Day 1449 of 1456

Day 1449 of 1456

I've voted. I've done all I can do. It's in God's hands now.

And if God's track record is any indication, that's not saying much. It's also a bullshit position to think that voting was all I could've done. At the very least I could've kept this dark alley of a webpage more regularly updated. No one was even making me do anything, there was no responsibility. This was my idea, I liked doing it, and I still couldn't cut the mustard. It's not even a 60 minute job, and I couldn't find the gumption, motivation, discipline and drive to make it happen. I don't know about anyone else, but I deserve whatever I get.

It's possible I'm being too hard on myself – escaping from a domestic abuse relationship will do that. I know I've never offered any personal anecdotes in these 4 years, but I figured now was a good time. And I don't offer this up as fishing for pity, or even as an excuse for my lackluster update schedule. But mostly just to say that I won't be making an update next week – planning ahead my gaps counts as professionalism – because next week is the vote results. All the early votes get counted, all the walk-up votes happen. Everything happens.

If I'm being real honest, things feel now exactly like I thought they would, 4 years ago. I admit I didn't anticipate the quarter of a million citizens dead from a contagious airborne plague – past half way to the number of American casualties in World War Two, and we're not even properly in to winter yet – but the general vibe of unstoppable racial anxiety, execution chamber dread for minorities of every class, gender, and foreign heritage, and a natural feeling of pendulum-blade murder of a civil war swinging above our heads, yeah, that checks out. The only real chance we have right now is that the American people have the capacity to learn from their past mistakes, so you'll forgive me if I start battening down the hatches now, instead of waiting until next week.

If next week doesn't turn out the way it needs to, this page won't be doing much good. If things DO turn out the way they have to, well then, this page can still fade away anyway, just under better circumstances. But if the real nightmare sets in, at the very least I'll have to start updating more often than just once a week. I just mean, one way or another I'll have to move beyond what I've got going on here. Something with a more regular style. Something with some verve to the writing. Something that cares. Not just a spot check on whichever fortnight I feel like getting my shit together. I'm not good for much besides writing. But that, I can do. I knew how to once, and if things go South I'll need to find out how to again. I don't know if you've heard, but I'm a survivor of domestic abuse. I have surpassed and Gone Beyond. I have seen the promised land, and it is good. Anything that has happened to me so far, I have withstood. Anything after that is child's play.

There is nothing anyone can do to stop me. Someone tried once, and I defeated them. From now on, everyday is a day I was told I don't deserve, that I would never have.

And now there is a very real chance that things will get worse. Very worse, very soon. For everyone you have ever met or passed on the sidewalk. Even the winners will die on the inside. That's how a national tragedy works, it rots everything to the core. In terms of "everything" and "core" that previously you could never imagine. This is Real Poker. Lives and entire legacies are at stake. No one thinks about France's Rights of Man without seeing the guillotine in their mind, no one hears about German engineering without thinking of cattle-car trains. If we fuck this up it embarrasses every good thing America has ever done, going back in time to personally shit in George Washington's wooden mouth right as he's making the Christmas crossing at the Delaware River. We'd have to redeem this entire country ourselves one day at a time with our bare hands, back at square one. It wouldn't be impossible, other peoples have done it before. But I'd much rather find out in roughly 168 hours from now that hey, we don't have to do it. That would be nice. But the future might be asking a lot from us all very soon.

We find out in a week what happens. We find out if we decided to "give them one more chance," or if we climbed down the fire escape and made a run for it. What could make someone ask for seconds of this? What could make someone stay, after all this?

It's not that they think their lives are great. They know what they're dealing with. They know they get punched in the face three square meals a day. But they think leaving is even worse. When they leave their front door, they don't see the world you do. They think everything is on fire, and it will kill them and their babies if they set foot out into it. There is only the gutter. There is only death. Slow and painful and hungry and cold, and staying stuck next to someone who thinks they're on top at least feels better, because you also trick yourself into thinking you're on top with them. And that's better than dying a slow shriveled death. Because you can't think anyone is out there for you. If you thought there was a net you would've used it by now. It doesn't matter if there is one, you're not going to see it.

