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April 5th, the day after my own birthday, marked the 22nd anniversary of the suicide of Nirvana singer songwriter Kurt Cobain – when it happened, not just a big thing in our shared region of the Pacific Northwest, but all over the world. Today, April 8, marks the 22nd anniversary of … the discovery of his body. Back in that fateful year of 1994, different fans reacted to the news in different ways: there were copycat suicides (though curiously, fewer than expected), there were public vigils, and surely a lot of angsty teens wrote a lot of poems about it.

(“GrownUps Read Things They Wrote As Kids” is a thing; our local variant has for years been “Teen Angst Poetry”, which I never found very funny because these feelings the emo teenagers were experiencing were very real to them, then, and looking back for a cheap laugh is a way of dismissing an earlier version of yourself – you know, back when I was so intense and actually believed in something. How naive! – which in turn undermines the very foundations of who you are today. But I digress.)

At the time I had my pop music blinders on, concluding somewhat rashly that anything part of the major media scene had to be crass emptiness, and had no understanding of the band’s body of work – only that it was popular, and hence: why on earth would I be paying attention to it? (My main “in” to Nirvana was the twist on their mega hit by my nerdy then-idol pop parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic, and for some time thereafter I had a knot of concern in my stomach wondering whether, had Al not made fun of Kurt in such a pointed and public way, the suicide might not have happened. It turns out, following the publication of Cobain’s diaries, that he refers to “Weird Al” as “America’s modern pop-rock genious”, and consequently we can reasonably conclude that … he was probably in on the joke.)

But my artscene “boss” of April 1994 – The Narccissist of iMPERiAL – apparently felt sufficiently moved by the current events to put forth his feelings (in his blind grief, violating his own file-naming conventions – this should have been named TN-COBAIN.LIT, not COBAIN.ANS) in the April 1994 iMPERiAL artpack – the freshly-merged group’s first release! For your “enjoyment”, I have transcribed it here:

Endless Nirvana - Dedicated to Kurt Cobain 1966 - 1994

I don’t know why I’m on this earth,
Why my mother’s given birth.
Why I cannot face my fears,
Why I’m afraid to shed my tears.

The devils inside me are taking their toll,
I’ve got one friend, my rock and roll.
But even that haunts me the same,
As I cannot shake unwanted fame.

I must do this for the pain to cease,
And finally be alone in peace.
I know my death’s already forseen,
My heaven, nirvana, my ultimate dream.

Nirvana - What the buddhists believe to be their form of [h]eaven; a state that can only be reached through meditation or death.

The Narc [Imperial]
We miss you Kurt.

I can’t speak to what The Narc was thinking when he decided to save this snippet of doggerel in his text editor, but it stands as a sign of the times. (If they didn’t throw you clues, you might have no idea what kinds of music a computer artist enjoyed. Nitnatsnoc was happy enough to regale you with anecdotes from the rich history of Queen, and Darkforce represented himself with Kate Bush iconography, but otherwise you were on your own. It wasn’t all “Hackers” soundtrack round the clock – including computer music in Mist packs was actually a wedge issue with our membership, many of whom wanted to get their tunes the same way everyone else did: purchased on audiocassette tape at Sam the Record Man. But I digress.)

Though this poem and its host group pre-date the establishment of Mistigris, they presage us in a couple of important ways: iMPERiAL had the extraordinary quality of being one of those minority of artgroups with a “lit” division. This was useful to me when it turned out that I had no aptitude for ANSI art and would need more time in the oven before my computer music could approach being half-baked. Doubly extraordinary was the anomaly of its being run by a lit writer rather than an ANSI artist. (Chico, The Narc, aka The Narccissist, was also credited as a courier – a highly handy quality for senior staff to possess in the final days prior to mass Internet access.) Without his lead, I would surely never had the gumption to accept the Mistigris mantle thrust upon me after iMPERiAL collapsed and we needed something local to rise and fill its position in the area code 604 ecosystem. And he even graced us (of the two competing successors for iMPERiAL’s legacy – the other being Fab One’s Patriot, which led to RAiD, which led in a roundabout way to Integrity) with his blessing and nominal membership… though he made it clear, his involvement in the artscene was now behind him. (I follow in his footsteps in one further important fashion: committing to the long-term use of a misspelled handle!)

Mistigris ended up lasting quite a bit longer than iMPERiAL ever did, releasing a great deal more work and probably being seen and appreciated by more people, but to those who got aboard on the ground floor, it’s all been part of one long, strange ride.

Credits for the illustrations (unrelated to Mist, just to the Cobain theme) go to Flubber (the Chinese “Big 5” piece) and Nootropic from Apathy06.