a (love) letter to the tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, (aka the queer tendency toward immolation and self-annihilation). If you think that this address does not include you for whatever reason, i encourage you to pretend it does for emotional effect. Find the tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave inside yourself.)
– love letters don’t usually start this way, but I’m incredibly mad at you. It’s not a hot anger, its cold and sharp, like an icicle or broken heart. When I imagine how I would react if I saw you, my standby revenge fantasies of like, smashing someone’s face in while listing the names of my dead loved ones, just dunno’t do it for me. Unfortunately that only seems to work when I think about my enemies and you are not my enemy. It would be so much simpler if you were, but you’re not.
- I think I want to light you on fire. Safely of course, omg, this is not a death threat! After all, tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, you are not a person, just a tendency.
- Can’t rubbing alcohol burn without damaging skin if done right? I should probably look that up again ~ yeah that’s still true. I could pretend to spill a bunch of salted hand sanitizer on you and then go in with a Zippo. *PHueem* I imagine the flames ballooning and flickering around you. The fire would only be scary for a minute. That’s all you wanted to do, right? Just scare people for a minute? You weren’t trying to murder all of our comrades in a warehouse fire, pfft. I know that.
- There are ever-ready extinguishers everywhere, we’d put out the fire and then maybe we could talk?
- I don’t even know if you do, “talking” though.
- You seem sharp enough to see through all the standard social control mechanisms. You know that mediation, accountability processing, heart-to-hearts, deescalation, dude-seriouslies, all these anarcho-communitarian “come-to-jesus” tactics, are all forms of capture. You’re a fox too feral to be tamed. I do love that about you tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave. Ugh, I’m being matronizing (feminine form of patronizing) aren’t I? I think I know why I default to acting like your Mother even though I think you know tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, I’m not your Mother.
Your Mother1 is Dead.
Your Mother died in a warehouse fire, overdosed on fent, shot herself with a gun she bought for self-defense, slit her wrists in a beautiful ritual, was brutally slain. Phheeeew. That was harder for me to write than I thought it would be. I didn’t expect to cry about her today. Not so much with words, but I kind of promised your Mother I would look after you, tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave. I know I haven’t been around much, so it makes sense if there is some distrust and bitterness between us.
Ugh, its just that, I see her in you. Your devil-may-care charm, how you hold your body, your blasphemous pronouns, your stubborn love of starting shit. When you (allegedly) punched that person, smashed that phone, lit that fire, I thought of all the times she was up to those same shenanigans. Your face even…oh gawd…you fucking *look* like her. I wasn’t there, so how could I see your face, but I swear when I saw your face and you looked like her. If yer Mother was here, maybe she would scold you, denounce you, try to fight you, but there’s an equal chance she would think what you did was righteous, or at least funny as fuck(she had a sick sense of humor)? I’m not even sure she wasn’t the one who lit the fire that night. She was always very good about not talking details after an action. I expect you are not in the emotional place to hear this right now, but I think she would be proud of you.
Why did you do it tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave? Don’t answer that question! Its better that I don’t know. I’ve come up with a list of possible reasons;
- There were at least 5 dramas brewing that night, it could have been about one of them, a message in flame
- A distraction in service to the 5 dramas, the real action being elsewhere(smart).
- They finally concocted that Octavia Butler drug that makes fire feel like sex
- Fire has always felt like sex for you
- You were bored
- You were Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired
- You were Thirsty, Raging, Alone and Pooped
- Complete accident, you didn’t have a Mother to tell you “no candles left alone in a squat”
- You’ve been naively pulled into provocateuring for one of our many natural predators, fash, pigs, tiqqunist, ad nauseum
- Someone is doing a psy-op, of which we will never know the details because we can’t even communicate enough to compare notes
- A brand new factional bitterness, of which I’d love to hear all about
- A prank, a lark, a dare, a meme, a wild hare up your ass
- Old fashioned “bringin’ the war home”
- You were trying to BLOW UP THE SUN
- Your Mother’s ghost moved through your hand. In that brief moment of possession you weren’t sure what you were doing until it was done. I’m curious if you know what she was trying to say. Have we moved too far away from fire?
I’m still mad at you right now, but I will forgive any of these reasons eventually. Ugh, I’m trying to think of what your Mother would say. I’ll start with what I’m not mad about.
- I’m not mad at you, tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, for fighting “amounst ourselves”. From the first to final internationale, we will never stop doing that. We cut our teeth on each other first. It’s what wolves do, it’s what family does. It makes sense to practice action when the stakes are lower.
“You are acting like the cops…like a rad-libs…like a vigilante mob…like the state.”
