They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

I don’t know how to be honest enough to say that there isn’t a place for kids like us, so we need to make our own, and nothing is more punk rock than that. Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.

Plus, all of our pals got drink tickets but only about half of them could drink, and so, in half-full venues full of our friends, we could live like brief and generous kings.

The way I say “My people” and My People know who they are even if we’ve never met, or even if we’ve never spoken, or even if all we have is the shared lineage of coming from a people who came from a people who came from a people who didn’t intend to come here but built the here once they arrived.

The real grief is silence in a place where there was once noise. Silence is the hard thing to block out, because it hovers, immovable, over whatever it occupies. Noise can be drowned out with more noise, but the right type of silence, even when drowning, can still sit inside of a person, unmoving.

It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.

“Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” was the first time I considered the true work of the sample: to call us all back to something familiar, in hopes that we might ignore all that is falling apart outside.

Their question is often posed as How will I explain this person in the bathroom to my child? or How will I explain those two people kissing to my child? but rarely How will I explain to my child that people die and we do nothing?

The uncertainty of an afterlife has also kept some of us here: at my youngest, most reckless and uncertain, I had moments where I thought life was done with me and I thought myself done with it. And, perhaps like some of you, I have remained here because of my comfort with the darkness I know and my fear of the darkness I do not.

America, so frequently, is excited about the stories of black people but not the black people themselves. Everything is a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, or a march where no one was beaten or killed. This is why the telling of our own stories has always been important. The idea of black folklore as community is still how we connect to our past, lock