Famous People

by Justin Kuritzkes

  The choir director from St. James was there, by the way. I guess I forgot to mention that. He flew all the way out from Minnesota, and I let him crash in my guesthouse for a few days. He was really heartbroken by the whole thing—I mean, everyone back in St. James was—because, you know, we were sort of an important family to all those people. Even if we hadn’t visited in like, forever, and even if we had lost touch with most of them for a couple years, my dad’s death still hit the community pretty hard, because, you know, aside from me, the most notable person to ever come out of St. James was this guy Mike Kingery who played for the Seattle Mariners, and, like, he wasn’t even that amazing at baseball, you know? He was just on the team. So people felt really invested in my family. I don’t think anybody even knew my dad was back in town until he blew his brains out. At the burial, the choir director was bawling his eyes out, which was kind of a mess, since he was supposed to be leading everybody in the songs. He’d like, get through half a verse and then sob for a bit, and then we’d all have to stand there waiting for him to get his shit together so we could make it to the chorus.

  I ended up giving a little speech. I wasn’t really planning on it, but a few people started giving speeches, so I kinda figured I had to. I knew that all the microphones on the other side of the fence were gonna be able to pick up whatever I was saying, so I kind of knew that my speech wasn’t gonna just be for the people gathered there—it was gonna be for the whole world—so I just said, you know, that my dad wasn’t ultimately a bad guy but that he just wasn’t built for this life. I said that my dad’s life should be an example to everyone of what happens when you forget that life should be fun, when you start to take it all too seriously. I kinda said, like, I’m gonna choose to remember all the good moments with my dad instead of the dark ones. I’m gonna try to remember when we were making all those recordings in St. James, or like, when we first got to L.A. and we would drive around looking at all these crazy houses and taking all these stupid pictures of each other with disposable cameras. That’s how I’m gonna remember my dad. It wasn’t a masterpiece or anything. I was just kind of riffing off the dome.

  I’ll still go visit his grave every once in a while. I don’t totally know why, but sometimes I’ll just find myself there—whenever I’m in the neighborhood or I’m passing by—and I’ll see that people have left all kinds of stuff on the headstone. The cemetery’s private for the most part, but there are certain hours of the day when anyone can come take a walk through it, so sometimes I’ll see that people have left, like, little goofy things on top of the grave. Most of the time, it’ll be like, printed out pictures of the memes that people used to make about him or merchandise from my tour or like, stickers or something, but sometimes, it’ll be little notes for me—I guess people figure it’s a place I’ll drop by every once in a while—so I’ll read them if I have the time. Sometimes it’ll be like, people expressing their condolences, which is cool, and sometimes it’ll be girls trying to get that D, which is like: Seriously? That’s what you’re gonna do here? But, you know, whatever. You have to laugh. If you can’t laugh at the crazy shit people do, then your life is gonna be full of a lot of sadness.

  One time, I dropped by, and I saw that Mandy had left me a little note. She didn’t put her name on the front of the card or anything, but I could tell when I opened it up that it was from her. Inside, it was totally blank except for this little drawing of a seagull. LOL. I don’t know exactly what she was trying to communicate, but it really touched my heart, to be honest. I can’t believe we didn’t know what seagulls were.

  * * *

  #43—Left side of my torso. This just says the name “KATE” and the date that Deez and I first played at Charizard. I kind of love that this is the only tattoo I’ve got with a girl’s name on it, because I didn’t even know this girl that well. Basically, I just got caught up in the sort of amazing vibe of that night, and I ended up hooking up with her in the green room right there at Charizard, and like, I remember her being the hottest girl I’ve ever seen. Like, legitimately, to this day, I still think about her. It was also the first time I had ever fucked without a condom, so the next day I was freaking out and calling up Deez and being like: YO, MAN, WHAT DO I DO?? And he was just laughing his ass off, like: Bro, chill out. I’ll have my doctor come over and test you. And anyway, I was fine, but I never heard from Kate again. I texted her a few times, but she just straight up never responded. And Deez and I were laughing about it a couple years ago when we were hanging out, and it was just like, the funniest thing in the world to us, because she legitimately ghosted me. Like, that doesn’t happen that often. LOL. And so a few days later, I went to the parlor and got her name tatted on my torso just as a way to commemorate that time, you know? Commemorate that moment in my life. I don’t know. I kind of imagine us running into each other one day and her seeing the tattoo somehow and me being like: Ummm, yeah, about that …

