is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Darin Nick Johnson.

An old friend of mine committed suicide on November 28 this year. I met Darin Johnson in Seattle [when the hell? Some time between 1992 and 1994?] at a zine conference. I was womanning the table for h2so4 alongside Julie of Anodyne and my age-old friend and co-conspirator Halliday Dresser, when a strange but compelling dude walked up and asked me if I was afraid of sharks. I said context would matter. We had a short discussion about contexts in which shark fear would or would not be warranted. He walked away.

Later he came back, picked up a copy of h2so4, started to read it, gave me a look, read it some more, and then decided we were friends. He handed me his Shark Fear zine and went back to his table (or he just kept walking around talking to people. Maybe he didn't have a table. I think he wasn't the kind of person to have an official table at a zine conference. It doesn't matter). Later on that night he and I (and the various other people in both of our parties) wandered around Seattle for many hours, talking, drinking, discovering a shared sense of what is absurd (for better and for worse) and what is inspiring in this very messed up world we live in. It was one of those tremendously fun nights where sleeping just seems like the stupidest thing anyone would bother to do in the face of such a good range of company. We even found a diner late at night that would serve us bourbon, french fries and ice cream sundaes all at once. At least that's what I remember. It may be something of a memory metaphor.

That was the only time in my life that I saw him in person, but we kept in touch throughout the rest of his life--20 years. First through the good old US Postal Service, of which he and I were both fond (still am). Then, later, our messages moved to email and facebook messaging, which we would disparage but use anyway while lamenting the loss of mail art and the physicality of a handwritten letter.

A number of years into our friendship he wrote to me to tell me that from that moment forward I would refer to him only as Nicholas Johnson or Nick, never as Darin, and that I would do that both when speaking to him and when speaking to others about him. He said it had to do with trouble he might get into. So that's what I did, no questions asked. Darin became Nick.

I really always thought that I would someday see him in person again, in some strange place, and that it would be fun and at times uncomfortable and possibly even menacing, but very worth doing.

He was an adventurer. Soon after I met him he was off to Korea, where, as far as I could tell, he made money teaching English, read voraciously, published zines, and probably got himself in to all kinds of trouble, as was his way. Next thing I knew he was off to Antarctica, to take a grunt labor position in the US science program there. He spent a number of summers there, and a few winters, too (and that's some serious stuff--when you spend the winter in Antarctica you commit in advance to being marooned in a place where no one can leave and no one arrive until the season turns. And it's full of dangers to physical and mental health.). I remember sending an h2so4 tshirt along with a bunch of other stuff in a big package right before winter was going to set in, and I also remember how surprised everyone at the post office was that I would know someone who lived there.

Sure, I only spent time in his physical presence once in my life but I do feel like I knew him. Or at least I knew some of the kinds of things about him that a person only knows when she has been in a dialogue where both parties let each other get past superficiality and self-defensive stance and into the person behind, beneath or above that. (I'm resisting saying that such a thing gives you an access to "what's real," because the surface-level self is also real, after all.) I knew some things about him, as he did about me.

He would send me things, like videotape mixes: long landscape shots of the beauty of Antarctica, that place so few people get to see; performances he would plan and then direct his coworkers in; walking tours around McMurdo base (featuring lots of crazy and drunk characters); crazy little vignettes about Shackleton, and so on. One of my favorite things he ever sent me was a series of photos of him wearing an h2so4 tshirt standing at the geographic south pole. Here's one.

He documented his time there in blog and film and various projects, which culminated in the book Big Dead Place. It's a great and entertaining glimpse into life at the south pole, the bureaucracy of the US science mission down there, and lots of other things==I recommend it, it is a hearty good read. (In fact some of you will already have read it since I liked it so much that I bought it for lots of people for their birthdays. It is now available on Kindle, too.) The book is even currently in development at HBO to become a comitragic series starring James Gandolfini!

As a writer Nick was some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Barbara Ehrenreich, part-degenerate part-muckraker. He had a gift for ferreting out what is absurd and hypocritical about a lot of human interaction, and what is destructive about the way institutions sometimes allow human beings to treat each other. He had that gift because he also had a deep sensitivity to those things. He had a sense of justice, but he also knew that we can't always rely on institutions to deliver it, and that it might come from elsewhere than institutions. (Right here is where he and I might get into a definitional argument about justice. It seems this time I get the final word.)

It is so easy to misjudge people, especially one as complicated as Nick. It would be easy to meet him or view him from some distance and see in him a nihilistic punk who wouldn't commit to sincerity, as if his various projects were one big denial of meaning. That's likely how he would be seen by the Princeton professor who wrote that ill-judged series of half-truths about hipsters and irony in the NY Times recently. But that kind of judgment would miss something important.

