GRIEF IS AN EXTENDED RELEASE

Slowly I am starting to understand how death is so beautiful

A photo I took near the Floyd autonomous zone in Minneapolis last year. Today’s post was a tough one. Please consider supporting my work by liking, sharing, subscribing to a paid tier, you know the drill—love you.

Damn homies, shit has been heavy. Rockets over Gaza, death hanging like a mushroom cloud of debris in the air. After losing 6 people over the past 12 months, I have become preoccupied with grief—a process (and it truly is an unfolding, unraveling motion over time) that I’ve only been distantly acquainted with, until now. I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief, so this massive darkness makes me small.

How does grief change us? Can we be transformed by suffering, even if the loss is untimely, absurd, sickeningly cruel? And what changes when mourning happens online, death rituals become livestreamed funerals, social media accounts get deleted, and our phones are the graveyards where our beloved’s voices are buried?

Tackling these questions feels like trying to make sense of this entire pandemic lol—there’s no way I’ll nail the answers, but while stumbling around this murky sadness, I’ve turned to friends / writers / strangers on Tinder, and slowly I am starting to understand that death is so beautiful.

Below, some meditations on grief + the legends who slinked beyond the veil. I hope this helps you whenever it’s your turn.

PS: some friends are organizing an auction called GOD IS TRANS in memoriam of Sophie, with beautiful prints, paintings, and memorabilia (including a gorgeous Eckhaus GOWN) inspired by our queen. All proceeds go towards trans justice.

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Grief is an extended release pill that blooms slowly, burrowing deeper into the sediment of your psyche, changing you in mysterious ways that at first can only be felt viscerally.

Grief is a physical experience. The body turns metallic as sadness hardens through stagnation—the true self must be coaxed back through movement and ritual (raving)

Grief is a data download, a process of transfiguration that encodes a person’s essence into the DNA of those who loved them. As you adopt their language and lessons, you flaunt their face to the world.

Grief is to relinquish the luxury of intention. The word “accident” derives from ad cadere, that is, “to fall,” and the fall cannot be attributed to God or to the Fates.

Grief is a possession, a haunting, someone’s laugh suddenly flooding the room.

Grief is the most psychedelic sober experience, and must be properly integrated.

Grief is not being able to stop the slow burial of someone’s texts in your phone.

Grief is blowing up cars with cocaine cowboys.

Grief is the revelation of a scene or secret network that someone has woven through their field of social relations.

Grief is an interruption—the end of an era and beginning of another.

Grief is a test of your friends. Watch who responds with the substance to match the gravity of this moment, and who turns away, no longer entertained.

Grief is to know your essential loneliness.

Grief is an eruption, a volcano that goes dormant and then starts spewing again without warning.

“Grief makes me horny,” I tell a stranger on Tinder.  “I guess I can understand this need to be held in a visceral and sometimes numbing way” he responds, generously. “No, this sex/death link feels deeper,” I insist, but maybe he’s right and I’m just trying to numb out, like, sex as spiritual cocaine.

Grief is the wild edge of sorrow.

Grief is dancing to the “Cupid Shuffle” next to a memorial.

Grief is having a bootleg copy of someone in your head, an inferior avatar that you can summon and speak to as your ideal creative audience.

Grief is a catalyst, an irresistible urge to action. It is too difficult to sit with this much suffering, so you have to move into action. 

Grief is a spell that breaks the illusion of eternity and reveals how the future is just a fantasy—never a given.

Grief is a journey without direction or destination. There is no “coming” to terms or “getting over”— no finish line to move across, just a hazy horizon.

Grief is a reminder that the only thing that really fucking matters is loving + being generous to everyone.

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This essay was published earlier this week in a tribute with 34 other writers + compiled by Tao Lin. You should read the full thing, it’s beautiful.

Gian you were my depraved drug daddy and I am writing this while crying like a scared little bitch into the crater of awesomeness you used to fill. Today all I can remember is the warm pillow of your body, my head on your chest, the two of us waltzing on the side of a volcano. "Come to Italy maaan," you beckoned not too long ago, "My guy says there's a rave on the crater of Mount Vesuvius this weekend..." I never made it, too caught up in my own bullshit to leap into your splendor, but god damn, this fantasy is such a retreat.

I have never lost someone I loved this hard before so I keep asking my homies, what is this thing called grief, this bitter extended release pill that keeps blooming inside me. One of my friends said that death is the end of the multiverse of potentialities, and when you lose the infinitudes of intertwined futures with somebody, you can simply consider their story from beginning to end. This, I think, is a form of grace. Another friend who just lost her soulmate in an accident described death as a data download—a surreal process of transfiguration where the dead's DNA is encoded into those who loved them, so that their legacy lingers forever in the ether. "When someone slashes you so deep, you remember their wisdom," a friend said, "Everytime you act or think like them, you are showing a side of their face."

Slowly I am starting to understand how death is so beautiful.