Your forethought goes away, your plans die, you lose track of time and future and past and now, all you think about is keeping your immediate area as stress minimized as possible. Only minimized, because stress free has become impossible. Good days and bad days, nothing to do but keep kicking and hoping. Sometimes the thick oil lines creep in to take you, sometimes they stay farther away and you can squeeze a few breaths of fresh air.

Every single victim of abuse thinks they aren't strong enough to escape by themselves, and I can tell you that they are 100% right. No one can free themselves. I certainly didn't. I needed cops, trained movers, a legal advocate, and the human friends who first told me that what I was going through wasn't normal. Every time someone thinks they can't do it alone, they're right. They won't be able to. None of us do. Not for anything. Not escaping domestic abuse, or even just waking up in the morning and going to work without blowing your brains out all over your boss' nice blue tie. Everyone needs someone. Even cabin-living bomb-mailing maniacs talk to the critters of the earth.

The only way out of this is to be there for them. And that is a hard ask. That is not easy. They are meth heads. They are stupid racist hicks. They are not readers. They are the worst of us. All these things are true. They have abandoned what is best in us and will quite possibly curse an entire nation out of their spite. It is so easy to hate them. They don't deserve our help. They don't deserve the future, and the planet can soar on into the galaxy without them. They have insulted our Muslim and queer brothers and sisters in staggering, incessant, unimaginable ways. They have taken lives and destroyed families. I'm not looking for solutions to help them, I'm looking for solutions to help us. There is only stopping the cycle, or ignoring it as it spins harder and harder. The things that got us here will not dissolve on their own, left in the dark. The dark is where they grow. They're like mushrooms that grow into lynching trees.

And if this election ends the wrong way, they will be our enemies. That's irrefutable. I don't want to say anyone is beyond saving, but if trump wins another 4 years of this shit, there will be people out there who will need more immediate help than They do. That's just a question of allocation of resources. You have to prioritize, that's all.

I'm not asking we forgive them. They've made no appeasements, and have asked for no forgiveness. I just know that if the sun rises next week and we do come out on top – and I'll be gloating about it, don't worry – those people will still be there. They'll still need rescuing. Otherwise they become the next abusers. That's always how it works. Those are literally our only two options. Take the opening and stop the cycle by trying to save people before they "deserve" to be saved, or start the clock and grab some popcorn, because it'll all come right back around again.

People saved me, so I know it's possible. I've been through a lot of shit. We all have. We're probably going to be through a lot more. Unless the rapture ascends us all on next Tuesday night, we're going to be in for some shit. That's how life works, win or lose. Not the best of all possible Novembers, or inauguration January, or anytime after that will the hurting stop. Not if you give a shit. And that always hurts. It only stops hurting when you quit. Your only other option is to keep caring the whole time, right up until the light goes out. And that's the best option. That way you really only die once.

But we have been through many things. And now we are here for One Of Them. A thing that people will talk about later. It's really happening. It's alive and in front of us. If we get through this, it'll only be the same way we got through all the other dirty stupid useless valleys that our species has ever gotten ourselves lost in.

There's a very real possibility that this will be the worst winters of our lives. And that's the good version. Either this winter will be the worst, or it'll turn out to be the first of many, only the 4th worst because we're just getting started. We'll find out if January is the beginning of the rebound or the cliff.

But I can't tell if my brain is broken or impervious but I'm still putting my chips on us, no matter which way next week falls. Or at least, betting it all on myself. I don't know how far I can trust all the rest of you, but there's something strange about being through an unimaginable and long term emotional tragedy that makes you know exactly where you stand on a lot of things. I'm running on a lot more optimism than one should rightfully expect, the way things are & have been, personally and nationally. Most of my memories aren't of the horror I escaped, but of the people who helped me get out. And they're squishy blood filled humans just like the rest of us. And I've always been on the right side of history with my words or spirit or beliefs or whatever joke of a name you want to call these Nice and Useless Thoughts, but I've only recently come into the new school of thinking that I'm capable of anything. Giving a shit in your heart has been easy, but you never feel like you've got anything to actually offer. But Being There For Someone is criminally underrated. It's immediate, and god's blessings upon our technology, but it means now there are even more chances than ever to check in with someone. Least excuses ever. And that shit saves lives. And luckily I'm still here to hassle you with this bullshit because of it, because someone checked in on me. Lucky you. Lucky us. We have each other.

