Kaleb Horton has departed this life, and for those left behind there is nothing that reconciles any part of what’s happened with what should’ve happened. He had a family, grieving now. He had friends, and we’re all grieving too. The rest of the world is somehow still bearing up under the loss of one of those rare creatures who could wear cowboy boots all the time and not look like an asshole.
But the most immediate problem his absence has created, the real blue-ribbon motherfucker of what is already a unanimous lose-lose-lose determination, is this: Who the hell is supposed to write his obituary?
That was his thing, the thing he could do better than just about anybody, and now he’s gone, and there’s a crater where a fitting remembrance ought to be and nobody fit to fill it, including me. It’s not that I don’t want to. Kaleb and I met as writers, became colleagues and friends as writers, got hired and fired from a few gigs together as writers, and I’m on the wrong side of the country right now from the community we shared, so it’s this or send flowers or nothing.
(I did send flowers. Let me tell you, picking out flowers for Kaleb Horton felt like one of the dumbest things I’ve ever tried to do. He would’ve rolled his eyes and said something withering, and he would’ve been right. But it’s what you do, and he got that too.)
The ways in which this is all terribly incorrect are hard to hold all at once, so apologies to Kaleb himself, first of all: This isn’t anything like what you would’ve cooked up. (But look, sonny boy, you went and died; so if you want to know who to blame for me not being able to land this any better, well.)
[WORDS TO MAKE YOU CRY]
There’s no poetry to it, first of all. And here is a guy who deserved poetry. Not wanted it, deserved it. Spencer found out before I did, from Marie the morning after, and that’s how I found out Kaleb was gone, that he’d had another seizure, and the only thing I could think was: This is not how this story ends. Not because he was young, although he was, stupefyingly young for the voice he had and the authority it carried. No, it’s all wrong because this just isn’t how Kaleb is supposed to die. Kaleb is supposed to die in a time-traveling accident after killing Jack Ruby for the CIA. If you never got the chance to meet him, I can’t explain it any better than that, but I promise it would make perfect sense if you had.
^^^ That was almost two years ago. He’d been prescribed a medication that just happened to cause seizures in a tiny fraction of people taking it. The figure he quoted me was “less than half a percent.” I don’t know if that’s what happened this last time, because I haven’t asked. It’s hard to feel like that matters right now.
[THROUGH SOME STRANGE TRANSACTION,]
I had never read anything Kaleb wrote before we met, but we were in the You think we need one more/Okay, we’ll get one more stage of putting a squad together to relaunch the politics desk at MTV, and one day (this would’ve been early 2016) Alex stuck his head in the conference room on the Paramount lot where we were all camping and said “I found you a genius,” and he was towing this gangly kid wearing cowboy boots behind him.
We found a tiny empty office down the hall, sat knee to knee in these awful pleather armchairs, and talked for … three hours? More? At one point we realized it was dark outside, and we should probably pick this up tomorrow, and he ambled back out of the office. Alex stuck his head back in, asked how it went, and I said “I’m pretty sure he killed JFK, can we keep him?”
Again, if you ever met Kaleb, you know what I’m talking about. He had a preposterous way of speaking, completely untethered to linear time, that only made slightly more sense when he told me he was from Bakersfield, which is spiritually not all that different from Appalachia. Maybe that’s why we understood one another right away. He understood immediately what I wanted him to do, anyway, which was use the resources of a massive media conglomerate to tell stories from the middle and south of the country, stories that didn’t involve parachuting reporters into red-state all-night diners and acting like they’d discovered some goddamn foreign planet.
[AND EVERYBODY'S SEARCHING FOR THE KING OF UNDERGROUND]
Kaleb understood, on a specific and immediate level, that we were witnessing an onrushing apocalypse. This was – and it seems incredible even now, but these things are timestamped, so – one of the first pieces he got out of the gate, in March of 2016:
For the most part, those responsible for conducting our national conversation like to pretend there’s something strange about all this. Like there's no precedent for Trump's rise and rhetoric, apart from pro wrestlers or fascist regimes. Like Trump metastasized out of nowhere, a newly discovered disease.
He wrote about it in the micro and the macro. He could be screamingly funny, in the face of all that approaching darkness. He could be spookily prescient in ways I’m sure he would’ve been thrilled to be wrong about. May of 2016:
Nobody running for president there was planning on becoming president, they were just planning to hang close in case God is an interventionist.
