Bread & Circuses

In Japan, clothes washing machines have “Ultra-Fine Bubbles,” or UFB technology that can keep whites - literally - whiter by separating oils and stains from the cloth using nanobubbles.

Throughout Europe, China and Japan, citizens may ride bullet trains from one city to the next reaching average speeds of 190mph. You can take a train from Paris to London in 2 hours and 16 minutes. Granted, the drive would only be 6 hours and 32 minutes - not very long in America, but the cost for the train trip would only be $50.

Australia has some of the best healthcare in the world, including a greater system and, better delivery, better results and nationwide universal coverage funded by both the private and public sectors.

America. What a fucking mess. What a tired, run down, pathetic fucking mess. America is what the 1980’s was to Chryslers. America spends THE MOST on healthcare than any other developed nation, and ranks THE LOWEST in citizen health. We are also one of the few Western nations without socialized medicine, because - get this - paying out of your nose for privately funded coverage is better. Did you know that? Did you know that paying more for less, with poorer results is BETTER?

In America, you can easily purchase (not afford, I said purchase) any number of appliances; dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers, water heaters, air conditioning units, you name it. In America, there are tiers of quality. Spend $200 on a dishwasher, expect hard push buttons, three washing options (Extended, Quick and Normal), and expect the machine to run for a year before it breaks down completely. No repairs, no warranty, buy another machine. Spend $650 and now we’re talking; this is the most common “middle tier” line of machines with 8 wash options (Extended Pro, Quick Pro, Pots & Pans, Self-Clean, Delayed Wash, Hi-Temp, Sanitize, Hard Water Extra Rinse), bottle jets, three racks, low db ceiling, etc. Lasts about two years before you have to call a repair service (it’s under warranty, don’t worry) who comes out, charges you $320 for the part that wasn’t under warranty (the door latch) and then also replaces the control panel, which burnt out. So…yeah, you know, at least it’s working again, right? For another two years, and then it’s out of warranty, and you WILL need to replace it. No problem, because now, you’ve graduated to tier 3 - $1200, back to three wash options (AI Pro, Delicates, Self-Clean). This washer works. It doesn’t break. In fact, you get tired of the stainless steel finish and you buy another washer in 7 years because you want the new Carbon Matte Black.

But wait. There’s more.

Let’s skip tiers and move to Tier 5 - Miele AutoDos K20 Clean Touch, $3699. Frankly, you should be embarrassed that you’ve read that name aloud in your mind. Who do you think you are? Custom fascia (do you EVEN know what that means?), more options than your typical consumer vehicle, faster than your consumer vehicle, so quiet, your dog can’t hear it, and thank goodness, because knowing you - if you even have the MONEY to afford a “dog,” it would be an inbred mongrel, half blind, shitting itself on a cheap Target rug in some corner of the house where you left it last, wet and flea bitten. If it even heard this dishwasher, which it cannot, it would have heart failure and die. You will never afford this - not because you can’t, but because you are simply not intelligent enough.

So, realistically, America has options. But see, I led you down this rabbit hole for a reason, and I KNOW you didn’t see this coming. Japan? What do you suppose they have for dishwashers? High technology, right? Fast, quiet, probably cheaper? No. They don’t have dishwashers. Sure, you can buy them, they exist, but they’re smaller, quieter, less common. Most Japanese families just wash dishes by hand.

I have a point here. This is leading to something, I promise.

America. You want to get somewhere? You have three options: 1. By car - expensive gas, fatal accidents, bad traffic, blood thirsty white supremacist cops, State Patrol literally flying in small airplanes to capture speeders, traffic cameras, toll booths, multi-passenger lanes, congestion, gas stations with food so bad it’s referred to as “gas station food,” expensive “fast food” that will absolutely give you diarrhea, heartburn and high cholesterol, and roadside motels where you will be extorted for a filthy room with parasites and bed bugs, and where you will be filmed nude, and the video streamed to Russia. Your identity will be stolen at the front desk, your car will be tracked by GPS, and you will potentially have to fight off a drug-frenzied attacker. Just so you can visit family in *checks notes - Ohio.

2. By airplane - in our current year of the lord, 2025, flying via air travel is either expensive, or fatal, or sometimes both. You do not get to choose, but you do have to endure at least one of those things. Meanwhile, so called “leg room” is not what it seems because you will be required to fold your legs into your genitals to fit into the seat, which you will share with a fat, retired, sweating Republican with halitosis and a penchant for arguing. There will be 2 layovers, one in Denver, and one in Atlanta - not necessarily in that order, and regardless of your final destination. The flight itself is a breezy 2 hours and 33 minutes, but with the layovers, you won’t be arriving for another 8 hours 57 minutes. And you had better PRAY that your airplane doesn’t run into lightning strikes, bird strikes, air traffic controller strikes, disgruntled passengers, disgruntled staff, a literal terrorist, cryptic unannounced “delays,” or, you know, a Blackhawk helicopter that turned all of its instruments off and is proceeding blind toward Regan International Airport, because - fuck it, we’re the military!

3. By Amtrak - you sweet summer child! Leg room? Check. Boarding without any security? Check. Can I get so drunk beyond my wildest fantasies that I will either get left behind at a random station in Illinois or held down by the Amish for most of the trip - but NOT get kicked off? Check. Scenic views of an America almost forgotten? Check. Relatively inexpensive? Eh…well, no. Safe and comfortable? I mean…those tracks may be well over 110 years old, so… and safe? I mean… you die less often than cars and only slightly more than planes! Fast? Awe geeze. How long does it take to travel from your city to your destination? An eight hour drive? Ok, add three hours for stops, but, BUT…see #1 above.

I know, where are we here? What’s all the jibber jabber about?

America. I was driving down one of those weird suburban roads in the Des Moines Metro, where speed limits are posted at 50 mph in town. In the distance, I saw a car that looked like it was stuck in a deep ditch. No, it was a car dealership, and the car was a Land Rover purposely parked in that ditch to attract attention. Somewhere, some absolute asshole suburban dad was looking at that, getting an erection and saying, “Boy…isn’t that something? I wonder if…no. It can’t be. Can Land Rovers get out of ditches that deep? I bet they can. I bet I could…”

And then I was listening to NPR’s Marketplace. Commercial comes on. Land Rover, blah blah blah, power, luxury, perception.

YouTube. Commercial. Land Rover. Watch how this fucking machine drives up a mountain, unloads 18 soccer balls, two tents, a dog, a kayak and a kitchenette. Now watch it handle tight mountainous roads with ease. Look - LOOK YOU IDIOT - this woman is giving this middle aged model a look that would make him absolutely know…that this is the one. The car. The Land Rover. You unwashed beast.

But that’s just it. People ARE buying this crap. People actually huddle around the TV during the Super Bowl to watch advertisements. They love them! Omg, remember that one where the squirrel intercepts the football and runs it back for a touchdown, and the whole squirrel team is partying on the sidelines, HUH HUH, you know? And the human team is like, “Oh man, why did we flavor those chips with nuts?” and the announcer is like, “Super Crunch Nut Dusters! So good, even squirrels will sack for ‘em!” REMEMBER? CUZ THEY ARE NUTS?

