In the mirror we crease and wrinkle and gray. We laugh about our crow’s feet and hidden white nose hairs, known to each other and trimmed for the world. “I’ll die first,” you say. “No, I’ll die first, men always die first.” On average — it’s the truth. We die tripping over the garden hose. We die wrecking the hastily bought red motorcycle. We stumble and clutch at our hearts, as they betray us one final time. But the browning veins, the aching hue of the dying leaves causes us to pledge that we will grow beautiful as we age. Stooped and tired, bent ever closer together. No children, just us. The sunsets in Korea. The biting winds of Ireland. Years lie ahead of us. Plans. We are still young enough to make them, and old enough to know that many of them will always stir as dreams, beyond our grasp. But the plans we succeed in are enough to live for. We steady ourselves on the years of our past, on the rain blotted days, the days we locked ourselves out of the car, and the days we rocked with laughter at our cats fighting in the windowsill like furious boxers on a stage — always knowing there will be a future without them, and yet, when we pull them apart, our hands feel the warmth of their hairless Sphynx skin right here, right now. Tomorrow they will be here, and so will she. That is more than enough.

Among so much to say about a show that came out of nowhere and utterly captivated the culture, I want to say this: Heated Rivalry is a true piece of cinematic excellence. Storytelling excellence. And damn, if it is not the most romantic thing this mostly straight guy has seen in years. I’ve also been a huge fan of Jacob Tierney since his Glenn on Letterkenny days as well as his other hockey related work on Shoresy. It is so rewarding to see Jacob create something so fantastic, so undeniably excellent and romantic and unpredictable and deliciously fun and in the end, joyous.

To me, an elder millennial man, it is so gratifying to see a show centered on gay men that is about their romance, their desire, their affection, their multifaceted feelings and attractions to each other. And it’s NOT tragic! Finally!!

I grew up with Boys Don’t Cry, ok? I was so used to any movie about LBGTQ+ people ending in death, and rape, and tragedy that I honestly avoided a lot of queer media because of how awful it always ended. Movies like Philadelphia, Milk, Brokeback Mountain, while being great films — are fucking depressing. They’re either not all that romantic, or, their romance is beautiful and fleeting and always destroyed by our awful, unforgiving, cold world. That was the queer media I was still used to and numbed by. I always thought queer people deserved better, deserved more John Waters and Divines.

Heated Rivalry bucks the old forms of queer storytelling and goes for a radical romanticism — and I love it. As much as it is a romantic and sexual story, it is a story of emotion, a story of yearning. One of the most mature aspects of Shane and Ilya’s story is the sheer inconvenience of it all. On top of hiding their sexuality, they also hide their general relationship, they bury their longing for each other and endure a decade of fleeting, secret encounters and memorably sexy nights — but they always come to a close. The world always gets in the way. And they must wait, always waiting. For years. It’s painfully, almost heartbreakingly romantic to watch two young men long for each other so deeply, and have to endure without each other.

That’s romance, baby. My kind of romance. I’ve never been much a fan of rom-coms, I have my exceptions and my favorites, though it’s not really my bag. But I love a sincere, beautiful romance story. Done well, they’re often among my favorite stories. In The Mood For Love is one of my all time favorite films, both in its aesthetic, its taste, as well as because of its mature storytelling of temporary love, of love lost, love squandered — but still felt. I love adult stories about love, not just a bunch of 28 year olds pretending to be high schoolers with crushes on each other. No, I want adults, grown ups contending with the difficulties of adult life and finding a way, a path for romance and tenderness in their lives. Pioneers and defenders of love — that’s what I want to see.

I kinda think the culture at large agrees with me, if I may be so bold. I think we’re all a bit sick of shallow, 90 minute rom-com plots that are incredibly predictable. I think we’re all more in the mood for serious, passionate romance. Like, we all want that in our own lives, do we not? Why not depict lovers who are serious about each other? Devoted to each other? Longing for each other? Having great, hot, realistic sex with each other? That’s what I’m in the mood for. Gimme that real shit.

Heated Rivalry is so effectively and powerfully sincere that it is completely captivating. Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie’s chemistry together is undeniable. It is evocative and sexy. To watch them navigate each other over the course of years and years makes their love’s culmination so, so satisfying…

But before that: Scott and Kip.

The moment of Scott and Kip’s kiss is one of the most affecting moments I’ve seen in television in quite some time. Such an earned moment. A moment truly built toward, a moment full of longing and desire dismissed until that moment, until right now. It’s achingly romantic, it’s boundlessly sincere. It is masterful writing, filming, editing and music choices that make that moment. And damn, I have loved Wolf Parade and that song for such a long time, it is so satisfying to see it resurge alongside such a culturally resonant and beautiful moment in television history.

It is also, perhaps, the most powerful depiction of representation’s power in our own lives and our own identities. To see ourselves represented in culture and media is life affirming, it reminds us we have a place in the world. When Ilya and Shane, like lovers looking to the same moon at the same moment, see that kiss — they instantly know. They instantly realize: they can be themselves. It is a liberatory kiss, a kiss that unchains both Ilya and Shane and frees them to love each other the way should have always been able to: openly.

Moms and Dads, Uncles and Aunts, your cousins, your co-workers, your friends or your partner: they’re watching and talking about Heated Rivalry. Why? Not because its one of the most well made and incredibly effective, proudly gay dramas out there, even though it is. Not because it’s hot and sexy — which it is. Not even because of the two handsome leads and their truly impressive performances and talents. Everyone is watching this show, because it shows hope. In its most visceral and romantic form: the blossoming and the liberation of love. It’s powerful. It’s honestly so refreshing and so incredible to see. I have wanted to see a show like this for many years, it’s almost hard to believe how perfectly it arrived. Like Ilya and Shane, I think it was always meant to be.

It does not matter what your personal politics are. It does not matter if you’re a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, a Communist, a veteran, or a draft dodger — the imprisonment of Mahmoud Khalil is an attack on you. Yes, you. I will write more about his particular case and its ramifications in a moment, but first I want to address you directly as a reader.

I think we often consider “the news” to be events that are far away from us, from our daily lives, from our potential futures. We think of “current events” as something to think about, read about on social media, watch on TV and discuss with our friends, family, and co-workers. “The news” is just a part of our day, our life, it’s something we do. It’s not something we need to worry about invading the individual moments of our daily lives.

Forget all of that.

The United States government is testing you, right now. It is testing all of us. It is trying to see just how much we, as a people, as a society, a collective citizenry — will take. The government is attempting to push its hand deeper into our lives. To limit our choices, to prevent our movements, to tell us what we can and can’t say, to tell us who we can and can’t love.

As Albert Camus once said of rebels: a rebel is a person who says NO. The true mark of the rebel is a refusal. An insistence on not backing up any further, on not backing down. A rebel is a person who will not obey an unjust law written by an unjust system. A rebel is a person who refuses to allow any government the right to control and dictate their personal, natural freedoms.

I demand of you all, as readers, as Americans, as human beings — it is time to refuse.

Mahmoud Khalil was born in 1995 in a refugee camp in Damascus, Syria. His parents are Palestinian refugees who have never lived in their homeland. Mahmoud taught himself English while working with Syrian refugees through the Syrian-American education nonprofit, Junsoor. While learning English and helping fellow refugees, he earned his Bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Lebanese American University in Beirut. He immigrated to the United States in 2022 on a student visa. Mahmoud’s wife, Noor Abdalla, is an American citizen. So, Mahmoud was living in New York on a green card that was issued to him in 2024. Next month, his wife Noor will be giving birth to their first child. Currently, Mahmoud sits in an ICE prison cell in Louisiana. He may still be there when his child is born.

Khalil was a prominent leader of protests for Gaza among Columbia University students. He served as the main negotiator between Columbia administrators and the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) organization of students. From the beginning of Israel’s genocidal retaliation against Gaza, Mahmoud and the student protestors sought to pressure the university to divest from companies that do business with Israel. They wanted to move the school away from supporting an active apartheid state. Columbia University quickly began its own investigation of Khalil, and after a pro-Israel activist met with aides for senators John Fetterman and Ted Cruz, they promised their senators would “escalate” attention on Khalil. Soon, an online campaign of hate toward Khalil would begin, and accusations of antisemitism would begin flying.

