The Free Orcs of Cascadia, Ft. Margaret Killjoy

Margaret Killjoy reads her short story, The Free Orcs of Cascadia.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
It could happen here to welcome the Evans Robert podcast
End of the World at the beginning of news. Yeah,
I think we did it right. Evans, Evans, Robert. Who's
here with us? That would be kill Joy, Margaret and Lictorman, Sophie.

(00:25):
I like this m M keeping Victiman, Comma Sophie, kill
Joy Comma Margaret, Um Margaret Commas as I could also
attorney's general you kill Joy's Margaret. One of my hobbies
is anytime I pluralize something, attorneys generally it Um. Margaret,

(00:46):
How are you? How are you doing on this beautiful
December day. I'm good. I just got my booster shot
and the negative effects haven't kicked in yet. That's good. Um.
How does it feel to have, like, as your interne
sped up, now that I have a boost? Yeah, I'm
making the same fight that everybody makes, because it's easier

(01:07):
than thinking about the fact that, oh, Macron looks like
it's going to be a real, real nightmare and the
world's never going to go back to you know, it's
not going back to normal. I miss It's it's being
able to walk into a bar and not worry that
I was going to catch a new variant of a plague. Yeah, yeah,
that's a yeah. Yeah, how are you doing with the plague?

(01:35):
I live completely alone and isolated, so yeah, which I
you know, I'm not sure this is how I would
have built my life if I hadn't done it during
a plague. Yeah. I mean, well, I dream about interacting
with humans. Yeah, just like hugging a person that that
you don't know all that well and it not being

(01:55):
like involving both of you risking your life. It's like
a blood packed Yes, we're going, Doug, and if we
wind up in how we'll scream at Satan together. Hu,
you have written another story. I mean you wrote this
a while ago, as you did with the last one.

(02:16):
But we're doing. We decided we one of the things
we wanted to do to close this year out was
a little bit more fiction, because fiction, I think plays
an underappreciated role in uh revolutionary practice, in kind of
every aspect of being someone who envisions the different world. Um.

(02:37):
So we we've always I mean it could happen here
from the beginning, there was always a strong kind of
um uh focus on fiction. Um. And I'm really happy
to be presenting another one of your stories. Today. Thanks.
You want to introduce this piece? Sure. This piece is
called The Free Yorks of Cascadia. It was first published

(02:59):
in Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is the name of
a magazine. Um and this one was also really important
to me because Fantasy and Science Fiction F and s
F was one of the magazines that my my dad
had a subscription to. Yeah. Yeah, this was a very
um uh and it was a very important piece for
me that it got published there. Yeah, that's awesome. Um well,

(03:23):
let's uh, let's let's let's take a take a hop
in a publicly funded bus and roll down to Storytown.
Speaking of taking one's life in one's hands. The story

(03:46):
is called The Free Orcs of Cascadia. You all know
the first part of the story. The song ended in blood.
It was two years ago in the summer. Rick Green,
the singer of Goblin Forest, crooned in his Osborne esque
voice to fifteen thousand Goblin metal fans. A short man
wearing green body paint and brown leather, stepped out from backstage,
drew a sword and cut the singer down from behind.

(04:10):
The last lyrics Green ever sang were take me back,
take me Back, take me back to the misty Mountains.
The man with the sword, of course, was Golfin Bull,
the rhythm guitarist for Crimpatool the opening act. He and
his bandmates escaped in the ensuing chaos and remain at
large to this day. Neither band has released a song
or played a show since the rest of Goblin Forest

(04:31):
decided to call it quits. Without Green and crimp Atool,
no one knew what happened to Crimpatool. Fans deserted the
genre and droves, and overnight Goblin Metal went from stadium
rock fad to a niche interest of the obscure Canadian
orc cults were originated. It was no longer hip to
be Green. If golf and Bull had been trying to
take the Goblin Metal throne, as it were, he failed spectacularly.

(04:55):
Rumors have flown about motives and locations, but there have
been no arrests and no like statement from the band.
All we've had to work with were rumors until now.
Earlier this month, Orc Folk act Alsith listed golf and
Bull as the harpist in their liner notes of the
single The Gray Fog of a Ruined Forest. All Syreth

(05:16):
was as obscure as Crimpatool was infamous. The band had
never done an interview, not even a photo shoot. Like
everyone else these days in countercultural music, their videos featured
only masked performers. I've been casually obsessed with post civilization
culture ever since the Communicate from the Junkyard Rats of
the Rust Belt, and I've been covering music of pretty

(05:36):
much every secessionist movement and subculture I could sink my
teeth into. Since after I saw those liner notes, I
put out feelers to friends and friends of friends, and
I waited, and last week I was invited to go
to an orc village hidden away in the burned forests
of Cascadia. I was invited to be the first person
to tell Golf and Bull's story hell Fire Harriet Exclusive.