Yes. We all were. It would not be effective LARPing if we weren’t. Political infighting is better than any training camp we could’ve planned. Your Mother taught me how important conflict and disunity are. Beefing sets the boundaries necessary for us to form affinity. Conflict is how we get to deeper sharing. Table flipping, white dread cutting, mace threats, fist fights, screaming matches, call outs, graffiti beef, these are all going to keep happening and for good reasons.
- I’m not mad about being “triggered” er whatever. I’m being serious , tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, you did not trigger me, and if you had I woundn’t care. PTSD is my super power that protects me. I did not go to the Bash Back warehouse rave (which means the fire in question has always been mere rumor to me), because of a premonition that there would be a fire there. It could’ve been hypervigilance or an educated guess that you, tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, were the type to do something like set a fire at a crowded rave in an abandoned warehouse. You are after all, your Mother’s child.
- I can’t be mad at you for being unsmart. I don’t know what the smart move here is and I don’t really trust anyone who says that they do. At least you have the excuse, tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave that you didn’t have a Mother to tell you that buildings can go up in flames in about 5 minutes. That’s the time it takes for a small uncontrolled fire to become a full bonfire where everybody dies. Or at least the people who don’t notice fast enough or don’t have an escape route available. The build-up to that kind of blaze is rather unnoticeable, people in the building might only experience a slight haze of smoke and warmth before *Pheeem* it goes up like a Xmas tree. Abandoned buildings are the worst for this because they dont’ have any alarms or sprinkler systems, and often have flammable chemical accelerants.
- You never listen to me tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave and yet, I can’t blame you for it. I’m so fucking condescending. I speak like a Boomer/Zoomer/Doomer bit on loop. I exude “kids these days” energy. I’m literally addressing a strawperson and have done no work to learn anything about you. I talk and talk and talk and never get to the good part. I could go on for too long about the perfectly good reasons why you don’t listen, but you don’t listen so that would be a waste of breath.
- Of course you weren’t thinking about your own safety tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave. You’ve embraced your expendability. It’s uncanny how much you mimic the tools of your action, fire. The energetics of fire in a tactical sense2 is that of forward motion and the abandonment of self concern. It is the “speed and violence of action” doctrine. What use is it to rage against the nature of fire itself? You are your Mother’s child afterall.
- It’s always wise to hone firestarting skills.
Why I am mad.
When you lit that fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, we all thought of your Mother, specifically the versions of her that died in a warehouse rave fire. Her deaths felt pitiful and sad. It made us feel impotent and lost for months, years, probably the rest of my life. As ash3 in the wound, it set off a chain of events that shut down a bunch of underground social centers because of an opportunistic alt-right power move. You had no idea what you were risking by lighting that fire. Besides the numerous people who would have died, and the inevitable crackdown on queer organizing or renegade raves, it would’ve been you tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave that died in that fire. You can see that right? As a tendency you’d be dead. You would not be seen as a martyr, the equal and opposite reaction would only be a strengthening of our enemies, nothing else. If you had gotten people killed over whatever petty bullshit you were on that night, I just…play out the scenario in your head and tell me anything turns out good for anyone.
I’m mad because I think we fucking need your wildass tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave. Maybe I put too much weight on you specifically, but I think yer kind of our best shot for collective survival. There’s still dangers untold and hardships unnumbered before we reach and defeat the BBEG. I’m not good at this either, but could you maybe get your shit together? Or fuck off? Denounce Bash Back already, write a fucking screed about it. Start something new that isn’t held down by all our legacy bullshit. Maybe you already have and good luck to you. I hope that you can learn from our failures, your Mothers’ deaths, tear apart our carcasses like a vulture.
I think you should stick around though tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, I want you to stay and have it out with me. Read me to filth, tell me what I don’t and won’t get. I can’t promise I won’t want to light you on fire, but let’s be real, I was never going to do that.
Whatever, this is prolly just a fire safety rant that went off the rails. I don’t have anything to solve these perennial problems. The convergence was a success and the drama was delicious. Fascists and cops didn’t find or storm the venues. Old networks were reawakened and new ones were formed. No one died. I’m scared that you tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave, are going to walk away from the weekend full of adrenaline and dopamine thinking everything you did was righteous and I just want to remind you of the razor’s edge that we were actually all walking on. I don’t know, I’m bad at conclusions.
Even if it’s just on behalf of your Mother, I want you to know that I do love you tendency that lit the fire at the Bash Back warehouse rave.
~ an old friend of your Mothers’
Submitted Anonymously
- don’t be confused by the traditional gendered meaning of the word Mother or the pronouns she/her, your Mother refused categorization and was immune to the gendering reach of pronouns. ↩︎
- water escapes away in a snaking pattern, earth defends in a half-moon side-to-side motion, and air controls with a zig-zag flanking maneuver. my source for this is a long-dead esoteric ninja cult ↩︎
- cause salt is actually good in wounds, at least in the form of sterile saline ↩︎