Day 1295 of 1456

Day 1295 of 1456 in trump's America.

Cops killed George Floyd.

I have a friend from high school who’s a cop who broke contact with me several years ago when I made a joke about cops getting their feelings hurt because of a song by Beyoncé. He reached out again a few months ago and I never got back to him. I have to admit, it’s because of days like today. I don’t want to know that he’s a cop, because best case scenario is that he’s one of the ones who avert their eyes at this stuff. I knew this dude; he’s certainly not a villain, but he’s definitely not a hero. And I know he’s in a job that attracts way too many of the former and apparently none of the latter. I’d rather just sit here and assume he disappoints me, rather than check in and confirm it. Because I know if he spoke up – as an officer – and took a stand against the cops that murdered George Floyd, he’d be famous overnight – the one cop in the nation with a conscience! Step right up! See this amazing marvel of modern society! – and then his name would find its way to me, and I could say, “Hey, I know that guy. Good job, dude.” But I’m not going to hold out much hope.

Because cops killed George Floyd.

I haven’t watched the video. I really don’t feel like it. You might say that impedes my ability to be objective in a situation like this. Luckily I’m not a real journalist and you’re not paying for this, so I don’t have to really care about sad kindergarten ideas like “both sides of the argument.” Cops killed a human being. He died because of them. Those are the facts. If you need a video to convince you, you go watch it. If you didn’t already know that they do this kind of stuff before today, I don’t really know what to tell you. I’m talking now only to the people who already know this stuff happens, who have already known, for years, that cops kill black people. If you weren’t already convinced, I’m not going to waste time here trying to turn you. I can write off anyone I want as a lost cause here, I don’t have an editor. Once again, not a real journalist. If you just turned 18 yesterday and you can finally unlock the “mature” settings on YouTube and this is your first rodeo, welcome! Cops kill black people, constantly. They did it again in Minneapolis yesterday. That’s what we’re talking about right now. Now you’re all caught up. How does that make you feel? Since you’re only 18, I’m going to assume you can’t drink about it, which I am sorry about. Unless you’re a sociopath and feel nothing, in which case, again, fuck off. No one owes you anything. No one needs to meet you half way. There is no other side to this.

Because cops killed George Floyd.

These are facts. And those are our two options, from now on. They have always been the only two options, everyday: Either you care, or you don’t. You can’t “kind of care.” You can’t “care, if…” You can’t “care depending on what kind of person he was.” You either care that cops killed a person – and that people are actually shocked and surprised that the cops were at least actually fired for once this time – or you don’t. And we have no obligation to “try to sway you otherwise” if you don’t. Go play with crayons on the railroad tracks. The adults with working emotional capacities are talking.

Hi everyone. How’s everyone doing? Rough day, huh? Yeah, I know. How many of you are actually shocked? How many of you even remember what shock feels like? How many of you are unsure whether you’ll ever call the cops for anything ever again? Yeah, me too. I’m sure that’ll pass, which is still kind of gross, but still probably true. How do we take a stand? How do we draw a line in the sand and say “no more?” Every time something like this happens and The Last Straw still doesn’t show up to the party, you just get more and more disappointed in yourself to even want to still count yourself as a Human Being. Can’t we switch teams or something? Sometimes I laugh at people who claim to identify as a wolf, or an owl, or a bear or a unicorn, but fuck, today I get it. This is what we’re putting up with, being a member of this species. This is the kind of world we decided on. Not WE we, like us reading and writing this, but you know what I mean. You know what I’m trying to say, hopefully. We have to share living space with sacks of wet meat who “aren’t quite sure if it should’ve escalated like that but those cops have a tough job and they know what they’re doing.” Ugh. Gross. Get a hobby. Something besides kissing ass, because you’re helping people die in your free time by going along with it.

Because cops killed George Floyd.

And they won’t stop unless we make them stop. That’s the final conclusion. No one’s coming to rescue us. We decide when this ends. There is no ultimate justice, there is no final judgment. People get away with murder unless non-murderers decide to do something to make them stop. The cops were immediately fired for once – not “put on paid administrative leave,” but actually unemployed – and that’s a start. I almost said, “good start,” but that first word doesn’t really feel like an adjective that applies anywhere in these situations. We decide how far this goes, both this time and from now on.