“As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-in-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,” Mahmoud Khalil told CNN in 2024. There has so far been zero evidence that Mahmoud has said or done anything remotely antisemitic, done anything violent, or advocated for or endorsed violence. Never. Khalil has not been charged with a crime. Removal procedures against him were initiated under section 237(a)(4)©(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which permits deportation of lawful residents if the Secretary of State believes their presence risks “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences”. Ramzi Kassem, a member of Khalil’s legal team, told The Guardian:

“The government, as far as we understand, is relying on a rarely used provision in immigration law to justify the detention of a lawful permanent resident and his placement in removal proceeding. It is a provision that basically says that if the secretary of state determines that a non-citizen’s presence or activity in this country poses a serious risk of adverse foreign policy consequences, then that person can be processed for removal. That provision is not only rarely used, it is certainly not intended by Congress to be used to silence dissent.”

The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is a direct threat made by the United States government, aimed at all of us. It is not only Trump, it is the entire establishment apparatus of our government. Their loyalty to Israel is so unquestioned, so diehard, that they are more than willing to smash our collective freedom of speech and bring the full, violent force of law down on one man, a legal resident married to a citizen who has committed NO crime — in order to scare all of us.

The United States government wants you to be afraid. It also wants you to be ignorant. It desperately hopes that you will both be too scared to ever speak out, and too distracted by some other news story, some other scandal. It is in our government’s interest that the average American citizen really has no idea what’s going on in Israel. Or Sudan. Or the Congo. They don’t want you to know the truth of what America has been up to in the shadows with its CIA and FBI agents. They don’t want you to know why we actually invaded Vietnam. To be aware of the truth would make you dangerous to them. Who was Martin Luther King other than a man who could see the truth, and was not afraid to tell it? Our government doesn’t like people too familiar with the truth, doesn’t like people who are willing to say “No” to America. And those are the people, my friends, that we must be willing to do everything to protect.

If we allow our government to imprison or deport Mahmoud Khalil, then we have handed over full control of our freedom. If the government can simply wave its hand and ruin the life of an innocent man because they don’t like what he said, then we no longer live in a democracy — we live under the boot of tyranny.

We stand on the blade-edge of history. This moment can really only go one of two ways: the US government releases Mahmoud and drops any investigation of him, or, they charge him with crimes and imprison or deport him. We face two very different paths. The country that frees Mahmoud, that respects and restores civil rights — that country, I still have some shred of faith in. Yet, the country that deports him, or jails him — that country is a country I have no faith in. It would be a country fully and proudly embracing fascism, a country where people of color will live in even further fear of discrimination, harassment, and violence — state sanctioned or otherwise. That America would be a country that I see no other future for than a future of civil chaos and conflict and, potentially, war. It would really become damn near inevitable.

I don’t want that America. I want the America that would see this innocent man for what he is: a truthteller. Our country will only go one of two ways on the matter of Mahmoud Khalil’s freedom, but the consequences will be fast, numerous, and complex, regardless of the outcome. Even if he is freed, we are not out of the dark. We sit in a very dark place at this moment, a heated, angry, bleak moment in our history. If we can free Mahmoud, then we can perhaps avoid accelerating our descent into a frenzied, fascistic, oligarchy — but if we let our officials condemn this man, then we have given them the signal: they can get away with this. And once they know they can get away with shredding one innocent man’s freedom, they’ll know they can do it to you.

This is a test. They are testing all of us to see if we will allow this. It is time, right now, more than ever — to say NO.

The ACLU is actively defending Mahmoud, I urge you: sign their petition and give what you can. As it always has been throughout history — it is on us to save us, because those in power never will, because those in power do not see you as a person. Like Mahmoud, they see people who speak up for the truth (in a way that could disrupt their profits) as problems to solve, not people. Show them that we will not allow this. Show them you are still free.

I lived in a small red-brick house in Central, South Carolina, just a mile from downtown Six Mile with its one elementary school, church, gas station and a diner that my family never went to. As a child, I loved the world around our house far out in the upstate country, the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. Our home was surrounded on all sides by horse pastures. Parts of the property we lived on still belonged to the horse pasture owner, and our neighbor, Mr. Singleton. His daughter was my second-grade teacher, and a favorite of mine. The dead mill towns nearby crept over with kudzu vines, and the man-made lake I swam across hundreds of times was just a few miles down the road behind my PopPop’s house. My Golden retriever Buddy and I would swim back and forth across the lake that was poured into the land in the 50’s, sent rushing over the rooftops of abandoned towns and churches and roads. We lived removed, but in an idyllic landscape, my father, mother, sister, and I.

I loved my father’s garden behind our house with its tall rows of corn and scores of tomatoes, onions, peppers, lettuce and more, and I loved the woods beyond the horse pasture. My closest friend, Justin, would hold open the non-electrified wire of the horse fence and I would climb through and hold it for him. Occasionally kicking piles of horse shit or throwing the drier shits at each other, we would walk through the pasture, into the taller grass past the gate, and down into the forest. We spent most of our adolescent time out there, eventually setting up camp and finding any excuse to use our hatchets and machetes, build fires and be loud. We played war games in the forest, dressed in all the military gear we could get our hands on from military surplus stores and my grandfathers. We wore our helmets and pointed our guns at invisible enemies and we either won or were shot dramatically and bloodily so the other one of us could scream — No! — over their dying friend.

When I was around seven years old, at Six Mile Elementary, I stood waiting in a hallway with my class. The special education class came walking quickly out of the cafeteria in a single file line. My sister, Mallory, was among them, being tugged along. My sister cannot speak — never has and never will. As her class walked by ours, she must have thought something was funny — but it wasn’t me, she hardly noticed me. Instead she laughed about something loudly and squealed her own brand of sound, startling kids in my class. Mallory was ushered along by an aid, and then my teacher asked me what was wrong with my sister.

I replied, “She’s autistic.”

“Artistic?” she said.

“No, autistic. She has autism.”

“What is that?”

By then, I was used to explaining my sister, even to adults. The rest of the class snickered about my sister and her class. Kids would ask me, “Why did your sister do that?” and I replied the same way each time:

“I don’t know.”

I understand Mallory in a different way from how I understand anyone else. She has never spoken. I don’t remember her ever imitating word sounds. I know her movements, her noises. I know her every facial expression and how they associate with her array of sounds. Songbird chirps and drawn out grunts, whimpering notes and deep yawling sounds like something heavy jerked across a wood floor. The closest she came to making a sound like a word, was the loud way she would extend a “shiiiiii” sound, but without the punctuating “t” sound. She would yell it in grocery stores. “SHIIIIII!” I think she thought it was funny.

Mallory was the center of gravity in our house for the first twenty-three years of my life. The mood of our home: its constant, ever shifting tone. If my sister was unhappy, our world was unhappy. But even when she was happy, the risk came of her becoming overstimulated and wild. When she got that way, she wouldn’t hesitate to slap me across the face or hit my back or arm. And as a boy two years younger than her, for the stretch of childhood before puberty, she was larger than me. Angrier than me. Unpredictable. Loud. Volatile. She could easily knock me down and she did.

When Mallory was calm and happy, I would try and approach her. I tried to play with her. I would show her my toys and bring her the Barbies my parents always bought her that, in truth, she cared far more about pulling the heads off of than playing with me. I would play with my LEGOs in front of her and show her how they worked. She would, after not paying any attention to me, pick out a single LEGO piece to hold between her thumb and forefinger to squeeze and press tightly. It was her favorite stim — my LEGOs. Wherever we went she would be holding one, usually a one or two-dot brick, squeezing and squeezing. If for whatever reason one could not be found for her, we would be unable to leave because my sister would be screaming and crying and stomping and biting the tops of her wrists and hands until they bled. Her wrists were wrapped in gauze, tape, and sweatbands for years, and they remain so now.

