This piece originally ran in Stereogum’s The Black Market on July and August 2018. This is an annotated version. It is also lightly edited to conjoin both parts.
How do you end up getting cursed by a unicorn? Well, the story is always a little different.1
Maybe you’re just getting off stage. Or, you’re behind your band’s merch table. Perhaps you’re even settling down at that night’s crash spot, your state of mind wavering between exhilaration and exhaustion as you descend into sleep-deprived delirium.2 Really, the setting doesn’t matter as much as what happens next: A member of a different band or the band’s manager approaches you. They hand you a painting. The black canvas is velvet, the decaying frame long since retired from fulfilling its original duties. On the front, a white unicorn is rearing in a dark forest, a wispy rainbow emanating from its nub of a horn. “Want it?” the giver asks. This is like the 16th weirdest thing that has happened to you on this tour so you say sure. “Great,” the giver responds, looking relived, “it’s cursed.” You turn the painting over and see a list of band names. The instructions soon follow: “You need to give this to another band within six months or your band will break up.” Maybe you think it’s a prank, the kind of inside joke that can’t be cracked by anyone outside of the unique bond formed by bandmates. You toss it in the back of your van and depart for your next destination. You lose sight of the painting, its existence submerged by the monotony of touring life. It’s then that the Curse of the Velvet Unicorn truly begins.
Between 2011 and 2014, the Velvet Unicorn terrorized bands across the United States and Canada. In its wake, it has been blamed for breakups and hiatuses and other misfortunes big and small. While camouflaging itself as a forgettable piece of junk, it was said to have refueled its powers by sucking out the lifeforce of vans, turning once-functioning vehicles into scrap. Even when assessed by skeptics, it was present for runs of luck so shitty, its temporary owners were compelled to keep the tradition alive by passing it on to the next crew of unfortunate souls lured out of a cozy existence by the age-old call of the road. In turn, no matter the popularity of its prey, the Unicorn showed those who came in contact with it a vision of a dark future, forcing all to answer the question: What will you do when the life you chose gets tough?
“I got rid of that painting after almost six months exactly. We’ve been on indefinite hiatus ever since,” Angus Buyer told me with a chuckle over Skype in 2015. His band, the Montreal-based Hypnophonics, were the fifth to feel the curse, making Buyer the earliest victim that was willing to go on record with me. He was also something of a bridge between the Unicorn’s two eras, transplanting the bane from punk circles to the heavier realms of sludge, noise rock, and, eventually, death metal.
During a short jaunt with Chicago’s Flatfoot 56, the Hypnophonics cruised into Ottawa’s Café DeKcuf on March 25, 2012. A local Celtic/folk punk band, the Beer Barons, opened. After spying Buyer selling prints of his artwork, they ambled up after the show. “One of them was like, ‘Ah, you’re an artist. Do you like art?’ And I was like, ‘…yeah.’ And then they were like, ‘Do you want this?’ And it’s this black velvet unicorn painting. And I was like, ‘Fuck yeah I do.’ And they hand it over to me and they’re like, ‘OK, cool. It’s cursed.’ I’m like, ‘…what?'” From there, the rest of the now-familiar transaction played out: Buyer was told to pass the painting to a different band within six months or his would break up.
“The Beer Barons were the ones that were really scared of it,” Buyer remembered. And maybe for good reason. Of the four previous bands, “a couple of them had already broken up. And everyone attributed it to the black unicorn.”
The Wolf Hongos, a folk punk band from Fall River, Massachusetts, was the first to sign the back of the painting. How the members acquired was once lost to history, but it’s possible they decided to doom Farler’s Fury on July 16, 2011 after a show at the Midway Café in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Farler’s Fury, perhaps not realizing it was the unwitting victim of an act of American aggression, schlepped the painting back to Quebec where it was presumably passed to Crooked Jacks. On January 27, 2012, Crooked Jacks played with the Beer Barons at Crobar in Montreal. Less than three months later, the Unicorn belonged to Buyer.3
“You just keep on forgetting about it. It just lingers in the back of your van,” Buyer said. During the six months it sat there, “everything started to get a lot harder for us as a band. Everything was harder: we could never organize practices, we had a lot more van trouble. Our van died two days before I gave the painting to Sean. The van was running great and then the engine just cracked in half.” Even though Buyer originally contemplated keeping it, the death of the van sealed the deal: The Unicorn needed new hosts.
