February 21 2024

I hear the beep beep beep of trucks backing up at the ship yard and the hiss of a large rusted boat being pressure washed. My energetic body has slipped into a cocoon of protection where sounds are muffled as if I’m holding my hands over my ears while people scream around me. Bombs keep raining down on Gaza and the West Bank and other parts of the Middle East, in an ongoing Holocaust.. I condemn it and I’m fighting it but I’m also a part of it because most of my ancestors are Germanic or from other parts of Europe where Jewish people were ridiculed, marginalized, scapegoated and eventually exterminated en masse over thousands of years of brutal antisemitism. It’s not antisemitic to criticize Israel, but it’s antisemitism that created the deep layers of inter-generational trauma that are fueling the colonization and insane massacres that are taking place.

On one hand I’m fully fucked up by all that’s going down in the world and I’m working to dismantle the systems of oppression that I live under, and on the other hand I’m dismantling the oppressiveness I allow others to enact upon me and which I carry within myself and enact upon myself and others.

I’ve written a lot about the abusiveness I’ve experienced from various people in my life, my inability to fit in in various social situations, and not being fully included in people’s lives yet being called on for huge favours and deep emotional and spiritual support. This winter was my breaking point and I’ve been a lot more careful with how I dispense my energies. And guess what?? I'm feeling a lot better.

I also recognize that there are parts of myself that are oppressive, judgmental and reactive, and as I feel stronger, I'm keeping my ego in check and trying to stay in touch with my feelings, as with great strength comes great responsibility to use that strength for the forces of freedom and change.

I’m also feeling better and better about being alone and am genuinely excited to be going on another solo trip to see one of my favourite black metal bands in Seattle at the end of March.

And speaking of Seattle / Washington state, I started reading Kurt Cobain’s journals, which I picked up from a totally awesome store here in Lekwungen called Cavity Curiosity Shop. I traded in a bunch of old stuff I had and they gave me a really decent amount of credit for it, yet for some of the rare items they kept the prices low because they said they like to have a cap on what they’ll charge for things. They recommended I put some stuff online if I wanted to get more money, but I was totally cool to support their store. They really seemed to want to support the underground music scenes here and weren’t caring about making a huge profit. Unlike the dingleberries at the so-called anarchist book store who wouldn't lend a front-line Indigenous activist a $10 book they got for free, and then were trying to have me get a better deal for them out of a purchasing arrangement with a local author who self-published a book about going through recovery. I was like no I won’t be doing that, sorry.. and that was the last straw before I left.

Oh ya, so I picked up a book of Kurt Cobain’s journals from Cavity Shop and it’s been really interesting and taking me back to the 90’s in a huge way, and forcing me to confront some very uncomfortable aspects of myself and what an insensitive edgy immature moron I was for quite a long time (and still am at times). Though I also have a lot of sympathy and understanding for a lot of us who were expressing ourselves in such raw and uncompromising ways back then, and in getting deeper into Cobain’s journals I’m reminded of how the sometimes brutal and offensive expressions of dudes like Kurt Cobain and Steve Albini were never meant as a proclamation; and dark humour, word play, satire and irony are ripe throughout the book.

When I first read the piece where he claims to have tried to have sex with a woman who may or may not have been mentally disabled and then was so ashamed that he tried to kill himself, I initially took it literally; but then I was confused by so much of his other writings where he so clearly is against rape and any kind of sexism. Then I read another excerpt from his journals about a serial killer supposedly called “Chuck Taylor” who would give his sister "tobasco sauce or his soiled finger that had been up his anus". Well.. there was no serial killer by that name, just a ubiquitous shoe brand - and I really started to get Kurt’s fucked up sense of humour, and sardonic way of shoving the dark underbelly of America into people’s faces. In many other passages he very harshly criticizes rape culture in a way that few men were at that time (late 80’s / early 90’s). And at one point he raised $15,000 to support rape victims in Bosnia. But if you take Kurt Cobain’s journals at face value, they could easily be misinterpreted.

I also recently re-read the Faust comics (before I traded them in at Cavity shop), which are full of brutal vivid rape and gore scenes, yet it was not celebratory at all, and the anti-hero had a strong moral compass.

But then there were the likes of Boyd Rice and Jim Goad who are legitimate misogynists whose art was both provocative and hateful, and I can understand why they’ve had backlash for their output, and almost nobody thinks they're cool anymore. (Disclaimer: I used to be into these guys - and the most extreme, offensive, misanthropic shit I could find).

Kurt Cobain on the other hand.. if you can get into his mind and understand the warped-ass way he presents himself, you'll likely find him to be an exceptionally perceptive, poetic and beautiful in many ways. And he openly reflected on how he somewhat reflected that which he reviled. Yet he was speaking out about homophobia, sexism and racism in the liner notes from Insecticide:

“If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of a different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”

Not that the dude was perfect, he physically abused Courtney at one point (she shoved him, he shoved her back and threw her to the ground choking her).

**

I was worried that reading his diaries might depress the fuck out of me or drag me into another spiral of self battery, but it didn’t. I did get really emotional when I went online and read his suicide note though. I realized that I never grieved his death when I was younger, even though it was probably the most impactful and shocking event of my generation. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I found out and it was like a boot in the chest, but I never cried. Until now. 30 years later..

Kurt Cobain was the person who defined my whole generation. It didn't matter what genre of music you were into, the one thing we all shared was our love for Nirvana.

I don’t want to see his life as something to forever be fucked up about, but rather a warning and a portal:

Drugs are bad. Don't do them.

The void is just an interlude. Keep going.


p.s. The number of people online talking about whether or not Kurt Cobain is a r*tard f*cker is because there is also an excerpt from the Montage of Heck film where this piece of writing is read out and there isn't any other context given (they also changed the text to make it more believable). I would recommend that anyone who wants to understand Kurt Cobain better read his journals all the way through and get into his mind. He was no more a r*tard f*cker than a serial killer called Chuck Taylor mutilated a kitten in order to see if their rib cage felt the same as the ribbed flesh on the top of his mouth when he ran his tongue along them, or that Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic were “two bored art students” who were “gluing sea shells and drift wood on burlap potatoe sacks.” I’m not saying this to provide myself with some soothing cognitive dissonance to avoid dethroning yet another 90’s rock god. I promise you, that piece of writing about pursuing a vulnerable girl and then switching schools after cops sopped him "one night at a football game" is speculative fiction where he attempts to enter the mind of the type of person who he reviled in high school.

Kurt Cobain wasn't hanging out at football games as a teenager and he never went to art school. He moved schools because his parents divorced, not because of some shameful incident at high school.