She showed no interest in playing or engaging with me. The things I brought her she would sometimes take from me, making her birdy, squeaky sounds as she turned and walked away. That was about as close to playing as we could get. Mallory seemingly wanted nothing to do with me, clinging to my mother like an adhesive shadow and spurning my every suggestion or attempt at playing with her. By my sister I felt unwanted, by my parents I sometimes felt like an additional problem in their already difficult lives. My father was working long shifts at the hospital in Atlanta then, and my mother was completely exhausted at the end of every day of running a classroom of special needs children and dodging slaps to the face and spit — only to come home to my screaming, wailing sister who followed her through every room of our house until three or four in the morning hitting her and biting herself.

It is hard to watch someone live in agony. My sister’s fury is, in the end, justified. She, like many other non-verbal disabled people, often teem with an anger, a constant frustration, and cannot help their frustrated screams at the inability to express what they need, what they think, feel, or would be comforted by. We think of autism so differently now, and my own view of it and feelings around it have evolved and grown more flexible with time. But what is so rarely spoken about, are the experiences of severely autistic people like my sister, Mallory, and their family and their caretakers. We only talk about people who can talk. America is quite comfortable with the existence of people like Mallory being politely ushered to the back of the room, away from conversation, and out the door when they start to become a noisy problem. There is a speaking privilege in this country, a country which deals in petty, arbitrary privileges.

My family could never go out to eat. My sister was prone to losing her temper and biting her wrists and taking food off stranger’s plates. Is something wrong with her? I’m so sorry, she’s autistic. My father would bring home takeout food and that was an occasion. So long as Mallory wasn’t already angry about a delay in dinner arriving and stomping and crying and screaming, then those would be good times. My parents preferred a Chinese buffet on Tiger Boulevard in Clemson. I was a picky eater at the time, but I liked the fried dumplings and Orange Chicken, tolerated some rice, and loved sipping Coke. Mallory would make her happier, buzzing noises (the one that always sounded to me like some Jurassic bird growling merrily) and walk around the table, bobbing in her rhythmic way, stopping by her plate to take a large bite of mashed potatoes, and walk away again laughing and chewing. She could be funny, too.

Patience is a finite thing. Though it is true that my sister is the one who cannot speak, who suffers from being unable to communicate — we suffer with her and from her. My father often worked nights, not arriving home until 9:00 pm or later, and it became my most common home experience: my mother and I enduring my sister, just the two of us. Mallory was so unpredictably explosive that you were almost always caught surprised and in a bad position when she did something awful. Once, she somehow got into a can of wall paint and dumped it in the kitchen. She would get upset and turn and hit our dog Buddy in the face. She burst in completely naked on me and Justin playing video games in my room, having emerged from the bathtub when my mom had stepped away, and began rummaging through my LEGOs, looking for a two-stud brick.

I never knew when I might open my bedroom door to our hallway only to be hit with a wave of human fecal matter odor. A handprint smeared across one wall for four or five feet, chunks of it stuck to the doorknobs, a glob mushed onto the light switch. Mallory would often soil her diaper and before my mother was aware, she would run her hands down into the back of her diaper, frosting her fingers, both hands. Then she would touch everything as she made her way to wherever my mother was in the house. It became so routine that eventually I was the one who would catch Mallory in the act, and grab her arms above her wrists so as not to touch her hands, and to keep her from touching anything, and guide her to the closest sink while shouting for my mother.

My mother and I have cleaned my sister’s feces off of everything. Scrubbed it out of the carpet, cleaned it off the walls, the picture frames, scraped it off the wood floor in my room. It was one of the many ways that my sister would invade our lives. Disrupt your space, your quiet. Stop reading for class, stop the movie, turn off the music, time to leave — she’s doing it again. I used to joke, once I’d become a cynical teenager, that I got all the downsides of being an only child, and none of the upsides to having a sibling — just the shit.

I spent years bubbling with a fear of embarrassment. I was nervous to bring friends around her, and terrified to bring girls over. I know she had no intentions, no schemes to abuse me or disrupt my life, but I couldn’t help resenting her. As I grew older, I leaned further and further away from Mallory, toward the door, the car, the headphones that blotted out her loud, intrusive existence. I was constantly looking for the next spot of good footing to step further away from the screaming, burning, humiliating, angering environment of our house.

I don’t mean to make it sound all bad. It wasn’t. My mother, Pam, was for years an instructor at a camp for troubled teens, then a special-ed teacher, later a cashier, eventually a personal caretaker for the elderly, including her own parents. My mother is a born mother. A gentle, nurturing soul. My memories of her hands stay with me. Her hands scratching my back, my head, waking me, combing my hair, pushing a tear aside. When I think of her touch, I think only of how love radiates. How it transmits. I always felt the love of my mother. And I always felt her anguish, her sacrifices, her sobs beyond their bedroom door, so tired from it all.

My mother sings. She always has. She was Anna in a stage version of The King and I, the final show she performed before giving birth to my sister, never knowing that it would be her final show. She sings the Gospel now. I have heard her practice and perform “Amazing Grace” countless times. She would belt her songs, practicing for Sunday service, driving in our car, Mallory and I riding with her. I was so surrounded by my mother’s singing, something she truly loved and at which she was truly gifted, that I never had any chance of appreciating it. Looking back, after time and with distance, I think that if God did in fact ever stop to listen to the human voice, the human plea: it was when my mother sang.

As early as I can remember learning to write my own name, I learned how to write my sister’s name. It was a small, unspoken, yet steady tradition in our home: when it was time for the family to sign a card — Christmas, Birthday, Get Well Soon — my mother and father would sign, and then I would sign my name and Mallory’s. Matthew & Mallory. I learned how to write an ampersand because of this little duty of mine. At first my parents told me to. Eventually it was just known. I don’t know why. Is it more fitting for a brother to sign for his sister, rather than her parents? Is it more within my right as a brother? Does that make it less of a forgery? Somehow, me also being their child made me closer to her, more similar, more able to represent Mallory as her peer. Maybe. The truth is — when someone cannot sign their own name, someone must do it for them.

I sometimes felt wrong doing it. Like an imposter. Like someone taking something from my sister, depriving her of still more of her identity. But what were our choices? Mallory would bob and sway and make her sounds, squeezing her LEGO, and I would carefully write our names below our parents, knowing in some small way that I was speaking for my sister. Standing in for her. But also, vaguely, pretending. Performing the idea of a sibling who can express themselves alongside their family. A whisper of a lie — not quite dishonest, but not authentic. Matthew & Mallory. Both of us, and also just me. Both alone, and beset with a furious siblinghood. One that would never include the luxury of making sense with time.

I envy that part of most people’s sibling relationships. The way siblinghood evolves, like all life-long relationships, and makes more sense with time, or at least comes closer to a more balanced dynamic. I remember once, when Mallory was maybe fourteen and I was maybe twelve, we sat waiting in our car while my mother shopped for groceries. A boring, routine event. While I sat in the back reading a book, Mallory sat in the front playing with the radio, tuning it back and forth between stations, raising and lowering the volume, all while leaning in close to the speaker. As usual, I was ignoring her. But then I heard her sobbing, and looked up. My sister had turned around to face me, looked straight into my eyes, hers overflowing, and she wept and trembled. I had nothing to offer her, knew nothing I could do. She cried and cried and stared at me. I started to feel overwhelmed, started to cry myself, and eventually started yelling at her. Yelling at her to leave me alone, to stop looking at me, to just turn around and cry. We both wept until my mom returned, perplexed at us. Another of so many moments of painful confusion between us.

I don’t know how to speak for her, and I try not to. I try to let her presence, her sounds, her choices lead my understanding of her. I try to resist thinking that I know exactly what she wants, or how she feels, or what her opinions may be. I know her happy, sing-song chirps and I know her mournful wails. I know the sounds that come before each, the sounds that lead up to other sounds. I know I can read her somewhat, but I’ll never pretend to have fully grasped her: a good reminder that there is no one we can ever fully grasp.

