Illustration Credit: Aaron Cooper
Note from the informational ether: “Nosedive” is a collection of essays and narrative prose written by Ben Lee over the course of a year prior to his death. Per his will, I am posting these on his behalf with no changes made to his original text. He’s not that Ben Lee. He’s also fictional.
Part 1: Is Suicide Punk?
Chapter 1
Punk is punk.
Veganism is punk, but so are burgers.
Straightedge and drinking beer are both punk.
Peace and violence are punk.
Boots. Shorts. Zip-up hoodies. But mohawks aren’t punk (controversial, I know).
Poetry is and isn’t punk. Government isn’t punk. Healthcare isn’t punk.
Cars aren’t punk. Bikes are very punk. Skateboards aren’t as punk as everyone thinks, which is to say that they aren’t punk. Rollerblades/skates will never be punk.
Indian food is punk. Tacos are the most punk.
College isn’t punk but art is. College isn’t punk but self-education is. College isn’t punk, but I went anyway. College isn’t punk, but I graduated and got married and got a job and had a kid and then a second kid, and most of that wasn’t punk (more on this much later).
Everything in this world is binary: punk or not punk. No middle ground has room to exist.
When I have nothing left to write, I’m going to kill myself. That’s just how it’s going to be.
Three times I’ve attempted suicide already, and obviously, three times I failed but was left with a question that is outstandingly stupid – is suicide punk?
It’s a complicated question if only because punk itself is elusive and paradoxical. To understand whether or not a thing is punk, one has to understand punk. And understanding punk is not punk. Observing punk is like if Schrödinger knew he would die if he ever looked inside the box, and I’m a Schrödinger who still couldn’t help himself.
Punk is rebellious yet absolute, rigid on the verge of militaristic.
At its core, punk is the enlightenment of a thing’s true self, completely sincere and devoid of irony or winking or self-aware nonsense. But that thing’s true self has to exist, naturally, within a set of rules without specifically attempting to conform to those rules because conformity (even conformity to punk) is not punk.
The essence of any existing thing has to be punk for a thing to be punk.
This is why a band like Green Day was never (and never could be) punk. Billie Joe Armstrong tried to sound like Johnny Rotten, and that alone disqualifies him from being punk on the basis of trying to be punk instead of just being punk. His essence was not truly punk. Being punk isn’t a state to which one can aspire in the same way that being a dog is not a state a cat can aspire.
People are born punk or they’re not, and their punkness reveals itself over the course of their lives or it doesn’t. The moment they force the issue and attempt to become punk instead of just being punk, the revelation is that they are not punk.
(Although, as punk is a strange beast, trying to be punk when one isn’t could be the foundation of greater punk actualization later, but this is with the presumption that this act somehow leads oneself to a moment of truth about one’s lack of punkness that strips away the posturing and allows one to start anew and become that which one’s essence dictates.)
And like I said before, merely positing the question of whether something is punk or not has stripped me of my own punkness. Reading about whether something is punk or not strips you of your punkness. Thinking about punk is like eating fruit from the tree of knowledge – the paradise of punk exists only within ignorance of the thing itself.
If all of this seems messy, that’s because it is. Punk is a mess, which is the most punk thing about it.
At the end of this, I’m going to kill myself. I’ve thought a lot lately about whether or not suicide is punk. The answer is going to be binary: either it’s punk or it isn’t. The reason behind the answer is going to be messy.