one of my friends lives in an anarchist collective house and I ended up cooking for her a few times when she broke her right arm bc her shitty collective house couldn’t get their shit together and, like, help her eat
it’s like don’t talk to me about your radical politics if your radical politics don’t involve “radical disability politics” aka feeding your roommate with a broken arm jesus christ
(she also broke her arm via falling out of a tree, bc she was climbing trees, bc obviously why wouldn’t you climb a bunch of trees all the time put every body in every tree? but she got SO MUCH HASSLE for being in a tree! like people were all victim-blamey like “why were you even in a tree, what were you doing there didn’t you know trees were unsafe” ugh FUCK EVERYONE my friend is a rad and brave tree-climber is what I am saying)
This reminds me of one of my favorite Matthew stories. On their first tour the other band was kind of mean to them, he lost his guitar early on* and had to borrow one from their guitar player and she was a jerk about it, I think maybe there was some kind of radio interview on-air mocking. Then someone in the other band broke his arm or got hit by a car, it doesn’t matter this is the important part: Matthew and Daniel and Ira went to see him in the hospital and he said “Wow no one in my band even came,” and they thought that was horrible, bec it is, so after they left the hospital they made a pledge A PLEDGE to always be nice to everyone in music business because that is what is important.
I love this story forever I probably have half of the details wrong** but along with “Fuck them if they can’t take a joke,” (Ethan Port, 1989) and “It’s not selling out it’s sneaking in,” (Al FLipside, 1992), “It’s not actually worth it and it’s not art if you aren’t being nice to the people around you” (that’s not an actual quote like the others but that’s the takeaway) are probably the biggest organizing principles of my life.
*He still does this once he left like all of his stuff, all of it, in a parking lot in France or something.
**Also my favorite quote that I know I am misquoting but I prefer my misquote is in Althusser’s autobiography where he (doesn’t) say, “This book is part history, part memory, and part fantasy. All of it is real.”