I live far away from her now. On the other side of the country. I see her rarely, once or twice a year. She’s in her thirties now, just as I am, and she is far more quiet. Not without noise, but she seems more selective of when. I don’t know what she thinks of me. Sometimes I think we like each other, and other times I imagine that she hardly thinks of me at all. In so many ways she is beyond words — the only things I’ve ever truly relied on to understand myself. For all that we have shared in our mutual childhood, words could not be. And words were how I found myself, steadied myself, and eventually, forgave myself. For all the anger, the resentment, the boyish frustration and lashing out. For all the ways I failed at being a good brother.

Mallory is my only sibling. She will have no children, and know no spouse. She will continue living in a group home, until my mother is unable to care for her, and then she will be my responsibility completely. Eventually, a portion of my life will be the overseeing of my sister, her health, her safety, all the paperwork and all the signatures that will be required to maintain it all. The way in which we are family is more duty-bound than most, I think. I will need to be there for my sister, for eventually no one else will be able. And I will. I will always sign for my sister, and look out for her. When it is needed, I will always write her name for her, stand with her as close as I can — Matthew & Mallory.

The Birthday Card Forgeries: A Brother’s Memoir was originally published in Beloved on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On being a longtime, white guy fan

Alright, let me get my K.dot bonafides in order immediately: the first Kendrick track I ever heard was “HiiiPower.” The lead single off his first studio album with TDE — Section.80 — from my birthday month of July, all the way back in 2011. I was transfixed by that song. It flew open my eyes to the history of Black revolutionaries like Fred Hampton and reignited my interest in Malcom X’s politics and in him as a man. It powerfully pronounced the social, historical, and world altering attitude of a bold new artist. And the J. Cole produced beat and Kendrick’s flow are still so good. I fell in love on first listen while driving home from Clemson University’s library late at night, listening on Shade 45 while I had a 90-day free trial of satellite radio. The song shook me — I was an instant fan.

When I got home, I went to my room, got on my laptop and looked up “Kendrick Lamar HiiiPower” on YouTube. I watched this video. I’ll say this looking back, Kendrick has come a long way with his visuals. This video looks slightly dated now, a little rougher than his current PgLang output, surely, but it is also incredibly provocative. The video ends with Kendrick calling back to Tupac, repeating “Thug Life” as he pours gasoline all over himself, lights a match, and drops it. The image goes to static and then zooms out of a static filled TV set that two children are watching. That was my introduction to TDE and Kendrick Lamar proper. I was immediately hooked by Kendrick’s bold, even challenging lyricism, his sheer lyrical ability, and his stunning imagery. No one, not even Kanye back before he lost his grip, was doing what Kendrick was doing. You’ll probably roll your eyes at my saying it now, now that it’s obvious — but I always knew that kid was gonna be a superstar.

Before getting into Kendrick’s Super Bowl show, and the bizarre and hilarious reaction some idiots and talking heads have had to it, I want to go a little further back. I used to be that kid in high school who only listened to classic rock. You know the stuff. Led Zeppelin. Jimi Hendrix. The Doors. The Beatles. Credence Clearwater Revival. I was that guy, with the long, past my shoulders, hair, wearing skinny bootcut jeans (I really did do it before Kenny, but he made it look better) and a Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here” t-shirt. Basically, I was listening to mostly old White dude rock bands, or even older Black R&B artists like Son House, BB King, or James Brown, artists my dad would show me. It was an interesting mix, listening to the Blues that both informed, influenced, and was stolen by the White rockers who proceeded them. But then Hip Hop came into my life through the words of one of the greatest: Mos Def (now known as Yasiin Bey, which I will refer to him by).

Black on Both Sides is the first rap album I truly listened to, start to finish. As a seventeen year old, I was already starting to lean away from my prior interests. I was less interested in drawing, and more interested in writing, playing with words, playing with rhythm and meaning and metaphor. Poetry was starting to interest me more. I was starting to listen to a little T.I., a little Jay-Z, but not super often yet, usually with friends. At some point, after starting to get curious about earlier Hip Hop, 90’s Hip Hop, I came across the track, “Mathematics.” That was the first time rap truly grabbed me. Electrified me. Raised goosebumps up and down my arms. It was the first time I ever truly heard in rap a voice that had a perspective that demanded attention, demanded it with a fierce and knowing conviction. And could deliver truth with such incredible flow and rhythm and rhyme:

Hip Hop passed all your tall social hurdles
Like the nationwide projects-prison-industry complex
Working-class poor — better keep your alarm set
Streets too loud to ever hear freedom ring
Say evacuate your sleep, it’s dangerous to dream

If you call yourself a fan of Hip Hop and you’re a grown up like me and you’ve somehow never heard this track, it makes me want to shove you a little.

Go listen, really — the man is virtuosic.

Yasiin Bey is a rapper that is willing to tell you the most important kind of truths: ones you don’t want to hear. Especially as an American. Especially as a white American. Especially especially, a straight, white young American man.

Bubblin’ crack, jewel theft and robbery to combat poverty
And end up in the global jail economy
Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks, but increased police presence
And even if you get out of prison still livin’
Join the other 5 million under state supervision
This is bidness; no faces, just lines and statistics
From your phone, your Zip Code, to SSI digits
The system break man, child and women into figures
2 columns for “Who is” and “Who ain’t” niggas
Numbers is hard and real and they never have feelings
But you push too hard, even numbers got limits
Why did one straw break the camel’s back?
Here’s the secret — the million other straws underneath it
It’s all mathematics

From “Mathematics” on — my bar for Hip Hop had been raised. I started to appreciate more dynamic wordplay, slang, and ad libs, the playfulness and the humor of rap, as well as the serious and complex ideas that this agile, nimble artform can tackle. Yasiin Bey got me, perhaps for the first real time in my life, to consider the everyday position of Black people in this particular time and place, saddled with all the centuries of history that our country is in such a hurry to never talk about. Yasiin Bey challenged me, in much the same way that later reading James Baldwin would also push me, to think differently about my country, my home, my skin, and my position in this world. Rap can do that, it can open eyes.

I say all this about Yasiin Bey to say, that I didn’t again feel this wowed or this strongly about anyone in Hip Hop until Kendrick came along. Kendrick Lamar is 37 years old. I am 35. He’s like big bro, but not too much older, just enough to show you how to be cool. Watching Kendrick’s journey has been one of the most inspiring and captivating experiences of my life. I’ve been a sincere fan of Lamar’s for fourteen years now. Watching him grow as an artist, while remaining steadfastly private and close to the vest, has led me to not only highly regard his work and his expression, but to admire him as a person, as a man who puts human life, that of him and his family and friends, first. He doesn’t revel in fame. He is normally pretty quiet. That’s what longtime fans really know. He takes his time with every album, every project — it was five long years between DAMN and Mr. Morale. He lets his music, his art, do all the talking for him. He doesn’t lead with press releases and interviews, he just drops. New shit. Bam. Pivot, walk.

The world knows now, but Kendrick fans already knew how Kendrick was. He’ll surprise the shit out of you. No announcement. Untitled, Unmastered. Bam. (Speaking of Untitled, Unmastered, if you’ve never heard “Untitled 07" then levitate, levitate, levitate, levitate your ass over to this link.) Kendrick does what Kendrick does. His own way, his own style. And no fluffy lead up, he just hits you with it and leaves you to think about it. Much like David Lynch’s reply to his interviewer's question of “can you elaborate on that?” Kendrick is likely gonna say “No” when you ask if he can explain the meaning of his music. He ain’t that kinda guy. You get the art, handed to you, delivered to your eyes and ears, and then he leaves the interpretation and the tools to do that interpretation in your own hands as a listener. It’s demanding. It’s difficult sometimes. But he always gives a piercingly honest expression of himself, his worldview, and his cultural point of view. It has become a uniquely powerful force in American culture, one that you should not dismiss.

If you weren’t in the know, over the last year Kendrick has been in an extremely public beef with Canadian rapper, Drake, that essentially concluded with Kendrick’s Pop Out show with the Super Bowl being an elaborate, bombastic victory lap. If you didn’t get it — Kendrick won that battle. Decisively. Easily, really. Something that I never doubted would be the case. But Kendrick’s songs in the beef became both more aggressive and way, way funnier than anything Drake could achieve. I’ve always thought that was K.dot’s secret weapon: he’s brilliant, serious…and hilarious! Not just his wordplay, but his delivery, his sneaky jokes and turns of phrase. The man had the whole nation singing a punchline in unison at Drake’s expense. Kendrick’s vocal range, emphasis, and variety on “Euphoria” alone make Drake look yawn-worthy by comparison.

