A Situation Like This

Gun violence in America

One of the weird things about Message from the Underworld is even though I compose these things a day or two in advance I write them as if it’s Wednesday. Like I’m sitting on the other side of the computer screen with a cup of coffee in my hand, waiting to wish you good day the second you open the email. 

In between scheduling the email and sending it, I hope that the world doesn’t completely go to shit so that you don’t wake up on doomsday with me chirping “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!” You know, like I did last week. 

Since the last time I wrote this newsletter we’ve had two mass shootings and it’s absolutely sickening. 

First, there was the shootings in Atlanta where a terrorist targeted his victims because of their race. Then this week there was another shooting in Boulder not far from the campus of the University of Colorado. I don’t know why this gunman shot up a grocery store, and I don’t want to know. 

Every time there’s a shooting I think about the morning of December 14, 2012, when I heard about the mass shooting at a school at Sandy Hook Elementary. Even though my wife, Nuvia, was in class with her students several thousands of miles away, I immediately texted her to let her know what had happened. I just wanted to give her a head’s up in case her students found out about the school shooting and were upset about it. 

The name Sandy Hook didn’t mean anything to me then, and I’d give anything to go back to that time of relative innocence, but Nuvia made the connection immediately. The previous summer, Nuvia had gone to Newtown to visit our friends who’d moved there from San Diego. It was the last time she saw our friends’ daughter Avielle. She was just six years old. 

That day was one of the longest days of our lives, a day of waiting for bad news to get worse, because it couldn’t get better. When these shootings take place, horror takes root and slowly unfolds, affecting more and more people until the number grows into the thousands. People who are waiting by the phone, glued to the Internet, waiting for the news to get worse. 

There were two things that stood out to me about these shootings. In Atlanta, Delaina Yuan and her husband Mario Gonzalez were getting massages in separate rooms when the spa came under attack. Gonzalez ran outside and was handcuffed by the police, who detained him for four hours while his wife died inside the spa. Why? Because they didn’t believe Gonzalez, who has brown skin, was married to Yuan, who has white skin. Leave it to the police to respond to a racist hate crime and make it worse. I hope Gonzalez sues that police department into the stone age. 

In Colorado, one of the survivors who escaped by jumping off the loading dock at the rear of the store said, “It seemed like all of us had imagined we’d be in a situation like this at some point in our lives.” 

The terrible thing about that statement is he’s probably right. I don’t think about active shooters when I’m at the post office or the grocery store, but I think about them in the abstract, worrying about my family as schools get ready to open up again.  

What happened to us? How did we became so callous? There was a time when murders of this magnitude would dominate not just the news cycle, but the national conversation. Now it’s breaking news for a few hours and then it shares space with other news stories. Meanwhile, in the communities destroyed by violence, the news gets worse and worse and worse. 

The shootings in Atlanta made me numb. When I heard the murders took place at multiple locations, I wrongly assumed it was a domestic situation gone very, very wrong. I didn’t get angry until I heard the racist cop minimize what was clearly a racist hate crime as a “bad day,” by then it seemed the media had moved on to other outrages.

I don’t want to look away, but I don’t want to feed a media machine that during the first 24 hours of a mass shooting event is almost completely useless.  

I also don’t want to “unplug,” to become so callous and numb that I sink into my own concerns like a diving bell settling into black depths.  

Honestly, I don’t know what to do because this is not the situation I’d imagined. My family is getting vaccinated. Annie has been accepted to several of the colleges she applied to and has some big decisions to make. Every few weeks it seems Nuvia masters some new platform for her job at High Tech High. I want to feel that this year we spent bottled up in our quarters is leading to something good, but it’s really hard to feel that way when the shootings never stop and all we can manage is a collective shrug. 

I want to believe that things are getting better but this week has been a wake-up call with respect to how much hate and fear there is out there, and how much work needs to be done. 

Because as much as we wish we could imagine it, we can’t go back to the morning of 12/14/12 and rewrite the past. I need to believe our actions today can help write a brighter future. 

But how? 

PssSST…

I haven’t been reading much, but I’ve been doing a ton of research on the SST book while various novels and zines I’d been hoping to get to pile up. That’s probably the way it’s going to be for the next few months as I enter the home stretch. 

I recently finished Greg Prato’s Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets, which I’ve been “reading” for months. It’s a confounding book in that it attempts to tell the entire story of the Meat Puppets as an oral history, but where Prato’s book leaves it up to the reader to connect the dots and piece together a narrative, the stories in the book are incredible. Too High to Die probably comes closest to being on a tour bus and listening to the band tell stories.

On the tour bus, musicians usually don’t reflect on their past unless prompted by a visiting member from another band or an old friend. That’s when you get the good stuff. Prato interviews not only the band members but their friends and associates as well. I don’t know if this provides a fuller picture, but it certainly is a more entertaining one. 

The Meat Puppets are a fascinating band. The Meat Puppets went on the road with Black Flag on the My War Tour to support its second album and lots of people who would go on to form important bands who came to see Black Flag were mesmerized by the Meat Puppets. You could write a thesis on the Meat Puppets’ influence on Nirvana alone.

There’s a long anecdote in the book where Kim Thayil discusses how he logged a lazy description of the Meat Puppets first record as “generic hardcore” at the radio station where he worked. Over time his opinion of the record changed and he realized how wrong he was and how that error haunted him. His early dismissal of the band led to him becoming something of an evangelist. 

This is interesting to me as a fan because Meat Puppets are a band that grows on you. I recently picked up a copy of the first record at Beatbox Records in Barrio Logan. The cover is pretty beat up but the record is pristine. It wasn’t a record I sought out, I’d listened to it a million times on iTunes, but there it was in the bin and I snagged it. Listening to it these past few weeks has changed the way I feel about the record, especially the trippy cover of “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds.” 

It might shock you to know that the song was recorded while the singer was on some form of hallucinogen, but then again it might not. The chapter in Too High to Die about bassist Cris Kirkwood’s heroin addiction is gnarly as hell and the story about how he got shot at the post office is worth the price of admission. (I don’t mean to make light of a shooting, but he brought it on himself, and it ultimately saved his life.)

The book came out in 2012 so someone will have to write the next chapter, including the 2019 release of Dusty Notes, which features the return of original drummer Derrick Bostrom. 

I loved this song from the new album. It has a haunting, melancholy beauty that suits my mood right now. It’s called “Nine Pins” but I like to think of it as “Five Dudes Who Have Seen Some Shit.”

There's a path
It's not a road
No traffic through
No noisy highway
Where I can walk
Between the trees
A strip of green
That's rolling my way
And the moon shines down
The moon shines down