Day 1414 of 1456

Day 1414 of 1456

Good god, 42 days. That's all that's left. Then the term "trump's America" ceases to apply, either by trump's defeat in the elections, or the dissolution of America. I know in my life I've tried not to awfulize with my shitty imagination, and admittedly right now I do feel the old impulse to hope that maybe I'm overstating things, or being dramatic. To rein it in. But I think now I – and a lot of us – have the opposite problem. Have had it for a while: things are even worse than we've been thinking.

I know the natural tendency to de-escalate tragedy in your mind – I've been an on-stage actual comedian, that's half the job. Twain himself says that "against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." So I know the verve with which we push on, sometimes it's the best trick we have. But that can also lead us to sheer unstoppable ignorance when things are going apocalyptically wrong. We have a tendency to sow and plow our fields in the sheer horrific rain of brimstone, expecting happy little flowers to sprout up tomorrow, someday. It's the closest thing to schizophrenia we get.

I admit there's not much else to say right here but to just jump to the fact that your tax dollars are currently paying to force-sterilize immigrant refugees, as if minority women were just boxes of Neapolitan ice cream on a conveyor belt leading towards a modern American Mengele with a rusty melon baller in one hand and a gleaming American flag waving the in other. Genocide has too many syllables. It doesn't shock as deeply for effect. This is Race-Rape. By God, if you won't let us put a white baby in your womb then you won't get one at all. Yeah, I admit that might be the phrase to describe it. New horrors require new words to help pin them down. That's the first lesson.

The only thing left right now that possibly crosses my mind is to try to express how far this all will reach. This is history book level shit. Going on right now. Hearing about it is automatic complicity. Think of it like the other side of the coin of that Catholic judgment ruling on innocent ignorance: If some aboriginal tribe in the middle of nowhere hasn't heard about the flowing bearded goofy-headed christ yet, and one of them happens to die before The Good Word reaches them, well it's not his fault he was born so geographically inaccessible, and he's just got to walk the Good Deed treadmill in afterlife limbo for a few millennia, and then he'll be headed right on up to the big house. But, if while on this plane of existence, he hears about The Big News and chooses to reject it, that's when the real afterlife trouble starts for him.

These blood soaked nightmare tragedies going on now are just like that. Every race of people, in every country on earth, every year of the future, every school building, and every planet & race of people after the inevitable exodus to the stars, will be reading forever & ever about the literal hell on Earth we've made with our own proud little grubby human hands and fingers dripped in viscera from unchecked surgical torture. They'll be reading about what we did when we found out. And that is where we will live, forever and ever. When the untold unimaginably numbered denizens of the future worlds stand mouths agape and weeping horrified at the dried bloody stuck together pages of history we've written, the only thing they'll be able to do – in lieu of killing themselves on the spot right there in the library – will be to hopefully somehow turn to the next page and try to find stories somewhere of someone who tried to stop it at the time. Just something to keep them going, reading about us, their past, in our future they're living in. It's not a question of whether we succeed or not – we're already here now, look around. On some certain measurements, we've obviously already failed. I wouldn't presume to redeem the present. That boat sailed on a sea of blood. The only imagery I have is to somehow redeem the time that will come after us.

Day 1316 of 1456

Day 1316 of 1456

I don’t even want to say “in trump’s America” anymore. It’s insulting, to everybody.

What redeems us here? What is the final game? How does this all shake out?

The ultimate show and tell here was about letting someone (usually me) know exactly what’s happening here. To try and untangle something. To get at least a little certainty. I’m not dumb or vapid enough to become cynical and say that certainty is impossible, but it’s certainly tricky.