After putting Drake’s inauthenticity and dead-beat lifestyle on full cannon blast in the epistolary song “Meet the Grahams” and then dropping the chantable pop culture earthquake that is “Not Like Us”, Drake pretty much admitted defeat, or at least limped away giving the finger on “THE HEART PART 6.” It was a war about authenticity, and Kendrick is a far more honest man than Drake, and for that reason alone he was a difficult opponent to get dirt on, and an impossible opponent to out-observe. I think Kendrick is just a smarter guy. More thoughtful. He moves with a more clever, more intense kind of focus.

(If you feel totally lost and clueless about all of this — well, I’m surprised you’ve read this far — but I highly suggest this Josh Johnson video, very useful for a lot of us gringos, enjoy it.)

But for my fellow longtime Kendrick fans, we were all looking forward to the Super Bowl once it was announced that Kendrick would be headlining the halftime show. I haven’t cared about pro-football in years, I grew up a Carolina Panthers fan — can you really blame me for not giving a shit anymore? But I was definitely tuning in for the Kendrick show. I had to know what he would do.

He’d already surprised us all again with GNX. No lead up. Bam: “Fuck everybody, that’s on my body.” Kendrick knows how to make a statement, make it strong, and leave you with its reverberating echo. GNX is more attitude than any of his previous albums. It’s loud and proud and sure of itself. Confident. Arrived. It feels like Kendrick embraced a healthy masculinity and truly entered adulthood on Mr. Morale, on GNX Kendrick is wearing a grown man’s kind of hard earned, wisdom heavy swagger. It is him putting his city, Compton, on his back with pride.

He wears and pronounces his influences proudly and “sends it up to Pac”. He puts the culture of Black Americans, the culture of LA, and of Hip Hop on his back, and he carries them like the important touchstones of human culture that they are, and he wears his culture, his experience, his reality on his sleeve. He does it with integrity and with unapologetic Black pride. It is manly. It is strong. He looks mightier than any rockstar when the camera whirls around him in that Super Bowl arena of sparkling lights looking down on a heroically American spectacle of an artist fully arriving on the cultural stage at the height of his creative powers and influence. Kendrick Lamar understood that in this moment, this particular Sunday night, he represented all of Hip Hop as an artform, and it was on him to carry the torch high and proud. This was not just entertainment to help you forget, this was a statement to help you remember.

So, did I like the halftime show?

Yes!

I enjoyed the hell out of it as a Kendrick fan, as a fan of rap, as a fan of bold artists — I thought he captured an attitude, a style, a way of performing his art and a way of performing his masculinity that is radical and defiant and fascinating. The way Kendrick is framed as he squats on the hood of the Grand National Experimental, the namesake of his album, a car made the same year he was born in only one color — Black. As he stands up under the spotlight rapping an as of yet unrevealed song — “20 years in I still got that pen dedicated to bear our truth” — he looks like a conflicted, but confident titan. A towering rapper who articulated his pain and sorrow, his pride and his ego, his vision and his questions into one of the clearest, most arresting American oeuvres of the past fifty years.

It’s hard for me to single out a favorite moment — “say Drake” as Kenny smiles into the camera definitely made me laugh the hardest. But I think the power of the performance comes more from its tenacious energy than any one particular statement it’s making or “meaning” it’s giving. It was a layered performance, its symbolism and production elements all being rightly analyzed and scrutinized for meaning. But I think the real point of it all is that Kendrick got America looking, talking, and thinking about Hip Hop. He got your mom and pop, whether they liked it or not, to listen to some of the sharpest, catchiest, boldest music of our day. As well as all your aunts, uncles, and noisy cousins. I also think rapping “Turn this TV off” at over 100 million people, live, during your televised performance is one of the cheekiest, funniest moments in live television history.

For Kendrick personally, I think the Halftime show was a victory lap for his spiritual and lyrical battle with Drake, and on a broader level, it was a moment of cultural victory for Hip Hop as an artform — and Kenny was well aware of both these truths. This was absolutely a moment for Hip Hop, for rap, for Black people, for America and all Americans. Rap, which is a solidly American rooted poetic artform, has existed for over fifty years now, and finally has a solo artist headlining the Super Bowl. That Kendrick gets to do that first and figuratively wear the crown of Rap King, or God, or GOAT feels like it somehow became more literal at Super Bowl LIX. Like, Kendrick literally took the biggest stage in all of America, the place with the most eyes on Earth watching at the same time, to show off the power of Hip Hop and coronate himself in the same moment. The fact that it was viewed live by 133 million people only solidifies the magnitude of the moment, making it the most watched halftime show of all time (that’s more people than who watched the Moon landing live).

For me, I’ve been rooting for this guy for the better part of my life, telling friends about good kid, m.A.A.d city back before anyone I knew, knew Kendrick. So to watch him go from a 23 year old kid with his debut studio album, to being legit accepted as a rapper, to being celebrated, to being acclaimed, to being hailed as the GOAT…it has been incredible to be a fan of Lamar’s for as long as I have been. The journey has been unreal to just watch, I can’t imagine the dizzying power Kendrick must feel at the tip of his pen. To watch Kendrick take the Super Bowl show with his own style and flair, is to watch us be reminded of the power of one of the true American artforms of our day and it is to witness one of its greatest practitioners at the very pinnacle of his form. It is to see the sheer force of will and tenacity behind Hip Hop, to see the Black Americans pushing it forward into greater and greater artistic heights. Rap has been here for fifty years — Kendrick just cemented that it is here to stay. And, that if no one else will, he will pick up the artform and carry it like an Olympian, to victory.

[All this to say: this White dude loved Kendrick’s halftime show. Somebody tell those Fox News hosts that the reason they couldn’t “understand” what Kendrick was saying is because they never actually listen to Black people when they speak. That’s their default, and those liars know it. So sit down, shut up, and be humble. Somebody tell these White people that not everything has to be FOR them.]

Here’s to an ascendant 2025 for Kendrick Lamar — THUG LIFE.

Kendrick Lamar & The Super Bowl: On Being a Longtime, White Guy Fan was originally published in Rock n’ Heavy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you decide to read this essay, do so when you have the spare time to also listen to the songs. And before you read, get your best pair of headphones, or get ready with the best speaker you’ve got. I’ll wait.

It was 2008, and I was driving home on winding country roads from watching a comet shower in a field in my small college town of Clemson, South Carolina. My friends and I had pointed to the shooting stars, tracing their quickly fading cuts in the sky and laid on blankets laughing until past midnight. I drove home alone, past cow and horse fields. I tuned the radio to WSBF (or WizBif ), the station of Clemson University — where I hoped to transfer to from my community college. A song lilts forward, an uneasy creaking sound quiet in the background as a tone begins to envelop me. A lonesome, echoing drumbeat gives way to splendid acoustic guitar and sparse piano to drift us along a string of moments, impressions addressed to someone, like a letter hesitantly read aloud through Kurt Wagner’s baritone voice:

Sadly, all of our business
Is the business of our dying here at home
And you ought to understand that
For the moment things sound pretty good that way

There’s a sorrowful splendor to the song. There’s a country quality to the guitars, a bit of a country music drawl. A longing, a desire. It feels as honest as a confession, and it feels flighty, unsure of its own meaning, but sure of feeling in the way songs carry moods within them and transfer those feelings more vividly than any other art. The song on the radio delivers such a distinct mood of both longing for the past as well as feeling troubled by that longing, that aching of life’s inevitable growth pains.

I’ve been looking through these pages
Of a diary that they made me keep in school
And the words were really awful
But this picture that I found of you was cool

“Can you feel me now?” Wagner asks. And then the song draws downward toward an end, a quieting. A moment…

Then the song erupts with all its instruments, the distortion from the background brought forward, made louder, as the song transforms into an instrumental coda. A faster paced, thrumming stretch of song that underscores the unspoken wellspring of feeling beneath the images given, the pain laden certainty of life’s many endings, and a swelling admiration for its beauty all the same.