And I’m only interested in talking to people who already think it’s wrong. I don’t really think it’s my job to talk you into caring about other people. Your parents probably should’ve done a better job raising you? I don’t know what else to tell you. More people are going to die while we waste time trying to get you to see how bad things have gotten, everywhere. If you don’t already know, if the videos haven’t already worked, I doubt this stupid pile of angry words I wrote while I was sitting in my underwear are going to do the trick for you. I’m not interested in talking to you if you don’t already care. I only want to spend my time with people who know how bad it’s gotten. I have no inclination to talk to anyone wondering if he deserved it. I have no desire to talk to anyone who needs to be convinced that people don’t deserve to be crushed to death. I have no patience with people who still aren’t quite sure if people deserve to survive their encounters with authority figures.

I don’t need to hear from people who think it’s important to know what country someone came from or why before you stick them in a cage. The cage is the issue. I don’t care what kind of person George Floyd was on Sunday before he died on Monday. The death is the issue. We don’t have time to try to reach out to people who think like that – that the system works and if someone gets snuffed out it because they must have deserved it – because they are lost children who think there is a greater justice above us who takes care of everything. There is not. There is no reaching those people. And even if it that great justice up above was real, I’d still spit on it if it meant we had to let cops crush black men’s necks under their knees until they stopped breathing.

Because that’s how cops killed George Floyd. Now we get to decide if he’s the last one.

Day 1288 of 1456

Day 1288 of 1456 in trump's America.

1204 days. That's how long it's been since I wrote one of these. How cute was I, thinking that taking a week off was rude, and promising to really buckle down and provide you all with quality product from now on every week. What a mar-oon, as Bugs would say.

What an eternity these three years have been. What a world. What an unimaginable runaway train of decrepit disgust and unhinged racial hatred and phlegm spat out from walking rotted zombies in suits who want to have their way with your daughters and brown children. I need a larger laptop to write all this; I'm going to hurt this one.

But we push on, as best as we can do. Isn't that the motto? Well, no. A motto is a cute sentence. Something we say for luck. Some kind of heave-ho. That is not good enough for our pestilence. We are starved and desiccated puppets of dry meat walking a desert wasteland begging for lifeboats in the Dead Sea where the salt has killed everything and the sun has burnt our eyes and left them to melt down our fallow cheeks. God has abandoned us.

I always knew he would, the sadist. All that stuff about mercy and love was just humanity creating god in their most hopeful and admirable image. We came up with "fair" and "justice," the universe didn't. No one above us provides us with decency. We are the only market, customers, producers, and managers of "Hope for the Future." There is no "best we can do," there is "all we can manage right now." One of those sentences implies a choice, and that's not on our ride right now.

I'd like to give a nice summation of the last three years. I wish I was that good of a writer, but I'm not. One person alone wouldn't be anyway, so I guess I'll try not to feel too bad. But nostalgia is a poison fool's game anyway. There is no past right now, there is only aiming to maintain the present and future. In my game – a weirdo yelling by himself in front of a laptop someone else threw out – there is only the now. There is only the levee that you try to keep built around your heart by listening to Beethoven and typing a thousand words into the bottomless hole of the internet's abyss. Somehow it makes me feel better. Right now we don't really ask why, we're just glad for the fun where we can get it.

What will the future space humanoids think of us? Once my writing is inevitably discovered as visionary and genius after my death, will they be able to understand what it was like during this time? Maybe that's more likely who I should be talking to; life forms that need a reference after the fact, or maybe even regular humans who need one now. That was one of the things I read in one of these older essays I was perusing before I did this one: The idea of preaching to the choir, or not, and hoping that someone who doesn't already agree with you might find their mind changed, or how you could do that. I'm fairly positive these screeds aren't going to make an actual difference; I'm not a decision maker, and I'm not friends with anyone who is. This isn't really about making a difference. If it was, I'd be doing something else. I certainly wouldn't have saved this laptop from the goddamn landfill. I'm not writing this for money, I have no deadlines, no one expects anything out of me. This is just for solidarity, even if it's only with myself. With the person I used to be, or want to be, or still am but it's hard to remember that I'm not crazy. And maybe it's solidarity with someone else who stumbles on this mess. You're not crazy either. Then it does make a difference. I can work with that.

