Troy Holmes

Remembering a warrior for community and compassion.

I first really got to know Troy at the first Food Not Bombs kitchen we'd just set up out in the yard of Jura Books - cobbling together a bunch of burnerns. Troy distinguished himself immediately by knowing what the hell he was doing when it came to cooking, cool politics and talking trash. 

This left us free to discuss more important matters - like how awesome tacky 90s house is, and dance parties with the queers, how to shoulder roll punches in boxing and how it's not hard to be kind to your community and to its animals.

Troy was just the kind of guy to knock out a delicious Aloo Gobi for 50 people who needed it, and in under an hour, fuck off to do something else just as awesome - like train for a charity boxing match or get us some free donuts.

He was constantly fighting for compassion and justice with a ferocity you rarely see in anyone - let alone someone terminally ill.

I wish I could have known Troy for longer. For me he really broke through with the message: Be Kind. Be kind in the face of fear  and genocide and oppression. Fight back by being nice to people. Help break through their isolation. When you go down, you go down fighting. 

I don't know of Troy liked poetry, it is possible he fucking hated it, but he might have liked this one because it is also a battle hymn:

It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

- Rilke

Troy broke through for me, and quite a few of us in some messed up times. In my version of an afterlife you're punching air in the club and the beats are always sick.

This track’s a tribute to your punctuality in delivering food to the protest, the street or the party:
Black Box - Ride on Time