Gloves back on. Back in the ring.

On drumming, grief, and medicine.

Oh, hello there.

I have to admit I’m surprised to see you. Not you specifically. I’m just surprised to see anyone.

See, I haven’t posted anything in so long that Substack has banished me to the deepest depths of the algorithm dungeon.

I thought the only way to get to this abysmal abyss is by playing Ghost

backwards while dancing naked in the woods and burning black candles.¹

Or maybe you got here by scrolling to the actual end of the internet. If so, here are your white letters.

If it’s not one of those things I can only assume you’re here because you’re a devoted follower who eagerly awaits my next offering no matter how long I’ve been away because you just love my writing that much…

And in that case I can only say, from the bottom of my heart…

Hi mom.

Seriously, I’m afraid that even the email my subscribers got this week is not a link to this post at all, but a portal to the underworld…and if they don’t send it to ten other people, they too will be swallowed up by this black hole.²

I’m not here to bitch about the algorithm (again.)

Honestly, I don’t wanna return to Substack by kicking in the front door with some grand announcement.

Hell, I’m not even trying to slip in through the back door.

I’m gonna slither through that little window in the basement bathroom that someone forgot to close after the last time they smoked a blunt. I’m small. I’ll fit.

and that feels just right for now.

And y’know what?

I could do a lot worse than to think of my mom as my audience: someone who believes in me and gets all my jokes.

But for the entirety of my adult life it was someone else who was my constant audience:

My friend and mentor: wayne a. gilbert

He escaped the prison of pain that his body had become on September 23rd, 2025.

At least that’s the way I see it. Parkinson’s can be brutal in the end, and I know he was ready to go.

But of course, I wasn’t ready. I never would be.

So, that’s where I’ve been.

In grief.

I haven’t written a word in the last 30 years without wondering what he would think of it.

He was the truest “father” that I had in those 30 years.

And even though sometimes the grief feels like breathing broken glass…

I am so fucking grateful I got to know him.

He was the best teacher I ever knew.

In Walking this World, Julia Cameron refers to such a magical friend as a “catcher’s mitt”:

“our catcher’s mitt fields our creative energies, is open to all of them, and has faith in our artist’s arm-wild, tired, serviceable, blistering. In other words, our catchers mitt must be generous-which does not mean non-discerning.”

Wayne was that for me.

For 30 years³, through everything, he always encouraged me: “keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.”

It was one of the first things he said to me, and one of the last things he said to me.

We got closer in the last few years of Wayne’s life. We texted a lot, had coffee sometimes and we exchanged our writing with a new sense of urgency.

One of the things I cherish most from my talks with Wayne, toward the end of his life, was when he told me he thought he was done writing poems, that they had “left him”.

But he started writing them again after reading, Chronically Creative.

I can’t fully articulate how much that meant to me, but if his words were a physical object, that object would be one of the first things I would grab before escaping a burning house.⁴

But then I think some part of me started to believe that I could keep him alive.

If I could just keep him writing poems and I could keep him writing poems if my own words were good enough…

It’s funny how you can know with 100% certainty that a thought is batshit crazy… but still somehow believe it in your heart.

Enough for it to dictate your actions… and fuel the whispers of the most terrible un-truths that you hear on those sleepless nights. Like some kind of hellish soundtrack to insomnia.

And after he left, I realized what I had been doing subconsciously, that every word I had written was woven through with this thread of desperation. And when I sat down to write for chronically creative, I found that I just couldn’t.

So, this winter has been a hard one for me, though with the foreboding heat in my city*, it has hardly felt like winter at all.⁵

For a while, I couldn’t even walk into my studio.

Something about the angle of light coming in the window made me feel sick.

The chair where I sat and wrote when he was still here, cheering me on, now sat empty and ominous, whispering to me that nothing would ever be the same.

In desperation, I retreated to my basement, where I wasn’t constantly reminded of that absence.

And more importantly, the place my drums reside.

I turned to drums because words hurt too much.

I turned to drums because I needed to hit something- furiously and continuously.

I beat on them as if I was showing my heart how to beat again.

Beat on them as if I was trying to beat down the door to that dark little room where my soul had barricaded herself.

But after a while, I softened. I decided to just keep her company with a song until she was ready to come out.

Because the drums were teaching me.

Teaching me to slow down until I actually understood what I was doing.

Until I could do it smooth.

Until I could do it right.

And when birdsong began to hint that spring might come again after all, I knew it was time to come back.

To bring back the medicine I’ve found on that arduous journey.

There’s no way I can tell you everything about the strange place I explored while I was away.

Not in one post that’s already too long.

But I will tell you.

All of it.

Eventually.

Just know it was dark there.

But I’ve learned that the best medicine is often gathered from the darkest places.

Maybe this kind of medicine eats darkness the way plants absorb the sun.

Because even when I had to retreat from the form of artistic expression where I feel most comfortable…it was still an art practice that saved me.

Drumming held me up and gave me a safe place where I could feel something other than grief. Or sometimes blissfully feel nothing at all and I’m not talking about the numbness of depression and drugs. I mean the blissful nothingness of flow. The trance state that one can enter just practicing a paradiddle inversion repeatedly, obsessively.

And when you are in that state, you know you are experiencing transcendence, and healing.

It’s medicine.

And that’s what wayne kept urging me to return to.

“Talk about the medicine;” He said.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

I will continue to post these crude⁶, maniacal, occasionally insightful little ramblings each week and I really hope you continue to hang out with me while I do.

And don’t be shy to say hello, knowing that this matters to a few people keeps me going.

So thanks for being here.

rNow, whether you leave February behind with a soft, adieu or you do donuts in an old truck in February’s front yard while screaming: “see you in hell!” time keeps moving forward.

Spring is coming and your bitch is back. Let’s fuck some shit up.

And as always, and maybe more than ever:

love and hisses,

K

1. I'm referring to the band Ghost, not the movie, but I wonder what would happen if Dance naked in the Woods while playing the movie Ghost backwards … if you try this, let me know what happens.

Also, Smoky the Bear would like me to remind you: please don't burn candles in the woods, kids. Thanks.

2. I’m unclear on the tech behind this, but if you did receive an email for this post, you probably should send it to ten people. Just to be safe.

3. It was actually 27 years if you want to nitpick. But if you’re here to nitpick, who let you in?

4. After my cats, of course, who probably started the fire by playing with matches just to spite me because I had the gall to shut my office door.

5. my wife tells me that this disconcerting February heat is largely due to La Niña and therefore not necessarily signaling the immediate end of days. So hopefully I still have time to die as I was meant to, tripping over a cat, before the world is engulfed in flames.

6. As promised, Chris Pureka