What happens when you have the kind of sensitivity that, when you really look at the world, it breaks your heart, and you can't make it stop? One way to deal with it is to do whatever you can to make things livable. Nick did that, I think, by pointing out what was ridiculous and absurd about most of the conventions any of us live by. And he did it by creating things like plays and blogs and books. But it is important to understand that Nick's embrace of absurdity and irony was not only a defense mechanism. It was also a provocation. He wanted to force anyone around him to confront her own hypocrisy or unreflective embrace of prevailing norms. In that way he was utterly sincere (and somewhere in Princeton a woman's head is exploding as she tries to figure out how irony and sincerity could cohabitate in the same body). His uses of irony were meant to force you to judge things well rather than choosing an easy half-truth (like the irony article) or letting other people do it for you (which is what many of us do much of the time, because, let's face it, it is difficult and exhausting and potentially heartbreaking to think carefully about everything).

But I am also not saying that everything Nick did had some sort of ethical light burning beneath it. He was an adventurer through and through, so he pushed boundaries, and not all of them were virtuous. He was a human being, full of light and dark, like all of us.

And then he went to Baghdad. And then Afghanistan. In both places he worked as a contractor doing grunt work. I'm sure his aim was to write another book. I wish he had--we could use such a thing from a guy like him. We really could. He had a way.

From my time spent reading the testimony of various survivors of horrific violence (I am currently writing a book on this stuff, but it will be a philosophy book, I am no Nick Johnson, and HBO will never make it into a series), I have learned that you can't even read that stuff without having it change you. So I think I have the slightest glimpse into how hellish and transformative it may have been for Nick to encounter what he did in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wasn't just reading about it. He was witnessing.

From those messed up places, I got more gifts--little films, a photo of him in front of a tank in an h2so4 tshirt, wearing a hilarious baseball cap that reads "TOMORROW WILL BETTER" beneath an Iraqi flag, various emailed vignettes of the absurdity and the tragedy of life there. But I think what he saw in those places changed him, or became too much of a burden for him. Maybe that's what happened. We all like to find causes.

I haven't yet had the heart to go back and read all the letters and zines we mailed to each other over the years, though I know where to find them and I know there will be a time when I'll be glad to reread them. But I did recently read through three years worth of correspondence we had with each other using facebook messaging. I was saddened and inspired by all the reminders of his intelligence and his wit, his open-mindedness and his will to think about what he believed, and why, rather than just accepting things. All of our conversations were dominated by that--both of us talking about our choices, plans and failings, both of us calling each other out on the stupid stuff we'd say sometimes, both us basically being philosophers with each other--though I suspect he would never call it that. I think I hear him laughing right now, and it is not a friendly laugh! However, my laugh in response is very friendly. I'm the nicer one. But there is a downside to that--I let people off the hook more easily than he ever did. But there is an upside to that--life is hard and full of messed up shit and sometimes people need a little kindness instead of or alongside the bitter pill. It's a difficult line to tread. I think he was always obsessively treading it. No, this is not leading to a conclusion that he drove himself mad with that inner battle. Any smart person lives that battle--between good and bad, irony and sincerity, cruelty and kindness. We like to find causes, but maybe we will never really find one in this case.

Anyway, reading through our Facebook correspondence, this caught my eye. On March 12, 2009 at 1:30am, I wrote to him, "In other news, I sometimes wonder whether you have a death wish." He had just told me he was headed to Baghdad. We had been planning on having him take over webhosting for h2so4 and doing some design work for it, because he had some time for projects, but then he heard that he got the contractor job in Baghdad so he was writing to me to tell me that web projects were on hold. I wrote back that it was just as well as, realistically speaking, I would not get around to putting together the files to move the site for another year (note: it is now 2012 and I have still not done it) and wow, how exciting, a job in that place.

I still cannot make what I know about Nick or Darin coincide well with the report that he took his own life.

Of course, how well could I know him, having met him only once? The thing about a letter-writing friendship is that we both got to present the parts of ourselves that we liked best to each other, and gloss over some of the darker or uncertain areas. I know that. But it sounds like many people who knew him more closely than I did are also pretty shocked by this. Not only shocked in the way that suicide is always shocking, but extra-shocked, in that it doesn't seem to fit the picture. There isn't any "looking back and seeing what led to it" that produces a narrative that might make sense of it. Or so it seems to me.

So I've said that he possessed the kind of sensitivity to the world that breaks a person's heart, and that he may have been deeply affected by what he witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also had recently been accepted to work in Antarctica again and then had that acceptance rescinded when NSA apparently figured out that he had written that book. But that would be a trigger, not a cause, right? He may even have had something like post-traumatic stress disorder. I don't know.

We don't know the answers to these questions. And that's why the questions haunt.

Each of us who knew him has to figure out how to deal with this in her or his own way. (As Nietzsche said: "This is my way. Where is yours?") This is my way. Whatever I do, I'm not going to let myself embrace a simple explanation for why this happened. That is my way of doing him justice. His death is a senseless loss. That's just what it is.

3:25 p.m. - December 18, 2012
Liz Muck - 2013-01-06 00:55:53
Thank you for this.
-------------------------------

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next