From Anthony Veasna So, “baby yeah”

Brilliant writer who “accidentally” overdosed in 2020.

“My friend and I saw each other as hopeless writers, misunderstood prophets, critics of our cultural moment who rejected obvious and reductive politics. We never indulged in ordinary pursuits because we yearned to write masterpieces, timeless works infused with nihilistic joy and dissenting imaginations…

“At the same time we remained detached from our lofty ambitions, skeptical of our dreams. We knew what we were, after all, which was graduate students scammed into university contracts with subpar health insurance. We lived off measly stipends and soggy pizza left over from department meetings. We taught undergrads we pitied in composition classes we hated, and we had an excessive tally of opinions that chafed our superiors. For example:

We preferred grammar to metaphors…

“… I wrote stories. My friend was a poet. We were full of giddy potential, love for idiotic jokes, fuzzy notions beginning to be clarified into true art, until one of us peered into the foreseeable future, or maybe the next gray day, and decided living wasn’t worth the trouble.”

He was all about “a celestial mode of offbeat artistic creation” seemingly embodied in the works of the band Pavement. So sad what happened to him.