Like most of you I have social media on multiple platforms. I often consider that one day I will die and I hope that I haven’t done or said anything on these sites that would misrepresent my life. I have a real fascination with peoples final posts, here I have changed/omitted certain names and places in the interest of respecting the privacy of the departed and their loved ones.
CASE 1:
It was the day after Halloween 7 or so years ago. I was living in a midsize city just North of San Francisco. The city was small enough that it didn’t have a ton of crime, but just big enough so that it wasn’t incredibly uncommon it to be the setting for several murders a year.
I lived in a duplex, sharing a wall with one of my best friends. The house was in an area we called The Grid which happened to be where the bulk of our friends lived in during that era. Now most of us have been priced out of that county, but at the time every third house would be home to friendly faces. Ours was one of the more frequented spots to hang out, in part due to its centralized location, and in other part due to our rather inviting street facing porch. We would sit on that porch for hours at a time, sometimes with so many of us there that it was standing room only.
Our friend Ian came through that morning, all of us worse for the wear, residual makeup on our faces to punctuate the dark circles under our eyes that resulted from the late night and celebratory libations from the previous evening. Immediately after greeting us Ian told us of a mysterious situation going on a few blocks over on the lawn of the Junior College. He claimed to have seen a body.
“I doubt that. Musta been some drunk kid KO’d over there.” I said with a skeptical sneer, Ian had a level of charming gullibility that made his report a bit less than airtight.
“No dude, he was dead, cops are already swarming over there.”
I hopped up asking the others if they wanted to go check it out, all wisely declining. I’m not the kind of person who typically goes out of his way to see such vestiges of mortality, but a body in the middle of the expansive JC lawn was too compelling for me to resist. It couldn’t have been a murder, the middle of the lawn was not where such an act would be committed and the last place one might think to drop off a corpse. It must have been an overdose or something, while the town had its share of homeless folks, death from exposure was unlikely.
I made my way up the few short blocks to the main street, directly across from it was the lawn, and sure enough, in its middle several members of law enforcement patrolled the area and were actively hanging crime scene tape around what was obviously a body, covered by a pristine white sheet. There were several other community members around speaking in hushed tones. Most remained on the far side of the road near me, afraid they might be barked at by law enforcement should they get too close.
Most seemed clueless looking on, but several from the crowd who had arrived on the scene earlier described a man face down on the lawn. Some described blood, but their tone wasn’t entirely convincing. Oddly the police had failed to cover the feet of the victim, which remained sticking out of the bottom of the sheet. He was wearing very new looking black and red Nike sneakers, they were gaudy and reminded me of the kind of shoes some folks take extreme steps to prevent from getting dirty. These were not the kind of shoes one wears to walk over the soggy lawn on the JC, not when there was a perfectly good sidewalk a few yards away. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened… were the reports of the blood true? The whole scene captured my imagination and as I walked back to the porch I made a note to follow up on the reports of this that were likely to start hitting the internet by later that same day.
This wasn’t the first murder victim I had ever seen, but the memory of this one was striking, I suspect it was due to the fact that the shoes communicated something about the individual I could relate to. No, I have never been a shoe person, but it seemed to me to be a young person’s interest to indulge in such things. I suspected that the person under the sheet was of similar age to me, and when online news reports started to come in my suspicion was confirmed.
The reports were limited and vague, as these things tend to be. One thing that was made clear in the articles I found was that this was not a homicide investigation. Various social media comments confirmed (at least in a rumorous way) that there had been a good deal of blood on the scene. No guns were recovered, according to reports, so it seemed to me that this was likely a suicide, with a knife or razor being the means with which the grisley act was committed. All of this was very unscientific, but I was interested in unspooling the narrative of this young man’s final days.