(05:57):
Usually I post full interviews for everyone, but reserve my
travel diary for the patrons of my blog. This time, though,
I'm foregoing that this story is too important, so I've
interspersed to the two below. All I knew before I
went with what everyone else knew. Three years ago, a
bunch of metal heads and hippies and burners and nerds
all decided to dress up like orcs and goblins, and
some of them took it too far and decided to

(06:19):
distance themselves from the rest of society. They got really
famous one summer, then that fame died in a single
bloody act, and who knows what kind of weird ship
they're up to. Now, before you get worried, no, I
will never offer a platform to a fascist fascist. Fascism,
as it turns out, is the furthest thing from golf
and Ball's mind. What he's into is a lot weirder

(06:40):
than that. Still, it's sort of lucky that I survived
to write this story. So you killed a guy, Yeah,
I killed a guy. We stared in silence at one
another for a while. He wore raw hide and fur,
and not much of either. He wasn't painted up, but
his skin was sort of natural olive is Our teeth

(07:00):
were filed down to fangs like any serious works. There
was still something unassuming about him that I have a
hard time describing. You're waiting for me to tell you
about it, aren't you. The interview was not off to
a good start. Are you worried about how your words
will sound in court? I killed Rick Green on stage
with a sword in front of thousands of witnesses. Talking

(07:23):
to the media, isn't going to make anything worse for
me at this point, and I don't respect the authority
of the US government to hold me accountable for my actions.
I will not go to court, So why do you
do it? The old world is dying my world, the
Free Orcs of Cascadia. We're not going to replace the
old world, but we will be part of its replacement.
In order to do that, we have to take ourselves seriously.

(07:45):
An element of that struggle is the struggle to create meaning,
to create a new sacred. I killed Rick Green because
he was defiling something mint to be sacred. How so
we share an aesthetic, but he didn't understand what it
meant to be an orc. You killed him because he
was a poser. I guess you could put it like that.

(08:07):
So the lesson here is, don't be a poser. Don't
be a poser. You heard it here first, kids, don't
be a poser, or golf and Ball will literally murder you.
They picked me up in the parking lot of grocery
outlet in northeast Portland. That's a mundane detail, I suppose,
but perhaps the single most remarkable thing about my trip

(08:27):
was the ever present contrast between mandanity and the bizarre.
I bought a case of coconut water while we waited.
Works might like coconut water. Who doesn't like coconut water.
They showed up in a mid teens Honda Civic sedan,
and I've been hoping for something out of Mad Max.
The two women who got out, one cis one trans,
both white, were dressed in clean gray tank tops and leggings,

(08:49):
like half the women who live in Portland. To be honest,
I only noticed them in the parking lot at all
because the trans woman was cute. Hell Fire this, this
woman asked. She was tall and severe, with the fierce
but almost trustworthy look of a loan shark, or, as
it turned out, an Orchis enforcer. That's me, I said, Fenrik.
This this woman offered her name, but no handshake, fist

(09:09):
bump or hug. I nodded. Nor Inda, the trans woman said,
Like a lot of trans women these days, she didn't
bother to feminize her voice. Her name sounded familiar, but
I couldn't place it. How is this going to work?
I asked. We're going to drive around back where no
one can see us. Fenric said, We're going to take
your phone, and laptop and any electronics and put them
in a fair day in the car. Then we're going

(09:31):
to put you in the trunk and drive out to
the forest. Will provide you with a recorder and notebook
when we arrive. You'll get your stuff back when we leave.
I nodded, I'd pretty much expected this. Do you need
to use the bathroom? Nor? In asked, have any medical
conditions we should know about? No, and no, I said,
either of you want a coconut water? Goblin forests sang

(09:53):
in English. But Crimpletool's lyrics were all in Tolkien's Black Speech.
Dark speech are lyrics were in Dark Speech. Each Token
referred to the language as black speech. Token meant well,
but he was about the most influential unconsciously racist author
of the twentieth century. All his villains were either Green
or Middle Eastern. When you engage with the work of

(10:14):
historical authors, especially when you make derivative works a century later,
you have to adapt to one's own social context. Calling
the language black speech today is at best wildly misleading.
Its name is a translation. Anyway, It's possible that dark
speech is just as accurate. Besides, Token didn't write the language.
He only wrote like sixteen words or something we wrote

(10:36):
the rest Most of us prefer to translate the name
of it as dark speech, since why our murderers PC
My status as a person who has ended the life
of another person carries no implications about my personal ethics
other than that I clearly believe there are circumstances under
which it's okay to kill someone. Imagine being at the

(10:57):
Renaissance Fair when the apocalypse hits and you're stuck trying
to recreate society, surrounded by swords and minstrels and these
and thous. You know how that sounds like either heaven
or hell, depending on who you are and also who
you're stuck there with. That was my first impression of
the village of Gray Morrow. The fires out west have
burned forest after forest and small town after small town,
and no one tries to deny that pretty much every

(11:19):
bioregion on the planet is going through a transformation right now.
It's in the worst spots, these dead ecologies that the
post civilization movement has found its roots, like wild flowers
growing up between paving stones, or rats hiding in the walls.
I guess, depending on who you ask, Gray Morrow sits
in the scorched graveyard of a Douglas fir forest, half
way up a mountain, occupying the remains of an evacuated town.

