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.

Day 84 of 1456

Day 84 of 1456 in trump's America.

I'll be honest: when you take a week off from this shit, it feels really hard to jump back on the wagon. I was barely staying on top of it from a week to week basis. Now that there's twice as much as usual, it's overwhelming. Add that to the fact that I don't even know what these blog post are doing or what they're for, it can be tough to keep your bearings. It's hard keeping your eyes on the prize when you don't even know what the prize is.

And you try to remind yourself that this is one of their tricks: throwing everything at you all the time so you eventually get burned out and let them roll over you.

But I know the solution is simpler than I make it out to be. The initial fault is with my method when I write these. I try to bash in everything that's happened in the last 7 days down to one three hour crash session, without any forethought, notes, or planned structure. In one week – 7 days – that's 168 hours. At the rate this presidency is going, that's somewhere around an average of 336 mind bending developments of a deeper moral horror than most of us would imagine we'd see in our lifetime.

So as far as what to talk about this week, I'm not sure. I've had many thoughts. Impeachment vs. Mike Pence. The Women's March, which was quite possibly the largest coordinated protest in recorded human history. The Muslim travel ban and it's respective record breaking fund raising weekend for the ACLU (6 years worth of fundraising achieved in one weekend). More Russian developments, Godzilla movies, as well as a comparison between Mad Max movies and jihadist suicide bombers that's been itching my head for months even before I started this blog.

So this is my promise to you and me. I'm going to start writing these things sooner than 9:30 pm on a Tuesday night. There's more going on than I can siphon down into one shape in that small of an amount of time, and it's not fair to me to give myself a stroke forcing it, or you to put up with my panic attack ADD topic jumping. These will have shapes and points now. It's been 70 days of practice. Now the wolf is in the building. Getting our shit together starts at home.

Day 70 of 1456

Day 70 of 1456 in trump's America.

We're in the closing days. In less than 72 hours, donald trump will be sworn in as the President of the United States of America.

Ten weeks of typing and I can still barely imagine it. Will the Bible burn his hands? Could lightning strike? I wrote on the internet a couple weeks ago about imagining a scene of a thousand bald eagles descending on the podium to mangle him limb from limb, vicious racist orange blood spewing in fountains in every direction, a black cloud to blot out the sun as they kept coming, secret service powerless to do anything, not that they'd honestly try very hard to stop it, probably.

A process got him there, which means that process is vile. That's the evil tautology.

One of the "plans" I've heard mentioned relates to TV ratings. "Don't watch the inauguration!", they say, "Don't give him the attention!" "Watch something else!", they say. Turn your channel to anything else, to show that your cable works, you're just not giving him the satisfaction. "It'll definitely hurt his feelings if we ignore him really hard. That'll help." I honestly don't know which is worse: that Watching Television The Right Way actually counts as political activism, or that we're going to have a president that plan actually works on. How depressing is it that his poor ratings might actually make him sad, and also he's in charge of every civil service for the next four years? Fuck you, your revolution sucks.

We need to establish a distinction between Actions & Words Really Hard. I'm fairly certain that's the only way we're going to get out of this alive.

There's a quote from Kurt Vonnegut – who I personally put on my list of one of the top 5 smartest human beings the universe has ever known – that I've always had trouble understanding, and unfortunately I feel like I understand it now.

"When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high."

I never bought in to that. I always believed – naively, in retrospect – that artistic effort could do some good. But the truth of the matter is that it depends on someone listening. Those two last words in that sentence should let you know what a futile exercise that would be right now.

I can't speak for a lot of people, but I can say that the possibility that Someone Important Is Listening has crumbled for me. What could anything we do convince anyone in charge to do anything better? They've already gutted healthcare, vaginas, abortions, the intelligence community, conflicts of interests, minorities, sexual consent, nuclear safety, religious tolerance, marriage eqaulity, and the right of the supreme court, and he's not even actually sworn in yet. You got a poem to fix this shit? Something for them to See The Light? Lick my balls.

I have to admit, I'm finding this post a bit harder to write than any other one so far. I am a bad writer, we've established that. But I also feel like there's a lot of things I wish I didn't have to admit. These are teeth I'm pulling.

Like the fact that one of the last things it seems art might be capable of is communicating with people who already agree with it. And I am not usually a fan of circle-jerking jack-off parties. But we've established that Art Pointed At Fixing doesn't actually do anything. I'm not willing to throw out the entire premise absolutely, but I know it doesn't work as well as I thought it did 71 days ago.

