Here's an anecdote only a couple months old that sort of sums up my "thing" about/with Kurt Cobain, and his memory.

During a horrifically cold string of winter days this past December, when the temperature hovered well below freezing for nearly a week, Tim was one evening wishing aloud he had some longjohns to wear under his jeans, for his early-morning walk to the bus stop. I suggested that since his jeans were too big (he'd recently lost a bunch of weight and hadn't gotten new clothes yet), he could wear his sweatpants under his jeans. He didn't embrace the idea, but in the course of our discussion, he said, "Didn't you have a friend who did that--wore a bunch of layers of clothes all the time?"

I replied, "You mean my friend Kurt Cobain? He used to do that."

I am first to admit that I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to Kurt and Nirvana while he was alive. My wannabe grungepunk rockstar circle of friends didn't trust Nirvana's fame and called them everything short of "sellout." We were jealous, and intimidated, we savoured negative gossip--but we were all hiding our cassette copies of Nevermind from each other all the while. It wasn't cool for me to like Nirvana, so I pretended not to.

When Kurt offed himself (or Courtney had Il Duce or someone else off him--a theory I didn't buy until her sociopathic side recently started winning out over her made-over movie star side; now, gods who knows what she is capable of. . .), it took my breath away. I became obsessed with collecting remembrances of him--my stack of Kurt-related paper grew and grew. And I didn't quite know why. A lot of it was just the wrongness of it--as I'd said not so much earlier after River Phoenix died, "People our age are just not supposed to die." Kurt's undeniable talent, his two-year-old daughter, his lifetime of physical pain, his legacy of emotional pain. . .it all dug into my heart and wouldn't let go.

I remember wondering aloud, during that time just after his death that it would be difficult to ever think of him as being dead, because all I'd ever known of him were songs, video, and photos--and those things were still here (over and over, endless and inescapable, that summer of '94), so for me he was, in a way, as alive as he'd ever been. I predicted that it wouldn't really become real until several years of seeing those same pictures, hearing those same songs, Kurt never aging, the songs never new ones. Ten years on, looking video of Nirvana's MTV Unplugged appearance (Kurt was wearing 4 shirts and at least two pairs of pants), I realise I was right.

A friend of mine who is gifted/cursed with the sort of psychic vision that causes dead people to like to hang around her agreed with me that sometimes the dead have things to tell us, and even though we didn't know them in life, they sometimes cleave to us, and who knows why? I did not hop a bandwagon of mourning for Kurt; he chose me. I don't know why. . .I don't really even question it. I figure he has his reasons. I have always believed in the reality of dream visitations--by the living or the dead--and Kurt came to me in dreams that are still some of the most vivid I've ever had. I figure that perhaps it is his penance or punishment to visit all of those of us whose lives he touched and "keep us posted."

One thing that's changed in these past 10 years is that some of my idealized illusions of Kurt have been shattered. In particular, the biography Heavier Than Heaven by Charles R. Cross paints a very different picture of Kurt than I wanted to believe in. Kurt was a very, very disturbed person, full of ambition, maybe even a bit of a hypocrite. Far from the dreamy, too-good-for-this-world victim of my imaginings, Kurt was in fact prolly the sort of person I'd have been afraid of, steered clear of, recognized as toxic and potentially dangerous. I've lost none of my compassion for him, but I do think of him differently now than I did in the immediate wake of his death.

I wrote the essay below in 1999, as a permanent record of what I thought of as a completed cycle of dream-visitations from him over the course of about 4 years. As it turns out, I have since had one more dream of him, a reassurance that he is--wherever he is--becoming "all right."

His work changed our cultural landscape, there is no arguing that. His death changed me. I'm grateful for the weird, posthumous relationship I've had with him.

I miss him.

( Three Dreams of Kurt Cobain )