(11:43):
Slab foundations are all that remain of the original structures.
A seasonal creek runs through what was recently a river
bed at the edge of the village, and long abandoned
train tracks skirt the ridge above town. Even armed with
all of that information, you'd still have at least seventy
or eighty possible spots to search. Satellite imagery would help,
of course, I can't imagine that the Big six texts

(12:04):
of the U. S. Government don't know where Gray Morrow is.
The residence of Gray Morrow in general, in golfing Bole
in particular, had an awful lot to lose by letting
me write this report. Nourinda let me out of the trunk,
and she smiled when she saw me. Her bottom teeth
were filed. That should have been unnerving, but I've always
been a sucker for face tattoos or anything that really
shows some one is going for broke. Fenric just stared

(12:26):
at me. Severe. Being severe was pretty much her thing,
as far as I could tell. She took a sip
from her cocoanut water. Three other cars filled a makeshift
parking lot. The village itself was surrounded by a wall
built from black and logs set upright and buried in
the ruins of the road. My escorts had changed clothes,
and rout Fenric looked like a bandit out of Skyrim,

(12:47):
complete with iron puldron on one shoulder and a hand
axe strapped to her belt. I won't lie, it was
a good look. I'm no fashion reporter, but I figure
half the magazines in New York would love to get
someone out here and take pictures of orcs like her.
Nornda wore a simple, modest dress of undyed wool. Imagine
a Viking kindergarten teacher who also wears a rather large
dagger horizontally on her belt at the small of her back.

(13:10):
My crushing on her intensified. She handed me a spiral
notebook in an old fashioned digital recorder, and we walked
into the village. A lot of people say that you
killed Ritt Green because you are jealous of Goblin Forest's success.
That the Orchish code insisted that if you wanted the throne,
you had to kill the reigning monarch. Golfin Bull stopped

(13:31):
fidgeting and stared directly at me, his dark brown eyes
boring into me. That's bullshit. I'm sorry, it's like three
layers deep of bullshit. He was still staring at me.
I was starting to regret this line of questioning. Okay,
to start, there are pretty much two ways to interpret
the Orchish Code of Honor. It's not written down anywhere,

(13:53):
but there's some strong central themes, like an interdependence between
individual sovereignty and collective identity. We veou you strength, but
the idea is that everyone develops their own strengths, whatever
they may be, for the benefit of all. One should
be as self reliant as one is able to be,
both for one's own sake and again for the community's sake.
I cared deeply about this. That same basic idea, though,

(14:16):
can be interpreted two different ways. So there's a split
in the ARC community. Damn right, there's a split. The
free Orcs are matriarchal and the or Seene are patriarchal.
Golfin Bill produced a cigarette from god knows where, considering
how little he was wearing, and lit it with a
lighter from the same mysterious origin it wasn't tobacco, it
wasn't weed, maybe mugwart. The matriarchal way of interpreting those

(14:40):
tenants is roughly anarchist. It's anti authoritarian, an anti nationalist.
At the very least. We respect the wisdom of elders,
children and women self identifying women. But the hierarchy is
anything but rigid, and the guidelines are anything but laws.
Most importantly, our sense of community or tribe is fluid.
Gray Morrow is a free or village. Go fifteen miles

(15:02):
southeast and you'll find a larger village lonely mountain there
or seen. The patriarchal way of interpreting Orcish tenants is
roughly fascistic. Authority is absolute. Rank within the hierarchy effects
every aspect of one's own life. It's not racialized, but
it's nationalistic. There are very specific considerations of who is
and isn't a part of any given social grouping, and

(15:23):
definitions of strength tend to skew toward boring shit like
physical size and power. So you tell any doubters that
you weren't trying to claim the goblin throne because your
faction of ORCS doesn't work that way. No, Orcish culture
works that way. Even those fascistic ships don't work that way.
Among the or scene. If you kill your superior, people
aren't going to just suddenly start kissing your ass. They

(15:46):
will literally flee you and turn your skin into a
battle flag. You advance and rank by demonstrating your capacity
to lead. This isn't some fucking Hollywood bullshit. Evil is
a lot more banal than that. I didn't have the
heart or maybe the courage to tell him that. To me,
to pretty much any outsider, Hollywood bullshit is exactly what
the whole place looked like. When you say battle flag,