But Art cannot march. Art cannot sign petitions. Art Does Nothing. We've established that. Art may be Words Really Hard, but it is not Action. And I've had to come to grips with that.

Or, one of the last things it seems art might be capable of is communicating For people who already agree with it.

Putting into flat words and sounds all the things we know already. And that would be preaching to the choir, which I've always hated and still believe is the problem that got us here in the first place. And now as I write that sentence, I'm back to out of ideas again.

It seems like there's no escape. Is it just good for ignoring problems? That's absurd. That's like telling people the chefs only have crackers. I know better. I've felt better. I've been taken places by things other people have made. Not done. Made. Actions versus words. I know that's a fact. My life and understanding is better for it.

And yet here we are again in the ugly circle. Swirling down a racist black drain. Does the issue stem from people not knowing When they're creating art? Because if you're writing, you're creating art. That might be a clutch solution. What if we saw every long status and yelling as a work of art? If we reminded ourselves that we're not Actually Doing Anything.

I might have to try that. Play the game in my head. Try parsing a long screed – even one I agree with on the tenets – as a work of art. And then try to decipher whether or not they've done a cogent job of explaining themselves. Or an artistic one. If we take away the opinions and stand on its merits of talent, or lack thereof. But whatever you do, we cannot reward them as if they were being proactive or productive. We've established that doesn't work. You don't get a cookie for yelling. You win by doing.

If we start looking at our Yelling as Art instead of Function, we'll realize that there are a lot of really shitty artists out there. No patience or subtlety. No command of the facts or pacing. Most of them can't even manage paragraph breaks, on both sides of the aisle.

Communication got us here. Overestimating communication got us here. We can't keep doing that shit. We can't hurt these people with our TVs from our living room. Guitars won't do it. Pens won't do it. Cameras won't do it. Microphones won't do it. All that's good for is the troops. It's got an amazing reach into the hearts and minds of people who feel the way you do. Or people who might feel the way you do, I'm even willing to go that far. But you also need to know who's too far gone. Those are the ones that need to be beaten with muscle.

Have music and art and writing and poems and sounds and laughter at the rallies. Have them at the tents. Have them on the stages, with the lights and fire. But you can't take it with you. It doesn't count. It's not enough.

We need to establish a distinction between Actions & Words Really Hard. That's the only way we get out of this alive.

Day 63 of 1456

Day 63 of 1456 in trump's America.

Our President is a Piss Fiend.

I'm drunk right now – and sipping wine, so I assume that will continue – so I wanted to be sure to get that sentence down first.

Right now I feel like we're done with questions. "Where do we go from here?" "What does this mean?" "Do we judge him for his sexual proclivities?" This is beside the deeper point. Think right now on how bad he is at keeping secrets. Or, in fact, if this is a secret he felt like keeping. We're either dealing with an intelligence failure, or an absence of shame. Not that piss play is automatically a sinful activity. But objectively, it's up to the character to decide when to reveal that. Or, they don't give a shit if you blow the lid for them.

Our President is a Piss Fiend.

I've always functioned with the assumption that every human being in power is engaging in excesses – sexual or otherwise – that would be beyond the mere mortal pale of simple novelty and enter into the realm of blistering incestuous degrading insanity. This is just a fact, as far as I'm concerned: Most of them have lived in a world of no stop signs. They go beyond anything that a Regular Human with a Regular Job and Regular Responsibilities could possibly begin to imagine. And to be honest, as long as all players involved were within consensual age and within consensual agreement, there's nothing wrong, a priori, with being a Piss Fiend.

Because our President is a Piss Fiend.

But as long as all characters were engaged and expectant with that – there was no Piss Rape, he typed in a sentence in reference to the President of the United States – then there's really nothing Wrong with the Act in Itself. We're talking about looking at it from the Far View. Either he did a bad job of hiding it, or he doesn't care. He's either stupid or a sociopath. Those are our options today. And those have been our options from the beginning. Either everything's changed or nothing has. There's no way I believe for a second that he and this are the most deviant things becoming of men of power, either in worldwide history or in the American Presidency.

In simpler, stupider times, I used to attend a church camp. While I was being forced to sit through one of my two daily sermons that day, the priest said something that has honestly stuck with me, for several, several years. In all of human history, humans haven't invented any new sins. We might see a change in quantity, but the bares bones are there. And they don't change.