The song finally ended.

And then, it began again.

As I finished the last few miles of my drive home, passing fenced in pastures, my headlights briefly painting the sides of decaying wood barns and quickly falling past, sometimes glowing the eyes of a deer and her fawn by the edge of the road — the song inexplicably played again and again and again. Like someone had fallen asleep on the controls at the radio station. Or, maybe someone played a lovely prank to give more exposure to Nashville’s “most fucked up” country band. I pulled into the driveway of my family’s home laughing to myself about the absurdity of this very peculiar, very long, strange song looping over and over, for hours on the radio. When I got in my car the next day to drive to class — it was still playing.

My forever wondering how that whoopsie was let to air for at least 15 hours on the radio only adds to my affinity for the song, the voice, the perspective. And especially, as I’d come to learn with time, the circumstances of my discovering this song remind me of this band’s own bizarre and warm sense of humor.

The song was “Popeye” by the band, Lambchop.

Now here is where I encourage you to pause your reading, and to listen. Think of it less like a piece of media to dissect, and more like a felt experience. If you’ve never heard them before, then I want to give you an experience. An impression of one of America’s longest running musical endeavors — Lambchop being a continually ebbing and flowing project of Kurt Wagner’s, with the arrangement of fellow musicians collaborating and disappearing and returning with every one of the project’s 16 albums. Each album is a reaching, vibrantly experimental and lavishly instrumental expression. I must agree with a review of their most recent album, The Bible: as an artist, Kurt Wagner is always making “ceaselessly unpredictable music.”

When you have the time, close your eyes, and just listen. I can’t promise you’ll love it, but I can guarantee if you’ve never heard Lambchop, then you’ve never heard anything quite like it.

What I am attempting to do here is not to give you historical background on Lambchop, or Kurt Wagner. Not to give you reviews of their songs or albums — instead, I want to give you a personal history of my encounter with their music. My own history of how Lambchop’s music entered my life and how it has stayed with me, and what it has meant to me over 17 years. I want to explore how it is that particular songs by particular artists somehow stand out more vividly to us than others. How they somehow remain with us, change with us, reveal themselves to us in new ways over time.

Lambchop has been performing as “Lambchop” since 1993, with the only constant of the band being the presence, the singing, songwriting, and guitar playing of Kurt Wagner. I discovered them on their 10th album (OH) Ohio, the album from which “Popeye” came from. They grew, slowly, into my favorite band. Yet, even though they came to mean so much to me, I’ve barely listened to any of their music prior to (OH) Ohio. And, out of the 6 albums of theirs to come out since that one, I’ve really only delved deeply into 3 of them, though I have listened to songs from all of them.

The closing song of (OH) Ohio is “I Believe In You.” I had known that song for many years already when I met the woman from Dayton, Ohio, smoking alone on a patio outside my apartment in Portland, Oregon. I was coming outside for a cigarette too, a hand-rolled one which I was prone to doing at the time, hilariously. We each said hello. She had just been stood up on a date, and we talked. We kept talking. What turned into cigarettes together, turned into hours spent together, to days spent together. Our relationship was ambiguous at times. Always intimate. And always contained a deep, natural fondness for each other, no matter how we felt otherwise. She became someone I couldn’t stop liking, it just grew and unfolded and built upon itself until I eventually started to realize that within me, love had grown for another person in a place I wasn’t sure I could ever feel it.

We lived through hard times together, early. My father’s losing his mind and accidentally burning my family’s home down, her father dying slowly in a hospital bed, unsure of how long any future can hold. Our families on the other side of the country from Portland, as well as most of our friends. There was my failed and broken engagement back in South Carolina. For her, there was the proposal she turned away from in Ohio. In very many ways we saw each other, more than other people truly saw either of us.

Over time, we would come to feel like two perfectly woodworked joints finally sliding together and fitting. We fit. Never in my life had someone fit me like she did, and like how I fit her. Through so much pain in our lives, we were always so naturally able to soothe and forgive each other, and climb, together, back to a place where two hurting human beings can mirror each other’s interior light, precisely and gently, and show each other how to love.

Lambchop’s “I Believe In You” is the first Lambchop song I ever shared with her. It is one of the only times I had ever shared their music by this point in my mid-twenties. Other people I had shared their music with mostly shrugged about it.

“It’s pretty weird. What’s he saying most of the time?” they usually said.

Yet, “I Believe In You,” in my opinion, is one of their sweetest, most accessible, and most enchanting songs. If nothing else, everyone likes this Lambchop song. I will challenge you, reader, to not find yourself smiling a little, at least once during this song. If nothing else.

I shared this song with the woman I love when I felt like she needed it. Needed something. She had lost a friend to suicide not long before. She was hurting in a complex and deeply layered way. Her grief and her hurting became a depression, one I could recognize as somewhat like my own which also meant that I had little idea how to cure it. One day, she was getting on a train to go somewhere, not for long, I knew I’d see her again soon, but we weren’t an official couple yet. As she got on the train, I had never seen her so dimmed. As if a dial had been turned down. She boarded the train, this lonesome beauty, and she sat alone as I watched her go, wishing I could do any damn thing.

We hadn’t said “love” yet. We hadn’t named the thing that tingled between us. But I knew this woman was hurting, and I felt the need to give her something. So I pulled up this song, copied the link, pasted it, and texted it to her. And waited.

Fortunately, this song found its way to her as if I flicked a candle toward her in the vast darkness separating us, and it floated all the way to her hand, just when she was about to stop believing in light. To this day, if I ever play this song, we end up holding each other.

I hope it can mean something to you too.

Well, I know with all my certainty
What’s going on with you and me
Is a good thing
and it’s true
And I believe in you

And I did.

I don’t wanna freak
but the tongue erodes each time we speak

That line, from Lambchop’s song “Nashville Parent” off of their album, Nixon, has swirled around in my head and rolled off my tongue for many years. It is one of the few songs off of Nixon that I return to often. Like I said, there are many earlier Lambchop albums, but I have only listened to a smattering of their songs. But I think this song is a perfect example of Lambchop’s greatest works.

Like the line about our tongues eroding, Lambchop, or maybe just Kurt Wagner, is often concerned with life’s inevitabilities. Big and small. The strange ways our lives shift and change, our bodies, our minds. The unending, marching change of the world around us. In “Nashville Parent” we also see an elevation of the everyday, the ordinary and mundane. Lambchop elevates small, common moments into moments of shared beauty, or absurdity, or humor.

Take the B train or the shuttle
at the exit have a smoke
try to spit onto the sidewalk
instead you wipe it off your chest

This song also, for me, is Lambchop at their “countriest.” The song has the beauty and lavish instrumentation of a 70’s country ballad, despite the peculiar and funny subject of the lyrics. The electric guitars, the swelling string section, the pedal steel guitar: it’s Nashville through and through. It’s a spectacular, lush arrangement. For me, it’s just one of those songs that I find lovely, and the lyrics continually re-emerge in my mind. I think of my tongue eroding when I find myself blathering a bit too much about my favorite movies.

Nixon was a breakthrough album for Lambchop, charting well for an indie record, especially in the UK. Their sound here is as rich and full as it gets. This is the song that reminds me, oh yeah, they started as a truly Southern, country band. As a Southerner, I can’t help but swoon a little.

To return to (OH) Ohio one more time, we come to what I think is not only one of Lambchop’s greatest ever songs, but to what I think is the single most beautiful song I know.

“I’m Thinking of a Number (Between 1 and 2),” is also one of the first Lambchop songs I heard when I looked up the band after hearing “Popeye” repeat itself over and over on the radio. It is a song that I liked right away, but its power grew on me over many years, and eventually, came to mean much more.

Other people may hear it differently, but to me, this is a love song, as pure as they come. The narrator, presumably Kurt, has found her — the woman he loves. His focus on her feels utterly devoted. He continually finds her, for he is always looking for her.

