RA Davis

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The music behind After the Party

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"It's aight."
- my wife

"I absolutely loved After the Party. It’s a thoughtful, deeply human book about meaning, identity, aging, relationships, loss, and what it means to truly be present in our lives. The parts about losing Maggie broke my heart, especially the reminder that ordinary moments often become the ones we miss most. The book also made me question whether we spend too much time waiting for the 'good part' of life to begin instead of recognizing that this is the life we’re already living. I laughed, cried, underlined passages, and thought about the story long after finishing it. After the Party didn’t give me easy answers, but it made me ask better questions - and I’ll be thinking about them for a long time."
- Amazon review

This was great! At times, I felt like the author was speaking directly to me, about people I knew, feelings I have felt and situations that I deal with every day. It was eye opening and comforting to see thoughts I have had in actual print. I got big time Malcolm Gladwell vibes from the writing style, but it seemed more personalized which made it even better. I look forward to anything else the author puts forth in the future. I have already recommended this to several people. Some because I know they will enjoy it and a few others because they just need to read it, hopefully to help them make a change for the better.
- Amazon review

Well, crap! I picked up a book about punk rock and somehow ended up questioning my beliefs, reevaluating my life, and considering whether I should become a better human being. What the heck, R.A. Davis? I did NOT ask for personal growth. Seriously though, I loved this book. It's like sitting around after a show with an old friend, talking about religion, life, getting older, and all the bs we thought we had figured out at 20. Except now our knees hurt, we have responsibilities, and staying up past 10 is out of the question. Punk's not dead, it’s just tired and standing in the back. What I loved most is the reminder that punk was never really about the clothes, the music, or giving the world the middle finger. It's about questioning everything, thinking for yourself, and figuring out how to give a damn about other people without becoming the person you spent your youth rebelling against. And somehow they manage to make all of that funny, thoughtful, and genuinely moving. The nerve of this guy!
- Amazon review

As a 55 year old who was deeply immersed in punk culture, it resonates deeply with the kind of self-reflection I've pursued over the decades. I love the honesty and the pragmatism of your analysis. The same philosophical questions I've wrestled with are spelled out in a broad and accessible way. I also liked the punk references throughout in the song titles/subject headings. There's a lot to love here, and your style is engaging and very readable. Which brings me to my biggest criticism. The style of single sentences and sentences fragments... This style of writing is something I first started to notice in the first wave of blogs, before the rise of social media. Now it's kind of a default for writing in online spaces, which is a place where the isolated string of statements might make sense for emphasis. Unfortunately, in a full length manuscript about philosophy, I feel like it's a liability because it doesn't communicate the logical, developing linearality of ideas that you're striving for. And your ideas are important and should be presented in the best possible fashion for their weight. Your book is good, but this stylistic choice makes it harder to read because it fragments your Big Ideas into pieces that are all too Tiny to communicate what you're trying to communicate. I hope this makes sense. And it's not a criticism of the overall content, which I think is really good, relevant, and truthful. As a librarian, I see this form of writing too often in self-published works, and it works against the intent of the author. I hope you can take this criticism as a constructive suggestion, not an existential challenge. I actually know you will, as you mention DIY skepticism toward the end of the book. And the self-analysis you talk about here is nothing if not a fundamental tenet of our evolving punk rock worldview... I do hope you contribute to hone your book into the work that it deserves to be. Thanks for sharing it out and for giving some of us a chance to wrestle with the ideas therein. Respect!
- a reader


"I'm just sick of leftist leaning punks telling me im a fascist and i'm not a punk because I share ideals with the maga movement... No other punk is gonna shame me or bully me into giving up my values and morals."
- a reader

