the tale of jebediah murderthreat

07 May, 2025

So, there's a story I've never properly written down before. That's probably not surprising--realistically there's probably dozens, if not hundreds, of those--but this one was at the very least kind of a big deal when it happened, and I have alluded to it a lot, because, well, kind of a big deal. It's about the time I had to get a restraining order against one of my oldest friends--someone I'd known since, if my mental math is correct, middle school. There's over a decade worth of story in here, so settle in, friends and enemies, and I will tell you the story of Jebediah Murderthreat.

(That is not actually his name. I'm sorry.)

The cliche is that you should start at the beginning, and while I actually think it's sometimes more fun to start somewhere else, it feels appropriate here. I met Jebediah when I was in middle school; his parents had just started teaching at the horrible fundamentalist Christian school I went to, and his brother had transferred to our school but Jebediah hadn't. As such, Jeb was still allowed to have his absurd 9th grade goatee, and he used way too much hair gel, and this marked him as different when he stopped and visited for lunch one day, and different in a school that tiny either means you're marked as an outcast (holla!) or cool as hell, depending on your audience. First impressions aren't everything but they aren't nothing either.

Most of my years at that school are a blur--not only was I a different person then, the nonstop blitz of trauma has caused my brain to block a lot of it out. At the time I was a part of our school's group of weird nerds, and so was Jebediah's brother, and so, inevitably, was Jebediah when he finally transferred.

It's important to understand that this school was tiny. We had 14 people in our graduating class; one year there was just one guy.¹ We were in many ways your typical nerds--the release of The Lord of the Rings films was a significant milestone in our lives--but we also were kind of left to become our own particular brand of weird. In a bigger school we probably ended up watching anime and playing D&D like everyone else but that was just not in the cards for us.

Since he didn't go to our school, and was two years older than me, Jebediah was sort of a later addition to my friend group. Even once he transferred over, I never really thought of him as a first-order friend; his brother was the one I was usually hanging out with, he was just kind of also there. This isn't trying to diminish his participation in our esteemed band of misfits--far from it--but it's an important fact to keep in your mind.

Our whole little group was built around doing nerdy shit. Somehow he managed to convince the school to let him actually teach a computer class one year, and we spent that whole term mostly goofing off. He was literally a high school student at the time. We did LAN parties, we made stupid movies, we made fun of the absurdities of our school. So there we are--the stage is set. The backdrop for our little tale.

There's a story Jebediah used to like to tell. Maybe he still does? Last I checked he wasn't even in the country anymore, which, good for him, I guess.

It goes like this: a high school class, one of our friends--you know the type, the one who likes pushing people's buttons--was kicking the back of ol' Jeb's desk, because it was funny. Jebediah told him, "If you do that one more time, I'm going to stab you with this pencil." He's very specific that he brandished the pencil and indicated the weapon. Our friend did it again, because, as he put it years later, "I had to see if he was actually going to do it." Then Jebediah stabbed him with the pencil.

He told this story a lot. I can still hear the cadence of it, see the way he mimes the stabbing. Now, you know the end of the tale of Jebediah Murderthreat, since I told it to you in the intro, so it's easy to read this as a deliberate implied threat of violence: "If I say I am going to do violence to you, I follow through." We tell stories because we think people will find them entertaining, or because there is something in them that speaks to us, something true about who we are that the story encapsulates. Often--maybe usually-both. I've often wondered which that story is.

The other thing you need to know about me is that I have lived most of my life on the internet. I was online before most people were online, because my dad did his masters in computer science before computer science was on most people's radars. I have internet friends I've known since, like, the year 2001. I had so many friends that I kept up with on instant messenger programs, and IRC, and MUSHes. I bring this up because this group, the group I was probably most associated with, just never really used those to talk to each other.

I always preferred interacting online. In-person interactions require performance that I ultimately end up finding exhausting. Which isn't to say I didn't think of this group as my real friends, but . . . well, I had other friends. Friends where I didn't feel the need to perform constantly. Friends who saw what I thought of as the real me. That's not to say these in person interactions weren't genuine, but they were taxing.

Okay. I think that's enough deep background. The main thing that stuck Jebediah and I specifically together, at first, was movies. He got into Lego animation ("brickfilms," as the community calls it to dodge trademark) and did a few of those, and eventually wanted to get into other stop motion as well. I wrote a few scripts for him. I don't even remember the order anymore--which ones did I do when I was still living in that awful desert town we grew up in? I have visceral memories of recording lines in the attic of my friend's house, everyone getting together and having a good time with these stupid scripts. But I also remember writing these scripts in the house I first moved to in Seattle, overlooking the freeway, all the noise, all the potential. I remember sitting on the couches upstairs, reading those scripts, printed out on clean white paper, and feeling like we had something magical.

There's two main stories that stick in my memory. The first is a series of four or five very short scripts--a couple minutes a piece--of which exactly one was ever finished, though we recorded voice lines for all of them. I was pretty proud of the writing on them (enough that many years later I was inspired to expand that fictional universe into Vaudeville Ghosts, the series that I still think contains some of my best writing, for all its many imperfections), and reception was pretty good on the first one, but he just didn't finish it.