  #18—Right butt cheek. This is one of the earlier tattoos I got. It’s just a treble clef and a bass clef. Pretty self-explanatory. I mean, I guess on the face of it, like, this is kind of a lame tattoo—like, this is kind of the lamest tattoo for a musician to have—but I think that’s maybe partly why I got it? Like, I don’t know, sometimes it just feels really freeing to like, lean into the person that a lot of people think I am—like, just get the tattoo that some creepy musician bro at a bar would get—because, like: If I put it on my body, then no one else can brand me with it, you know? Like, no one can be like: I bet he’s the kind of guy who’s got a treble clef on his ass, because then I can just be like: yeah, actually, I AM. Plus, like, all those things that we think of as lame, like, all those things we make fun of people for, are actually just very sincere, like, very beautiful things. Like, we’re actually just calling those things “lame” because we can feel that the person is being really embarrassingly honest about what they find beautiful or meaningful and it sort of makes us embarrassed to be confronted with it. But like, why are we embarrassed, you know? Is it because that person is stupid, or is it because we’re realizing how DEAD we are and how many bullshit defenses we’ve built up against simple, beautiful things? And like, why WOULDN’T I get a tattoo of a treble clef and a bass clef on my ass, you know? What could be more beautiful than the fact that we came up with a whole visual system for representing SOUNDS? I mean, seriously. I don’t know. That’s kind of incredible to me.

  #27—Left hand. This is a thorny rose growing out of a pile of shit. We haven’t gotten to the Roses and Mud tour yet, so I won’t say too much here, but let’s just say: I really deserved a tattoo after that one.

  * * *

  The seed vault was pretty dope.

  It wasn’t really much to look at—it was just like, rows and rows of boxes that, like, maybe contained the future of humanity—but it was still kind of amazing to see how everything worked.

  The entrance is actually pretty cool-looking—when you approach it, there’s this big triangular thing jutting out from the side of the mountain with, like, this glass skylight that looks totally futuristic and amazing—but then once you get inside, the whole thing just feels like you’re in a Costco or an Ikea or something.

  Oddvar showed me the seeds he named after me. He couldn’t really take them out of their package—they were vacuum packed for storage—but I could see them through the plastic, and they definitely looked like seeds. LOL. I guess there’s not really much more to say about that.

  I was totally right about the guys having the time of their lives, by the way. We got there, and immediately, Oddvar was like: Gentlemen, there’s a foosball table upstairs and there are a few snowmobiles in the garage if you would like to use them. And before he could even get the words out of his mouth, Patrick and Curt and Mo were just off to the fucking races to see who would get first dibs. They were practically clambering over each other.

  Oddvar showed me around a bit and talked about some of the experiments he was working on—I didn’t understand a lot of it, but
I still appreciated that he was trying to explain it all to me—and then we sat down in this little office area that had a heater and a coffee machine, and we started talking about the book.

  One of his big notes was about Bob.

  The publishers have been telling me that I should try and distance myself as much as possible from Bob in the book—you know, they think it might hurt sales for me to be associated with him—but Oddvar had pretty much the opposite note. He was basically like: It might be interesting for people to hear about Bob from my perspective—to hear from me which parts of Bob’s writings I’ve come to find so useful—especially since like, Bob’s written a lot of shit, and people might just assume that I find it all equally meaningful because of the relationship we have.

  And I guess I usually kind of avoid that stuff. Not necessarily because I don’t want to talk about it—like, anyone who knows me at all will tell you: If you wanna talk about Bob Winstock, I’m game to throw down whenever—but I guess I’ve avoided talking about it publicly because, like, first of all, I don’t want to sound like Bob’s spokesman—like, I don’t want people to mistake my interpretation of his writings for his intention or whatever—and second of all, like, I just don’t really believe in stepping out of my lane. I’m not an academic. I’m not a public intellectual. At the end of the day, I make songs and I sing songs, and like, yeah, I’m one hundred percent all for challenging myself and expanding the scope of what I can do—I mean, that’s why I’m trying to make this video game, you know, or like, even this book—but I’m also a firm believer in not trying to overstep my boundaries too much. Like, yeah, I like to do crazy projects every once in a while and push myself and push my limits, but I’ve just seen so many people—like, because they have success in one field or like, because people love them for this one thing they do—start thinking that they can do ANYTHING. Like, all of a sudden, they think that they can go around speaking at conferences and being ambassadors for shit that, like, people actually devote their whole lives to, and so they just end up looking like assholes.

  But, you know, I respect Oddvar. I think he’s a smart guy, and he knows me really well, and, like, unlike the fucking publishers, I believe that he’s actually coming from a place of what would be best for me and best for the book, so I’ll give it a shot.

  I guess the first way I connected with Bob—like, the first little tidbit of his teachings that worked its way into my life—had to do with art and the creation of art and what it means to be an artist. I mean, you know, if you’ve made it this far in the book, you know that I think about that shit all the time, but Bob had this really interesting take on it, and talking to him about it, or like, reading his books about it made me think about what I was doing for the first time as like, not just this thing that was about me and my ambition and like, trying to kill it and get ahead in the game, but actually as this other thing, this more human thing that could actually serve some purpose in the world.