You will get sick, and your healthcare will not save you because it is terrible in America. The nursing staff are overworked, the anesthesiologists have been fired and replaced with nurses (who are overworked), there are only so many doctors, who are overworked. You have to wait in a lobby full of drug using homeless, the elderly, and people with a fucking cough. And you will get a disease from the hospital that will weaken your immune system, and which will go untreated for months. And just hope you have healthcare, because if there’s a lapse, if you lost your job, or you have a job but really shitty coverage, or - disgusting! - you’re poor (fucking ew), then you may as well die. You will wish you were dead when you see the debt. You will end up a drug using homeless person wandering the streets like a zombie, no shred of dignity left, sores all over your legs, shooting xylazine into your sores, wishing you were dead - WISHING YOU WERE DEAD - on the streets of America.

America, what have we become? Our president wants to “make us great again” but to what time frame, to what end? He produces cheap shit in China and sells it to his tens of thousands of absolute imbecilic mouth breathers who think that we can “make us great again” by, what, buying more shit from China? Is that what made us great? Slap all the tariffs you want, the genie is out of the bottle and the USD is falling, falling, falling like a little golden leaf from a sugar maple in an uncut front yard where a Detroit house once stood.

It is over, America. You shit the bed, and all you have left is the hope that either AI kills all of us instantly, or that aliens are real… and kill us all instantly. Beyond that, just hope you’re not alive for the fall, because when China takes over - and they already have - it’s going to be PRETTY FUCKING DEPRESSING.

But hey, think how good you’ll look in a new Land Rover.

Even the Evil Genius Dr. Fu Manchu Doesn't Bother to Read

Wrote another book of short stories this year: Cawlding Honey. There are two themes - one is the demon of desire, and the other is aliens that have formed an atomic priesthood over ten thousand years in order to protect humanity from almost wiping itself out again. Gave it to two people who promptly forgot about it. No spark. Strange how you can create something and it disappears into the ether, somewhere betwixt, “Who fuckin’ cares?” and, “So what’s it about, again?”

I recently received a dresser that my grandfather had refinished; I’m told it was my uncle’s. It’s pretty solid wood, real wood, that was sanded and stained a light color. There’s newspaper lining some of the drawers, but I’m not keen on pulling it up to read it. The dresser has something like fifteen drawers, too, and it’s just fantastic. Before this, like some kind of Fort Des Moines work-release drug addled fuck up in his mid-fifties, I’ve been using a series of Target fabric cubes inside a wire rack. Did that for something on thirteen years. Last dresser I had was off a curb and smelled like poop when it got hot, so I tossed it. You’d think I gave a shit, but I’m lucky to buy myself new socks. On that note, someone at work pulled up a picture of me from 2009 and I was wearing the same Dickies button up mechanic shirt and Dickies jeans I’ve worn since, well…about 2008. It’s been 14 years and I still don’t give a shit. Conservatives think I’m a slob, and liberals think I’m square, so I guess what I wear isn’t critical.

But this dresser, my new dresser, I do give a shit. Not only do all my clothes fit into it, but it’s a family thing. And son of a bitch, I can stack shit on top of it, like books. I have three stacks of books on it right now. One stack includes the book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Dan Piepenbring and Tom O'Neill. Another stack has The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin. The third stack is all 14 Fu Manchu novels written by Sax Rohmer (a pseudonym) with the (awesome) 1960’s Pyramid publishing covers.

I took a trip to DC recently, stayed in a Hyatt downtown. Got to see Alexandria, and the Capitol, and the White House, and all that other shit people go to DC to see. Also got to spend some time by myself at the “Hitchcock Steps,” now better known as The Exorcist Steps in Georgetown. As soon as we hit the air over DSM, I opened book four of the Fu-Manchu series: The Daughter of Fu Manchu. I read it during the two and a half hour direct flight to DC, I read it every night I was there, and I finished it on the flight home. It was a quick read, like all the other Fu Manchu books. Unfortunately, most critics paint Rohmer as a racist and for my two cents, I suggest there’s more to the story. However, half the internet is full of idiots who believe Donald Trump is communicating with the ghost of Dom DeLuise to regain power over Jewish space lizards, and the other half of the internet gnashes their teeth and wipes away tears every time Sean Hannity has a bowel movement.

Anyway, book four was good. I enjoyed it. If only I could finish book five: The Mask of Fu Manchu. It’s a goddamn shame this world has come to a place where people - writers even - don’t give a shit about reading. That’s why I don’t fault anyone for forgetting about my “books”. Reading is a dying art. Better to chew up a 100mg edible, turn on Spongebob and forget about that pizza you put in the oven rather than to pick up some racist old turd like Dr. Fu Manchu Shits All Over the Pre-War Asian Community.

The book I wrote, Cawlding Honey - it’s not racist, it’s not homophobic, it’s not even a million-copy seller. But I think it would be worth reading on an airplane, at least - that’s about the only place anyone reads anymore, and only because phones don’t work so hot up there. Actually, they tell me you can connect to the airline’s connection if you pay a little extra. Probably better than reading a book anyway. So yeah, never mind, I didn’t write a book. There’s a channel on YouTube where a turtle eats fruit really loud; it’s called ASMR. That’s the shit cool kids are into now because, I guess, they’re all self-diagnosed as ADHD Autistic. Which…you know, fuck. That’s cool. Definitely not a condition suitable for reading books anyway.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Whatever, Never Mind

*I wrote most of this in May 2021, but the fucker didn’t “publish.” So I cleaned it up and hit publish again. Guess I’m doomed to unfinished thoughts.

I don’t know what I thought I would be doing at 39, or 40, or wherever it is I fall on the spectrum of ages. I never had direction or compass; I knew I would grow up and hit 30, and surely by then something would take place, but where or what, or when, I don’t know. In my youth, I would sit in my room for hours listening to music and reading books, and I got lost in those books, lost in stories, lost in music; I mean irretrievably lost. You could say that time of my life was the perfect alchemical solution, inert, waiting for a catalyst.

In 1991, when I was between the ages of 9 and 10, I was friends with this kid named Aaron Primmer and he had a sister, Alisha. She was older, 16 or 17 I think. She was your typical cool 16 year old girl - her boyfriend wore a leather jacket and flannel, she was sarcastic to a fault, she owned CDs instead of tapes, she drank, she smoked, she cussed, and thought kids our age were a pain in the ass. Alisha had the Nevermind CD by Nirvana, and I think I had only just seen Smells Like Teen Spirit once or twice on MTV, enough to know they were the coolest thing ever. We would sometimes wait for Alisha to leave, and we would sneak a listen to her CD. I was hooked.

In any case, as I got older - say between the ages of 12 and 14 - I felt so uncomfortable with myself, with my family, with my surroundings, and my “situation”, that I felt like an outcast thoroughly and completely. My friends were slowly turning on me, and girls weren’t at all interested. And while a lot of that is to be expected, and whether it was a chemical imbalance, a situational thing, or who knows what, I became suicidal with thoughts of self-harm frequently consuming my mind. I was probably as low as I ever got in my entire life. And then Kurt Cobain committed suicide. I was 12 when it happened (April of ‘94), and it devastated me. Looking for any excuse to hurt myself, I carved “Kurt” into my arm with the shard of plastic lens from a pair of sunglasses I’d smashed. Again, in reflection, I guess it was some kind of plea to the dead not to leave; some kind of acknowledgement of his passing; some kind of evidence that there were other things wrong in my life. One thing my behavior was not was an arm set out on a table, examined, weighed against potential consequences, worrying what people might say. Like an irrational 12 year old, I thought I’d be able to hide it from everyone. I couldn’t hide it for two hours.