I managed to pull up his Facebook before someone took it down. His privacy settings were almost nonexistent so I had access to all he shared in the years he had kept it active, and what I found was a very troubling story indeed. The young man was convinced that he had stumbled upon a government conspiracy, one that reached all the way to the top. He was calling upon angels to protect him as he exposed the misdeeds of those whom we trust to keep society up and running, hopefully with the interests of the people guiding them as they made choices and passed laws that we were all to adhere to.
His photographs were another story. Yes there were the typical uploads of conspiracy minded types There were images of Masonic origin, hidden symbols in film and tv. There were codes and ciphers that made little sense. There were even images of the World Trade Center complete with breakdowns focused on their rate of collapse and what was portrayed as incongruous math to to bolster the idea that the destruction was not in fact due to the impact of the commercial airlines. Along with these, and other half cocked conspiracies were images of angels, both from the Renaissance masters, as well as newer images put together by someone with Photoshop skills and a penchant for lens flares. These images were far less interesting than the ones of the man himself.
His pictures, mostly solo selfies, showed what appeared to be a happy, well kempt 20 something. His eyes looked deep and meaningful, his hair was always perfectly cut and maintained, and his smile was wide and generous. Many of the pictures had inconsequential settings, the bathroom, seated in front of a computer (clear from the illumination of a screen), and in what I could only imagine was his yard, on the grass. He didn’t express his fears in these pictures. In checking the time stamps, one shot would be uploaded of him grinning like a child at Chuck E. Cheese with a caption saying “Just kinda feelin’ myself lol” and moments later he would post in text “The Illuminati designed DC in the shape of a Luciferian star, look it up, they got no love for us.”
The warnings were just the start though, often he would lead in with such a thing, and then spiral into more and more dire personal anecdotes until hitting a fever pitch with posts about black cars following him, and feeling like he in danger for getting too close to the truth. The following day, or sometimes even in the midst of a paranoid flurry he would pop in again with a selfie, smiling, “Just got blessed up over at Avenue Barbershop by my boy Chuy!”
It all seemed to start for him maybe a year or two prior, beyond that his Facebook had the usual stuff, pics of food and cars, family photos, a couple memes that struck me as very typical. There was little to indicate that his future was one of great fear, terror so great that he would seek the aid of angelic forces to keep the men that hunted him at bay.
At the time I worked in the mental health field, so I had some education about this kind of thing. I have never been the type to fully disregard anything as simply delusional thinking, but it was hard not to land on that when reading his posts. I wished that he had found help and that his smiles wouldn’t have been buttressed by concerns for his safety and the dark forces that were undoubtedly taking their toll, real or imagined. I wondered where his network was, noticing that the likes on his pictures and posts had been in steady decline over the past few months. He was alienating everyone with his wild ideas. He was scaring away the people who loved him, or maybe they were turning a blind eye because they were embarrassed about the kind of person he was becoming. We all notice in our own lives that our friends rally when we are on the upswing, when we’re in the struggles it can be a really lonely place… but this guy had almost completely spooked off everyone.
I noticed that no one had written on his page anything like “Damn, I heard the news about ______, I love you man, Rest In Power.” or some other lightweight remembrance. If he had alienated his people I could understand not showing up pulling out your hair and weeping, but not even a simple “You will be missed.” It really made me wonder. He had a fairly typical number of friends for the site, what had this guy done that was so horrible as to not attract a single mourner?
As I closed my investigation I began to wonder if I had found the right guy, and then in his recent uploads I found undeniable proof that it was him. Unlike his other pictures this one had a lengthy bit of text. It went on at length and how he had found the links he had been looking for, how the secret empire had its claws firmly set in the small city we lived in. He named certain elected officials and members of law enforcement as instruments of this Satanic cabal that ran the world in secret. He cited a number of police shootings and the victims and painted a portrait of suppressed information and police misconduct. He did all this while calling on Michael and Gabriel and a number of other Seraphim to protect him as he continued to pull the veil. He said the Illuminati would eliminate him out for speaking up. He said his days were numbered, and that he was working to make peace with the fact that he would be killed by the police for doing what he was doing. After this lengthy piece of text there was a shot of his new shoes, those black and red Nikes I had seen on the lawn of the JC. The post script stating simply “These the boots yer boy gon be sportin’ when they take me.”