  Honestly, one of the things that I really appreciated about Bob when we first had that dinner at the Cuban place is that he never once said the word “responsibility.” He never once told me I had a responsibility to my fans or that, like, I had to be a role model for them. And I would always hear people say shit like that, and it would always kind of piss me off, because it was like: What do they even mean, you know? Before I met Bob, like, when I was just starting out, I would say that shit all the time, because I felt like I HAD to—it felt like if you didn’t say that shit, people were going to think you were shallow or ungrateful or entitled or an asshole—but the whole time I was saying it, like, any time I found myself in an interview saying that I wanted to set a good example for my fans, I would just always leave the room kind of hating myself, because I could tell that I didn’t mean it. It was just like this little bit of taxes I had to pay. “Gratefulness taxes.” And then Bob came along, and what he taught me was that it’s not about responsibility or being a role model or giving back. It’s not about paying back some debt that you owe the world for putting you in the position you’re in. It’s about expanding people’s minds, demonstrating for people what freedom really looks like in a human form.

  According to Bob, the world is organized to make us all feel unfree. That’s the point of basically every structure we’ve built as a society—whether it’s the government or the economy or our families or whatever—it’s all working against us all the time to make us feel like we don’t even own our own lives, like we’re all slaves to some project that we didn’t even sign up for. And the only people who get to feel differently, like, the only people who get to live like none of that even matters, are people like me. Not just wealthy people, you know—because there are plenty of wealthy people who buy into the bullshit just as much as anybody else, maybe even more—but basically anybody whose life doesn’t fit into the given mold, anyone who has to live in a way that’s completely separate from the world that’s been laid out for everybody else.

  In his book The Problem with the Middle, Bob gets into this really crazy thing about how uber-wealthy, uber-famous people and like, uber-destitute, uber-penniless people are actually really similar, because the world hasn’t really been set up for either of them. Like, obviously if you’re uber-wealthy and uber-famous, like, the world SUPPORTS that and you can live super-well, but most of society, most of what’s been built up around us, most of the ads you see and most of the infrastructure that’s in place and most of the rules that you’re told you have to follow, like, when you get down to it, it’s all geared toward the middle people, you know, the normal people. And to a really famous, really wealthy person or like, a really poor, really destitute person, none of that shit makes any sense, because it’s just so obvious that it doesn’t apply to us. Like, so many times, I’ll be watching TV on an airplane or like, watching a movie or something, or I’ll be driving around and I’ll see an ad for something on the side of the highway, and I’ll just be like: That has absolutely nothing to do with me! And for a really poor person, like, the exact same thing is happening, except the reason it doesn’t have anything to do with them is that they can’t afford it—they see an advertisement for a water park or a restaurant or something and they’re just like: I couldn’t ever afford to go there, so that place is barely even real to me. But for me, it’s like, the reason I can’t go to those places is because if I tried—like, if I tried to just go to a water park and get on one of the rides and like, have some chicken fingers or something—the whole park would shut down. That entire day for everybody at the park would become all about ME being there, and every single function of the park—like, every single thing that makes the park run—would just come to a screeching halt. The only way I could even think about going to one of those places is if I called ahead and rented out the whole park for the day, because my presence alone will just cause all this pandemonium. And I’m not just talking about me, you know? I’m not just talking about MY comfort. I’d be doing it for the sake of the park. Like, I’d HAVE to do it, or else I’d be a DICK, because if I just show up somewhere, like, if I just stroll into a space that’s meant for normal people and I don’t give everybody the proper warning, that affects people’s lives whether they give a shit about me or not. And so it’s just so obvious to me that the park is a space that wasn’t built for me at all. It’s just so obvious that they didn’t consider me or people like me when they were planning it, and they didn’t consider me when they were advertising it, and they’re still not really considering me until the day I show up and create a problem for them. And I think a really poor person feels the same way. They just look out at so much of the world around them and think: This isn’t mine. I’m actually not welcome in any of this. For all intents and purposes, we both—me and the poor person—live in separate worlds from everybody else, but we’re also both in constant contact with the normal people world—the world that everybody else lives in—and so we both kind of have to navigate it and negotiate with it because it’s the only thing that exists.
Like, we have to burrow our own little holes within this world and build our own societies within this larger society that mostly doesn’t include us just so that we can have a space to live. And like, obviously, my society is a lot nicer than the poor person’s—I’m not COMPLAINING about my situation at all—but the thing I have in common with the really poor person is that we both have to go around the rules. We both have to get creative and create our own spaces and find our own pockets within the world that exists just so that we can live our lives. And what that does, I think, or like, what that makes possible for both of us is that we can see that the world around us, the world that most people live in, is just total bullshit. Like, the normal people world is not “reality.” It’s not some concrete fact of the universe. It’s just a story that a lot of people are telling themselves at the same time. But the very fact that we exist—me and the really poor person—the very fact that we’re breathing and eating and walking around on the same Earth as everybody else is a rejection of the idea that the way most people live is “normal” or “natural” or “necessary.”