Jason Brown, another passing.

Sometimes I feel like Rob D. is my personal bearer of bad news – no insult to him! But I swear he has been the phone call informing me of the deaths of many people over the years… Last night being another.

From the old Victoria punk scene, Jason Brown passed away yesterday morning after a several-year battle with cancer (I think it was Hodgkins, though I’m not entirely sure). I haven’t seen him since he was diagnosed, though I had heard of his struggle so the death was not entirely a shock. Jason, like many of the punk brothers was his own special mix of misogyny and charisma, tolerated in part because of his open smile and quick comraderie. Although I will not say we were ever close, he was a good friend to me way back in the days when he played in a band with one of my boyfriends and we all spent a lot of time together traveling back and forth to shows and stuff. He was good for an ear when he wasn’t pounding on Lettuce for showing up late to rehearsals really really drunk.

That was 16 years ago, and I’ve long since stopped going to punk rock funerals.

As is often the case when Rob calls me to chat about the most recent passing, we did a little reminiscing on the phone last night – recalling the last punk rock funeral I went to eight years ago. Our friend Noel Raynor was buried then among the half-junked out crowd, the evening was crowned by some really messy drinking/crying/fighting bouts at Bon’s that culminated in confrontation with Noel’s parents over the paternity of a child. I mean, you could make a whole movie about just that funeral it was so punk rock.

But as I said to Rob last night, I’m not sure it’s really healthy for all of us to get together like that because as much fun as those days were, they were also hella traumatizing. When you get too many of us in a room together it’s like tearing open a wound you were tending to heal…. And of course the death of one more of us just makes it worse. Of course Jason’s death is different in that he went to illness rather than accident, suicide or overdose. It doesn’t make me any less sad both for the loss of another, but also for the fucked up lives we were living back then. When I flip through the old photo albums, I now can see how young we were and it frightens me a little.

Sometimes I can’t quite believe the things that happened, they seem so far removed from my life right now – but then another old friend dies – and it all comes racing back at me. And I’m laughing at it with NoMeansNo or Big Black blasting out of the stereo…. Or I’m angry all over again. And I’m not sure that it really matters which.