I wanted to hurt, obviously, but it was more than that. Nirvana was supposed to be my first real concert, my first band t-shirt, my first collection of posters, the cornerstone of my musical choices. Nirvana should have been my general smart-assed, unconcerned disinterest and angst that was literally just months away from informing my entire teenage life. And that was all sealed indefinitely with Kurt’s death. I know it seems silly, looking back - real silly - but what I desperately wanted died in 1994, and rather than feeling some kind of connectedness to the world, feeling like I at least had some anchor out there, I ended up carving the name of a dead man into my arm. The last part of the “normal” me died.

Yeah, I get it. That sounds a little too heavy for a 12 year old kid; maybe sounds like fanciful retrospective thinking. However, and in fact, the death of the Nirvana front man was the the death of the normal me, and it was irrecoverable. As the days became months became years, I no longer had anything that resembled an anchor, or for that matter, a direction in which to drift. I did have other interests - I had heard Marilyn Manson’s first album Portrait of an American Family some time in 1995, and so I was already a huge fan when Antichrist Superstar hit the scene in 1996. Marilyn Manson ended up being my first real concert at 16. I was also a fan of Nine Inch Nails, thanks to Pretty Hate Machine. And of course there were all the other groups like Tool, Slayer, Metallica, and Morbid Angel that stayed with me to the present day.

Yet that leads me back to the present, and I wonder, “Wasn’t I supposed to be doing something with myself by now?” Maybe it’s this pandemic wringing it out of all of us, make us stop to think where we are vs. where we “should have been”. Had Kurt Cobain received drug treatment and continued forward with the band, perhaps I would have had that string to the normal world. Instead, I lost interest in mainstream music and became obsessively interested in Satanism, cults, and death; serial killers, criminal psychology, the “bad guys”, horror films, etc. I was a morbid kid to begin with, and I most definitely fell down that rabbit hole headlong in 1994.

That same year (at least I’m fairly certain), my uncle David gave our family his press pass to drive into the Iowa State Fair - I mean, literally, drive your car through the crowds and up into the fairgrounds. The entire experience remains one of my fondest. I want to say we parked up on Expo Hill over by the Cultural Center, out of the way, in some kind of roped off area that probably no longer exists. As evening rolled in, we went back to the station wagon with our day’s haul and my parents opened a cooler full of little ham sandwiches (with butter, mayonnaise and cheese), a bag of chips and cold pop. We couldn’t afford the fair food, and frankly, this was better.

Like the brooding soon-to-be-teenager I was, I remained in the backseat of the car with a Walkman blasting my new favorite tape and reading these little pamphlet books that the John Birch Society guy was handing out. If you’ve ever seen one, they were published by a company called Chick Publications and featured little comic style illustrated stories with titles like, “The Gay Blade,” or, “Big Daddy?”, or, “Doom Town,” and the best way to describe their subject matter was to cross a Mad Magazine with a Hustler, and throw in some scripture. So here I was reading about giving one’s self to the devil, facing eternal damnation and having unmarried sex while listening to Slayer’s Seasons In the Abyss. One song screamed, “Close your eyes, Look deep in your soul, Step outside yourself, And let your mind go, Frozen eyes stare deep in your mind as you die!” or, “The final swing is not a drill, it’s how many people I can kill!”

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is I launched into my teen years on the heels of Devil worship because Kurt Cobain had to go and kill himself. And now look at me - an unrepentant gun owning social outcast maniac burnout loser who your kids pay to scare them in his downtown basement. I get so drunk sometimes, I knock over tables and piss all over the floor in the men’s room. I haven’t made any friends on Facebook - no “catching up” with that crowd of fuck stick dick wipes who I never liked to begin with, and no checking in from the other crowd of shit smears that forgot who I was because I stopped getting wasted on weeknights. My old best friend won’t even talk to me at the grocery store (he’s a comedian now…), and my other old (albeit more recent) best friend stopped talking to me after he joined the circus, got kicked out, got married, got divorced, came back to Des Moines and got pissed off in my face because I had a girlfriend…back in 2007. Yeah, what?

“And then one day, you find ten years have got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

Fuck man. I’m buying vinyl my parents used to take for granted and I close my eyes, turn up the $10k system I’m running and think, “What have I been missing,” while kids are finding the reissued repressed 180 gram 25th Year Anniversary Nevermind and saying, “Yeah, Nirvana’s pretty cool I guess...” And all those years, and all those tears, and all that heartache, and all that joy, and the summers in the backyard in the sun, and hanging out with the adults, and being a kid, and growing up with your friends, and chasing around the neighborhood on bikes, and then in cars, and kissing a girl for the first time, and then your first real girlfriend, and your first concert with a band you thought were gods, and those sleepless first nights at college in the dorms when the kids you met were just as ragtag fuckin’ dumb and horny and looking for cold beer and reading comic books as you were, with their doors open and loud music playing, and you get home when it’s all done and you start working somewhere, and then you start working somewhere else, but “serious” this time, and then, but then …

And next thing you know, the grandma and grandpa you absolutely cherished are dead. Your dad is a living lobotomy with someone else’s lungs; a complete stranger. The unrelated adults you once revered are all bitter, angry, lost - or dead - or worse: you see someone that used to be so fucking full of life, so cool, telling stories while smoking cigarettes in the kitchen with an ashtray full of gunpowder as a “surprise” for the newcomers, and then one day you run into them at Hy-Vee, and they’re bent over a shopping cart, bloated and puffed up twice their size, and their skin is peeling off in vast swathes, and their eyes are desperate and red around the edges, and their mouth is smaller, their teeth loose, their hands shaking, and in a quiet voice they say they survived cancer, again, and the kids are all fine, all grown up, all moved on, and boy are they glad they got to see you...

And dude, that’s fine, that’s what being alive in 2022 looks like, and shit happens, man, and life sure as shit goes on…

But more importantly, that’s what being 40 looks like. I’m at an age when I might have another 40 ahead of me, or not, but definitely not 50, or maybe, who knows. But the best half is over, and now the lonelier half, the one where I don’t have any kids to impart this to, the one where my older friends are dying, and the friends that are my age will start dropping off, little by little, ever so slowly, until one day, when I skip my forty-year high school reunion, someone calls me and says, “Oh hey, so and so’s dead, you know, your ex. Thought you should know.” And I say, “Who the fuck cares?” but that’s not what hits me - it’s the 58 years behind me, and the fact that my heart beats real hard up the stairs, and laughing sometimes hurts, and cold Iowa winters begin throbbing in the hands, and there aren’t “friends” really, anymore, and “work” is winding down (or in the case of my generation, not), and people don’t really care about smoking a joint and putting on Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, or Nirvana - that’s boring old bullshit from last century. And yeah, too fuckin’ bad. Buy a Corvette, or whatever it is old fuckers do in 2040.

So…I guess if you’re reading this in 2040, or fuck, 2025, why don’t you do me a favor and scrawl, “Looking for a good time? Call Lefty at 669-244-7447” on the bathroom wall at the Iowa State Fair. Maybe when I’m dead, someone will paint over it and for just a second, they’ll stop, read it and think, “Hmm…I wonder who Lefty was?”

The Sun Also Falls

In the fecundity of youth, when we still had passions, wouldn’t it have been a pretty thing to create a spectacle that lasted longer than ourselves? Some people try by creating a life, giving it a name and letting that thing wander off on its own. Such is the zenith of man and woman: a life created and loosed upon this world we all had a hand in spinning.

There are other ways; there are the arts, there are the mechanics, there are the virtues. I have struggled in my pursuit of creation, and what’s more, I seem to suffer greatly by the same or similar sickness as most writers: I dislike my creations.

