I never met Gary Webb, and I came to his work late, about the time I was first discovering NarcoNews.  Still, his death set off an earthquake inside me, shaking down everything that didn’t have a firm foundation.  And feeling, through the NarcoSphere, the way so many were intensely shaken, my tremors found sympathetic vibration and began to sing.

But this has all brought unexpected and hard revelations about the ettiquete of mourning and loss in Gringolandia, and just how quickly violating that ettiquete can bring isolation and estrangement.

There are rules here about what we are and are not supposed to feel deeply about.  And when we violate them people freak the fuck out.   As I was trying to take in and work through all the implications of Gary's death, the message I got again from people around me was -- You didn't know him, don't get sucked in.  Its other people's shit.  Its dangerous to think too much about it.  I can't be around you if you are going to let this bother you so much.

And the truth is this is nothing new -- its something that I think a lot of us face every day.  Radical compassion is pathologized in our culture.  Screaming at the radio when its announcing the death toll from Iraq, crying in the supermarket when you remember the Quecha woman who was shot in the shoulder by the counter-narcotics police, are considered sick and weak.    

We're supposed to leave our work behind when we aren't writing.  We're supposed to be able to pretend at parties that everything is alright and just talk about the Red Sox and someone's cousin's friend's brother's wedding.  If its not happening to us or to someone we see every day its not supposed to be real to us.

But that's not the way it fucking works.  Diane DiPrima wrote in her poem, "Rant":

"There is no part of yourself you can separate out,
saying, this is memory, this is sensation,
this is the work I care about,
this is how I make a living. "

What we feel, what we know, is part of us.  And when we silence it it festers inside us and becomes toxic.  And when we allow other people's insistence that we pretend not to know and feel to drive us into disconnection and isolation we begin to wither.

This time last year I was at the edge.  I couldn't get out of bed in the morning because I was drowning in grief that noone else was willing to hear or believe.  A few times I came way too close to downing a bottle of pills only to pull back at the last minute.

Writing is what keeps me alive.  Every word I type is an assertion that noone can deny the reality of my experience, and the reality that emotion and connection and compassion can't and won't be limited by rules of frienship and kinship and geography.

Just before Gary died I had allowed myself to begin to slip back into the darkness and to stop writing.  His death and our community's reaction to it jolted me back into recognition that if I didn't write I would slowly die.

Thank you, Al, for blowing the lid off political and psychological and emotional correctness.  There is no room for that fucking bullshit anymore.

We cannot keep cutting away parts of ourselves.

We cannot remain isolated.

We cannot stop writing.

We cannot live without our lives.