“I believe we were gearing up for a tour around that time so we must have seemed like prime candidates to get that thing away from him,” Sean Sabatini (surname like The Ramones) emailed me in 2015. The Great Sabatini, a smart sludge band from Quebec, is still active, having survived its brush with the Unicorn’s soft exterior. Sean and Steve Sabatini were also the first to popularize the existence of, along with standardizing the name of, the Velvet Unicorn; Sean doing so via his Thinking Man’s Idiot Online blog and Steve via his Taker Wide podcast.
But back in October 2012, Sean didn’t yet know what he was bringing with him. After getting relegated to the Great Sabatini’s roof rack, the Unicorn was soon hungry for van, setting the stage for two near-catastrophes in the “middle of nowhere.” But the painting would wait until Saskatchewan to unleash its true powers for the bizarre.
“After playing in Regina, I noticed a girl wearing one of our t-shirts,” Sean wrote, “and I stopped and said, ‘Hey, thanks for buying a shirt,’ to which she replied ‘who the hell are you?’ I told her I was in the band I’d assumed she’d just seen and didn’t think much of it till a few minutes later when our buddy McGee (who was doing merch for us on that tour) went bolting down the stairs and out the venue after her.” Turns out the wearer asked to try on a shirt and then took off, eventually forcing a standoff. “She was outside with her boyfriend when McGee caught up to her, and [he] told her to either pay for it or give it back. I can’t remember which option she took but McGee was incredulous. He asked her why the fuck she’d try to steal from a band with no money slogging it out on the road, and her answer was ‘you chose this life,’ as if that were an ethical ‘get out of jail free’ card or something.”
Once the Great Sabatini reached Vancouver, they knew their time with the Unicorn needed to end. “It went with us, a black velvet cloud of discontent, raining on our parade, for thousands of miles,” Sean wrote in his blog. “We forgot it was even there. which it probably wanted, (I assume it takes power from the forgetfulness of its possessors, waiting for that black magic moment of six months passed, when it can destroy the band that carried it) and we almost didn’t give it to the band we had thought of giving it to.” Packing up outside of “Steve from Anion’s place,” Sean saw his mark and made the transfer. “After [Steve] thanked me, with just a hint of a question mark in his tone, I told him it was cursed, gave him the rules, and witnessed the disappointment on his face the same way Angus must have seen it on mine.”
Sean also had a surprise in store for me: close-up pics of the painting. Finally, I beheld the bane of many bands. And…yeahhhhhh. Taken as a whole, the Velvet Unicorn is like The Picture Of Dorian Gray for a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. The dead-eyed head looks like it was modeled after a scrimshaw chess piece carved by a sociopath. The proportions, too, are creepily uncanny, such as its anatomically impossible, Barbie-sized midsection, an un-equine feature easily dwarfed by the half-dolphin-sized neck. Worse, the horn’s rainbow ejaculation resembles either cigarette smoke, as if it was ripped from some Marlboro executive’s fever dream, or a skid mark left in your undies if you only ate Lucky Charms for a week. If a family member requested your appraisal, you’d utter a “hmmm” long enough that either the asker would lose interest or you’d have time to quietly die. (And, speaking of dying, three successive computers that I viewed the pictures on are now in silicon heaven. Coincidence? Or…murder?) But…it’s also sort of entrancing? In a “this is where I left the bodies” kind of way? Which is why I thought one of the owners after Anion might want to reacquaint themselves with it.
“I don’t want to see that piece of trash ever again” is how Jesse Matthewson of KEN mode politely declined my offer. And that’s probably for the best. KEN mode is preparing for the release of Loved, their seventh full-length, at the end of next month through Season Of Mist, and now is not the time to chance a Crying Boy-style run-in with whatever evil the Unicorn still wielded. Especially since the band got off light in comparison to what others would eventually suffer.
On an off day in late October 2012, KEN mode bid farewell to tourmates Revocation and A Life Once Lost and trekked up to Vancouver to play a show. Something was waiting for them. Matthewson: “Anion handed us this disheveled painting and said Sean from the Great Sabatini wanted us to have it — then explained the story to us.” A picture was snapped for posterity.