I know that I love my neighborhood, that’s one certainty. There are so many lives going on around me, loud ones, that I’ll never understand. Part of me wonders if I ought to write something deep to report on them, to make sure they’re not forgotten. But I feel like they don’t need me. As if I’m incidental, which I am. “Hey, now your lives are being written about, now they’re important!” What a crock of shit.

They don’t even bother me when I’m trying to read. If it gets so loud that I can’t concentrate, that means it was something important enough to break my concentration. Someone a house or two down is working with power tools on a piece of wood, building something. I don’t even need or want to look and see what they’re making, I’m just glad someone nearby has a project, something they’re looking forward to completing. Something with an eye to the future. Stuff like that is small miracle magic.

Sometimes it can be really hard to stay angry all the time. But I think that’s also due to the fact that sometimes you can get stuck thinking that anger is the only right emotion for what we’re all going through. That it’s either anger or self-pity, those are the only two options.

Far be it from me to tell anyone to not feel angry right now. I’ve been riding that wave for one thousand three hundred and sixteen days. It hurts. I’m not telling you not to hurt. I’m just saying that you don’t have to feel like you let yourself down if you occasionally give yourself moments to feel something besides anger. Speaking to myself, I know I have trouble with that sometimes.

You can stick a knife in your heart and drag a line down to your crotch and pull your guts out and fall front side first onto a pile of burning coals – not to prove that you care to someone else, but just to prove it to yourself – and think it counts as doing something. And, like I said, speaking from experience, it feels good. Even great sometimes.

How do you let go while still holding on? How do you stop an enemy without hating them? There has to be a way to cure poison without drinking more poison. Because this needs to stop. Everything we’re seeing everyday cannot continue. It literally can’t. I don’t mean it’s bad for the economy, or it’s degrading, or embarrassing politically on an international scale. All those things are true, but I mean it feels like the whole human race won’t have a future unless we get this figured out. Unless we unlock this paradox. This is for everything we’ve ever done and for everything we’re ever going to do. There will be no more, unless we get through this. There is no future in this.

I don’t think I can love cops. I feel like it would be preposterous to even try. Is that strength? Is that weakness? Because a lot of them are the enemy. That’s a fact. We literally need to get rid of them in order to survive. That’s the truth of the matter. How do we grow from these ashes? I know that it’s possible, I know that’s how things work – that the natural cycle of new out of the death of the old is how everything works – but I still never believe it until it happens.

How do you pump something other than hot blood in your veins? How does a burned out street give birth? How do you get an entire city to stop being what it has been? How do you do that in a country?

I don’t know. I don’t know these things. I don’t know how you destroy something without also destroying a part of yourself. That’s been the only trick I’ve known, but it can’t last. I have to learn how to build while building. I don’t know how to get there, but it feels like the only solution.

Day 1309 of 1456

Day 1309 of 1456 in trump’s America.

“Abolish the police” was not a phrase that I ever thought could hold any real political weight in my lifetime. It was part of the utopian cloud of phrases I thought about, like Galactic Federation or Dissolving Capitalism. It’s strange how a time lived with so much violence could also float on a current of so much hope, all at the same time. Combine that with the fact that never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that anything that happened in Minnesota would be impetus for it all. History was like a thing that happened around the edges of the Midwest, and we’d just sit quietly, hoping to be invited.

We burned down a police precinct. That has literally never happened in American history. When has Minnesota been recorded as being first for any kind of justice action, on anywhere near the same caliber, in all its 162 year lifespan? Other than a handful of Bob Dylan albums, and being the only state to not vote Republican in 1984, “Causin’ Trouble” has never really been our state motto. Either that’s how bad things have gotten, or Minnesota is ahead of the curve of something for once, compared to the rest of the country. Either possibility is hard to comprehend.

And now we’re going to defund the police. We’re going to take away their toys. Serious, sober, boring politicians are talking about putting communities back in the hands of community members. Something that has literally only been done once in American history – in 2013, when Camden, New Jersey did what we are trying to do. Keeping in mind that Minneapolis does not have different problems than Camden had, but it does have more than 5 times the population. This is a Major Metropolitan City, one of the top 50 biggest cities in the country. I haven’t read much of the results from Camden – again, not a real journalist, no one’s paying me to write this, and you are getting what you pay for – but a cursory glance shows a significant drop in most of their violent crime since then.