Think. Real hard. Over the centuries. Can you honestly look me in the face which is currently your computer screen and tell me with a straight face that you think donald trump is the first man due for the White House who enjoys piss-play? Or anyone with a sexual deviancy. Take your pick. There's rumors that Abraham Lincoln was gay. I'm making a larger point about restraint, so stay with me.

On a social measurement, people probably felt more uncomfortable about homosexuality in 1865 than we do now in 2017 about piss-play. Now take it one step further with me. Compare how long, how many decades, we're still only suspicious of Lincoln for having non-heteronormative tastes, versus trump with his tastes. We haven't even made it to the inauguration yet. If politics is the art of controlling your environment, we're dealing with someone who will either:

A) Be ram-rod by every head of state every day for the next 4 years, either at home or abroad, into doing whatever they want him to do. He probably couldn't beat Kim Jong-Un at checkers at this point.

OR

B) So unimaginably shameless that nothing, no one, nowhere could stop him. He'd probably try to launch nuclear weapons at protesters if they were blocking his motorcade on its way to the golf course.

Because The President is a Piss Fiend.

This is when science fiction comes in handy.

Yeah, the wine's kicking in.

Human beings being so weird that we've already seen things coming.

What does it mean to be so prepared for the next stage that you've already carved out a place for our species in the coming Strange? There are uncertain proofs that we might be the only life form in reproductive intergalactic population. And some of us have already looked ahead, assuming we're still going to be here when all the smoke clears.

Because sci-fi isn't just Technology Literature. It's a glorious optimism, that no matter how bad it might get, some of us will be around to make sure it Keeps Going Again.

We have things happening that we've never considered as possibilities. But like I said, we have to accept the fact that they have happened, but we've lived through them. It's not THAT they're happening. It's that we KNOW about them better than we ever have. And the species will rise to the challenge. A challenge that we gave ourselves. We put this here. And whether we can solve it isn't the question. It's whether we can survive it.

But with what? With whatever we used to get through everything up to this point. Sheer numbers, insanity, a push towards Again.

Our President is a Piss Fiend. We've dealt with weirder. We've survived stupider. Can we do both at the same time? I'd bet we can.

Day 56 of 1456

Day 56 of 1456 in trump's America.

Happy New Year.

We have to start noticing when we're leaving people behind.

There's a reason it's called The Safety Net. It's not really about coddling people to make them lazy. It's about avoiding the social consequences of what happens when we let them hit rock bottom. Desperation is not a manageable resource.

If society is a machine, trust is the lubrication that lets it run. I wish there was a less whimsical metaphor to use, but I'm a shitty writer and you're not paying for this stuff anyway.

Do you know what the FDIC is? Yeah, me either. I have no idea what the letters stand for, but I know one of the things it does. Every bank account in America is guaranteed up to $100,000 dollars in the event of theft or destruction of the bank that your funds are actually held in. Now think of the weight behind that: we can promise that up to that amount of funds are safe in our vault, even if the vault itself is not actually safe. Now that's money of yours that's safe for you to use, and safe for the bank to use.

Panic isn't actually good for markets. If you knew your risk was safe, you'd be willing to risk a lot more, wouldn't you? Excusing the fact that I haven't taken an economics class since high school, I'm well aware that a fair amount of capitalist gains depends on risk. Risking on crazy fucking ideas, and huge insane plans. If people know they're not actually risking "everything", they'll be much more likely to risk more often. Even be able to bounce back and risk again after their first one goes tits up. How many American stories came true after 7 or 8 tries? It's one of those Dreams we all like to jerk ourselves and immigrants off about all the time. And they've happened. I'm not pretending they haven't.

Excusing the fact that I can't remember the last history class I took, I remember hearing a story about welfare. That the Romans invented it. Not because they particularly liked poor people, but because if you gave them a little bread, they wouldn't have to stab senators walking on sidewalks. Most likely I false-remembered some of those facts, but even if most of it's not true, it's enough to use to make my point. Being a rich person who helps poor people isn't just the Right Thing To Do, it can even literally be selfish if you want. It's literally a very stupid thing – in the scale of your own self-preservation – to not do at least a little bit to stop people more poor than you from losing their goddamn minds. You can't wait until Wall Street's been burned to the ground; then no one gets any money. It makes good business sense to help people. We don't even have to bring Right & Wrong into this.