From there, the Unicorn sneakily manipulated turnouts as it made its way down the West Coast, across the Midwest, and finally into Atlanta. “For us, it was a bomb of a leg,” Matthewson explained.4 “We blamed the Unicorn. I refuse to reference our historic statistics that would allude to the fact that we’ve never done well in those regions…it was the Unicorn that dictated how we did on the west coast/south of the US. It was the Unicorn.”
As for the next recipients…well, KEN mode was in a caravan with two prime choices. Thankfully, as Matthewson tells it, something like compassion — or survival of the fittest — guided their hands: “We handed it to Peter from Ramming Speed, who was Revocation’s tour manager for that run. We told him the rules, and that it’s their burden now. We contemplated giving it to A Life Once Lost, but they had already had horrible luck up to that point. Their box van got tagged in Portland, they got into a brawl because of that…it subsequently died in the middle of the desert and they had to abandon the thing mid tour. It was a rough go for them — we figured Revocation were resilient.”
So, what did that perceived resiliency buy Revocation? In late November 2012, that band jumped on a package with the Faceless and the HAARP Machine. As you can guess after leaving KEN mode’s four wheels unscathed, the Unicorn was starving. “On our way out, the van blew two cylinders in the Midwest,” Brett Bamberger told me via email, himself gearing up for the release of Revocation’s new album The Outer Ones in September through Metal Blade.5 “We drove that on six cylinders to Denver and junked it. Long story short we had to change vehicles three times on that tour. Old van to rental one, rental one to a suburban rental, suburban rental to East Of The Wall’s sprinter.”
Fully believing the curse was validated by the demise of many vehicles, Revocation quickly found some takers within their own convoy and unintentionally sealed the HAARP Machine’s fate. With its impossibly tiny belly full of van, the Unicorn’s power was (:anime voice:) unimaginable. On January 25, 2013, the HAARP Machine announced that three-fourths of the band had quit.
At this point, much like the way it hides within a holder’s belongings, the Unicorn’s history gets cloudy. Some remember that drummer Alex Rüdinger was left hanging with the painting and brought it with him when he joined up with the Faceless on January 28, 2013. (Rüdinger, the Faceless, and Sumerian Records didn’t respond to requests for comment.) If that’s true, here’s a sampling of Lambgoat headlines from Rüdinger’s run:
1/28/2013 – The Faceless cancels UK tour
2/14/2013 – Cradle of Filth cancels U.S. tour [note: the Faceless were the support act]
4/25/2013 – The Faceless stuck in Texas; missing shows
8/22/2014 – The Faceless hit moose and total van
10/21/2014 – The Faceless bassist, drummer quit band
Was the Unicorn there for all of that? It’s unclear. So too is the painting’s current whereabouts. From the outside, it doesn’t seem like either Rüdinger or the Faceless are presently bedeviled by velvet. By the measurables available to nosy music writers, Rüdinger appears to be doing well, drumming for Ordinance and the Conquering Dystopia supergroup. The Faceless? Welp…I’ll give the band the benefit of the doubt. It is technically intact, so, at the very least, it found a way to beat the breakup curse. The question then remains: If they don’t have the Unicorn, who does?
Sadly, the sightings have long since ceased. If the Unicorn was still in circulation, you’d figure someone in the age of document-everything would be like “LOL I’m getting a tetanus shot because of this stupid painting that smells like moose guts!!!” And yet, instead of fading away, its absence has only stoked escalating rumors. For the last three years, I’ve heard that it was left behind a dumpster, burned to ash in a cleansing ceremony, and migrated to a different circuit. My best guess is that it rematerialized in a Fall River thrift store, cloaked itself with its invisibility spell, and is biding its time until a U-Haul center is opened next-door. But these rumors and hypotheses are only that. No one can, or is willing to, say for certain.
Ah, but then, like it always does, the Unicorn turned up unexpectedly to sow chaos. Days before this piece was set to be published, a band got in touch with me and blew my mind.
Eight years ago, India Scott, guitarist for the Wolf Hongos, was helping a friend move into a new apartment.6
“The place was completely empty except for that painting,” Scott emailed to me. “We joked that the previous renters left it behind because it was cursed. She was just going to throw it out, but you’ve seen the thing. I couldn’t let it get tossed out.”