And I’m gonna find you
Find you like some beautiful poem
And you’re gonna like it
Just wait till we get home

That line has circulated my thoughts many times: “Find you like some beautiful poem.” Some of my favorite poems I have found by opening poetry books to a random, middle page and just reading the first poem I see. I don’t know why I do that. Forcing serendipity’s hand? It does work sometimes. When you read a poem that suddenly connects with you, suddenly means something to you, it is no longer just a poem. It becomes a part of your life, of yourself.

People are the same. We know so many people, but once you know a person’s favorite sweater, the painting they’ve loved since they were a little girl, or the way their hair smells and feels just out of the shower: you realize all of it is precious. It is rare and wonderful to know anyone on such a level. And I think, deep down, we all wish to know and be known in such a way.

But I won’t tell you
That love is a variable thing
Like the shape on your ass that
I noticed when you walked away
From me

My fiancé has a birthmark, in the same place, and I told her once that this song lyric feels tattooed on my soul now. A line I always thought was sweet and charming, noticing and loving something so intimate, but the line feels meant for us now. It feels prophetic. I used to think so much about finding her, like the narrator of the song seeks to “find you”, and once I finally did, the feeling of this song transformed, for me, into that of celebration.

And please don’t you tire of me
I know that you’ve waited so long
We can hold one another
Till the other is gone

Those last two lines have always made my heart ache with their double meaning. I hear it as two lovers holding one another until the “otherness” of each other, between all people when they are strangers to each other, is gone. That their love has washed away differences and misunderstanding. I also see the more literal meaning: that this man wants to hold onto his woman for as long as they possibly can, until one of them is eventually, inevitably, gone.

On some days, this is my single favorite Lambchop song. On other days, I might feel differently. But it is absolutely the most beautiful song I know.

Our final song is also one that I often think of as my single favorite song. Lambchop’s most recent album is entitled The Bible. The first track is “His Song is Sung.” I first heard this song when I saw that a new Lambchop album had dropped, and I listened on my earbuds walking around a cheap motel and literally kicking rocks late at night somewhere in Bend, Oregon. It stood out to me immediately as something powerful.

This song starts out lavishly, full of brass and string ensembles, then it becomes something smaller, more intimate with minimal piano, and then it explodes into a magnificent final third. It deals with the decline of his aging father, how he feels about the passing of time, and how he would like to be thought of once he himself is gone. I feel like a moment in this song even works as a thesis statement for all of Lambchop’s work:

We speak in loose abstracted thought
Waiting for a place to fill
It’s not the content of the doing
But what you’re feeling in the end

That when you walk away from a song, or a poem, a painting, or a film — that what you’re feeling is what matters. Not some intellectual analyzation, or some hardline opinion of meaning — but what that piece of art gave you. In particular. What associations and feelings and memories came awake for you because of it? I feel that Wagner is a songwriter and musician who cares far more about transmitting mood and feeling than any particular meaning. When you read an entire novel, you don’t remember all the best bits of dialogue or prose — you remember how you felt once you closed the book.

Some might think it perverse, but I often think, when I listen to “His Song is Sung” — “I’d like this to be played at my funeral.”

Why?

First, I think it’s astoundingly beautiful, like much of Lambchop’s music, but I also deeply enjoy the way it unfolds and transitions and transforms. It feels like an entire life playing out. Moments of quiet. Moments of grandeur. Moments of uncertainty and moments of striking clarity in meaning. It is like life: “ceaselessly unpredictable.”

I imagine my funeral service. Of course people are in black and, hopefully, some are crying because they loved me so much. I’m hoping my fiancé won’t be there, hoping that we died together holding hands (one can dream, right?) After my friends and family who want to speak about me have spoken, the person conducting my funeral will step up and say:

“Matthew wanted us to listen to his favorite song, from his favorite band. He hoped you would enjoy it as much as he did.”

Across the interstate the world is like another world
And I wanna believe in that
It should get easier with time
And I’m an unnamed bird that sings the same sad song
And my song is sung
That’s how I wanna believe in that
And it gets edgier with time
No one’s edgier than I

And after — that — everyone at my funeral will be looking around at each other. Scratching their heads. No one saying it out loud, but everyone kind of wondering “what the hell was that?”

Someone might say, “Well, it was kind of beautiful.”

“It was sorta fucked up and weird, too,” someone else mutters.

And then, from wherever I am, I’ll poke my head out from my ghost’s costume and say:

“Exactly.”

The Zone of Interest begins quietly. Just the title card. But then Mica Levi’s haunting, other-worldly score begins and we are forced to watch the title of the film warble and fluctuate to the sound of ominous droning voices. Over several minutes the title slowly, very slowly, begins to fade into blackness, like something fading beyond the grasp of living memory and into shadow as the music forces us to pay attention, to not look away.

The Zone of Interest is an almost unbearably powerful film that does exactly that: forces you to not look away. As Mica Levi’s foreboding score gives way to the sounds of birds and flowing water, the film gives us our first image: a family by the river, sitting idly, relaxing and swimming. It is truly the only moments of quiet peace in this film. The interactions between them, the moments shown, are so…real. So plain. Who doesn’t have a memory of walking up a trail with their family, quietly making their way back home, pleasantly tired from an outing? It is only a few moments later that we see this family is no ordinary family — their patriarch is the Nazi Commandant of the Auschwitz death camp. The Hoss family.

One of the most singularly unsettling elements of The Zone of Interest is its choice, and its incredible ability, to show us our commonalities with this family. Ordinary childhood experiences we’ve all shared — playing in a pool with friends while parents look on, sharing dinner, playing with a flashlight in the darkness of one’s childhood bedroom. We connect with these moments, because we’ve had them. We know them. We recognize ourselves in them. And juxtaposed with these moments is the unspeakable reality that merely yards away from this family’s home, churning 24/7, is a factory of human carnage and suffering and death that only Hell can compete with.

In one of the most disturbing scenes, we see the Hoss’ family’s youngest son playing alone in his room. Just as in nearly every moment at the Hoss’ house, we can hear, simmering in the background, the sounds of the Holocaust happening. Suddenly, nearby his window, we hear someone shouting. The boy notices, and hesitantly goes over to his window. We see only him, looking out, but we hear a man screaming at someone. Some of it is muffled, as we hear the victim pleading and struggling, all within view of the Hoss child — and then a man shouts “Drown him in the river.” The victim begins screaming and the boy turns away from his window. The boy is quiet for a moment…then he starts talking to himself. Repeating what he heard: “Don’t do that again,” the boy whispers to himself, miming striking someone. We literally see the ideology of genocide and fascism seeping into a child, an insidious, poisonous culture being reproduced in its next generation. It is quiet. It is horrific.

The drama of the Hoss family’s storyline is a droll, bureaucratic drama. Hoss is being transferred to another camp and tries to reverse this decision, his wife not wanting to be transferred, but eventually he is. That’s all that really happens with the family. But every moment in their household is saturated, teeming with barely hidden violence. Atrocities just out of view. The small pop pop pops of guns in the distance, executing prisoners, while the Hoss family clears the dinner table and plays among themselves.

Jonathan Glazer’s vision for this film feels ahead of its time. Like art from the future. Somehow, while only showing you the most ordinary elements of a family’s life, he fills the viewer with a feeling of utter dread, of horror — of the shame of being the same species as the Hoss family. It is their utterly clean and sanitized way of speaking about their deeds, their way of fitting it in so cleanly in an otherwise normal day that is so shocking. Hoss casually listens to the architectural plans for a new oven that can burn thousands of human beings alive in a more efficient manner, and his wife lovingly tends to flowers in their garden.

The Zone of Interest begs you to consider its title while you watch it play out. On a literal level, the Nazis referred obliquely in planning meetings to the area around Auschwitz as “the zone of interest.” But that being the title of the film beckons us to wonder…what did these human monsters think of while they committed these acts? Where were their personal zones of interest? The wife has her garden. The children have their toys. Hoss, the father, has his cigarettes smoked alone in the evening while the chimney of the human oven billows smoke and ash behind him. How does a man like Hoss gently put his crying baby to bed, while also having certainly watched infants be murdered, cooked alive even? How can such evil be compartmentalized? I think the most powerful truth of this film is in showing that — it can’t be.

