CHRIS TRACY

raised Catholic

"Maybe not traditions, but I have my rituals. It helps you sleep at night sometimes.”

I’m from Virginia. I really like Northern Virginia. A lot of people shit on it for being kind of a suburban wasteland, which it is. But it’s home to me and I think it’s a deceptively interesting place.

I went to Catholic school from kindergarten to twelfth grade. My parents are both practicing Catholics and my sister is actually a practicing Catholic again. My dad is of Irish background. My mom is half Irish and half Italian so there’s a lot of Catholicism between those backgrounds.

I have this one memory that always sticks out in my mind. It was the feast of St. Blaise one year. I remember my mom telling me that mass was going to be regular but in the end there was Eucharist again, except the priest was going to take candles and bless your throat with them. My mom was like, “You can come up now, you’re old enough.” And I remember being terrified. I thought the candles were going to be lit. I thought “Oh my god, what if I get burnt. Why would you do this.” [laughs]

The concept of God and the idea that someone was always watching you really freaked me out. And at least I interpreted a lot of what we learned as “Don’t fuck up. Cause you’re screwed.” Until I was able to call bullshit on a lot of things in middle school, I was actually very afraid of God growing up.

I didn’t look at my religion as being a particularly pleasant thing which is probably why once I got to calling BS on some things, I started feeling especially good about it because it wasn’t just I didn’t believe in this anymore, but maybe life doesn’t have to be miserable. Maybe you can try and have a good time and focus on making the world a better place rather than trying to prevent yourself from going to hell.

It was just a part of my life. I never once thought of how strange it was that I had books as a kid with saints in them with their skins flayed off and being burned alive. And it was just like OK so wait, not everyone grows up with this culture of torture and death as a way of ensuring your place with God.

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You start thinking more about things. In middle school I read Lord of the Rings. It kind of started to dawn on me, like, what if Christianity is as much of a myth? As real as this book and this world and these languages and cultures that Tolkien created are, what’s to say that the Bible isn’t just the same way?

Then once I got to high school I was a very stereotypical sort of angry, suburban high school male. Getting into… first Led Zeppelin, and then from there, becoming really into punk, and hardcore, and metal and stuff like that. Not the sort of corny, anti-Christian things but a kind of anti-system, sort of self-empowerment mantras. So first thing to go was religion. And I haven’t looked back since.

I’ve been interested in a lot of other religious systems since then. But more so mythologies as a whole. I think I intrinsically latch onto great stories. Thinking back on it, I thought well maybe Catholicism was sort of this first great epic I was into. But then I read other epics [laughs] and those are the ones that have more meaning within my personal life because people aren’t killed over them.

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On connecting to traditions outside the faith

Not very strongly. I guess playing in a band and being into punk music, that’s sort of like a tradition. But I feel so much of the idea of participating in a tradition has kind of become contrived. I think that sitting here and thinking we’re keeping DC punk alive is stupid, even as I say it.

I guess the traditions I participate in are less things I have a connection to and more of what I wish I had a connection to. I really love reading about Druidism and I pull a tarot card for myself every day. Do I believe it has any predictive power? No. Do I like thinking about what that card means for the day and thinking okay, where did we see this play out today and being aware? Yeah. It’s a good mental exercise.

Maybe not traditions, but I have my rituals. It helps you sleep at night sometimes. I think as you become more and more divorced from your natural instincts, it’s important to replace some of [those] things -  you might acknowledge them as stupid but they might make you feel comfortable. As we figure more and more and more out, it’s getting harder and harder to believe in anything that’s not right in front of you. Even though it’s leaning in more towards the romantic, I really want to believe in something. And maybe that’s why I have those rituals.

On a good day, I’m perfectly okay with this. All you have to believe in is your own will to power and that’s fine. And that gets me through most of the time. And sometimes on a bad day, when you feel like “this is too big for me right now,” it would be nice if there was some sort of spirit or fairy or ghost that can help you out, but ultimately I don’t think there is.

It’s kind of funny. I was walking in the park the other day. When I have a free day, I’ll walk around the park for a few hours and try to find interesting birds. And I noticed there was a black-crowned night heron. They’re nocturnal; it’s kind of hard to see them when they’re actually out feeding. I was freaking out. I watch this heron for about at least half an hour if not 45 minutes.