These days, Scott is an in-demand tattoo artist in Rhode Island who also runs a LARP event called Blessing in Massachusetts with her fiancé. The Wolf Hongos, the gipsy7 punk band that occupied the primary position in the list of names on back of the Velvet Unicorn’s canvas, is now inactive, though it wasn’t brought down by the curse. No, its end was far more human: people moved, the distance became difficult, and the creeping demands of non-band-life delayed the dream until there was more delay than dream. But that’s the thing about recorded music, right? If the music is findable, the music is active. All Hail The Mal Kree Odd, the Hongos’ 2016 LP, is right there on Bandcamp, a collection of past experiences ready to influence the present of whomever discovers it.
As for what Scott found in that apartment so long ago, well, things started small. “The painting was just another goofy thing in the Hongos’ arsenal of oddities. ‘Yeah man, just prop it up near Oliver’s suit of armor and Zac’s puppets,’” Scott remembered. Soon the Unicorn was transferred to the drummer’s van and became a convenient scapegoat. “It was just a gag for a while to blame anything bad that happened on the painting. ‘Can’t find parking in Cambridge? It must be the curse of the Unicorn!’”
That said, throughout its stay with Scott, the Velvet Unicorn was a cordial guest. “We never had any serious incidents that I can remember, but we were a young band in our early 20s. Shit was always tough for us even before the Velvet Unicorn popped up. Our drummer Nick sat on a bucket and a pillow to play his drums. Oliver’s accordion straps were 50% duct tape. The gigs rarely paid and no one outside of our friends wanted to buy our homemade merch. Still, we never considered ourselves cursed or down and out. We were just the Wolf Hongos and we played because we loved it.”
And play they did, finding likeminded souls in the Swaggerin’ Growlers who in turn would set up a show for the Hongos at the Midway Café in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on July 16, 2011. It was there that Scott saw an opportunity. “Farler’s Fury was down from Canada and that gave us a fun idea. ‘Hey guys…wouldn’t it be funny if other bands had to look at this ugly unicorn painting?’ We basically came up with the plan during the show. Our goal was to see how far the painting could get.”
At the bar, the Hongos set the foundation for everything to come. “[We] started telling [Farler’s Fury] our plan…we had this amazing painting and we wanted to get it into the hands of as many bands as possible,” Scott said. “Not only as an experiment to see how far it would go, but mostly as a reason for bands to have a fucking black velvet unicorn in their van. So, we grabbed some scrap paper and wrote up the rules of the curse. Then we tagged ‘The Wolf Hongos — MA’ on the back of the painting and stuffed the rules under the corner of the frame. After that it was put into the very capable hands of Farler’s Fury.”
After that, welp, you know there’s a lot after that. Now, so too do the Hongos. “We were all freaking out when we heard about the Unicorns travels. Our painting toured with bands that we never could have. We didn’t expect anything of this scale.” And I didn’t expect that the Unicorn’s travels might not be finished.
I reached out to a few other bands based on various leads. Most had no idea what I was talking about…but one did. I’m not sure they’re willing to go on record, so all I’ll say is that the story they gave me regarding their time with the Unicorn is pretty convincing, further bolstered by a third party who remembers the name of the band in question scrawled on the back of the painting.8 I mean, I’m as gullible as they come, but it had the hallmarks. And it shredded my timeline. It reminded me of those hidden-in-plain-sight, cult-revered albums that you finally check out due to some quirk of fate and it upends your understanding of an entire genre’s narrative. If I didn’t know about that, then what else don’t I know? Cue my mania, cue the curse. Saddled with a never-ending, Book Of Sand-esque non-conclusion, I started drowning in hypotheticals.9 Maybe it’s still out there. Maybe someone has it, blissfully ignorant of its secret history of doom and destruction. Maybe, without the story, it’s back to just being a painting.
Thinking about the Velvet Unicorn drives you a little nuts. It is, after all, just a painting. And yet, once you learn its history, once you spill a little human experience on it, it’s hard to think of it as just a painting. It’s like those old baseball cards that you should throw out but will continue to pile into U-Hauls, that lucky shirt that your OCD will never let you wash. It’s an inanimate object imbued by something else that might only exist in the beholder’s eye, notable only in the owner’s memory. It enlivens it, makes it more us, gives it powers. But any sense of youthful magical realism is leashed to an adult rationality. If one thought takes off, the other is close behind.