Before I go, a final personal word, the kind of which I always promise I wouldn't subject you to. The one major personal life change I've done in the last three years that I will brag about insufferably until the day I die is that I quit smoking and drinking. If any of you have tried, yes, thank you, I know you know how hard that shit is. And now getting back into writing – especially these shits every week – which will require such a deeper investment in my world around me, doing all that totally sober; you're right, I am a hero.

I think it gives me a strange insight to everything that's been going on in the last 3 years that have lasted the last 20 years. You see, when I first started putting fingers to keys, over a decade and a half ago, I had just finished engulfing every word that Hunter S. Thompson had ever written. I'm talking...everything. Books, magazines, stories, articles, letters, letters about his letters, grocery lists, goddamn fucking everything. It's all very good and exciting, I won't lie. It was the first suggestion, by anyone, that anyone could write. It was gross and weird and over the top and he certainly hadn't paid anyone to teach him how to do it, that much was obvious. It's like lightning in your veins to a kid who reads too much who thinks he's got nothing to turn around and contribute. It didn't have to be "good and right," it just had to be fast and exciting. Someone would want to read it. And even if They would not, You always could. You'd know You wrote it, and that was always good enough for You. You made something. You'd gotten something from your brain out of your brain. It was like blowing the steel bars into exploded shrapnel off a prison cell with your thunderously flatulent ass every day of your life. It's fun. Even when it's bad, it's fun. Even when it's filled with hate and despair and you don't know if the human race has a Tomorrow, it's still fun. Every time.

And anyone who peruses the Good Doctor's output will of course notice the copious ungodly inhuman and unstoppable amounts of illicit drug consumption. And boy, that part was fun too. It's drugs, they're great. Everyone knows it. I won't go into too much detail about the animal kingdom, but suffice to say we're not the only species who likes getting mentally fucked up. It's a good way to pass the time. Sometimes the best way. But, like I do with most things, I got bored with it. Just dropped them both – smoking and drinking – like they were bad habits or something. I'll admit, this was somewhere around my 27^th try to quit smoking, but I guess it finally took. The drinking part was effortless. It's been well over a year, for both. Not at the same time, obviously. I'm only human. If I tried to do both at the same time I'm sure I'd be writing this in jail on a nicotine withdrawal influenced murder charge.

I mention all this because this present history we're living through might be the greatest most necessary time to spend every waking second completely goddamn blitzed beyond all shadow of rational functionality. Why wouldn't we? It's a nightmare beyond anything we've ever seen. Who wouldn't want to sleep through it? I don't know if I can blame anyone. We haven't left our houses in two months because the air is slow poison that in a fortnight will make you drown in your lungs while standing on dry land, and that's the good news. The bad news is that we're all being sent back to our respective salt mines because all the billionaires are jealous of the one trillionaire on planet Earth so they need the invisible pimp hand of capitalism to slap us all back to work so they can use our mangled choking bodies and shriveled grandparent's corpses as a ladder to catch up to him. Who wouldn't despair?

But to despair is the ultimate sin. They're counting on that. Nothing would make them happier. They know nothing of beauty and happiness. They know nothing of Beethoven. So they do their best to make everything as shitty as they are, to bring us to their level, and then beat us with experience. That's always been their trick. We can never beat them at their own game where they've got home court advantage. They want us all fucked up and numb and miserable and cynical and shitty and ready to bend over and take it because it's coming anyway so why fight it.

What if we took spectacular care of ourselves? What if we got high because we wanted to and not because we had to? What if exercising, reading a book, and checking in with your friends was like you were shitting on the president chest? What if we jerked off into the abyss instead of gazing into it? It certainly can't jerk-off back also into us, to butcher a phrase.

I think I'll leave you all on that image. It's certainly not going to get any better than that for now. It might be the greatest thing I've ever written in my life so far, but we'll see what tomorrow brings. Hopefully more endorphins and serotonins. These are rebellion chemicals now, which automatically makes them way cooler than just normal day-to-day feel good ones. This is pleasure with a purpose. We're keeping everyone afloat, and that starts with yourself first. It's a full time job, with no pay or benefits. It's the best one I've ever had.