Certainly, writing is not some spoiled brat rolling around and dribbling along the rug, bolstered by the peasant notion that all life is good. Writing, for the most part I daresay, also requires some kind of parameters in as much as one must codify their utterances into a language, and then adhere to a modicum of grammar, unlike, say, painting, which allows among its hallowed ranks Malevich’s White on White, Baer’s Untitled, and quite literally anything by Jackson Pollock. In any case, I won’t try to defend the written word as some last bastion of reason - it’s not. In fact, it’s quite clear that books are replaced with screens, and prose replaced by whatever it is you call a ‘tweet’. In fact, reading itself is very much desired by the masses, but only ever in chewable pills of 280 characters in length. And we wonder why we elect the people we elect, or why the boogeymen of “capitalism”, “prejudice”, and “national security” linger just out of reach, striking at seemingly random intervals from the inky shadows.

I suppose one could pull back and objectively say that my writing, my creations, my children, are malformed things, hidden among the scraps of a filthy kennel dungeon, only allowed to peek through the barred windows of an inescapable basement. Sunlight may as well be a nuclear flash to these perverted things, and any attention garnered is wasted as a sort of masturbation among fettered limbs. My writing is so imperfect, so droll, that it pains me to have finished a piece at all because it means I’ve capped off any real potential. I often hear people say, “Well let me be the judge - you never let anyone read your work!” And that’s true, for good reason. Quite frankly, once you’ve locked away your mongoloid specimen in the cellar, no amount of convincing can change your mind that what you’re doing is wrong, and that someone should love the thing and wash upon it the sort of dignity it deserves. It’s a real horror show, then, because you, the parent, are quite certain you’re wrong in both respects: wrong for having created it, and wrong for locking it away until it starves. Yet, where are the millions of eager eyes begging to nourish your creation, begging to hold it, coddle it, worship it? There aren’t any. Few trouble themselves with the actual upkeep of such things, and far fewer are truly interested in giving it their time.

And so here I am, some clownish relic of an era passed. I’m watching my aging family finally peel off into death and I’m watching my years grow long in the tooth, too. Meanwhile, my muse seems to have skipped away somewhere, out among the other muses, and I can hear their echoes call up to me from a valley playground hidden forever.

I finished writing Regolith after nearly five years, and I don’t even care if it ever sees a pair of eyes. This, my child, may as well never have been born. I’m now moving my attention to a sort of “Volume II” of the Fawney Rig; not an extension or sequel, but something taking place in the same space and time. And yet I can barely muster five minutes for it.

If I were the Creator, and I had spent so many minutes and hours fashioning this beautiful Earth, and these wondrous cosmos, and if I finally fashioned a being like myself, but far less perfect, and I stood that golem up, and I breathed my soul into and said, “Live,” I, too, would stand back in awe of my work. But, like the Creator, I would watch the little thing moving around like a depraved animal, ignorant, murderous, imperfect, and I, too, would turn my back, shake my head, and sit among the heavens wondering what should be next.

And that’s assuming we weren’t already God’s sophomore project. His first masterpiece(s) probably ensure his shame for us.

Filthy Lives, Desperate Lies

* This was written March 2019, and due to some technical error, was never published. My, how things can change in two years.

From fresh morning rain is born the damp smell and boundless energy of spring upon the breast. A juicy peach, a tart lemon, the Earth drips her honey upon us. And from boughs budding green call the birds, from the sweet nectar plants sprout pink, and blue and yellow flowers. The woods are deep now, and the morels grow. Streams are running again, the ice melted away as cold clear water undulates over rocks and sand. Mist hangs low in the mornings, dew upon the grass. The Earth is taking slow breaths as it holds on a little longer.

But what fools, we who think this is our own to experience; who think we are qualified to describe such splendor. For within our hearts runs a crack covered by no more than a flimsy veneer. Our feelings were shut off years ago, and now we only experience strange sensations where feelings once were until, after a while, we experience everything all at once and we are overwhelmed. Nothing is normal for us, nothing works. Life is a series of gut wrenching heartbreaks, one after the other, leaving us increasingly numb to this vicious and useless world. And the feeling of loneliness consumes us.

We watched ourselves disappear a long time ago. And this is what is left.

Quiet

Quiet moments of desperation lead to self-reflection, lead to self-analyzation, lead to self-deprecation, lead to self-demonization, lead to self-infliction. In between brief glances from strangers, the shuffling of feet and the sickness of being, agonizing realizations creep among the silence…knowledge setting firm that it is all true. Time has passed you…

Remember the haunting voices of those who have died? Remember their smiles? Remember what it was like to be with them? And here you are alive, their memories nothing by a whisper within a sigh.

Remember the ways in which you were harmed - cut straight through into your heart? Was it careless, or was it purposeful? Deep within the wound, does such a poison reside as to never heal? Or were you lopped off by parts and pieces? Is there something missing from you now that can never come back?

Perhaps you’ve been running all along. Their darkened shrines baring soft light, illuminating your gasps but offering no quarter. The world may rest, but you cannot. You will never rest. Sleepless nights, darkness drowning into morning, you don’t even mouth words lying in bed anymore.

When every moment pushes forward into the next, a teeming throng of seconds crushing headlong into eternity, you begin to see the fleeting, beautiful, ringing laughter of happiness for what it is: a mere twinkling, prismatic spray among the mute sea of eternal death.

In your quiet moments of desperation, when you’re mask is securely fashioned so that the public cannot set upon you like a pack of ravenous dogs, do you ever wonder when your sorrow will end? Or do you wonder when the silence will finally take hold, choke you of your breath, and vanquish your light?

Fragile

Nearly fifteen years ago, on Thanksgiving day, I entered a hospital room in Des Moines and stood over the inert body of a good friend. His lungs rose with forced air from a machine, his heart beat, but his voice was gone; silent, fallen away, not even a whisper along the reeds of a slow and lazy river. Over his face lay a veil of desperate sadness, the look etched over a man’s brow when he realizes he hadn’t meant to commit suicide. There he lay, nonetheless, having failed to save himself. Joe was 27 years old, frail and worn, dressed in a hospital burial gown. Family in the hallway passed Thanksgiving dinner between each other in tinfoil pockets, paper plates, cold comfort. They let me in to see him so that I could say goodbye. Tears rolled from my eyes, but my throat closed up and I couldn’t talk. To reach out and hold him one more time… to open my heart and say what I wanted to say…

Although I have worked desperately to fill in the fissures of my own life, I am consumed by shame of such brittle plasterwork. Desperate and searching, running cut hands over the coarse dark floors of my soul, I find nothing but the haunting memories of those fragrant years. The air was sweeter, the laughter brighter, shadows remained banished as friends surrounded, so many nights spent in rapture with burning hearts alive. Though vulnerable as I was, I wore the shield of a gasoline future just waiting for the plugged spark.

Now, as I saddle up for another last ride across a sunburnt and salt parched plain, as I near the edge of a dark horizon upon which the camp flames of missing people burn on into the night, I feel my legs grow weak in the saddle, my hands let loose the reins, my hat has fallen around my neck and the world has closed her eyes to me. I struggle to warm my withering hands by a single ember, I look around and see no one. The more I hear myself talk, the more I realize I am no storyteller - merely a story repeater; a failure, a fool.

What have I become but the sentient wraith searching blindly, viciously, for a locked chest without a key? To what have I aspired but my own hopeless tarot reading - a future so impossible, so unattainable, as to merit ridicule from even the least presumptive witch of Fate? They tell me I’m not broken, that there is no such thing as irreparable, but when I look deep into the mirror, I see a vessel emptied and a torch quenched.

