The only one from that era I really want to write about right now is DMX. Alexie channeling Louis, Adrian tells it that poetry = angry x imagination, and I thought at 15 I could amplify the anger and the imagination would take care of itself. I didn’t have either for a long time, inshallah, and seeing as I live in flyover country 3 hours from where I was born and twenty minutes from where I grew up, I’m probably ill equipped to rise to the occasion of that specific artistic formula. But I also read it wrong - as though talking about inbuilt capacities of the speaker. Not the residual takeaway - the sustenance left in the wake - of the audience of one who might hear it and be shook by it, in the darkest recesses of his ownmost cell.

I didn’t have the imagination to hear it, to think of living in a way that summoned it. “I’m slipping” didn’t really hit until I was 40, and the idea of being Humpty Dumpty broken, beyond repair, grabbed and dug and sliced. The new talk of cope and seethe is a dig, seemingly. But it need not be. How is it better or worse to “process” or “metabolize,” as if a man could do either. It’s plain as electric shock therapy on a schizophrenic episode that if the alternative to coping is an Icarus ascent or a 1986 Sally Ride, then cope all day and seethe all night and live to bark about it.