(16:08):
what do you mean? Who do they do? Battle with us?
The free Orcs? Are you at war for the very
soul of our culture? How did that start? When I
cut down Rick Green, the Mountain King? You killed him
because he was the leader of a rival faction, then,
not because he was a poser. They weren't a rival
faction until I killed him. But sure he was a

(16:30):
poser though all fascists opposers. Did you go on tour
with Goblin Forest specifically to murder him? Yeah? Probably? What
do you mean? Probably? That's a very specific question about
a very specific intention. I mean, I guess I had
been thinking about killing him for a while. It was premeditated,
and it wasn't you know, No, I don't know, because

(16:53):
I've never killed anyone. So it's like I've known Rick
Green almost five years. He and I and maybe thirty
other people. We started this whole thing, Goblin Metal of
the Orcs. All of that. Rick Green has always been
a fucking bastard. I figured I'd probably kill him one
day for being kind of a Nazi or whatever. Then
we go on tour together and I tell myself, hey,
if this goes badly, I can always just kill him

(17:14):
on stage. You've got to understand, Orcas culture wasn't even
a year old at that point. We weren't split into
the Free Orcs and the or scene yet. There were
only maybe five villages total. We were just starting to
explore what it meant to be ourselves, what kind of
culture we could build. Then, while we were on tour,
I hear he's got himself crowned the Mountain King. And

(17:35):
this isn't a game. I don't know how to get
that through to you or your readers. This is our life.
It's one thing to put on a silly hat. And
pretend to tell people what to do in some LARP somewhere.
But Rick Green had gotten himself corornated for real dictator
over actual people. So I killed him. The free Orcs
split off the or scene, closed ranks, and we've been
at war ever since. Am I safe here? He didn't

(17:58):
answer me, at least, he didn't dare me down again.
He just looked off into the distance, maybe towards lonely Mountain.
I've been to LARPs before, where when you show up,
they make you put on garb. That is to say,
they make you wear period appropriate clothes, or whatever weird
interpretation of period appropriate that particular group of larbers had
come up with. As I met the denizens of the village,

(18:21):
they all came out to the parking lot to introduce themselves.
I realized they didn't insist on anything like that because
they weren't LARPing. Pretty much, every one of them was
dressed like either a Viking reenactor or fantasy game villain,
but it wasn't an act. About thirty adults and eight
kids lived there, running the age Gamut from six months
to seventy eight years. They told me their names and pronouns.

(18:42):
About a third told me she a third heat in
the third day. Many of them were white or past
as such, but a significant minority were black. Nourenda told
me later their Orc villages with substantially higher proportions of
people of color. That might be true, but I got
the impression she said it to convince herself or me
that the free Orcs aren't a specif typically white phenomenon.
No One, no one decent, likes looking around their community

(19:04):
or scene and seeing only white faces smiling back. After
everyone introduced themselves, immediately forgot all their names. There are
only so many fantasy names like Lazarre and Demlin that
you can hear before they all just sound the same.
Noriinda and Fenrik flanked me as we walked through a
gate in the wall into the village. It's strange to
say village in America. We don't really have villages here,

(19:26):
But in some ways Graymorrow isn't the United States. And
to be certain, it was a village, maybe ten or
fifteen houses crowded together along either side of a single
potholed street. Two architectural styles reigned. Junkyard shacks built out
of railroad cars in regular cars, and traditional American log cabins,
many of them were adorned with solar panels. At the

(19:47):
end of the street, near the Black Palisade, the beginnings
of a stone tower stood fifteen feet high. I wasn't
sure if I was impressed or not. On one hand,
the village couldn't have been around longer than three or
four years, and they had already done so much much.
On the other hand, it was filthy. Everyone was filthy.
I'm kind of obsessed with the post civilization movement, so
I wish I could tell you everyone looked well fed

(20:08):
and happy. They didn't. People looked proud, and they didn't
look miserable. But there was an intensity in everyone's eyes
you simply could not mistake for happiness. A trash pile
needed tending near the front gate, and some of the
animal hides stretched for tanning had begun to rot. Everything
looked like it was about to fall apart, both physically
and metaphorically. What now, I asked when we reached the

(20:29):
central square, a stone cobbled chunk of what had been
once an intersection, now decorated with poorly tended gardens and
rustic benches of dubious quality. You're here to interview. Golfing
Ball or you're not, Fenrick asked, I am. Golf Ball
doesn't live here. I waited for her to elaborate. Golfing
Ball lives in the forest with the rest of his band.
He's on his way. You'll meet him a bit outside

(20:50):
of town. I'll take you to him when he gets there.
Someone near the gate shouted, and both of my escorts
flinched bodily and turned to look. It was just a
kid chasing another kid with a wooden sword. Fendrick and
Narindo were on edge. Something was about to happen. Tell
me about your new band, Ulsare. What does the name mean?