I’ll tell you what I am reading – and since no one’s reading this, I can safely vent about the facts without being self-conscious that someone might think I’m literarily virtue signaling – and that’s two books, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Both started about 5 days before George Floyd was murdered. Yeah, I know, serendipitous, right? Apparently the last couple of weeks is all my fault. I did not know that the universe was using my personal reading list as a setup for its punchlines. If I had known, I would have started something more genteel, like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Gentleman’s Guide to the Golden Age of Blowjobs.

I’m not going to stretch this bullshit out any further than I need to. This is still only supposed to be fun for just me, so I’ll just get to the closing statement. One of the books – Invisible Man – is about a never-named black main character who is constantly seen by other people as everything in the world (slave, savior, token, worker, godless primitive, sex maniac, social taboo, union worker, union breaker, puppet, threat, and disappointment), everything except a human being. It’s an amazing book, one that I’d suggest every cop in America look into if I thought they could read.

The other one – A People’s History of the United States – is the strangest motivation to write that I’ve ever found. It’s a compendium of hundreds of years of written history of things that took place on the American continent – but the specific part below Canada, above Mexico, and between the oceans – as told by attempting to historically represent American Indigenous People, African slaves, women, farmers, industrial workers, unskilled labor, and every other racial and economic minority from 1492 up to the almost-present of the early 2000s. Over 500 years of struggle, some victories, mostly failures. Mostly the underhanded attempts to get the oppressed people in question to strike “compromise” just enough to get them to stop setting everything on fire forever, which is something that we apparently every so often remember we are totally capable of.

The thing I notice when I read this book is that none of this would be known – I wouldn’t even be reading it if Zinn hadn’t written it, if the sources he gleaned hadn’t written their books before him, and if the original sources hadn’t written it down when they were boots on the ground in the first place when these things happened – if no one had recorded anything. And every single person, names mostly lost in time, who wrote those things – reporting from the front lines when cops were clubbing strikers, or bringing machine guns on mothers and children in bread lines, or rolling tanks on war veterans in homeless camps – was writing in opposition to a thousand other people writing for the other side of the fight, the one that said that everything was going perfectly fine and no one has any reason to complain.

Sometimes it feels like the whole of human history is that battle played out a hundred times an hour, everywhere. People who think it’s good enough and the people who don’t. And if it wasn’t written down, we’d be even worse off right now. We’d be even more lost.

So everything is almost within our grasp again. We have another chance to climb another rung higher to ascend to our ultimate liberty, as they say. And just like always, we are the ones who can make these decisions. All the power is ours. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is trying to get things back to normal. They’ve done it before. Luckily someone was there to write it all down every time. A people’s right to their own agency includes solving their problems the way they want them to be solved. Every time it is diverted, it circles back again. Every time, for over 500 years.

We have all the power here. Or, to put it more precisely, we have as much power as we think we do.

Day 1302 of 1456

Day 1302 of 1456 in trump's America

What a week, huh?

It’s times like this that I wished I’d actually kept at being a writer. Or at least a half-assed journalist. There’s so much going on that I don’t really have the talent to describe, and that makes it feel so insurmountable. What does a college dropout (a philosophy major one at that) possibly have to say about a dozen week long race riots and a violent fascist literally hiding out in a bunker while it all happens. Did he do it ironically, like a meta-callback to his most similar predecessor? “Get it? You see what I’m doing? Yeah, you get it. I’m so clever.”

I don’t know how I’m going to express to anyone who would ever read this that America is simultaneously going through a triplicate of unimaginable democratic tragedies – a fascist take over, a worldwide pandemic with a body count in the hundreds of thousands and rising, and nationwide riots and protests against violent cops in a dozen major cities – all at the same time. I can’t even explain it to myself, so I don’t know how anyone else is going to understand it. What is there to do? What is there to say?