He flew away at one point because these two [young] guys walked up and they were talking loudly and smoking a blunt and you can tell they were kind of fucked up. They started talking to me. The older one was kind of a conspiracy theorist. But he also had a lot of interesting things to say. I was wearing a Black Flag t-shirt and he asked me why there were no black people in Black Flag. These guys were black, and I was like “You know, it’s not black in the racial context, it’s black in the color context like a pirate flag sort of thing.” And he was like “I don’t know, it just looks racist to me.” And I was like “That is not what this means at all, but, I’m also coming from a perspective where I would never ever think that. So, maybe I should think more about this shirt if it really offends you that much or intimidates you in any way.”

So we keep talking down that way and eventually, the older guy kind of stops me and is like “So you’re a smart motherfucker. What is your advice?” And I was like “oh shit, I don’t even know.” And he was like “Alright, I’ll let you think about it.” And I was like “Alright, first you have to know yourself. And then you have to let everyone else know themselves. And then you have to sort of revel in the absurdity of it all.”

So yeah, I’d say that. Just know yourself, give everyone the chance to know themselves too. Don’t bother anybody. Don’t impose your will on anybody and then realize it’s all kind of fucking crazy. So try to make sure you and everyone else are okay and having a good time. Drink a beer.

I guess it’s a combination of the existential, nihilist stuff I’ve sort of been into. You can’t control the world but you can control who you are in the world. I’ve always been… [long pause] I don’t want to say frustrated or angry, but I guess maybe sort of pessimistic. And as I actively tried to be less pessimistic and be more open…you at least have a happier life. Even if you go to bed alone at the end of the night and look up into the darkness and you’re sort of like okay, nothing really changed, but you know, maybe your dreams aren’t as bad or you wake up a little earlier the next morning feeling better about it.

It’s a two-sided thing. You might focus so much on OK, I’m going to be myself. But then you’re just so closed off. And I think that’s kind of what I was for a long time. I was so concerned with knowing myself and holding onto myself against this world I couldn’t control that I wasn’t listening to the other half. You end up learning a lot more about yourself and the people around you and how things work and being a decent person by listening to the world rather than trying to hear yourself.

I’m sitting here, telling my Pooka story. In Irish mythology, Pookas are nature spirits that can shape shift. What I left out was when I watching the heron, when the heron flew away and the guys showed up and asked me what I was doing alone in the dark. I was like, I’m watching the night heron and they were like why are you out here and looking for a stupid bird? And it was one of those poignant moments where I was like “You know what, I am standing here alone in the dark… in the park… chasing birds...” [laughs]

So I was trying to find something by chasing this bird and I ended up learning a lot more by talking to this person. And what if when the bird had flown away, he had shape-shifted and become this guy to ask me why I had been chasing him? When really I should’ve been thinking about things and talking to people.

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I’ve had weird experiences of dreams and ghosts. They’ve been powerful in my life. I had this dream one time where I was in my first year of living up in New York. This woman, who was wearing older clothes and bright red hair came into the restaurant I was working at. I knew it was my Aunt Betty. And she was like “hey, I came up to visit New York for a weekend. I just want to see your entire world. You know, just bring me along for your life,” and I said okay. So we were in the restaurant and we went to a bar. I walked her up to Times Square and put her on a bus. And she said “Chris, thank you so much, you seem to be happy here.” And then my mom called me to tell me that she had died, that night, because she had been sick for a long time. So that shook me a little bit.

And then the birds have always been important in my life. That’s why I like watching them in the park and stuff. There was one time I was in Ireland and I stayed at this pub past when everyone had gone back to the dorms and I was very drunk and realized I didn’t know how to get back. But there was a big raven in the back of the pub picking at cobblestones and I walked up to it, and it just kind of hopped me back to the dorm I was staying in.

So yeah, it’s weird. Me sitting here and shilling the value of the will to power and denying the existence of a spiritual world, where there are certain things in my life that I think are still a little too powerful to write off as being just luck or coincidental, the turn of those scales. 

October 2015, Prospect Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn

This interview has been edited and condensed.