The ideology that leads to mass dehumanization of an entire population, and justifies their mass murder, is a toxic, infectious ideology that will seep into every corner of your life and identity. It is inevitable. This is unnervingly illustrated when Hoss, on a visit to Berlin and after attending a party of his fellow Nazis, calls his wife and admits to her that he couldn’t concentrate on anything at the party. “I could only think of the most efficient way to gas the entire room,” he says. He is a human being remade — he is only death.

The choice to give us only the sounds of the Holocaust, rather than visual depiction, is a choice that forces us, almost against our will, to imagine cruelty. Brutality. Inhumanity. The knowledge of what is happening is horror enough. It is beyond horror, it speaks to the fact that human beings can transform into something else. That they can look and act like us, while being the literal perpetrators of Hell for other human beings. That they can both hug their children and blithely design mechanisms of the most hideous mass murder ever bureaucratized. They made the most abominable human misery numbers on a spreadsheet.

The closing moments of The Zone of Interest show that, deep down in his black core, even Hoss knows that the evil he is accomplice to is beyond containing. I will not reveal the power of the closing scene, but to me it shows that pure evil is undeniable, it can never be fully justified even by those who openly commit it. Something in them knows that they have unleashed a destruction that only begets destruction. The kind of evil that swallows your soul and leaves you hollow. No matter how much they look away from the truth of what they do, the sounds of it will haunt them, will overshadow everything.

The Zone of Interest is already being hailed as a masterpiece and a modern classic. It deserves to be. Stories that revivify the Holocaust in our living memory and experience are important — crucial to us as a species. Whatever evil resided in the Nazis, is an evil that can come back. In anyone. The most horrific truth of the film is that anything can be normalized, made banal, ignored. The most nightmarish genocide ever committed was happening while mother Hoss and her children laughingly splashed in their pool just beyond the camp wall. But the sounds of Hell cannot be diminished, cannot be ignored, they infect and they condemn. Even if the echoes of the past are all that remain, we must remember them, we must listen, and never forget.

“I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.” — Antonio Porchia

The essence of writing.

To know one’s own thoughts, to have laid them down as precisely as possible — and to have no certainty whatsoever what they will mean to the person who reads them. No understanding of what they will see. What they will conjure.

Sentences swim in and out of meaning. The sentence that meant everything to its author may go unnoticed or be quickly forgotten by its reader. The author will never know which words or sentences will sting or sing. Intention is frail, but impressions are sturdy. Lasting. We don’t remember what a piece of writing says, eventually, we remember the feeling it leaves us with. The feeling is yours, no one else’s. Your impression of a book or an essay or a poem is your most singular possession, so private as to be indescribable. All you can give of an impression, is another impression.

And so writing echoes this way, undulating and warping and transforming as it is spoken from one mouth to another ear and so on, until meaning is forgotten and what is left is something more pure. More universal. Something felt, experienced, something that marinates and surrounds us but momentarily. A marriage of vision and feeling both intangible, fleeting — and everlasting.

What is given is always a mystery, but what is received is something more than hope, more than joy, or sorrow, or knowledge. What is received is a small and porous container through which we can receive everything before it strides into the endlessness of nothingness.

I would ask something more of this world, if it had something more. — Antonio Porchia

The world we have is the only one we’ve known. Whether it was made for us, sculpted lovingly by a creator, or whether it was a miraculous accident of existence, a life creating explosion of matter: it’s all we’ve got. We’ve never made contact with anyone in the after, so we cannot be sure if there is. But my fingers are upon these keys as your eyes are upon my words, right now, this moment we’re sharing, your reading and my writing: this present is all we need.

For human perspective, the present is the entirety of our lives. The past made hazy the moment it passes by, and the future perpetually in fog. We experience our lives as the now, as the doing, as the moment of standing up, as the act of walking toward. Whether or not we will reach what we are headed to is always in question, but we can always choose to be moving.

Do we need anything more from the world? More than what is already before us? We have the means to feed all of humanity, we have the knowledge, we have the willpower and drive. Perhaps asking more of the world is asking the wrong subject; perhaps, we should be asking more of each other and ourselves.

Our world has provided everything you’ve ever touched or even looked upon. Your imagination springs from what you know; even your wildest dreamings retain elements of the familiar, of our ordinary world. We dream of other people, of places we know from childhood, of myth and magic all from the minds of other human beings.

If I could ask of the world one thing, it would be for more mercy. That people feel drawn toward mercy. That they feel drawn toward forgiving themselves the things they hold deeply and with pain. That they feel a sense of mercy toward any suffering they may indirectly or directly cause. That they revaluate: is this the way of the world, or is it what we have built, have imposed on the world? Because if this is just how the world is, then sorry darlin’, I guess it doesn’t ever get any better. But if this is what we have made, together — then together we can change ourselves. The world gives no answers, we will have to build new answers, new structures, with mercy and understanding for each other built in.

Every question we could pose to the world is irrelevant. All the most important questions are the ones we should always ask of ourselves.

Queerness itself makes narrative art more entertaining by the sheer fact that it makes relationship dynamics more unpredictable, more exciting. Anyone might fall in love with anyone. If there is room for the entire spectrum of sexuality and attraction, then there are infinite arrangements of people and love. The surprise of love is never fresher. The suddenness of an unexpected bonding. To be frank, we’ve seen that already with men and women in monogamous, hetero-normative relationships. We’ve all seen it a thousand times. There is an entire industry devoted to making films about men and women falling in love and marrying, so much so that we all recognize the “romantic comedy” formula. And inherent to that formula, up until recently, has been straightness.

Season 2 of “Our Flag Means Death” contains the same charm, the same fun of the first season. But this season leans more heavily into the violence of pirating, as well as into the fluid queerness of its main characters. There is a relationship of both violence and sexuality, abuse and devotion, toxicity and passion. And this relationship happens between two very masculine men. It is thrilling to slowly be shown the contours of their twisted relationship, the absolute loyalty offered by one and the half-hearted acceptance of it by the other. It is unfair and mean, but it is so much more entertaining to see this unfold between two hardened warriors, two feared pirates, and two gay men. In “Our Flag Means Death,” queerness is represented well, because queerness is never represented as the entirety of any character, as the sole aspect of their personality. It is simply a part of who they are, how they see the world, and how they love.

The characters are all robust in this way, revealing new emotional faces and expressing evolving personalities. They feel lively and purposeful, every character clearly wanting things, desiring progress for themselves and their friends. The sweetly innocent love between Stede and Blackbeard is one of the most genuinely romantic relationships I’ve ever seen on television. It happens at a perfect pace, their falling in love. We come to know them as people, and there is a perfectly spun gay take on the fish-out-of-water/transformation tropes in romantic comedy. Men fall in love in the universally felt and recognizable sense, but they also fall in love in a way that is their own. A way that is masculine and tough as much as it is heartfelt and sensual. As relatable as it is also unabashedly gay. And — crucially — it feels completely vibrant and alive.

Queerness — when represented with authenticity rather than caricatured stereotypes — inflames storytelling possibility. It creates new subtexts and undertones and it makes for a far, far less predictable plot. We should be embracing the portrayal of more queer characters for not only is it more truthful, more accurate to the real world, it also flies open the doors and windows of possibility. It gives us new angles on characters, on motivations, on desire and betrayal. Why not new? Why not more? Who could say no to the world expanding, growing, becoming richer and more complex in a healthy and satisfying way? In a way that informs and enriches all our experience, be you straight or queer or anything between, around, or abounding. I have never before seen pirates the way I see them now that I have watched “Our Flag Means Death.” It brought a new life to an archetype that I’d long since stopped caring about. With such fullness of character, such sincerity of love, and with genuine wit and enthusiastic style, the show is a well-crafted and winning combination. Queerness is simply given room to be, to blossom and unfurl. Like anything else worthy of thought and inspection, queerness is given the time and space to express naturally. The show displays queerness for what it is: natural.