(21:13):
Alsyrith is the dark speech word for the phase of
the moon on the last night before the new moon,
the last sliver of light. Ulsareth is a holy day,
a day of self reflection. Our band's music attempts to
capture that spirit of self reflection. On Alcyreth, we listened
to our naysayer and think about ourselves and our community

(21:33):
your naysayer. Free Orchish villages don't have leaders. We have naysayers.
Two years ago, we tried rotating leadership. It was ineffectual.
We didn't need leaders We stuck with it anyway because
we felt like we had to, because those were the
rules we had come up with. Then one person said, basically,
this is bullshit. We don't need someone to tell us

(21:53):
what to do. We need someone to tell us what
to stop doing. We need someone to tell us what
we're doing wrong. Every new moon, every village picks a
new naysayer. That person spends the month picking apart group structures,
observing what's happening, being critical and Alsareth, we fast and
listen to the naysayer. They don't offer solutions necessarily, but
instead bring our problems to light. Does that work surprisingly well,

(22:18):
except about a third of the naysayers end up leaving
after their month. Some go to other villages, some good
to live in the forest, like Narinda Alsareth singer did,
but most leave the woods. As we put it, most
go back to civilization. That's why Noarinda's name sound of
familiar when she didn't she introduced herself. To be honest,
I saw your name list in the liner notes and

(22:38):
didn't pay much attention to the rest. That's an argument
for me to take my name off our next release,
if there is one. Why did you put it there?
In the first place, Why did you agree to this interview?
And what do you mean if there is one? I
told you we're at war? Yeah, we're losing that war.
He took a deep breath, trying to keep himself calm.

(23:00):
He didn't strike me as a man who is afraid
to cry, but he was clearly trying to keep his composure.
There's no way that Gray Morrow would have let you
talk to me here if any of us thought that
Gray Morrow had a future. There's no way I would
have talked to you at all if I thought I
was going to be alive to see another alsirath. Why
are you losing? Why are you going to die? It's

(23:21):
not a question of military efficacy, or of bravery or
strength or any of that ship. It's just a question
of numbers or seen society. As a military society, every
member fights. As far as we can tell, they've got
fifteen hundred warriors, We've got five hundred, so use guerrilla tactics.
Golfing Bull shook his head. Striking Rick Green down from

(23:42):
behind was a cowardly action. I can justify it almost
by the fact that Green had declared himself my monarch.
But the orseeen warriors are my peers. They would not
stalk me in the night. I will not stalk them.
That sounds, I know how it sounds. So that an
interview I want to be remembered. I want the free

(24:03):
Orcs of Cascadia to be remembered. I put my name
on the liner notes so that someone like you, an
anti fascist music blogger, would talk to me. I leveraged
my own infamy to draw attention to what we're doing,
what we've done. I fucking hate the tragic utopian trope.
What like seriously, like fuck you? Okay, I know I'm
here as a journalist, but I'm not gonna write your

(24:24):
fucking obituary. I don't think i've ever turned on an
interview subject like that before. I get it. Hopeless causes
are beautiful, But as I understand it, the whole goddamn
point of holding onto your honor more firmly than your
life is because the world is a better place for
everyone if more people did that. Right, Okay, the world
isn't a goddamn better place if you let your subculture.

(24:44):
And I'm sorry, I know it's very serious and I'm
not trying to downplay it, but that's what this is
a musical subculture be taken over by fucking Nazis, and
I respect that you're going to fight them for it.
That's cool. But if you consider buying some guns, maybe
a few drones, they'll come in here with spears, right
and you'll fight them off with other spears. It's there
are fucking Nazis everywhere. If you don't give a shit

(25:04):
about going to jail or dying, then fucking shoot the
Nazis were trying to kill you. You don't understand, You're
fucking right, I don't, if I'm being honest. Most of
the time I was waiting, I spent flirting with Norenda
and avoiding talking to Fenrick. Horenda asked me to keep
our conversation off the record. We didn't talk about Gray
Morrow or the orc thing much. Anyway, everything I learned

(25:25):
about the village and its culture I learned by observation only.
An elderly man came by and offered us cold tea
and wooden mugs steeped BlackBerry leaves sweetened with juice from
the berries. He said, no caffeine, no other particularly strong
medicinal effects. The three of us took cups from his bladder,
and he continued down the street, passing out drinks. No
one else approached us. I watched people go about their lives,

(25:48):
though the tension in the air was thick. I saw
a few people look at cell phones and spent a
not inconsiderable amount of time trying to decide if that
was hypocritical and or bad ops sec. Eventually I gave up,
as frankly, it wasn't my business, and one of the
most interesting things about all the post civilization groups is
all the bits and pieces they choose to carry over
from mainstream culture. Finally, after an hour, Fenric stood up