One night many, many years ago, I was lying under a bridge with someone I only marginally trusted. I could not sleep. Out there in the woody hills, I heard a muffled scream nearby. I stayed silent hoping they would not come for me - hoping they could not see me. And isn’t that where Death stands now? I can hear him sliding between the brush and low branches. Doomed to repeat my same mistakes, doomed to grab my revolver, clutch it to my chest, to make a choice…

I’m tired of making that choice. I’m tired of falling off my horse and getting back on. There are riders I pass dead on their horses long ago and too weak to pull their triggers. They don’t even nod to a passing stranger enveloped within the same storm that chokes us both. The night here never ends, the ground is cold, the food is terrible and I can’t hear myself think over the silence.

And just when I think I’m riding out into the rising sun, I open my eyes and see the pitch blackness of my own soul. I whip harder, in frenzy, deeper still into the wound, into the bloodstream of my own folly, of my own death.

Footsteps creep closer to the edge of my camp. His knife is poised, his eyes twinkling by moonlight. Where did you go, Joe? Why did you have to leave camp? Death waits quietly for me to raise my gun… and I have to make a choice once more.

Ghost

Whispering footpads in rhythmic dance upon the stairs, through the narrow hall and into the room. The buzz of an electric toothbrush, like power lines overhead; the snapping of floss, the swishing and spit. Vanish among the shadows, you apparition, be buried within your sacred ground! But you reappear under cold marital covers, skin warm, almost corporeal. Your breath is slow, beautiful - your clockwork heart beats just like the living. The fool mistakes you for his hopes and dreams, but you vanish once more when the light comes and reappear only within his carved heart the next day.

Oh! how you haunt this place, your flickering eyes lit by Hades’ flame. The faint smell of your hair, a shock of cool breeze, you depart once more. Maddening presence, must you fill me with dread? Out there among the living, I suffer your bile memory, but when I close the lights and lock the door, you’re with me again.

I cannot cross the salt line to meet you, dear. You cannot cross the veil. Although we may haunt each other now, an end must come. For I have written upon the pages of your heart, and you have dipped your quill within my blood. The old witch drew the Devil, her daughter drew the Sun: our souls tossed out among the tea leaves and bones. Call my name when I see you, and I will close my eyes to remember.

Shadows of Living

Life is nothing without Light, and Darkness is her sister. Twin creators never to meet, destined to work in tandem. What she does not see, the other senses, and what one attempts to hide, the other discovers.

We carry with us the light and the dark because we were born from both. In shadows, our memories stir. From the shadows, we pull those things long passed into the light: a laugh, a glance, a warm cup of coffee in trembling hands, a walk to get ice cream, or a family dinner when everyone was present. From the gift of darkness, we temporarily illuminate what was lost.

I often lurk within the shadows of life - not as a bandit, or a coward, but as one who fights back sorrow so that I may lift the chalice of death to my lips for one last glance behind. Her spell weaves in and through me, whispers the past, clenches my hands within her cold embrace. Remember. Remember… I am lost within those places, those empty walls echoing, the chatter and buzz. Then it fades, and it was nothing, not but rustling of dried leaves. I drink once more, and I take her magic into me so that I won’t forget, but the magic of Darkness has its price and I am sometimes susceptible to the shadows.

Fall is a time of death. The world slowly passes before us, her leaves falling, her breath cold, her embrace sterile and weak. But she is not gone yet… she lingers; lingers to tell us her final story, lingers to love us a little longer. And then…the coldness, the emptiness, the end.

When the Earth warms once again, it is a different Earth - the tree buds are new, the flowers are not the same, the petals and leaves new extensions of old roots. Although it is all so similar, she has written new words into her poem of creation, and she, too, is different; a new mother, a new creator.

I do not want to be a wraith - a creature of the darkness bound to night, bound to the whispers of my memories. I have a heart full of love, a life full of light. But the shadows grow long, and the days grow short and weak. Tremors of the cold flicker across my skin, and the moon passes over my face. Perhaps I have drunk too deeply from the magic and held the pain too closely. Even with reassurance of their passing, my terrors still haunt me. A wraith I have become, a wraith searching for the light.

The world is dying - the cold is coming. Our mother will not return, but in her place, some other.

The Straw

There exists a fable about the Frog and the Boiling Pan of Water. The fable suggests that a frog, when placed in a pan of cool water, will remain in that pan even if someone were to introduce a source of heat, applied gradually, to eventually boil the water. Modern biologists don’t necessarily take the fable for truth because, although there are reported attempts to perform such an experiment, logic simply precludes such a thing from happening – after all, frogs are not typically known to simply sit for long periods of time without ever moving, unless of course their brains are removed. Of course, that was a different experiment altogether.

In any case, the fable is apt in describing a human characteristic. While I could also focus on individual tendencies, let’s just avoid that for the sake of brevity. We love routine, we love status quo, and this is in part because we have adapted to work within a conforming, comfortable system. After all, what societies can function effectively amid chaos? Likewise, what culture can survive when there is constant risk of death, famine or plague?

Consider the 1340's and 1350's : much of the world was firmly within the iron grip of the Black Death (a super-strain of the bubonic plague). See how the lack of power structure quickly toppled kingdoms? See how lawlessness and amorality spread when there was no authority? See how suddenly society crumbled?

Society, as we know it, is truly a balancing act; it is its own biome, and therefore, permeable and mortal. Humans have difficulty conceiving  of their society crumbling until it happens, and even then, the walls must be shaking down around the foundation before anyone becomes genuinely concerned.

World War II did not happen overnight, it didn't happen over a week, or a month, or a year, or even a decade. The second Great War was the result of decisions going as far back as 1918. Truly, one might even argue that the decisions resulting in the first Great War almost guaranteed there would be a second. In any case, the German people didn't suddenly elect a populist one day because they were fed up with Europe. And the Japanese didn't get together one night and figure on blow up Pearl Harbor because it seemed like a reasonable next-step. And the Italians, well they're just feisty, right? Obviously, all players had decades of decisions that eventually led to the outbreak of war. Even in the wind up to hostilities, Germany took Austria through the Anschluss, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then France. This took time, and inaction, as the Allies stood by quivering, biting their nails and "staying out of it". 

Humanity takes time to really come to terms with change. There has to be a breaking point, and that's often not immediately evident. Like the frog in hot water, we allow so many transgressions until the last straw finally breaks the exhausted camel's back.

So tell me how it makes sense that a company like Apple, who had already managed to brainwash millions of people into thinking their mundanity is somehow "better", is able to boldly admit that they purposely throttle performance of old software? Sure, just buy a new phone dummy. And your computer - what are you waiting for? Spend. Spend. Spend. And if you're not already dumb enough, just stop complaining and wait it out - maybe you'll be lucky enough to wait in line for four days so you can be one of the first to own another shiny white piece of shit in a box that cost you more than most life saving surgeries. But it's not just Apple, it's everyone - buy our shit, let it break, buy new shit, let it break, then shut up and buy some more. Our rifle accidentally fires without pulling the trigger? Shut up and buy another one. Our TVs break after a year? Get a 4k! Our pink slime makes you sick when you eat it? Buy our steaks!