I think about the guy I saw making a music video in front of a burned out building – using tragedy and destruction as inspiration for creativity, simply because nothing else was given to him to work with. I think about the dozens of groups spread out over parking lots and schools and churches who are gathering supplies – so many it’s impossible to keep track of – to get in the hands of people who can’t help themselves; communities trying to fix a problem that someone else put them in. I think about the Facebook groups with strangers who have never met, who might never meet, coordinating block watches and guards. White allies announcing and declaring themselves as allies, with clear lit pictures, and minority community members vouching for those white allies as One of the Good Ones. And those same white allies are not incensed at their intent being called into question; they know why they’re being treated suspiciously. They know who they look like. They’re the ones offering the information. They are also dealing with solving a problem that someone else put them in – crappy white people ruined it for the rest of us, so we’re going to have to try to rebuild trust that we had no hand in dismantling. Those are just the facts. Take the cues needed to fix it or get out of the way. We have no time for anything else; our streets are burning to death.

I think about how inconceivably, galactically enormous words like “pandemic,” “fascist takeover,” and “entrenched systemic racism” can sound and feel to a single human being watching it all, all day every day for 7 days straight. Much less if you’ve felt it for the last 1302 days, or for your entire life, or if you’ve perceived it happening for 500 years to people who look like you. Any of it is too much for one person.

But I can handle “food drive.” I can handle “we’re looking for donations of tampons and pads.” That’s not too much of a stretch of imagination for me. I can handle “liquor and cigarettes, some people can’t leave their house, and they might die from withdrawals.” I’ve been there, at least a little bit. I can imagine what that small comfort means. And there’s nothing wrong with asking for it; if someone can help, they help. If not, they can help something else. I can handle the words, “we need paper towels on 3^rd avenue.” Someone else can manage the words “block captain.”

I always get distracted by the phrase, “Do your part.” What is my part? Do I wait for orders? Who picks parts? Is this a destiny thing? Those are exhausting. When you see something like this Cerberus head of triplet demon agonies that is currently sucking the blood from all of us simultaneously, you can see so many billions and billions of moving parts over hundreds and hundreds of years that your feeble human mind recoils in horror. Millions of bad actors over hundreds of years of oppression and organization and back scratching favors and legal loopholes and shady paperwork and blind eyes and everyone’s just so tired what does it matter we’re all going to die in the end anyway. Where could one human being possibly choose One Part to pick and dash themselves against the rocks of that particular tragedy?

When it gets too big – which is often – I just let myself Do A Part. Just one. It doesn’t matter what. Just one thing. Right now, I’m obviously not talking to the Unstoppable Altruism Machines who march astride god’s glory of the firmament giving comfort to all creatures great and small, redeeming the race of humanity for the final judgment to the space people who will appear one day and demand an answer to why our species deserves to live and join the galactic federation. You’re all heroes, keep doing what you’re doing. I’m talking right now to the people who have 36 rolls of toilet paper and can probably make it on 24 rolls until shopping day this Friday. You know who you are, and we know why you did it. No one’s judging you, I was scared too. This whole thing right now is about no judgement. But things have changed a little bit. Those resources can go somewhere else for a minute. And I know it feels like it’s unbearable. It’s unfair to even imagine one of these kinds of things happening in your life, much less three at the same time. I know you’ve never faced something like this before in your entire lives. But I also know that our species has faced all of this before, at the same time, and worse. With a fourth, fifth, or sixth asshole coming to crash the party, too. We’ve been through worse. And the way things are going, we’ll probably have more worse soon. And when that worse happens, I will say we’ve been through worse than that too, because we will have been then, also. Don’t think about it, it’ll make sense at the time.

That’ll be my overall advice; don’t think about it too hard. Thinking is fine, as long as it leads to acting. And the acting redeems the thinking. And you only need to think long enough to come up with A Part You Can Do. Just one. Right in front of you, if you’d like. That’s fine. Just so there’s one less part for someone else to have to worry about later. Take on two if you can handle it, go ahead. But one is enough, I promise. Remember that. The only number that isn’t enough is zero.

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.