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Chapter 1: No Direction
You arrive in the world without instructions.
Almost immediately, people begin handing you some.
Be successful. Be respectable. Get the right education. Find the right career. Earn enough money. Buy the right things. Get married. Have children. Act your age. Be productive. Have a plan.
This is adulthood.
This is success.
This is a meaningful life.
Most of these instructions aren't necessarily malicious. Usually they're given to us by people who care about us. Parents want their children to be secure. Teachers want students to succeed. Friends want friends to be happy. Communities develop expectations because communities need some degree of stability.
The problem begins when suggestions quietly become rules.
This is no longer one way to live. This is how you're supposed to live.
And if your life doesn't look like that? Something must have gone wrong.
I've spent a surprising amount of my life wondering where exactly those instructions came from.
Because nobody seems to remember agreeing to them.
It Always Feels Like I’m Waiting for Something
I am forty-five years old. I have been married for decades. I have adult children. I have a career. I have managed people. I own a house. I pay taxes. I have retirement accounts. I make appointments. I have opinions about insurance. I occasionally get excited about buying some deeply boring household object.
By almost any reasonable standard, I am an adult.
And I am still waiting for the moment when somebody hands me the actual instructions.
When I was much younger, I imagined adulthood as a destination.
Finish school. Start a career. Become established. Figure everything out.
Then, presumably, spend the rest of your life being a fully formed adult who knows what he is doing.
Instead, I got older and discovered that life continues requiring you to make decisions you've never made before.
You change jobs. You lose people. You become a parent – if you choose to - and discover that raising children bears almost no resemblance to imagining what kind of parent you'll be. You reconsider beliefs you once thought were permanent. You learn something about yourself embarrassingly late. You realize that something you spent ten years pursuing isn't particularly important to you anymore. You begin something new at an age when you once assumed you would already be finished becoming yourself.
I went back to school later than I was supposed to. I mostly fell into a career by accident. Very little of my life has happened according to the imaginary schedule I assumed everyone was following when I was younger.
Every once in a while, I still look around for the adult in the room who knows what is supposed to happen next. Like I’m sitting in an imaginary kids’ table.
Then I remember:
We're the adults now.
That was one of adulthood's biggest disappointments.
Eventually it became one of its biggest comforts.
Nobody knows what they're doing as much as you imagined they did. Some people are simply better at disguising it.
So where did we get the idea that somebody does?
Faith Alone
For most of human history, one obvious answer has been religion.
There is an instruction manual.
Or at least that's the promise.
Someone knows why you're here. What kind of person you're supposed to become. What's right and wrong. What happens after you die.
And, most importantly, someone knows all of this from a position you don't have direct access to.
God.
Revelation.
Scripture.
Tradition.
The church.
For someone trying to figure out how to live, I understand the appeal. I felt it.
I grew up in Christianity, where life came with a basic shape.
God created you. Your life has a purpose. There is a right way and a wrong way to live. Some choices bring you closer to that purpose. Others take you away from it.
There are virtues to cultivate, sins to avoid, commandments to follow, and ultimately a meaning to the whole thing that exists whether or not you understand it.
That can be enormously comforting.
Your life isn't random. You're not improvising. You may not understand the plan, but there is a plan.
Even suffering can theoretically be folded into it.
Everything happens for a reason. God has a purpose. Trust the process.
At least somebody knows what's going on.
I don't want to dismiss that too easily because I understand why people want it to be true. There are plenty of moments when I would love to believe somebody has the answer key.
But once I stopped believing that divine authority was behind the instructions, an uncomfortable question remained:
Where did all the other instructions come from?
Because losing religion doesn't mean everybody stops telling you how you're supposed to live.
Sometimes we simply replace divine instructions with social ones.
God has a plan becomes:
Society has a plan. Your parents have a plan. Your employer has a plan. The market has a plan. Your political tribe has a plan. Your friends have a plan.
Instagram apparently has several plans for you, all of which involve owning things you didn't know existed fifteen seconds ago.
The source changes.
The structure remains strangely familiar.
Someone else knows what your life is supposed to look like.
Your job is to follow the instructions.
That's where some bad philosophy became increasingly annoying and other streams of philosophy became increasingly useful to me.