CASE 2:
I had become a fixture in the Boston punk and hardcore scene in the early 2000’s when I made a hasty retreat from my childhood home 30 minutes North in Southern New Hampshire. I was in bands, played a ton of shows, booked out of state bands, and went to concerts almost nightly. For several years this was my life, music. During this time I made a lot of friends and even more acquaintances that I would see regularly at the same venues and basements that were home to such affairs. It was during this time that I met this guy who I will now call Jon.
Jon was older than me and if I’m being truthful he seemed a bit out of touch. He was into a lot of the same stuff that I was, but his eccentricities forbid me from ever considering him someone I really had an interest in knowing better. He was a weirdo, but he was close with a number of my friends, and seeing him so often we came to engage in friendly terms. He was at many of the parties I attended, always loudly gregarious. At shows he would dance wildly before the crowd was even warmed up, he was a real individual and he literally wore it on his sleeve.
This was a time in hardcore when fashion was moving away from the jockish appearances of the Youth Crew era, and was drawing more from Mod culture than anywhere else. I found myself wearing “girl jeans” and polos, huge faux fur lined parkas, and allowing my dyed black hair to hang to one side in a look that would become more identified with Justin Bieber in a decades time, and become a cartoonish reflection of what I considered hot shit at the dawning of this new millenia.
Jon owed his look more to gutter punk or industrial sensibilities. He would cut his hair into these wacky nonsense styles, half shaved, with a strange patch here and there. He wore a ring in his nose that had to be 00 gauge, lips pierced all over, eyebrows, cheeks, on his body spotty home done tattoos visible through his fishnet tanks. He had sewn bizarre patches in strange places on a rancid military surplus jacket. His boots that seemed comically large and he smelled like a dumpster. He was one of a kind, so unique in fact that I struggle to convey his appearance because any description sounds almost rational, but I assure you it wasn’t. His attitude was similar, Jon didn’t care when the party started or ended, he had his own clock, and at shows if he was enjoying the bands he could give a flying fart if the energy of the room was there, he had his own engine. I have to repeat these bits because everyone has their moments, for Jon it was his default setting.
I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t leave Boston gracefully. I told a lot of people off, feeling like I’d never see them again. I didn’t mind burning a few bridges on the way out. I felt like my move was allowing me to speak truths that the folks I was leaving behind had been wanting to say but couldn’t due to being stuck in the same scene with those who needed to be humbled. Even the folks who would have maintained a friendship with me were met more often with unanswered phone calls and more unanswered internet messages than even the most steadfast could persist in the face of. I didn’t like who I had become in Boston and the move would serve as a soft reset, a means of personal reinvention, and a renewal in my journey to find out who I was.
Years later, things looped around and even some of the folks I was rude to found their way back into my social media circles. Time is the great healer, and a lot of the stones I had thrown were forgiven, many of them having done the same, or at least having developed the worldly quality of knowing that different seasons of life have different weather patterns. I hadn’t done anything too rotten, and nostalgia for the good times and all those shows and all that magic helped heal the wounds I may have caused as a self righteous kid.
It wasn’t as if we spoke all the time, someone would pop up, friend request, chat a second, and now you’re in my feed and I’m in yours. You know all about me that I find fit to share and I know all about the stuff you wish to share. We leave out a good deal, but most of us are pretty open about the good and the bad, and it felt good to see where life had taken my old friends. Most were doing really well, so well in fact that I often wondered what they thought about Boston’s Prodigal Son, who went to sunny California and spent the better part of a decade in some of the deepest depressions he had ever known. I was still doing the same shit, and most of them had nice careers, kids, and had moved on from those old fanciful dreams we shared. Most were contented to live good, wholesome lives and not worry about creation, or late nights and impossible dreams.