What about all these militant thugs (i.e. innocent black people) who the police see fit to shoot while they are unarmed? Like dogs - they are being murdered like rabid dogs. White people stand on the side lines and come up with genius game changers like, "Well this one white guy, like, a year ago...yeah, the cops shot him and he was unarmed." Great fix, guys. Great way to ignore the facts. Black people are pissed - and I don't mean black people are all just one seething group, but talk to your local black dude or chick, and they'll probably tell you, "Gotta stop killing black folk in the streets." The answer isn't, "Thin Blue Line, baby!" and the answer isn't, "All lives matter!" Where is our society right now? Where are black people in our society? If a group of people find this onslaught of death to deprive them of their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, how will our society address this? 

And what about our Commander in Queef, Donald J. "I don't give a shit about the peasants" Trump? Forget politics - how can the most righteous, holy rolling bible thumpers actually poopoo Trump's evil behavior? I'm talking about the way he speaks of women, children the disabled, etc. How can someone who says they follow Jesus, nay, "love" Jesus, how can they "Follow the word of God..." and murmur out the other side of their mouth, "...unless it means upsetting the money changers' tables in the temple..." and still look themselves in the mirror? They had better stare down the eye of that needle long and hard because you and your camel are simply not going to fit through no matter how many ounces of Jesus-Juice you pour down the sides. God was a bastard in the Old Testament, but Jesus was the new and everlasting covenant, and he sure as shoot wasn't making friends with people who mocked the disabled. Jesus healed the disabled, the leperous, the maimed - not mocked them. Are you kidding me? Where is the anger? You call yourselves followers of Christ? You shall know them by their fruits - Satan, get behind me! No...no...he's doing some "great" stuff, so let's just ride this Satanic wave and hope God turns a blind eye...

The heat's been on a while now but the water's not yet boiling. I'm no prophet and I'm not even a qualified intellectual, but you're lying to yourself if you think society is a brighter side of peachy right now. And anyway, you don't think that - you know it's shit slowly hits the every rotating fan. I mean, what if I told you we were reaching another schism? Would you stockpile food to feel safe? Or water? Or cash? Would that suddenly change your game and you could stop worrying? It helped some people for Y2k, did it not?

I'm not suggesting we're on the brink of collapse, but as time marches ever forward, isn't it hindsight that teaches us? What about the German people? Well damnit, they shouldn't have elected Hitler; they should have demanded he step down after he became chancellor AND president; they should have voted him out after he took Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and Poland...and France...and Russian territory... But they didn't, did they? There were good people just like us and they made many shameful and lazy decisions, just like Americans did in 2016. The difference is that their decisions resulted in a world war, and ours, well...time will tell. 

But over these last 20 or 30 years, through both democratic and republican administrations, through the evil and lazy decisions we've made, are we not coming to a boiling point? And if we are, when will we hop out of the pan? 

Or are we doomed to fry?

Shame of Inequity

There was a time, when I was between housing accommodations, that I reached out to the county for food assistance, health assistance and housing assistance. I wandered into a cavernous room from out of the scalding summer heat, took a number at the front and sat down among empty chairs save for a pregnant Latino woman nursing her child and a black woman sitting at one of twelve counters. The air-conditioning wasn't working well and the cloying Iowa humidity was mixed in with tepid air creeping out of the vents. Only three people were working the counters that day - one with the black woman and two others obviously doing paperwork. 

They called the Latino woman's number and she dutifully pulled her baby away, tucked herself and brought along the carrier to the window. I waited. I hadn't been sleeping well most nights. I was getting around the medical system by taking Ambien prescribed to someone else who was getting it specifically for me. The drug didn't seem to work very well - I laid awake restless until the medication hammered me to sleep, only to wake up groggy and exhausted. I wouldn't find out until nearly 15 years later that I actually suffered from severe sleep apnea, and that the drug was further reducing my oxygen.

The Latino woman was done at the window. She stood up with paperwork in her hand, adjusted her shirt and left the building. I waited. My legs were sweltering in the only pair of jeans I owned, sweat dripping from the bend of my knee down my calf and into my threadbare socks. I didn't know what I would say when I went to the window - I didn't know what to do. I'd never asked for assistance up to that point, and I really didn't want to change that any time soon. But needs must when the Devil drives.

They called my number. I approached the window and sat down nervously. "How can we help you today?" "I'd like to apply for food stamps and Medicaid." "Ok, can you fill this out for me?" I took the clipboard from her; a pen was strung to the top with twine and tape. It was basic information. I handed it back. "Ok, it says you are employed." Yes. "You make about $7200 a year?" Yes...under, actually, but yes. "You don't have a permanent address?" Do I need one? "Yes." I entered my grandparents address. "Ok, and you are not covered under any medical or dental insurance?" No. "Ok, thank you. So...I can give you some pamphlets here...these are about work programs..." Ok, but I have a job. "I understand...so I can give you these pamphlets. You can call the number on the back of this one here...and they can help you find employment." I need food stamps.

The woman raised her brow but slit her eyes, "Let me ask you this...are you pregnant?" No, obviously. "Are you African American?" No. "Are you disabled?" No. "Then I'm sorry, we cannot help you." But...I need food stamps. I don't make enough to eat properly. "I'm sorry, I really am. Good luck."

So what. Those are days long gone. And I'm here now, much better, much stronger, much happier and much more present of mind. But that's not really what this is about. This is about the fine line we must ride between fair and foul. This is about understanding the balance of pulling ourselves up by bootstraps and a right to fight for what's right. Did I starve without those food stamps? No, I ate out of the trash and I made it. Was it fair? No, but life isn't fair. Did I try to sue, or call the ACLU, or go on a racist rant about everyone else getting something but me? No - because everyone needs help sometimes, and who in hell am I to poke my nose in everyone else's business but my own?

I think of the 'Millennial' generation who is often accused of being soft, and I'm reminded of the every generation before them into the Baby Boomers who are just as soft, if not softer. In fact, I'm called to consider American culture - once proud and strong, now crumbled into a crippled and demented smattering of insane racists versus crybaby foul-callers. I think of the people who lived in squalor, dressed in rags, sweated in sweltering heat at the end of a tool only to make just enough money to feed themselves beans.

Most of all, I think of all the unfair bullshit out there right now perpetrated by rich fucking pigs - like, for instance, immigrant families being split mother from child because a soulless human garbage can and his southern fried human hating bigoted attorney general want to impress their White Supremacist pals back at the yacht club. 

We've got to stop crying about how unfair everything is and put an end to these evil bastards once and for all. We have to toughen up a little, put our chins out and start throwing punches. This country has fallen apart and it's not because gays get married or because women work or because abortions happen or because blacks have the vote or because immigrants flood our borders or because you missed out on your dream job or because you can't get into the school you want or because someone won't bake you a cake - it's because no one can handle anything without sniffling, calling foul and bringing forth litigation. That's both sides. 

What we need is to bring back real American values. Tax those rich bastards until they're forced to eat lunch in the same establishments we do. Make them fix our crumbling roads. Estate tax - death tax? Make them pay the fucking luxury tax that funds our infrastructure and our children's educations. Free college for every citizen? You goddamn bet - paid for by each rich sonofabitch that wants to take a spin on the stock market. Marijuana? Legal as hell and taxed to death. Smoke away your brain, and meanwhile kids with cancer don't even need to worry about medical insurance. You're covered, courtesy of partying college frat boys. You judges and for-profit prisons better clean up. You know why? Because we're pretty fucking far from ok. Marcellus Wallace needs to call a couple hard pipe hittin dudes to go to work with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch on your asses.

