Someone Who Isn't Me

I’ve found that the advice to never meet your idols is generally correct, but I don’t say that from a place of having many horror stories. Most of the people I’ve looked up to that I’ve had the chance to meet in real life have been wonderful, and most of them put up with my 20’s Andy Griffith-ish tendency towards aww-shucksing myself to death in front of them. But the reason I still think it’s best not to do it outside of rare cases (for instance, I’d give up my hopes for a music career in heartbeat in exchange for my girlfriend getting the chance to meet Taylor Swift) is because it’s hard in those sorts of moments to bridge the gap between each other’s humanity. We often want our idols to be too many things, and for them to be all of those things consistently. We forgive ourselves for yelling at someone in the grocery store parking lot for not looking both ways, and then turn around and feel incredulous when we hear a story about a star telling someone asking for an autograph in Whole Foods to fuck off. We apologize after a party for taking someone’s comment too seriously, or asking someone too personal of a question, and then berate celebs for something strange they said in passing in an interview. We want the persona we love and the person behind it to enmesh so completely that the fuel for their very essence comes from the clamoring attention they receive both online and off. They should be grateful that we love them, and they should be happy every time they see us. And for the few we happen to think are doing this in a particular cultural moment, we bestow them with the velcro title of being Good while saving much of our forgiveness for our own unrecorded selves. But I digress.

This morning I wanted to take a minute to point your attention to Geoff Rickly, not because I met him but because he has a new novel coming out that is going to be incredible (he doesn’t read this newsletter). Geoff was my idol in high school, and his band Thursday was the most important band to me for many years. Full Collapse and War All The Time were prescient, post-Patriot Act totems of New Jersey youth and young manhood pressed against the now-emptier Manhattan skyline, and between 2001 and 2006 my friends and I collided with both of them regularly enough to come off as moths who were tired of life. When I saw in 2014 that Geoff was a member of Vinyl Me, Please (our database was so small at that point that I regularly just read through all the names to say what’s up to the homies keeping our lights on), I turned to Matt and said something to the effect of Holy Fucking Shit. It felt impossible that my world had connected to his in such a direct and specific way, and I think I waited a few days to DM him for fear of saying something tremendously stupid. Since we connected Geoff has proven to be not only a tremendous friend but also, much more importantly in some respects, an incredibly tender and compassionate public figure. Life has given him a number of opportunities to break down rather than break open, and the ways in which he continues to share his life and himself honestly while helping give a voice to those without one is inspiring in the true sense of the word.

He’s been working on this book for quite awhile, and Hanif Abdurraqib has already called it “a blaring achievement.” It covers Geoff’s decision to go to Mexico and work with ibogaine in an attempt to save himself from heroin addiction, and reimagines his trip in the context of the Divine Comedy. If it’s anything like hanging out with Geoff for an afternoon in Brooklyn, it will be raw, thought-provoking, and leave you more open to exploring your own connections with yourself and the habits and tendencies you’ve compiled over the course of your life in hopes of forming a more desirable public self-portrait. I’m so grateful that this book exists, and I’m so excited that all of us will get to read it soon. You can snag a first-edition copy on pre-order below.