And every once in a while he’d come up for air from the armageddon beat to rattle off some of the most terrific prose in the service of great art:
When Carter Stanley died of drinking in 1966 and the best bluegrass duo in the world ended, it must have been hard for Ralph Stanley to keep going. It must have seemed like the end of the world. You made a living and a life standing next to your brother on a stage, you did it for 20 years, you made a name as two people. But in bluegrass, the songs are bigger than you. The songs are a manner of being, and the songs are God.
Three rapid network president changes later, we were all out the revolving Viacom door on our striving asses, scattering to try and hitch rides on this or that carousel. So it goes. Here’s the last big piece of his from our time there that actually got finished, in late June of 2017:
Navigating our political landscape feels like we went for a walk in the woods and fell down a hole and landed in an America where the sun is going out. It is so surreal that it's tempting to regard it as fantasy, as something that has to end fantastically, something that can be undone with a magical reset button that sends Donald Trump back to a version of 2014 in which Bill O'Reilly voluntarily retires from Fox News and hands Trump his show and we can go back to our normal lives — oh god, for a road back home to our normal lives.
[...]
I got the feeling that the Christian conservative community I knew growing up was dying, which was advantageous to progressives. What I understated then was that these kinds of conservatives, governed by rules and traditions and "the old way is the best way," were being replaced by a more nihilist strain, a type of conservative who is not hopeful or politically engaged and wants to demolish government as we know it for entertainment, for spectacle. It's a movement whose motto is "fuck everything, who cares."
[AND NOW HE’S CALLED IMMORTAL]
It’s an intimate business, writing stories, or at least it feels like it the way I go about it. I have never figured out any other way to work, and the writers and editors I work with all have that in common, this ability to either crack their own ribcages open and pull a story out, or to stitch mine back up when it’s over, and when we find one another we tend to cling together like puppies in a basket (puppies who will never be satisfied enough with vaping to stop missing cigarettes altogether). Every single person I trust to handle any piece I really care about is somebody I built a relationship with eight years ago at MTV, or twelve years ago at Grantland, or god-only-knows-how-long ago at EDSBS. The vast majority of writers who send their stories to me today are people I haven’t shared a masthead with since at least 2020. Going through three full-newsroom layoffs in less than five years will do a lot for your senses of what matters and doesn’t, at least as far as mastheads are concerned.
Kaleb wasn’t the easiest writer to work with, a blanket trait he shared with all my other favorite writers. It wasn’t that he was bad at it, or lazy, or whatever. No, the problem I always had with Kaleb was that putting riverbanks around his thoughts to try and turn them into words could be like trying to fit Cyclops (the one from the comic books, I would’ve had to stop here and explain that to him) for reading glasses at a mall kiosk.
We were in and out of orbit with a few of the same literary concerns in the last eight years. A lot of the folks we worked with at one stop or another have leveled up since the last time we all had group health insurance, gone on to work bigger and under better conditions. Kaleb didn’t get that chance, and if I start screaming about what an indictment that is of the industry, I will simply never stop. But he had plans. There were always plans. Sometimes, he was even practical about it.
He never got to meet my current dogs. That’s something I flat-out hate. I think they would’ve liked him. Champ liked him, which counts for a lot, and also bolsters my certainty about him being a time traveler. I hate that he missed seeing himself become a trending topic, however briefly, on Bluesky, because he would have been appalled, and because bringing it up at every opportunity for the next decade would have provided endless hours of entertainment.
[THE LAST CURSE IS COSMIC]
It might sound to you like I’m building to an upswing here, to try and land this thing on a high note. I promise you, I’m not. That, he really would hate, like genuinely hate, and anyway, I’d be forcing it to try. There is no bright side, not here, not to this. But I need to tell you one more thing, and I’m pretty sure I’m right: I’m going to tell you where it is I think Kaleb has gone.
Because I’d like to think I was right about him the first time, see, and that he’s out there rambling the cosmos. I used the word “departed” up top, because that’s what he did; he was spectacularly annoyed in life by the use of synonyms for death, but I’m using it literally here, departed.
And before you think I’m saying he’s in heaven, or hell, or purgatory … no. I’m saying he’s out there somewhere right now, untroubled by constraints of space or time, bootheels shedding dust he picked up walking between worlds, as he steps into another California valley in another time, on his way to convince Tom Joad to buy a gun.
