlier, he’d been trying his hardest to maintain the proper balance between speaking to us respectfully and patronizingly about God, and we weren’t having any of it. Yet there we were, earnestly singing Hallelujah.
Cohen’s version strikes at what’s true about God and Death and all those other words that may or may not deserve capital letters. That day, it was an atheist prayer. I don’t really care too much what the priest thought of us.
One friend, face wet with tears and guitar in hand, got off the stool and joined the rest of us while another friend was lowered into the ground forever.
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