The writer Kaleb Horton died recently. He was in his 30s, much too young. Like most of the people who have been posting about his death, I didn’t really know him. I sort of internet-knew him: I followed him on Twitter, and I admired his writing, which was mainly about country music and the history of Southern and Central California. His gift was making the commonplace poetic, to find little pockets of revelation everywhere. He could make cliches seem somehow fresh. Here he is writing about Los Angeles and fast food, a topic that has been done to death:
Los Angeles is the capital of fast food. This is where it all started. That whole bit about the car and speed-obsessed megalopolis that needed everything fast. Los Angeles is why we have McDonald’s. It’s why Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake is a historical landmark. It’s why there’s still a preserved first-generation McDonald’s in Downey with ol’ Speedee the Chef staring down at you, trapped in a world he no longer understands.
You likely haven’t heard of Kaleb Horton, though, because the kind of writing he did — lyrical, literary, demanding of the reader’s focus — was dying off. He was talented at the wrong thing at the wrong time. “He was a born magazine writer long past the day when being a magazine writer was something you could make much of a name for yourself doing,” wrote former LA Times journalist Matt Pearce.
No one was quite like Kaleb. But there are a lot of guys sort of like him.
They had a blog if they were around in the 2000s and an active Twitter presence in the 2010s. You’d find them in odd internet corners — the old basketball site FreeDarko, the Something Awful forums, Deadspin and AV Club comment sections. These guys are witty, acerbic, glib, overly knowledgeable about weird niches of pop culture. They love A Confederacy of Dunces, Fred Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, unpopular pop music, Silver Jews, the Replacements, the Coen brothers, Robert Altman, David Letterman, Mitch Hedberg, Elmore Leonard, the Onion (only the old stuff). They probably loved Hunter S. Thompson and Bukowski before they grew out of trying to imitate them in writing or lifestyle. A lot of their heroes killed themselves or died of overdose. They tend to order shot-and-a-beer specials. They avoid “craft cocktails” and wine bars. They are cynical and jaded about politics, but some of them got passionately into Bernie Sanders, maybe more for the sense of rebellion than a deep-seated commitment to left-wing politics. The ethos that ties guys of this type together is vague, a quilt of tattered pieces of barroom wisdom and half-remembered bits from grad school. If I had to give them a mission statement, it would be this:
Life is full of struggle and failure, and there is nothing after death. But in that brief, disappointing span between birth and the grave, it’s the failures that unite us, the imperfections in ourselves and art and the world that provide the joy and beauty that keep us going in spite of ourselves. There are forces that want to make life more homogenous, to smooth out its rough edges and make corporate and sterile what was once messy and human; these forces are the enemy of joy and must be resisted.
These guys are all too young to be part of Gen X but carry a torch for a Gen X cultural phenotype: the scruffy, flannel-shirted loser-hero. Alienated from mainstream culture, too smart to fit in, a little bit self-loathing, maybe more than a little bit misanthropic.
And a lot of times, these guys are talented writers. They wear their cynicism lightly; what they really want to do is share their incredible love for Merle Haggard, the Steve Nash Phoenix Suns, some hoary old sitcom, a mystery writer you’ve never heard of. They care, and they want you to care too, about cryptozoology or the band Suicide or R. Crumb or some screaming evangelist on public access TV. They want to turn you on to the same crooked, crackling frequency they are on, and to do this they will cajole and sputter and berate. They are usually tough reads, in the best way — they have jagged, individual styles that defy skimming. They resist all that pressure to be breezy, conversational, readable (ugh). This doesn’t always work out. Sometimes one of these guys will turn in 9,000 words of impenetrable, Nietzschean prose about how some justifiably forgotten Van Damme vehicle is the Rosetta Stone for the Trump era. But they are trying. They are cursed to try.
A few decades ago, some of them would have made it all the way to fancy $5-a-word magazine writer land. Maybe Kaleb would have, I don’t know. Becoming one of those guys was always like making the majors as a baseball player. Even in the era when the magazine economy was humming, you needed not just talent but luck, the right kind of personality defects, and a few sympathetic editors. But now? Becoming a fancy magazine writer in the 2020s is like trying to become a major leaguer when there are no minor leagues. There are basically no alt-weeklies left where a screw-loose writer can try to find their voice and learn something about reporting and deadlines, precious few small outlets that feed naturally into larger national outlets, almost no outlets of any size that will tell you, Sure, I will publish your ambitious longform nonfiction project and pay for it!
What is this type of guy supposed to do now? Even before the collapse of the media ecosystem, his temperament and interests marked him as an outsider. What he wants to chronicle is the counterculture, a history usually documented in mumbled lyrics, zines, bathroom wall graffiti, late-night radio shows. The America pulsing under the skin of the America everyone else knows. The things you see when you’re driving a van through the desert at 3 a.m. Urban myths passed around in dive bars, card rooms, the stained houses of suburban drug dealers. Is he supposed to put all that in a Substack — for free, no editor to guide or polish the work — and hope it finds an audience? There’s precious little chance of finding readers, and no chance of making a living. Not so long ago, this type of guy could have clawed for a scrap of the media landscape. Now that landscape is eroding and his already tenuous grip is being loosened.
When a magazine shutters, it doesn’t just hurt the writers, editors, photographers, and artists who work there, it limits the horizons of everyone who might have submitted something to be published there. As outlets close down or turn into slop factories, the prospects of ambitious writers like Kaleb Horton dim. What would you do if it felt like the world was conspiring to stop you from doing the only thing you were really good at? Do something else, maybe. Update your LinkedIn. Get a day job, then stop calling it a “day job.” Walk around for the rest of your life with a tiny knot way down at the bottom of your heart.
One guy not getting to write for a magazine isn’t a tragedy. But when it happens over and over again, when the magazines themselves are being hollowed out or just shutting down altogether, something is being lost. Potential left unrealized, talent squandered, knowledge dissipated into the wind. An invisible world is fading away. If you feel a sense of grief at its fading, maybe it was your world too.
If you read to the end and liked this, please tell someone about it in real life.
Beautiful piece.
When I worked at Vice and I would read something he wrote I would always think “ah shit this is the guy who is supposed to have my job.”