We're already a country of working poor, what's wrong with going broke at the dangling feet of another lynched rich white bastard? You know what real American values are? All are welcome - no matter where you're from or how you got here - YOU ARE WELCOME. And I don't care what the fuck you look like, if you're in this country because you want to be, and if you treat other people with respect and deference and love, then you get the same fucking luxuries we all get. That's the American Dream. That's the promise of this great land. You want real American values? A gun in my hand, a dollar in my bank account, freedom to brew moonshine and sell it to whomever, freedom to be left alone, freedom to go to school for free, freedom to have medical care, freedom to work, freedom to organize, an open border, an open market and the freedom to grab a rope for the wealthy bastard that wants to take it all away from me. 

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Too Long to Fail...

Been working at an insurance company downtown since May 2008 and my ten years is coming up. Was in a meeting on Wednesday, got a message that we needed to meet on the second floor assembly hall. They fed us some lines, gave us some folders, and after busting my ass for ten years, I'll be out of a job July 2nd, 2018. It's not a layoff; that's a legal term that expensive lawyers have "recrafted" so that it doesn't apply here. No, we're being offered a chance to reapply for our own positions. If we're selected, we can interview again. If we fail the application or interviewing process, we've been offered a demotion. And if that doesn't sit right, well, sorry Mac, the door's that way and hurry up or you'll let in the cold.

So this rant isn't about me, or my decision to apply for my own job (again), or how I feel about my employer (who I still appreciate to a large degree) or my even more reluctant decision to accept demotion if necessary. This is about the America my generation lives in today - the so called, often maligned, Millennial generation. 

My parents and grandparents had the opportunity to go to college for a few hundred dollars each semester. Not cheap, but not a mortgage, even in "old timey dollars". Your ass wasn't in a sling if you tried to get a degree, and you could work nights to afford tuition AND food AND a place to sleep. My generation, well, you wanna know why there's so many strippers, hookers, porn "stars", drug pushers, human traffickers and low lifes? Money. Everything costs a whole lot. What's the average tuition at a state college? Roughly $80,000 for a four year degree, assuming you're not in the usual 5 to 6 years holding pattern common among state colleges. And why not, someone has to pay for the football team's uniforms, so pony up. And God forbid you go to a private school, or a public college outside of your own state. Then you're looking at REAL debt to the tune of $240,000 for eight semesters. That's not just spittin money, either. That's a fucking fortune for a piece of funny paper that says you can think on your own. And how will you pay that back? Well not working as a teacher, cop or botanist. You better start shooting porno, stripping or selling drugs. Or bitcoin, I guess.

My parents and grandparents had the opportunity to purchase a brand new car in 1974 for roughly $3,542. A full load of gas in the 14 gallon tank cost about $5.00. The car was a piece of shit, no doubt, but we can thank American car manufacturers for that. Besides, the thing lasted more than a couple years anyway. Forty years later, in 2014, my generation would pay roughly $25,449 for a new car; that's ~7.25 times as much. And before you think it, if we just went by inflation dollars, the car should cost $17,800. Full tank of gas? $51.80 for 14 gallons. You wonder why people are using Tide laundry detergent as currency? Because they're fucking stealing it and reselling it. They're broke. What do you want?

My parents and grandparents had the opportunity to start a lifelong career, work into old age and retire. Now obviously it's more complicated than that - if you chose a job in labor, your ass is still working. If you're a baby boomer that worked in a factory, your ass is now a Wal-Mart greeter. Right? But if you joined, say, an insurance company in downtown Des Moines, you're probably celebrating your 45 years of service with a retirement party (I should know, I've been to a few of them). But my generation? We don't have the luxury of "careers" anymore, unless we started rich. There hasn't been a middle class since the unions broke under that decrepit cocksucker Reagan. You want to lionize a real Satan-worshipping, human hating bastard, then let's throw that slobbering goon's face up on Mt. Rushmore. Fuck it.

I worked for Iowa Student Loan for two years hoping to start my career. My department, my boss, her boss...and her boss, were laid off. And it was a true "lay off". We got severance, so whoop di do. When I started working at my downtown insurance company, they assured me, "If you stick with it, you'll be here for life." Buddy, let me tell you, I've been sticking with it. I give 100% every day, sometimes at the cost of my own health. I go to work and get shit done. Something wrong? Need a guy? Call me. I will fix it, or find someone that can. Period. Firing on all cylinders because that's how I do things.

But I live in a dream world. I live in a world where coming to work every day doesn't matter. What matters is giving 100 + 10%, also known as an impossible feat that you're left to cower at knowing you'll never achieve it. It isn't enough to work hard, now you have to prove the numbers, better yet, IMprove the numbers. You have to do more with less. You have to do six peoples' work, and not only grin and bear it, but pick up three more peoples' work while you're there on the bottom. Because it's not enough to love your job, you have to fear it, too. And don't just fear the job, fear your boss. And fear your boss's boss. And glue that goddamned smile to your face, because at any minute, your ass might get cut, so look good, be happy and push push push. You should be happy they even suffer your disgraceful presence, because believe me pal, there's a hundred other cowards that would die for your spot (and believe me, they would).

I could be fucking homeless in July because I came to work every day and did a great job. Does that make any fucking sense? I'm not the only one. Places like Nationwide and Wells Fargo are synonymous for shitcanning people after a couple years. Why let them get tenure? Why keep paying the same desperate masses when you could save some money and rehire new idiots equally as desperate?

How many more times can I hear, "We have to cut taxes for companies so they will create more jobs,"? Create more jobs? Are you fucking blind? We don't need MORE jobs, we need A job. We need a job that doesn't pay shit for nothing, and cans your ass in five years so they can rehire you for less. "More jobs" is a front for laundering money in and out of your corporation while your fat-cat-ass smokes a cigar and checks your stock dividends. More jobs is ludicrous.

Here's a secret you'll never believe. It's juicy. Boy, let me tell you - if anyone gets a hold of this, they'll shit a brick...

You want the economy to bounce back overnight? You want better roads and smarter kids, and prettier girls, and nicer cars? You want the whole package, the "Make America Great Again" promise?

Fucking pay people. Stop firing everyone. 

Yeah, that's it. Wild, huh?! Guess what a 30 year old mother of three is going to do when you give her a check for $4,000 every two weeks? She's gonna blow it on makeup, jewelry, clothes; backpacks, school books, diapers; kids' toys, new cars, televisions, freezers, new houses, new boats. Fuck, when you're rolling in money, the average boot scraper is spending dough like it's burning a hole through his ass. And where's that money go? Yep...you guessed it... to create more jobs. Jobs selling cars. Jobs selling houses. Jobs selling boats. Jobs selling clothes. And on and on and on. Give people money, and they will spend the shit out of it. Let them keep their jobs, and they'll spend spend spend without worry, because they know if they show up tomorrow and try, they'll get paid again. 

But anyway, what do I know? I'm not some economist. I'm not some dickbag Republican. I don't know shit from shinola. I'm just a guy that got laid off and now has to fight to get his job back. And if I'm lucky, I'll go back to the workhouse and keep shining shoes and smiling big, and saying, "Yes boss!" because I need to get paid. That's one thing my generation has in common with my parents and their parents - nobody likes to starve.

Your Huddled Masses

"The beauty of me is that I'm very rich."  "The point is, you can never be too greedy." "I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier." 

“My entire life, I've watched politicians bragging about how poor they are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents and grandparents were. And I said to myself, if they can stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn't the kind of person we want to be electing to higher office. How smart can they be? They're morons. There's a perception that voters like poverty. I don't like poverty. Usually, there's a reason for poverty. Do you want someone who gets to be president and that's literally the highest paying job he's ever had?” 