(26:12):
come with me. I followed her to the other side
of town and through a smaller gait. On the other side,
a box truck that had seen better days sat on
a road that had too. We skirted around the truck
and up into the black forest. The scorched hills looked
more like meadows than forests, with green grass and undergrowth
broken only by black spikes of burned trees. We followed

(26:33):
the path this way and that, and soon I was lost.
Soon after fog set in, I was further through the
looking glass than I had realized. I imagined us lost
a mile from a town full of people who gave
a double meaning to the word stranger, and probably at
least an hour's drive from civilization. My guard hadn't shown
me much in the way of kindness, and I was
on my way to meet someone I knew to be
a murderer. It's the kind of shift I live for.

(26:56):
If I'm being honest, I love my stupid, fucking weird
job and the stupid fucking weird world we live in.
Thank you, my readers, for making that possible for me.
Be sure to check out my Patreon page if this
is the first thing you've read by me. Lots of
members only content over there, including a few snippets of
orc song from Nearinda. The only thing I saw in
the distance was a single black spire, thicker than the
dead snags around me. As we approached, it came into

(27:18):
focus as a boulder jutting up into the sky like
an angry finger. Sitting at the base of it was
a short man with a sword across his lap, golfing bull.
I'll leave you to to it, Fenric said. She left
me alone with an armed murderer. I sat down across
from him, took out the notebook and recorder and asked
him questions. All right, convince me we can't fight them dishonorably,

(27:42):
because you can't protect an idea by defiling that idea.
We don't want them to destroy our way of life,
but we don't want to destroy our way of life
ourselves either. The basic problem with your scene is that
they're interpreting your code of honor to mean might makes right. Yeah. Yes.
By facing them in open battle, nobly dying or whatever
your goddamn planet is, you're just letting them make my right.

(28:05):
You're letting their superior numbers dictate what your cultures to
look like. It's like majority voting, but even dumber because
more people die. I expected him to double down on
his position. Most men would. What do you suggest instead, funk?
I don't know. Don't be here when they attack, Go
somewhere else, stay on the move, build your strength. Oh ship,
That's what Rick Green was doing, wasn't it. Huh Goblin

(28:31):
forest singing in English, a stupid name like Rick Green.
All That ship was designed to make Goblin metal more
palatable to the masses, to get fans, to get recruits
for his stupid, fucking fashy goals. Yep, do that. I mean,
don't become fascists, or change your name, or make your
music where everyone knows Goblin Forest and have shipped on Krimpazol.

(28:51):
Just don't be obscure for the sake of being obscure.
Fucking advertise you have a decent thing going here. People
abandoning mainstream society left and right, no coal pun intended.
Make it easier for them to get here. Make it
so that when you fight the fashion your epics swords
and spears Viking deathmatch, you win better. Yet, make it
so they don't even want to funk with you because
they know they lose. I don't know whether that would work. Yeah,

(29:15):
but dying doesn't work either. The Earth way of life
isn't meant to be some revolution. It's not meant to
supplant the mainstream. It will never appeal to the mainstream,
not without losing its soul. Would you live like this?
Would you want to? You're right, I'm obsessed with you
weird subcultures, but I wouldn't want to live like you.
We both stared at each other in silence. It wasn't

(29:36):
an uncomfortable silence. We're both just thinking, Okay, scrap that
you're never going to get big numbers. You don't need
big numbers. You don't want big numbers. You don't need recruits,
you need allies. What would that look like? God damn
due all Orcish men not actually listen to women's ideas.
I'm used to guys just talking over me or shutting
down completely. If I get mad free Orkish men, I

(29:59):
would hope know how to listen. Guns break the spell
and the spell you're casting here's powerful. It's good. So
no guns. Other people have guns, though, Let those people
stand guard or make their arm presence. Note outside or
seen camps other people have access to, say dock singe.
How many recruits are the or Sine gonna get if
every time some want to be forest Nazi dude joins,

(30:20):
someone tells his mother what they're about for access to
the media, How many recruits are going to join if
everyone knows the or scene or posers putting out substandard
water down goblin metal just to try and lure an
impressionable military age men to fight their holy war. You'll
write those stories. I'm not gonna write you any propaganda,
but sure I'll tell the truth. How do we get allies,

(30:43):
but at another single, maybe a full length. The gray
fog of a ruined forest was the best ship of
hurtin years. You're redefining folk music, just like you redefined
metal without ship like that, and I'll cover it. Talk
to more press, maybe someone other than you. Not everyone's
going to be sympathetic to what you did, even if
that fucking guy was a fucking tree. Not see a
hunting horn cut through the fog and through our conversation,