I never got a friend request from Jon (naturally) and I had all but forgotten about him until a mutual posted about his death. He has died AT A SHOW. Any idea I had about being the one true lifer dissolved in an instant. Here it was, proof that Jon was the real one and I was a fraud. This was something I had already begun to suspect years earlier when my interest in maintaining social stature by being en vogue began to give way to a mindset less concerned with such things. In shaking such aspirations I was able to reflect more clearly on certain people with queer tastes and understand that these were the real punks, and that all the posturing and posing I had done was quite the opposite.
When I became interested in punk I had very little information about what it all meant. The definition was added to as I went along, and with each new piece of information my prejudices as to what was and was not punk became more and more constrictive and antithetical to what attracted me to the lifestyle. For example, in the beginning I made no delineation between hippies and punks. It seemed to me that it was about counter culture, rebellion against the imposed status quo of the mainstream. When I got word that punks and hippies were in fact diametrically opposed, I threw in with the punks, they had better music. This kind of foolish thinking narrowed my scope to a pin hole. Folks like Jon missed that memo and as a result they were able to skip, what for me was an important part of the identity I had assumed in the name of rebellion. I had to build walls around myself, lock myself into a dogmatism so that I could execute on the greatest skill that punk ever taught me, the one where you initiate the most important rebellion one can undertake. This great revolution is the one that takes place in our own hearts when we realize we have become the bad guy.
I wondered how many other incredible people I had dismissed or alienated with my dumb rules and expectations. I felt ashamed about how vapid and shallow my attitude had been. I had traded in the exclusivity and elitism of my small town’s social cliques and had upgraded to being the one drawing up designs for a brand new caste system. I had become a part of a problem that got me into punk and hardcore in the first place, and now from my imagined place of esteem, I had appointed myself gatekeeper to a counter culture that mirrored all the worst parts of what made the social piece of public education so foul. Jon had apparently been immune to that toxic trap. Maybe if I had access to his perspective I wouldn’t have felt stuck in that old imagined identity, but then I might would have missed out on the important growth that takes place when you burn down your former self like a hated effigy.
Jon was not a drug user and had no diagnosis of heart issues or anything like that, at least as far as I can tell. People have a way of indicating such things, even in brief memorials. He just went to a show, like we had all done so many times, and died, right there on the dancefloor. He wasn’t assaulted or struck by a stagediver. He didn’t OD in the bathroom, and according to all records of the night he hadn’t even seemed unwell, right up until his very end. I don’t know what killed him, an aneurysm? Sudden heart failure? Something mysterious had taken this man and I had so many questions. Again, I would use social media to investigate.
I plumbed the listings on Facebook and I found him. He didn’t have privacy set, so like in the case of ______, the man on the lawn, I had access to a good deal. Unlike the man on the lawn, Jon’s facebook was loaded with mournful friends recounting memories, sharing their grief, and saying all the things they wished they had said to him, or would love to say to him once more. Jon was someone that everyone loved, because there was little to not love. He remained true to himself, something I had scoffed at when I was masquerading as one whose authenticity circumstantially was what everyone else wanted. It felt like such a joke, this guy I hardly knew died knowing who he was and even as I type this I am still peeling away layers of an old facade to find an honest expression of the universe I carry around in between my ears.
When I got to his final post I found myself smiling unconsciously as I read it. Jon really was a great and beautiful enigma and I had missed it. The last post was about the show. Some band from long ago was doing a reunion and he was looking for friends who would like to join him. He recalled a number of previous performances of theirs that he had enjoyed 10-15 years prior before their long pause. He was really excited to see them and to feel that wondrous feeling again, to feel young and to dance and to be free. He closed the post with something brilliantly prophetic.“If I don’t come back from this show it’s because I’ve fallen into the Time Tunnel. I’ll be back in 96’ dancing with myself in the past- forever.”
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