Caine Rose: Chronicle and Commentary

  The Message I woke up this morning to a message from my uncle telling me that my aunt had passed away at 2:30 in the morning. That was about five hours prior to me somewhat consciously entering into a new day—those first moments when you're not quite awake, not quite asleep, checking your phone before your eyes have fully adjusted to the light. The words on the screen didn't make sense at first. Then they did. Then I wished they didn't. I had known for less than two weeks that my aunt had cancer of the liver and that it had spread incredibly fast. The kind of fast that doesn't give you time to prepare, to say everything you need to say, to reconcile yourself to what's coming. One day she was there, the next she was diagnosed, and now she's gone. Cancer doesn't care about timelines or goodbyes or the things left unsaid. She had taken care of my stepmother for the past several years. My father died in 2018, and it was incredibly hard on my stepmother, Jo...

Fool's Gold and Crimson Tears The leaves crunch beneath my boots as I walk through Homewood Cemetery in Pittsburgh on a cool, crisp late November morning. It's around 9:30 AM, and the sacred ground is decorated like nature's potpourri—fool's gold and crimson tears scattered across graves that hold some of America's mightiest names. We're fresh from rain the night before. The dampness fills the air, clinging to everything—the weathered monuments, the elaborate mausoleums, the modest headstones that stretch across rolling hills in every direction. The birds are chirping their morning songs. Deer meander gracefully between gravestones, unbothered by my presence. Just moments ago, a flock of wild turkeys crossed my path, their prehistoric silhouettes moving with surprising dignity through this city of the dead. I'm reminded, walking through this hallowed ground, that I was here almost exactly one year ago to the day. Perhaps coincidence. Perhaps fate. But here I...

  Two Classes of Truth-Seekers When I worked as a freelance photojournalist from the late 1990s to around 2006, I met many other "journos" of all stripes—from the fancy Wall Street Journal and Esquire magazine types to grassroots activist writers more akin to myself. The fancy journos were easy to spot a mile away. They stayed in fancy hotels with their cameras that cost more than the car I drove, tapping away on the latest and greatest MacBooks, being ferried around in chauffeured G-Wagons to their expensive hotel suites. I rubbed elbows with a bunch of them, and invariably, they almost always looked down on me. I never had the best cameras or fastest laptops. I didn't have an expense account. I never ordered room service. I bought my own plane tickets and sat in economy class while they sipped champagne in business class, discussing their next assignment over complimentary meals I couldn't afford. Still, I never thought my poverty was a sign of righteousness eit...

  Luxury and Paranoia in Karachi In 2003, I flew into Karachi Airport on assignment covering stories related to the Global War on Terror and various human rights issues. I figured I'd splurge at the beginning of the trip since I always ended up broke by the time I departed for home. I checked into a very nice hotel—elegant in a third-world kind of way—complete with armed guards carrying AK-47s at the door and a manservant assigned to attend to my every need. I was dying for a long hot bath after the grueling flight, but my tub was without a stopper. I tried stuffing a washcloth into the drain, but that was useless—the water just drained out a little slower than without the washcloth. I finally put on my MacGyver cap and located a nice tumbler glass from the minibar. With the washcloth stuffed into the drain and the glass positioned just so, it formed a passable suction to contain the bathwater. Problem solved. The rest of the night was less eventful. The Shadow of Daniel Pearl ...

  The Millstone of Shame When I look back at the absent-mindedness of my parenting in the early 1990s, it sends a chill up my spine. Many parents would never admit to being careless regarding their small children, but I'm all about falling on my sword and learning from my mistakes—even when those mistakes could have ended in tragedy. We all have them, these moments of parental failure that we carry like millstones around our necks. The common mistakes that make you question whether you're fit to raise another human being. Like forgetting your kid is strapped in the car seat and walking halfway to the grocery store entrance before the horror strikes: you've left God's most perfect gift alone in a hot parking lot. The sprint back to the car, the flood of relief when you see they're fine, the crushing guilt that follows for days. Or not securing deadly chemicals under the kitchen sink and awakening to blood-curdling screams from your two-year-old upstairs, accompani...