When J called to tell me you were gone I felt your presence suddenly flood my room, so intensely it was like a possession, your chuckle ringing circles around my head. "How can he be gone," I cried, "when I can feel him here with me right now?" Gian, you were a giant of a man, the sweetest of all friends, and you should have seen the way Twitter lit up that week, all of your scraggly children co-writing a collage of your largesse—you would have fucking relished it. Of course everyone tuned into your funeral, all of us gazing down at your casket with a god's eye view through the church's panopticon webcam. I was still sobbing through my mask as I boarded a plane a few hours later, wondering what you would have said if I told you I was heading to Jay Z's weed factory in Silicon Valley. Nobody talked about drugs like you did.

tbh dude, I am struggling to reconcile how the thing that bonded us—our deep obsession with drugs—is also the thing that ripped you away forever. J told me that when he last saw you, you guys were laughing about that time—it must have been, what, 2015?—I tried heroin for the first time in your Hell's Kitchen apartment and puked all over your bathroom. I was starting to explore the contours of substances most people were too afraid to try or never even heard of, and your presence in these netherworlds always felt like a guardian. All I remember is sniffing a tiny line and crawling into your bed with your pitbull, while you finished the bag with a shrug and went out to some fancy dinner meeting. That night (and always) you seemed god-level invincible, an all-powerful sabyrite that no earthly chemical could conquer. It was almost a joke how nothing could fell you. Most people treat drugs like a guilty indulgence or frivolous escape, but you taught me how to regard them without stigma or shame—and for this gift I am so grateful.

When you slid into my phone in the middle of the pandemic saying "yo kinda vibing on this drug spectrum addiction thing you plugging...seems like some real shit"—I did not realize this was the start of a conversation that would spin out for six months and shift the course of my life forever. You were now in Italy with the love of your life, and I was in LA writing about drugs and addiction, advocating against the common assumption that abstinence is the only path to redemption. You liked this idea that sobriety is more of a non-binary spectrum, rather than a dictation by the gatekeepers of traditional recovery programs.

I loved waking up to your voice in my DMs as we ping-ponged our takes across the Atlantic ocean. "I have a bag of k the size of a golf ball in my pocket preparing for lockdown," you said, telling me how using ketamine for depression was a new revelation for you, born in quarantine conditions. Often I would listen to your messages as I took my morning shits, your late-night drawl beat-matched to the clinking of ice cubes as you chuckled about scientists doing ketamine with dolphins, or asked for advice on investing in shrooms on the stock exchange.

When we talked about new books shaping America's evolving drug conversation, you told me that Carl Hart's Drug Use for Grown-Ups had made an impression: "sup babe? so finished the book. a lot not addressed about addiction but i just feel kinda vindicated in a weird way about being open about everything. i've always gotten so much shit for it and i like this coming out of the closet thing." (My other reading rec was less well-reviewed: "reading the Pollan book. what a fucking nerd he is.")

Gian, forgive me for being such a dumbass when you proposed we work on a book together, saying "let's define the drug situation and get rich as nazis"—and I dared to leave you on read. The pandemic felt so close to being over, the light at the end of this never-ending tunnel so bright it was burning my retinas. I thought I'd wait till to tell you IRL that I was scared, and now what kills is your possible misinterpretation of my silence. You peaced before I had a chance to explain myself.

Now I hate how your texts are getting buried deeper in my phone as the days slip by so I changed my screensaver to a photo I took from our last night together in New York before you moved to Italy. Do you remember? We're standing on some street corner in Hell's Kitchen and you're midway through telling a story, your hands blurry smears as you gesticulate wildly (such an Italian). Your eyes have this soft and sort of sad gaze slightly off camera and you're cracking a half-grin. Every so often, I catch you peeking out at me between my Lyft and TikTok apps. I'm sorry if that's weird. I just really miss you.

Gian I wish I probed into the one glaring thing we never discussed together: our own addictions. Where does it come from, this void we keep trying to fill with k-holes, and is this grand theory of “spectrum sobriety” just an enabling excuse? I know you would have answered with total honesty, if only I'd had the courage not to laugh and look away when you/we were spiraling. I know you'd just laugh at all this regret I'm carrying and say "dude shut up, it's all good." I guess your greatest lesson to me was to live on the fringes without fear. Under the next full moon, I dance for you.

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RIP

Giancarlo DiTrapano, last great literary renegade 

Michael Alig, party monster who fell off the edge

Sean McCabe, high school homie, lover of the deeply weird

SOPHIE, transcendant pop prophet

Goddess Bunny, glamor queen of freaky Hollywood

Vjuan Allure, godfather of ballroom, belle of the booth

Brytani Caipa, princess of the protest-rave Melting Point

ALL OF YOU WENT OUT THE WAY YOU LIVED — LIKE ROCK STARS — AT THE PEAK OF YOUR POWERS — BOWING OUT AS COVID’S CURTAINS DROPPED 🕊️

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