I also wrote something stupid about a vampire pope from outer space? I remember almost nothing about that one, but this was going to be the big grand project, no holds barred. That one also never got finished.

I couldn't tell you if he didn't finish them because he didn't like working with my scripts or if it was the same reason most time-intensive projects fail. But after that he'd ask me to edit his scripts but never seemed interested in having me write any of them. Which, fair enough, I get why you'd rather just make your own things, and I've got plenty going on. But that was the moment, I think, that cemented us as, y'know, a creative partnership. I did a fair bit of work for most of his future movies, did my share of recruiting vocal talent, edited scripts--nothing huge but I liked to be involved. They were cool projects and I liked supporting what my friend was working on.

In the meantime I had done a lot of writing, and I don't think he ever read any of it. Not even Vaudeville Ghosts, the series based on the thing we had made together all those years ago.

I must stress here that I don't expect people to read these things. It makes my day when you do. But it always stung a little bit coming from a person who, by this point, most people assumed was probably my closest friend in Seattle, and whose art I had given so much time and energy to. And my takeaway from that is: a friend is someone who doesn't support your projects.

We also shared a lot of interests in music and movies. As a general rule I was the one showing him music and he was the one showing me movies. So here's another little anecdote. We were at a show in Sodo--if I recall correctly, Godspeed You! Black Emperor was playing--and as we were biking home it started raining pretty hard, and something got in my eye. It was extremely painful, and I had to stop riding both because I couldn't see and because the pain was distracting, and this motherfucker just kept riding.

I walked for a mile or two until the sting had settled down to something manageable, rode the rest of the way back. He didn't wait up, or even ask what happened next time he saw me. A friend is someone who doesn't make sure you're okay.

And now we come to the main event, what we're all here for. We'd been living together at one of those big houses run by slumlords whose primary interest is providing some cheap housing for college students. There were something like 6-8 people there--this is around the time the numbers were always fluctuating, but if my mental math is right we're looking at 6. He had taken over the dining room as his private animation studio, so there was even less common space than you'd like, and the place was pretty messy. The girl who lived on the main level moved out to live with her boyfriend, and he decided that she left because everyone else was just too messy.

After he sent a few abusive messages to the group chat (hitherto mainly used for 'rent is due' messages) about how everyone was a lazy piece of shit who didn't know how to clean up after themselves, I felt like I should maybe stand up and say 'hey, you shouldn't treat people like this,' which of course didn't work. He escalated into saying he was going to charge people $100 per day that they didn't do the cleaning he had arbitrarily assigned them; I said something like "I don't recognize your authority to do that," and he ran up the stairs, nearly knocking our disabled roommate down the stairs in the process, to scream at me incoherently for a few minutes.

The goal, I think, was to get people he didn't want living there to leave so he could bring in some of his friends, but that's just speculation; obviously we didn't talk much after this. But that's not what finally got me to go get a restraining order. No, this is just standard roommate drama--too many people in a house generates friction. It happens, it was handled badly. Whatever.

But after . . . weeks of this? A month? Eventually he sent a very calm, polite message to the group chat which was meant to seem like an apology but wasn't one, which contained, as a throwaway line, something very much like "If this continues, I will probably murder someone." The line "I will probably murder someone" stuck with me not only because I had grown up with the repeated advice that you should never, under any circumstances, make a death threat--not in jest, not in hyperbole--but also because of that story about the pencil.

So the three of us who were the target of this abuse (the remaining person in the basement was, I am pretty sure, encouraging this behavior) had us a little meeting and agreed that we probably shouldn't just ignore the little murder threat. So we went and filed a police report, just so there would be some official documentation, and then I went to the courts, and applied for a temporary order of protection.²

He hired a lawyer to represent him when the court date appeared, and I don't have that kind of money; the judge declined to extend the temporary order at least partly on the merits of him promising to leave immediately because he "didn't want to live with people who would treat me this way." But he was true to his word, not least because lying in court is an actual crime you can get in trouble for³; his family all showed up to get his stuff out of there that very day, while the rest of us were already interviewing his replacement.

I kept the doors locked for a while, but what a fucking relief it was, when the final box was gone and they were out the door.

So many people had been telling me, in the years leading up to this, that this was my closest friend in Seattle, and I need you to imagine how miserable and how trapped that thought made me feel. It's not a sentiment I would have ever expressed, but, y'know, I've been wrong before. And if this guy is my best friend, how could I possibly expect anyone else to have my back? But I thought, if he was going to murder someone, it would probably be shortly after being served a temporary protective order. So while all this was happening I reached out to some friends and asked if they had a place to crash so I could avoid the knife for a couple days, and they said yes, and were happy to listen to my sleepless explanation of what happened and buy me dinner and, you know, do what friends do. Express an interest. Make sure you're okay.

Someone once told me she hoped we never had a falling out, because I recommended her some great music and it would suck for that music to remind me of her. What surprised me the most about the fallout of Jebediah Murderthreat is how little that matters. There are bands I can't listen to without thinking of the person who showed them to me, but there was a fundamental emptiness in our friendship--it was proximity, and shared interests, and absolutely zero depth. There are lost friendships I have mourned, people whose loss I have felt deeply . . . but Jebediah? Honestly? Whatever.

#essay