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grief in the time of the apocalypse
At karaoke at the historic dive gay bar, my main spiritual practice in honor of the apotheosis of Freddie Mercury and the liminal spirit of David Bowie, I almost always start with Bowie and end with Queen. Sometimes, rarely, I'll tack on another Bowie song after that, a good late-night one like "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" or "Heroes." But I don't like doing "Heroes" often--a little goes a long way (and besides, most of the "Heroes" tracks in the machine are all fucked up with missing verses and half the proper length).
Tonight I ended with "Heroes." There were...reasons.
A long-time online friend of mine (just over a year younger than me) passed away suddenly on Tuesday; I can't pin down when exactly I first met her, but it was at least fifteen years ago, on some loosely Final-Fantasy-themed sandbox MUX. If you don't know what a MUX is, treasure your youth.
She went by the handle Atma, short for Atma Weapon, after a questionable early romanization of Ultima Weapon in Final Fantasy. At some point she largely adopted this as her name everywhere, which should tell you something about the kind of unabashedly dedicated (and neurodivergent) nerd she was.
Now, I should say she wasn't just a big weeb; she was the weeb equivalent of the Magician card of the Tarot, the big weeb who actualizes her dreams via her own power. She didn't just style herself a samurai and speak fanboy Japanese, she dedicated decades of her life to learning martial arts and building a personal American Shinto practice. For this, many people around her despised her.* She was a lesbian and she was cringe. Fuck that.
The end goal, as for her various self-insert characters, seems to have always been some combination of earnest heroism and romancing the ladies. The keystone of her gender and essential being as her lesbian himbo samurai self was always a yearning to serve the feminine that I (a similarly eccentric bisexual trans man) could to some degree identify with.
Not that I understood her completely. Brains are different. But it was an unconscious comfort to have her in the world that I didn't expect to lose so soon, and it's a jagged space in my world now; I don't know how to sand down the edges yet and I still cut myself on them all the time.
Musically she was big into screaming metal (and passionate about rooting out the Nazis from the scene), so I don't yet have anything in my karaoke repertoire that I feel entirely comfortable sending her off with to ease my heart.** But, while not musically her style, "Heroes" seemed like more or less the kind of message she'd send to the ladies, so I put it in tonight and prepared to swap out "I, I'll drink all the time" for "I, I'll smoke all the weed."
I didn't need to bother, as it turned out to be a chopped-in-half version of the song without that verse. Still, I did my best. Afterwards, as I was packing up to go, someone came over from the other side of the bar and said she always appreciated seeing me perform and was happy to hear that song. I said I'd done it for a friend who passed recently, because it was her kind of message for the ladies. She was happy to hear that; it had been a favorite song of a friend of hers who passed away at the start of the year.
Little by little, I file down the points of my grief, though the sensation makes my heart raw.
Atma's website is here for now.
*Cultural appropriation by being passionate about another culture. Being "creepy" by being unashamed of loving women of all shapes, sizes, and agabs. I post this here in part in hopes that the people who hated her will find it and know that they will never be as cool as she was.
**I am going to try to make a track of "The Prophet's Song," which I am given to understand was her favorite Queen song, but that is an eight-minute-long proto-metal power ballad with a lot of wailing. She was nothing if not consistent.
Tonight I ended with "Heroes." There were...reasons.
A long-time online friend of mine (just over a year younger than me) passed away suddenly on Tuesday; I can't pin down when exactly I first met her, but it was at least fifteen years ago, on some loosely Final-Fantasy-themed sandbox MUX. If you don't know what a MUX is, treasure your youth.
She went by the handle Atma, short for Atma Weapon, after a questionable early romanization of Ultima Weapon in Final Fantasy. At some point she largely adopted this as her name everywhere, which should tell you something about the kind of unabashedly dedicated (and neurodivergent) nerd she was.
Now, I should say she wasn't just a big weeb; she was the weeb equivalent of the Magician card of the Tarot, the big weeb who actualizes her dreams via her own power. She didn't just style herself a samurai and speak fanboy Japanese, she dedicated decades of her life to learning martial arts and building a personal American Shinto practice. For this, many people around her despised her.* She was a lesbian and she was cringe. Fuck that.
The end goal, as for her various self-insert characters, seems to have always been some combination of earnest heroism and romancing the ladies. The keystone of her gender and essential being as her lesbian himbo samurai self was always a yearning to serve the feminine that I (a similarly eccentric bisexual trans man) could to some degree identify with.
Not that I understood her completely. Brains are different. But it was an unconscious comfort to have her in the world that I didn't expect to lose so soon, and it's a jagged space in my world now; I don't know how to sand down the edges yet and I still cut myself on them all the time.
Musically she was big into screaming metal (and passionate about rooting out the Nazis from the scene), so I don't yet have anything in my karaoke repertoire that I feel entirely comfortable sending her off with to ease my heart.** But, while not musically her style, "Heroes" seemed like more or less the kind of message she'd send to the ladies, so I put it in tonight and prepared to swap out "I, I'll drink all the time" for "I, I'll smoke all the weed."
I didn't need to bother, as it turned out to be a chopped-in-half version of the song without that verse. Still, I did my best. Afterwards, as I was packing up to go, someone came over from the other side of the bar and said she always appreciated seeing me perform and was happy to hear that song. I said I'd done it for a friend who passed recently, because it was her kind of message for the ladies. She was happy to hear that; it had been a favorite song of a friend of hers who passed away at the start of the year.
Little by little, I file down the points of my grief, though the sensation makes my heart raw.
Atma's website is here for now.
*Cultural appropriation by being passionate about another culture. Being "creepy" by being unashamed of loving women of all shapes, sizes, and agabs. I post this here in part in hopes that the people who hated her will find it and know that they will never be as cool as she was.
**I am going to try to make a track of "The Prophet's Song," which I am given to understand was her favorite Queen song, but that is an eight-minute-long proto-metal power ballad with a lot of wailing. She was nothing if not consistent.