Do you know the heroin addiction fatality rates in the Appalachian range? I don't. Do you know how many cities have worse lead in their pipes than Flint, MI? I don't. I just heard about both of those things this week. What can we do about those things besides just mention them and add the statistics to the mnemonic vault of misery we're all carrying in our heads every second of every day now? I don't know. I do know a lot of people voted because they felt left behind. They made irrefutably the worst presidential vote in the 240 year history of this country – I'm not disputing that – but I want to repeat here something I've mentioned in conversation and give it some more detail: Other than Hillary voters, EVERY vote this year was a protest vote. That's how you got people doing things like switching their support from Bernie Sanders to Gary Johnson, even though they had nothing in common with each other politically. I've already mentioned a couple weeks ago that American voters have never been that great voting with facts anyway, but this year definitely wasn't going to do it.

No one has ever cared what trump has had to say, they've only ever cared that he was saying what they wanted to hear. You wouldn't have been able to bring a supporter in and make him look at two different trump speeches and expect him to be shocked or dismayed at any inconsistencies or dishonesty. These were abandoned people.

It doesn't matter that statistically they'd be more likely to hold a CEO position, or that statistically they'd be more likely to be treated fairly by the cops, or any other of the myriad other aspects of white privilege that they have access to – I'm not disputing that white privilege exists – what matters is what's in their face and how they feel. Their selfishness has damned us all. Their stupidity is entirely their fault. But the first thing that happened was that they were shafted by people with more money than them. Which is always the first step. Then the people on top find someone for the people on the bottom to blame. Then everything burns.

I feel like the only hope we might have is how unbearably bad he's going to be at this job. He's not actually going to fix any of these problems. He wouldn't know how to, and no one he's hiring has any interest in doing that either. Things are going to get bad, in a hundred hundred ways that I can't predict, and a couple dozen that I can, depending on how rotten my mood is. But I still feel like if we sign on for Division, we're playing their game. I feel like that's definitely true. They're banking on us still hating each other, 56 days after the fact. That's the only opening we've got. An angry orange man lied to them and got what he wanted and left them in the dust. These stupid, sad, angry, selfish people. People who still aren't going to be helped if we kick them to the curb. I'll remind you they can all still vote. We still have to keep this at only 1,456 days.

And I have gay friends that I'd never ask to bridge the divide. They're too scared, and angry, and have too much to lose. And I have minority friends that I'd never ask to bridge the divide. They're too scared, and angry, and have too much to lose. I'm a White Guy. I've got about the only chance to out of anyone to be a Secret Agent.

This isn't White Savior shit. This is functional responsibility. Each of us has something we're good at, something we can use to fight The Plague. It just so happens that apparently Skin Tone is a tool in the tool box, now. I'm the only person that most of the people of the Other Side would even tolerate an opening for even 5 seconds. We can't imagine a lot of patience happening for someone else on Our Team, could we? Imagine if a minority came into a lion's den and tried to bridge the divide. They'd probably be ignored, best case scenario. We can't ask that. They've already had so much taken from them. We can't expect them to give anymore.

I'm white and straight. I haven't lost anything yet. I've got shit to spare. That's who goes on the front lines now.

Day 49 of 1456

Day 49 of 1456 in trump's America.

Merry Christmas.

When I was home this weekend with my family, I felt like I was in a bubble. A stupid, bright lit bubble where no one could hurt us. I think about the genetic draw I won – being Greek – getting a complexion white enough to fit in after 80 years of assimilation by people who came before me, but dark and swarthy enough that someone would believe me if I told them I'm not a W.A.S.P. And then I'd just be a pinch exotic. But probably still "one of the good ones", if I didn't make too much noise.

All my family is very well off, very well educated, and pretty well liberal without the effort, if that makes any sense. We don't have a lot of marchers in my family. No one got beaten by cops. No boat rockers. Everything under The American Dream we pretty much pass with flying colors. Hit all the marks. And I love my family very much. But I was also thinking of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". I've only read it once, so I'm willing to bet I didn't catch the right gist of it. But I think now about how frightening it must have been for the other characters to put up with Stephen Dedalus. Watching him float farther and farther away. Not knowing what he's doing or why. Being scared of what's in his head, and what he might do to himself.

I have this uncomfortable feeling lately that every tine I see someone important to me, that might be the last time I see them. My imagination's running away with me. Secret arrests in our future. Hate crimes. Not knowing. And I feel bad when I think those things. Like I'm doing the work for all these terrible people above us, who get something out of that fear and paranoia. It's what they want. It's what they've run on this whole time. Being scared does them a favor.