What If There Was Never a Page 47?
Jean-Paul Sartre gives us an unnecessarily complicated vocabulary for something that becomes fairly simple once you strip the philosophy away.
Existence precedes essence.
You exist first. Then you become something.
You aren't born carrying a little document explaining:
NAME: __________
Occupation: __________
Purpose: __________
Correct worldview: __________
Number of children: __________
Approved hobbies: __________
Proper retirement age: __________
Meaning of existence: see page 47.
There is no page 47.
That's the disturbing part. It's also the liberating part.
For Sartre, a human being isn't like a tool manufactured for a predetermined purpose.
A hammer is made to hammer things. A knife is made to cut.
Its purpose comes first. Then somebody makes the object to fulfill that purpose.
But what if human beings aren't like that? What if you arrive first?
You show up. Things happen. You make choices. Other people make choices that affect you. You inherit circumstances you didn't choose. You discover things you're good at. You discover things you're terrible at. You get hurt. You hurt people. You fall in love. You change your mind. You sometimes refuse to change your mind long after you should have.
You become something through living. And then you keep becoming.
There isn't some final version of me waiting at the end of all this.
There is just the person I keep becoming through what I do next.
That doesn't mean we create ourselves out of nothing.
I didn't choose where I was born. I didn't choose my parents. I didn't choose the culture I entered. I didn't choose most of the expectations that were handed to me before I was old enough to recognize them as expectations.
None of us starts from zero.
But inherited isn't the same thing as inevitable.
And that's where another philosopher becomes useful.
Somebody Made This Up
Jacques Derrida is difficult to explain. Don't worry. I'm not going to ask you to read him. I'm not even entirely sure Derrida wanted anyone to read Derrida.
But one useful instinct behind deconstruction is surprisingly simple:
When something presents itself as natural, permanent, obvious, or inevitable, take another look.
Ask:
Who decided this?
Where did it come from?
What assumptions are underneath it?
Who benefits from it?
Who gets excluded?
Has it always been this way?
Could it be different?
This doesn't mean every rule is stupid. It doesn't mean every tradition is oppressive. It doesn't mean every institution should be destroyed. And it definitely doesn't mean nothing is true (contrary to very popular misunderstandings).
It means something incredibly basic that we forget constantly:
Somebody made this.
Somebody created this tradition. Somebody designed this workplace. Somebody decided what a respectable career looks like. Somebody created this dress code. Somebody decided when adulthood supposedly begins. Somebody decided what success means.
Somebody decided that changing careers at forty is reckless while spending another twenty-five years miserable in a job you hate is responsible.
Somebody decided that eighteen-year-olds should know what they want to do for the rest of their lives.
Somebody decided that a person without children must eventually regret it.
Somebody decided that making more money always represents moving forward.
Somebody decided adulthood means becoming increasingly boring until you eventually develop strong opinions about lawn maintenance.
People built these ideas.
That doesn't automatically make them bad.
It does make them available for inspection.
You can ask whether they still work. You can ask who they work for. You can ask whether they work for you.
And if they don't?
Maybe you don't need to obey them just because they're old.

Parents
There is a particularly strange moment in adulthood when you realize your parents were basically improvising.
As a kid, adults appear to belong to an entirely different category of human being.
They know how things work. They know what to do when the washing machine breaks. They know how insurance works. They understand mortgages. They know where you're supposed to go. They know why.
Then you become older than your parents were in some of your earliest memories.
And you realize:
They were just people.
They were scared sometimes. They didn't know what would happen. They made decisions with incomplete information. They repeated things their parents taught them. They made mistakes. They had hopes about what their lives would become. They changed. They regretted things.
They probably stood in a room at some point wondering what the hell they were supposed to do next.
Exactly like you.
That realization didn't make me respect my parents less.
If anything, it made them more human.
Becoming a parent made the realization even stranger.
Eventually your children become old enough to look at your decisions the way you once looked at your parents'.
And they should.
My kids don't owe me agreement simply because I'm their father. This is one of the most important things I think we taught our kids – while it was happening, when they were much younger, it was also one of the most frustrating:
Keep what works.
Question what doesn't.
Tell me when I got it wrong.
Improve on it.
That's what inheritance should allow.
Our parents can teach us things without being infallible. Traditions can contain wisdom without being sacred. A culture can discover something useful without discovering the one correct way to live.
The choices aren't:
Accept everything.
Or reject everything.
There is another possibility.
Keep what works. Question what doesn't. Forgive some of what they got wrong. Try not to repeat the worst parts. Accept that your children, if you have them, will someday do exactly the same thing to you.
That sounds suspiciously like deconstruction.
It also sounds suspiciously like punk.
Knowledge
Punk figured out a version of this without Derrida.
Somebody says:
This is how music is supposed to sound.
Why?
You need to be an incredible musician before you start a band.
Why?
You need a record company before anyone can hear your music.
Why?
You need somebody important to discover you.
Why?
You need permission to put on a show.
Why?
You need to dress this way.
Why?
You need to grow up.
Why?
That might be one of punk's most useful contributions to philosophy.
Not an answer.
A question.
Why?
It's almost embarrassingly simple. It’s why sometimes small children are very annoying.
A surprising amount of authority becomes less impressive the moment someone asks it sincerely.
Why do we do it this way? Why does success mean that? Why is this considered normal? Why am I supposed to want this?
That's not the same as automatically rejecting the answer.
Sometimes the answer is good.
Why do I have to stop at a red light? Because we'd all like to survive the intersection.
Fair enough.
Why do I have to show up when I promise someone I will? Because other people's time matters too.
Also fair.
Questioning something isn't the same as rejecting it.
Sometimes you take an idea apart and discover there was a very good reason for it. Sometimes you discover it was useful once and isn't anymore. Sometimes you discover it mostly benefits the people who already have power. Sometimes you discover you believed it only because everyone around you did.
And sometimes you discover that the conventional thing you spent years rejecting is actually something you genuinely want.
That's fine too.
The point isn't to arrive at the rebellious answer.
The point is to make sure you've actually examined the question.