  Self-Righteous and Impossibly Bored Back in 1988, at the height of my straight edge period, I ran with a select crowd of teenagers and Taylor Steele, who was twenty-one years old but acted like seventeen. Taylor was the lead singer of Four Walls Falling, a popular hardcore band in Richmond. I would later go on to play bass for them and debut on their first 7-inch record. Almost all of our elite crowd of friends were straight edge as well—or at least feigned the discipline to keep up appearances. It seemed many of the straight edge guys had girlfriends who occasionally drank wine coolers or secretly smoked cigarettes. I had a couple of those during my time in service as a drug-free youth in the mid-to-late eighties. A genuine straight edge girl was extremely hard to find. We would go out on weekends, and since we didn't drink or do drugs, we were impossibly bored. Terminally bored. Boredom was our constant enemy, and we combated it the way self-righteous teenagers do—with prank...

Three Strangers in Egypt In 1999, I went to Egypt to research alternative world history for a book I was interested in writing. Among the many adventures on that trip, the most memorable—and terrifying—was my time temporarily stranded on the wrong mountaintop. I met my future climbing companions after our ferry crossed from Jordan to Egypt. Roger was about ten years my senior, a small-framed New Zealander who'd retired early as a corporate stock trader in Australia after making a fortune. He'd decided to travel the world indefinitely, and he had the easy confidence of someone who'd solved money problems permanently. He struck up a conversation as we disembarked. He explained that when we'd surrendered our passports upon boarding the ferry, the Jordanian crew had chosen him to sort through them by nationality for their logbook. He already knew where I was from and even my name. It probably should have seemed creepy, but I'd traveled enough by then not to get weirded ...

  The Gateway: Metal Magazines and Mystery Bands The first time punk rock entered my radar was around 1983, flipping through metal magazines like Kerrang!, Circus, and Hit Parader. Buried among the glossy photos of spandex-clad hair metal bands and Ozzy Osbourne's latest antics, I spotted an advertisement for Black Flag's "Damaged" LP. The cover alone was arresting—a stark black-and-white image that looked nothing like the airbrushed fantasy covers dominating metal at the time. Then I started noticing a very young Metallica in these same magazines, their members sporting t-shirts from bands I'd never heard of: Misfits, Dead Kennedys, Discharge. These weren't metal bands. There was something very fringe, very underground about these mysterious groups, and I needed to know what punk rock was all about. The mystique was intoxicating. Here were metal bands I respected—Metallica was already building a reputation—wearing shirts from bands that seemed to exist in ...

  Autumn in Charlottesville, 1989 Long before Facebook events or Instagram announcements, before viral tweets or TikTok invitations, information traveled differently. A flyer tacked to a bulletin board at a local bookstore. A poster in a record shop window. Word of mouth passed between fellow enthusiasts who shared your particular obsessions. That's how I learned about the classic film festival at the University of Virginia in the autumn of 1989. Somehow—probably a flyer at a Richmond bookstore—news reached me that Hollywood legends Jimmy Stewart and Gregory Peck would be attending screenings of their classic films, including "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." My best friend and I made immediate plans. We were driving to Charlottesville, no question. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The day we left Richmond was crisp and perfect—that ideal fall weather when the air carries just enough chill to make you grateful for a good jacket. The leaves had turned in Charlo...

  The Man Who Saw It Coming: Tom Wolfe Scroll through Instagram for five minutes and you'll witness something Tom Wolfe predicted fifty years ago: an entire civilization organized around status competition, where people catalog the minutiae of their lives—the exact brand of coffee, the precise angle of vacation photos, the careful curation of political opinions—as signals in an endless game of social positioning. Wolfe called this phenomenon decades before the technology existed to turbocharge it. He understood that when transcendent values collapse, all that remains is the desperate scramble to prove you matter. The man in the white suit died in 2018, but his ghost haunts our present with uncomfortable accuracy. Every contemporary crisis seems to vindicate another of his observations. Identity politics consuming American discourse? He wrote about 'back to blood'—the tribal regression that occurs when 'religion is dying but everybody still has to believe in somethin...