And how do you flip that switch back? How do you turn the corner? What's the only thing that can literally take hold of your innards and rewire your brain?

Carrie Fisher died today. I've made it a point to try to make these posts as objective as possible. Try to have no outside reference sometimes. But this is an exception I'll make right now, because it's worth it.

I thought so much today about what she meant to us at first. In Star Wars, it was just a character she played. Someone who you don't fuck around with who's also a girl. Before her in 1977, I can't really think of too many examples. And what Star Wars has meant to billions of people at this point, and the part she played in that. Think of that number. Billions. Over decades. Watching the exact same movie. But never the same movie, because there were billions of ways it has been seen.

A work of art has never once changed between partakings. But it has literally never been the same from the last time you partook. Think of that.

And remakes aren't a crime either. The human brain is going to take whatever lessons it can find from wherever it can find them. You literally cannot predict what one thing is going to do to one person. No matter how shitty or critically garbage you might think a thing is. You don't know the cord it will strike.

And whatever message was delivered the first time – in any work of art – did well that time. And it was everything we needed. And it meant everything to the people who heard it when it was made because they were the ones it was trying to reach. And they are beautiful. And a credit to our race and every part of it that's good.

But with Carrie Fisher dying, another point was made clear in my head.

In the world we're going to be living in – the one that started 49 days ago and will be inaugurated in 24 days – it's like the mental armory's turning to dust. All these artist who spoke for us and spoke to us are dead. It's been a holocaust of artistic talent, on every front, for a straight 12 months. And obviously it's not going to get better, whatever the fuck that means. Time strikes on forever. We will lose more people that created things that made us happy. That's a fact.

I wonder what the future would've looked like for us if we still had these people around to help our hearts, to make us steel for what we might have to do.

It's like all the fates conspired to not only vote in misery but also take away our ability to withstand it. Our Soul Generals are dead.

Art speaks to you. Art speaks for you. It tells us things we want to hear. It tells us things we need to hear. It tells us things we have to hear. Things we wish we didn't have to understand. Art drowns out things you don't want to hear. It vice-squeezes your blood vessels and shoots you in the head and you die. It puts things in a language you didn't know you needed to hear things in.

And so many of the people who died this year were so weird. So amazingly weird. Coke heads and cross-dressers and sex monsters and gross, rude, terribly immature and beautiful people. So wonderfully weird that the color gray makes me want to cry when I look at how stupid and useless their gravestones will inevitably look. Hunter S. Thompson had his ashes shot out of a fist-cannon with fireworks. That's close to what a dozen people who died this year deserve at their funerals – at least the first night.

Which brings me to my next point, using Thompson as an awkward ham-fisted segue. I've seen people whine about how unfortunate we are that he's not here anymore. That he'd be able to put this all into words for us. Maybe. He would've been 79 by now. You think he would've been able to do that well? I've bought every word the man's written down. Even the collection of his personal letters. I loved him. I still do. If you've read ten minutes of him, you can tell he's soaked in to my fingers if you read this stuff every week. I owe him so much. Gratitude doesn't begin to describe it.

But I'd also be disappointed if I kept on loving him the way I had been. Does David Bowie speak for you forever? Is there nothing you can do beyond the gifts he brought us? If the finger points to the moon, are you the monkey looking at the finger?

So much Weird has died. We have to cover the spread.

I wish all my dead heroes were alive. And we were all hanging out together. And drinking tea forever while we all pet cats and take turns flirting with Joan of Arc and Janis Joplin. But we're not. And we won't. That will literally never happen.

Many things are old now. It's the same story. The same hatred. The same racism. The same problem. People hating people who don't look the same as their people. But some of it's new. It's a new world. New words. Farther consequences. Bigger stakes. Faster ripples. More synapses connecting farther with more electricity. There will – without a doubt – be things and ideas and possibilities that the Old Gods could not have possibly put in to words in their wildest dreams. That's just how the species rolls. The only ones who could try to understand it will be the ones who were there for it. Ashes to ashes. Leave the dust in the dust. I know they had no idea what was going on around them either. If it had made sense to them, they wouldn't have made the art they used to try to make sense of it.

They spoke for us before. It would be unfair to them to ask them to do it forever. And it would be unfair to us as well. To expect that we could not reach the heights they pointed us toward.

To speak for ourselves now. We have no other option. Everyone else is dead.