(31:04):
and my subject's face fell into despair for a half
second before determination took over. What's that? Interviews over? And
I thought there would be more time another day. At
least we have to get you out of here. Turns
out Fenric had taken us on a purposefully circatuitous route
into the woods. It wasn't a quarter of a mile

(31:25):
straight downhill before golf and bowl and I reached the
box truck at the back entrance to Graymorrow. Norinda and
Fenrick stood there talking with a kid, maybe fifteen, who
was out of breath. She was dressed in scraps of
fur and leathern cloth, like you might imagine a medieval beggar.
It wasn't until I noticed all the twigs and sticks
and moss tangled up in the fabrics. I recognized it
as camouflage. I saw about thirty the scout, for that's

(31:47):
what she was said about. Fenrick asked, exactly thirty, ten
with pikes, ten with tower, shields and swords, five archers,
two scouts to command, one non combatant. I'd guess a surgeon,
but I couldn't promise how far away I asked. Fenrick
glared at me for interrupting. Five miles Nourenda said, probably
three and a half by now downhill. We have time

(32:08):
to get you out with the children and the elders.
The scout had just run five miles uphill because she
was too stubborn to use a walkie talkie or a
cell phone. We should evacuate everyone. Gulf and Bull said
what Fendrick asked. We've got walls and almost even numbers.
Fuck them, this is our home. I wanted to shout
at her. I wanted to shake her, to tell her

(32:28):
this wasn't a fucking game, that it wasn't the twelfth century,
and that killing people or dying over some squatted chunk
of nowhere was somewhere between stupid and reprehensible. It didn't
though I'm a good journalist. This isn't the place for
us to debate this, Nourenda said, and all four of
them walked through the gate and left me standing by
the truck. That was why the gardens were untended, and
with the trash was piled up and the hides were

(32:50):
left to rot. They were expecting this. They'd lost their
will to pretend like their lives were going to continue
to progress forward. I'm not the first to suggest that
Nila him as the dominant effect of society today, with
climate change destroying communities and bioregions all over the map,
with the economic crisis deepening and the wealth gap widening.
I think all of us are guilty of forgetting to

(33:11):
tend our gardens. All of us have a hard time
figuring out why it matters whether or not we deal
with our trash. All of us have proverbial or literal
Nazis marching on us. The Nazis the free Orcs of
Cascadia are dealing with are the literal variety. Some cosplaying
fascist was about to stick a sword between Noranda's ribs.
Biole rows in my throat. I don't know I believe

(33:34):
in love at first sight or any of that ship,
but I just couldn't handle the idea. I fucking hate honor.
I will never be an orc. I got lost running
through solutions to the problem of hypothetical arrows and swords
that were going to interfere with Norinda's continued existence. Most
of those solutions involved assault rifles, which I didn't have
access to. Cars, though were available. What's thirty warriors of

(33:56):
medieval armor versus one station wagon driven by an angry
woman with a lead foot. I put the odds in
my favor. I wasn't going to do it, though. Instead
I waited to evacuate. I don't think that speaks well
of me. Individually and in groups, people came out through
the gate and loaded bags and baskets on to the
back of the truck. Noriinda returned with a simple backpack

(34:17):
sewn from raw hide. Most of her belongings were probably
wherever she engulfen Bule and the rest of Allsareth lived.
She handed me my phone, I didn't have service. I
wondered whether or not she engulfen Bule were dating. It
wasn't relevant to the present moment exactly, but my mind
always as a way of thinking about bullshit to avoid
thinking about impending doom. Another important effect of our generation

(34:38):
distract ourselves with disaster with petty things like love and jealousy.
I don't know what you said to Golfen Bull, Randa said,
but whatever it was worked. He just convinced everyone to evacuate. Everyone,
I asked, shocked, everyone except him and Fenric and Gorn.
Which one's Gorn, the man who brought us tea? Do
you remember him? He's old a ship, though, I said,

(34:59):
because I have no in manners or common sense. Yeah,
he's old as ship. He's a linguist by training. His
main hobby is writing morbid poetry and dark speech, and
when he can't figure out how to say something, he
just makes up new words. He developed about a third
of the language, did all that ship before orc culture
was even around. He's also a widower three times over.
He doesn't give a shit about dying. His last chat

(35:20):
book was called soon I will return to the Earth. Oh,
Gorn is going to die today. Golf and Bull and
Fenric they're going to hold the wall as long as
they can and then fall back to the woods. And you,
I asked, I'm driving us out of here to another village.
Then I'll take you home after that. I don't know, girl,
I don't know. If I signed up for this, I

(35:40):
might leave the woods go back to being a vet tech.
I just nodded. I was too biased to offer objective
life advice. Oh, and golf and Bull said to give
you this, He said, it's in case he dies. He says,
you're right, you shouldn't have to write his obituary, so
he wrote his own. She handed me a piece of
paper I piled into the back of the box truck
with are to other people, many of them in tears,

(36:02):
many of them in shock, and we drove away from Graymorrow.
None of the three free Orc survived the battle. Goren
died and paled on a spear while holding the gate.
Fedric was killed by an arrow that struck her in
the back of the neck as she and Golfing Bull
ran golf and Bull, Fenric's lover turned and stood his
ground over her body. I didn't know any of that yet.