Growing Up Isn't the Problem
This matters especially when people talk about growing up.
I've been resistant to that phrase for most of my life.
Sometimes just because I'm stubborn.
What exactly are you asking me to become?
If growing up means becoming responsible for yourself and other people, fine. If it means learning from experience, absolutely. If it means becoming less selfish, more capable, more dependable, and better able to take care of the people you love, great.
I'm trying.
But if growing up simply means surrendering curiosity, creativity, idealism, music, politics, play, or the parts of yourself that other adults have decided are embarrassing?
Why?
Who wrote that rule?
The important distinction isn't between growing up and refusing to grow up.
It's between maturing and conforming.
Those aren't the same thing.
You can become more responsible without becoming less curious. You can earn a living without deciding money is the purpose of living. You can have a family without believing everybody else should. You can get older without treating your younger self as an embarrassment.
You can also admit that your younger self was wrong about some things.
Very wrong, occasionally.
There is no philosophical virtue in remaining exactly the same person forever.
Freedom Isn't Magic
There is an obvious danger in all of this.
“There is no instruction manual” can easily become another stupid slogan.
Do whatever you want.
Nothing matters.
Nobody can tell me anything.
That's definitely not what I mean.
You don't create your life alone.
You have responsibilities. Your choices have consequences. Other people have their own freedom.
Money matters.
Bodies matter.
Power matters.
Luck matters.
History matters.
The circumstances you inherit can open some possibilities and close others.
Sartre famously described us as “condemned to be free.”
The word condemned matters.
Freedom, in this sense, isn't all butterflies and rainbows. It doesn't mean you can do anything you want, or that every possibility is actually available to you. It means there is no instruction manual that can make your choices for you. Even when the options are terrible, limited, or unfair, you still have to respond somehow.
You don't get to opt out completely.
Even refusing to choose becomes a kind of choice.
That's part of what makes freedom frightening. It comes with responsibility for what we do with whatever possibilities we actually have.
Real life is messy.
But “I can't choose everything” doesn't mean “I choose nothing.”
Some part of what happens next remains undecided.
We'll spend a lot more time with the responsibility that comes with that freedom.
For now, I just want to establish something simpler:
There isn't one correct version of your life waiting for you to discover.
The Final Draft?
And there is no completed version of your life that you're supposed to uncover or “achieve.”
There are circumstances you didn't choose. There are obligations you genuinely have. There are consequences. There are other people whose lives matter.
Freedom is not unlimited.
But inside all of that remains this extraordinary fact:
What happens next is still unwritten.
You can change. You can reconsider. You can abandon an old plan. You can discover that something you thought you wanted was really something other people wanted for you. You can discover the opposite too—that something you rejected because it seemed conventional is actually exactly what makes you happy.
That isn't failure.
That's living.
At forty-five, I haven’t finally found the instruction manual. I’ve become more comfortable with the reality that there isn't one.
There is no secret path everyone else knows.
There is no adult you eventually become who never doubts himself again.
There is no final draft.
Religion once gave me an instruction manual. Philosophy helped me understand why I didn't need one. Punk taught me to scribble in the margins anyway.
So look at the instructions you've been handed. Read them. Understand where they came from. Don't reject them merely because somebody else gave them to you. But don't obey them merely because somebody else gave them to you either.
Question them.
Keep the useful ones.
Cross some out.
Write in the margins.
Ignore a few completely.
And when necessary, make up something better.
There is no page 47.
There is no final draft.

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