Here’s what I mean. The Velvet Unicorn? It’s cursed. It has inflicted misery upon many punk and metal bands. Its perceived powers would fill up a D&D monster manual: van eater, mysterious disappearer, bad luck band breaker-upper, anatomically incorrect rainbow vaper. Totally. Yes. Logically, though? Minus the rainbow part because that heinous beast is clearly juuling Skittles, all of that is bullshit. As a music writer, and not much of one at that, I can relate to what KEN mode’s Jesse Matthewson wrote: “So many people in bands are such hot disasters of human beings, it’s not surprising at all that this ‘curse’ could seem like it’s real.”
“Seem” is the keyword because I don’t think anyone thinks the curse is real real. I don’t think it’s real. The people who created the curse, building it brick by brick as a gag, don’t think it’s real. Similarly, no one I’ve interviewed believes in spooky stuff. In spite of that, this duality twists people into the same mental gymnastics as kayfabe, where I know it’s not real, and you know it’s not real, but this thing that we agree upon not being real that’s playing out in front of us makes me feel…real things. In that way, the Unicorn is a stand-in for something greater.
This all falls in line with something Sean Sabatini wrote years ago that has always stuck with me: “The best part of this cursed painting being around is that it seems real to those of us who know about it. Folks like the KEN mode dudes as well as ourselves in the Great Sabatini, I know there is a distinct lack of belief in supernatural shit going on…we’re all pretty grounded, skeptical folks, but everyone I know of who had that painting in their possession was upset to have it, as if we all became superstitious as soon as we were unwittingly involved. I think that as the Unicorn has traveled, and been passed from hand to hand, it HAS gained power and it HAS fucked with certain bands, to varying degrees. But ‘bad luck’ is a part of the road.”
We know instinctively to chalk this up to the no-feelings-please realm of probability, that even “bad luck” isn’t a devilish deviation from a universe-defined equilibrium so much as just another data point. We know that there’s no weird shit going on…except, shit, there’s some weird shit going on. Thing is, I think we’re the weird shit.
Take this weird shit: No matter who held the Unicorn, how is that the rules the Hongos wrote up somehow remained the same? This part of the story wasn’t a little different. It’s hard enough getting people to agree on the plot points of the argument they just had let alone centuries-old laws that continue to shape society. However, to the end, this painting’s governing particulars were bedrock: The Unicorn is cursed and you have six months to pass it on to the next band or yours will break up. Regardless of how many more bands added their names to the back of the canvas, the behavior-setting backstory stayed remarkably consistent. When it came time to burden a new owner, you ended up saying the same thing as whomever was previously in your position. So much for free will. Didn’t anyone think to amend the rules or append more?
“We really should have,” Matthewson said. “I could have constructed any narrative I wanted…I guess we’re just honest to a fault. Bloody Canadians.” Sean concurred: “Never. All we wanted to do was get rid of it, and we did discuss who might be the best band to give it to, but we never considered changing the rule. It’s so simple…. I was curious as to where it might go, or how far it might go, based on that one rule and the growing ‘mystique.'”
Of course, who knows if the mystique would’ve metastasized the way it did if people knew the Unicorn’s actual origin. Part of the appeal was, once that not-very-dangerous meeting in a Massachusetts bar was obscured by a few degrees, people could fill that part in. “It probably started like any run of the mill chain-letter,” Sean said. Still, he was quick to cover his bases: “But probably, some lesser demon made that painting from the upholstery of Cliff Burton’s bunk, and mixed the paint using spit from the valves of some road-worn vaudevillian’s trumpet and the plaster dust from a hotel room that Keith Moon had trashed.”
Though I never could, people would fill in the finale, too. On episode 53 of the Taker Wide Podcast, Steve Sabatini and Jesse and Shane Matthewson joke about an ambitious endgame: “Somebody said they wanted to see if it could’ve gotten into the hands of Metallica.” As if Metallica needed a curse, but did anyone check the studio walls when Lou Reed was in the booth?
But, even if the painting never had the opportunity to suck the life out of busses and private planes and whatever the fuck powers this room, it still traveled farther than anyone could have imagined: thousands of miles across North America and a tour cancellation away from reaching Cradle Of Filth. The daydream and the kayfabe one could weave was enjoyably wild, but the truth was still plenty weird. To be clear, the truth was that a painting was passed from band to band for longer than anyone could have reasonably expected. When given the story, people just…went with it.
So…why? What makes Angus Byers of the Hypnophonics tell me stuff like “I was really glad I was a part of this shit” despite him losing his van and band? I think it’s because it’s a good tour story for people who know a good tour story.