(36:24):
I found out when Mirinda found out two days later.
Maybe all three of them would have survived if I
hadn't interfered, and they had all fought with equal numbers.
Maybe more of them would have died. Maybe I can
forgive myself. Maybe there's nothing to forgive. In the back
of the truck, by the light coming in through a
crack in the steel wall, I read Golfing Bull's note.

(36:45):
All my life, I didn't give a shit about anything.
I liked weed and metal in whatever counterculture trend was
big in a given year, but my heart wasn't in it.
I just went through the motions until I became an orc,
saying I'm an orc and meaning it. Isn't like a
transman saying he's a man and meaning it. Gender is
a social construct that goes back as far as I understand,
to the beginning of humanity. There has always been gender,

(37:07):
and there have always been people who transgress the roles
assigned to them at birth. An orc is a social
construct that we just fucking made up. I mean, I
guess the orc is an archetype too, but it's a
fantasy archetype. We know what's make believe. Make believe is
what gave my life, meaning, I promise you that for me.
The day we decided we were orcs was the first
day that the sun shone benevolence upon the world. It

(37:29):
was the first day that color radiated from everything I saw.
It was the first day that the rain on my
roof tapped out codes of meaning. It was the first
day of my life, my real life, my first Also,
I fell in love with the world. Everyone finds meaning
in different ways. I found meaning by believing in some
ship we made up and letting that be real. I

(37:51):
was born Jason Sanchez. I died gulfing Bull. I'm not sorry.
That was great. That was so fun. I mean, not
my narration, the story. The story, not my narration. Mm hmm.

(38:15):
The second we finished, we all just got that little
smirk on her face. Think that was delightful. Yeah, Margaret,
you're the best. Yeah. I mean, if I were going
to be an orc, there would be rifles but problems. Yeah,
this is absolutely This is like a really good example

(38:37):
of what I mean that when I write utopian fiction
or like fiction about other societies, I'm not saying, hey,
everyone go do this or like this is what people
should do. No, I mean I liked that. I like
I like that. I've had that experience in other cultures,
you know, places like slab City and different kind of
encampments and whatnot. That I've spent a lot of time
and as a journalist where it's like I'm fascinated by

(38:57):
and I respect aspects of this, but like, I also
think some of these things are that you're doing or
dumb or I don't understand why you do it, or
this isn't like you know, but you don't Your notes
don't matter. You know, that's not your job, although actually
having an impact in that way is is kind of Yeah,

(39:20):
I don't know. Somebody go, somebody go make an work village. Yeah, yeah,
I'll go out there, I'll report on it. We'll go.
It'll be fine. Don't take the band name all sort
though I already stole that. There's a number of dope
band names in here. All right, people should make orc folk.
I'd be really excited to hear make orc folk abandon

(39:46):
civilization to live as fantasy creatures. Um, fight fascists, all
that good stuff. Yeah, Margaret, is there anything you'd like
to plug? Well? I do have a new book out,
or a reprint of an older book called A Country
Ghost that is a more directly utopian book. It's out

(40:07):
from a K Press, came out last month, and um,
I think that's it. That's the main thing. Oh, you
can support me on Patreon, although it's no longer supporting
me on Patreon. It's supporting a publishing thing that I'm
starting back up with people called Strangers and a Tangled Wilderness.
And it will publish fiction and memoir and like the
kind of like more culture side of radical politics and

(40:29):
less the like theory and stuff. What's the patreon patreon
dot com slash Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness? Because why
would I pick short names for things? Don't do that? Yeah,
and we have we have a live show coming up right,
Robert h. That doesn't sound like us. It's a virtual
live show of for Behind the Bastard to put our

(40:51):
friend prop that's on Thursday February allegedly moment House dot
com slash Behind the Bastards. I can't confirm or deny that. Okay,
you gotta a lawyer on here before you can sure. Yeah,
let's get Moira on the horn and where come on

(41:12):
the horn and tell us if we're actually doing this
thing that show? Yeah? Are we also? Are we alive?
That's another question? How I text here that most days? Um?
All right, well, thank you Margaret, and thank you all
for tuning in in the first year of the rest
of the next year. It could happen here as a

(41:38):
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
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find sources for It could Happen here, updated monthly at
cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.