I was sitting up late by myself in a tiny atelier in Paris staring out the window at the silent courtyard and smoking grams of some truly top-shelf Moroccan hash when I learned that Lil Peep was dead.

I'm messing around, of course! I wish...I was back home in North Carolina, reading to my daughters, glancing over to see if they'd fallen asleep.

No, now that I think of it, I was in Paris in the atelier smoking the hash, in the wee hours even. Seems like a dream, but life will do that if you live enough, and long enough. Don't misunderstand me; it's not like this kind of scene—sitting up late in the oldest part of a great capital, smoking hash, and contemplating the death of the young—is "what I do." On the other hand, I guess it's not not what I do. I mean, we move around the world. We cop when we can. Generally, though, in these times we live in, when the thing you're doing is sort of too obviously romantically cinematic or could be viewed in that light, you know enough to play it down, to undersell it preemptively as ersatz and banal, in order to not strike others as a pretentious shithead. Notice that as always the crime, the great shame, is the social one, to seem pretentious. Whereas to actually be so, that would be...human life! Look at us all running around pretending like death isn't soon and forever! "We play at games until death calls us home," said poet and collagist Kurt Schwitters, a pioneer in the field of "art from rubbish."

There's a passage in a book called Road-Side Dog by Czeslaw Milosz. He's remembering the years he spent in Warsaw, and the poetry scene there. He says, we had two different ways of dressing. Half of us dressed like poets, wearing black capes and large-brimmed hats—"the uniform of the bohemians." The other half, those "sure enough of their work's value to manage without that paraphernalia," dressed like normal people. But then Milosz makes an interesting move. He says wait a minute, weren't those other ones, the "pretentious" ones, being more honest than we were? They were telling the world what was inside of them. Whereas we, he says—including himself, destined to win the Nobel—we wore camouflage. Because on some level, we were ashamed. We did not wish to be associated with "deviants and madmen."

This was real hash, not the next-gen compounds they're making now in Colorado and calling "hash," which are hardly hash at all but some new style of compressed weed juices. I'm sure it has its virtues. This, though, was the wonderfully redolent brown shit I was raised on. This hash had at some point spent time in a nervous person's butthole on an international flight, which is when old-world hash comes into its ripeness. Hash is one of the things God gave us to cancel out cockroaches and “getting shingles.” An excellent man named Samir had just sold it to me. Possibly it had been in his own butthole. He had smoked too much of it that night, it appeared, and kept making little mistakes, forgetting if I'd paid him, forgetting where he'd put the cup of coffee I'd brought him, seemingly forgetting at moments why he had come to this place. But after about ten minutes, he became satisfied that we had transacted our business. I sat down and looked at the little package he’d left.

That was the moment I got an e-mail from a man named Woody Register. That's his real name. It would be a great made-up name. He was my adviser in college. Don't judge him for that—I didn't listen to (enough of) his advice. He's a serious historian and a brilliant scholar-writer on numerous topics in American culture, pop and high. In the more than 20 years since I was a student, he's become one of my closest friends, and we write back and forth a lot, on both personal subjects and academic ones we're mutually fixated on, but this message was unlike any he'd ever sent me. It read, "Have you kept up with Lil Peep? The younger son of a dear and old friend. Haunting me in a bad way today."