“There are some great tour stories that you can really only relate to if you’ve lived this lifestyle…while others tap into some of the most primal fears of your average adult in our society,” Matthewson wrote. “Tour stories are all about bizarre people (musicians) getting into bizarre situations constantly! Hell, an easy example: We once stayed at an abandoned race horse slaughterhouse in upstate NY with Anodyne and American Heritage back in 2004; and we swore we heard the faint screams of dying race horses in the middle of the night. In daylight hours, there were horse skulls and repossessed cars with bullet holes all over the lot. I smashed a horse skull with a stick for the simple sake of doing so. What normal person wouldn’t have questions about that ridiculous story?”
On the one hand: Hi, normal person here, I have questions. On the other…that story is the The Right Stuff for cowardly hot disasters like me, thrillingly adjacent to the expectations of my constructed and curated day-to-day. And it nails the other tour-yarn-criteria that Scott laid out: “Like any good story there needs to be conflict. No one cares if things went off without a hitch. People want the blood, sweat, and tears. The stuff that inspires them to push on, too.”
And part of me kind of thinks that’s it. Trust me, I feel a strong desire to blurt out some tortured Dean Witter shit like “the painting’s real power is its story!” and call it a day, but let’s not. Instead, to me, the Curse of the Velvet Unicorn caught on because it’s an encapsulation of what it’s like to feel the irrepressible itch to pursue something creative. It’s like this weird, bizarre feeling that shows up unannounced, sometimes inspired by someone else. The window to achieve it is finite. There’s hardship, there’s bad luck. If it works out, you pass something along, something of yourself, to the next person and the next person and the next person, farther than you could’ve ever imagined. If it doesn’t, and van dies and band breaks up, hey, at least you were exerting some agency over your existence. And sure, people won’t get it because they haven’t felt it and its incongruous with their path. But, as Sean said, “I’ve had more fulfillment in my experiences on the road as a musician than I ever got out of working in a kitchen or hammering away at some other dead-end job.” That’s why you chose this life. That’s the story you want to tell, the story you want people to pass on. You played because you loved it.
But…yeah. Really, in keeping with what the Unicorn does to people, the real reason is probably more elemental, devoid of the abstractions we put upon it and it puts upon us. It’s probably more what like what Scott wrote: “Some beautiful person woke up one morning and said, ‘Today is the day I paint a unicorn on black velvet.’ And they did a shit job. There is nothing purer in this world.”10
The reporting on this piece was an off-and-on odyssey that stretched over years. I left Invisible Oranges in 2014, and this was finally published in 2018. All of this came from a comment KEN Mode left on a KEN Mode premiere on IO. I eventually caught up with KEN Mode when their publicist reached out to see if I’d be covering their then-new album. I was like, “Listen…this is going to be the weirdest email you get today, but do they want to talk about the Velvet Unicorn?” Turns out they did.
I’m sure this line took at least 40 passes for me to dial it in. It’s annoying, but a lot of writing is dictated by the mouth feel of the words in a sentence or phrase. Is that dirty? I don’t mean it to be dirty.
This is my typical ‘in the stacks’ research, back when Google was usable. For bigger stories, Newspapers.com is invaluable.
Just an interesting writing quirk. Now, I’d used “explains,” that being present voice, to differentiate between my reporting and someone else’s.
Always got to plug the album. The perils of access journalism, folks.
This is one of my more hilarious reporting feats. I tracked Scott down through Facebook, and finally found the tattoo shop they worked at. This took weeks of trial and error, and many phone calls to shops that assumed I was pranking them.
I think we went with the alternate spelling because that’s what the Hongos used, probably referencing the Gipsy Kings. This was also before the world at large finally moved to the far less offensive “Romani.” Still, “gipsy punk,” etc., does represent a distinct subgenre, so that’s why it remains.
I’ll blow my source’s cover here because, at this point, who cares? It was The Dillinger Escape Plan.
Book of Sand is something that I’ve probably referenced 8,000 times. When you start publishing a lot, you notice that you talk about the same five things ad nauseam. It’s that and the fact you’re working out a lot of stuff on the page that you should probably bring up in therapy.
I think the j-school maxim is that you should never let anyone else have the last word. I think that’s bullshit. I want to be in these stories as little as possible. Plus, this line is an absolute banger. How could this piece end with anything else?