-Donald Trump

In 2015, I was walking south of MLK searching for old railroad tracks. I came upon two homeless men arguing over liquor - one was too drunk to stand and fight, the other was just trying to offer his friend water.  I may have been one of the last people to see both men together, although, regretfully, I failed to take a picture of the pair. Mark Allen Thomsen, 46, sobered up enough that night to squirt a bottle of lighter fluid on his water-offering friend, set him on fire and killed him. When police arrested Mark, he was so intoxicated he had to be admitted to Methodist hospital until he could be stabilized and released. He's now serving 36 years.

April 1st, 2016, Des Moines police found the charred remains of a human being near a burnt shed in a homeless camp. Investigators never identified the victim.

January 26th, 2018, I met a man named Marshall outside of the camps near CISS. Articulate, good looking, pleasant, inquisitive, self-aware and braving the odds. He asked me why I was taking pictures of the homeless. He wondered if I'd seen the trash strewn about everywhere just the day before - prior to everyone coming together to clean up. "We're not animals," he said, "we're people. We're just homeless." He told me that CISS - the Central Iowa Shelter & Services - was banning people left and right for anything (tuning into the evening police scanner can confirm this, if you're bored).

This large influx of homeless to CISS recently began when Hubbell developers, working with the snakes in City Hall, began knocking down overgrown and wooded areas south of MLK between SW 11th and SW 16th in order to turn the old Factory District into "Gray's Landing", described by wealthy elite as "a small city within the city" with "competitively priced" condos. In other words, the rich are kicking out the poor so they can build another playground to make this shithole city look "better". The homeless must find somewhere to go, and so they go to the shelter. And the shelter kicks them out. Thus, tents on the lawn.

Isn't it a shame that a city like Des Moines can't figure this out? Isn't it a shame that our country can't figure this out? In 2018, we're banning millions of immigrants from our country, we're kicking out millions more, and we're leaving our own homeless out on the streets. You think this is making America great again? You must not know shit about where this country came from, or how it made it here.

Blindness and Folly

Our human race teters on the brink of annihilation as we remain well within the shadow of Ignorance. Do you suppose we'll come out of this having learned anything?

The Mexicans settled Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and California. America took that territory from them. You can lie about their productivity, call them lazy and shiftless, call them idiots, joke about their desperate journeys to our country as if you have ever endured anything like that; you can build a wall, and ignore their slave labor in our produce fields, but do not tell them they belong back in Mexico. They are in Mexico - the part you stole. They are family here. And let that be a starting point...

The Natives, a diverse people who cover a broad swath of North America, who are made up by countless unique cultures swallowed up through genocide and indifference, and who are nearly lost entirely within the shackles of Time, owned this land before the Mexicans, before the Spaniards, before the Vikings. We get pissed off because they say, "Get rid of the Washington Redskins team," like they're trying to shame us, like they're trying to steal our culture. But the 'redskin' brave is their culture; the 'redskin' is them. The Native is American, and America broke the backs of those people. We should be ashamed how we talk about ourselves. Let's have some class and quietly strike those images from our rosters. And let that be a starting point...

The Blacks, meaning people with skin ranging from the lightest caramel to deep ebony (a people whose nationalities we can't begin listing because they encompasses so many different nations that it's ludicrous to even lump them together) are followed as they drive, or shop, or walk; they are harassed endlessly and killed in our streets because their skin possesses more melanin than white skin. Their culture is appropriated (much different than appreciated), their opinions are crammed together as if there is a single black one, their plight is mocked. But deeper into the problem, we have taught ourselves to fear them - fear them. What is a black man to do when we ignore the honest statement, "I am just another person,"? You don't have to be white to be a racist - those come in all shades. But if you're white, you do have to understand what people of color endure. You must put yourself in their shoes to see what they face. Forget "black" and instead think "person." How can we let another person die in the street like an animal, and then turn around and say, "We have to protect ourselves against [people]!"? How can you look at a black woman, a coworker, and say, "She only got this job because she's a [person]? How can you follow a kid through a store because he's a [person]? What damned sense does that make? It doesn't. People of color are Americans. They built America. Their sweat grew the plants we ate. Their muscle stacked the bricks we used to build. Their tears were our quiet dreams slept at night. None of this by choice. At the very least, we must begin to embrace people before we lose them, because we do not want to lose them. They are us, and we are them. Don't be arrogant and think you came from something better - your fathers were portrayed as lazy, shiftless, ignorant savages once, too. Drop the act and start embracing our family. We are all Americans. And let that be a starting point...

The alternative?

The survivors of our eventual nuclear war huddle around firelight and explain to their children that there was a time when we hated each other because of the way we looked. We will explain that we all came from the same ancestors, crawled out of our caves and peered into the starlight so that we could one day throttle each other. We will explain that those grim trees in the distance or not earth's creatures - they are the man made shells of what once was. Ashamed, noiseless, we will fall asleep choking on the irradiated dust, dreaming of a simpler time when we had everything anyone wanted, but we decided to spite ourselves for good measure. And that's if anyone survives.

The Reflection Tastes So Cold...So I Drink God Deeper Into Me.

Late at night, sometime after 12, a car rolls to a gentle inclined stop over grooved concrete. There is tension in the air like pink electricity, and it sits heavy in the guts of each man and woman stepping out of the vehicle. They awkwardly walk down the hill toward a sandy beach; not soft sand from the coasts, but the coarse, rocky sands of the Midwest, which feels excruciating along soft bare feet. They find a patch close to the water that looks dry, and they each begin pulling off their shoes, and then their socks, followed by their pants, one by one. The men don't hesitate to pull off their shirts, but the women glance at one another, crossing their chests with both hands hanging at their collar bones and look out over the inky black water burbling the weft out into pitch horizon. They giggle in anticipation, lifting from their belly button and flipping the shirt inside out onto the sand, then reaching up and unclasping their bras. 

Everyone covers their parts, the men with both hands between their legs, the women with one arm over the top and the other hand like a leaf. They each dip a toe into the chilly ink before slowly, and painfully, sidling in. There's talk, there's always talk; something to kill the jolt of cold through the body, and something to distract from bare flesh hidden beneath the murk. Everyone in the water wants to see everyone else underneath the water... And everyone in the water wants everyone else to see them... Yet this is the dance in which they partake. Perhaps nothing shall take place inside, or outside, of that cold and black reflection, but when the heart begins to race, and when each man or woman has the chance to show another just what's underneath all of those clothes - just what they could be capable of, given the right conditions, lights down, lips interlocked, fevered hands moving quickly - the body suddenly wriggles away from consciousness and slides effortlessly down, down, down into the deepness and wholeness of primal, nurturing nakedness. Everything there is warm. Everything there makes us tingle. Everything there makes us yearn. And we never, ever want to leave.

On the outside of the water, a place between the emptiness of cold night and the loneliness of exclusion, sits those too afraid to enter: the nerds, the uninvited, the cowardly, the ugly, people too mixed up in their own apprehensions and repression. They look out over the churning black tide and see their friends having so much fun. In between glimpses of naked flesh and the trumpeting of singing voices, they wonder what it's like to feel the silt squishing between their toes, or how little plants feel like tufts of hair against the pads of feet, or how, sometimes, a little nibble means there's a fish, or a little pinch means there's a suitor. Yet, they remain outside, they do not enter. Perhaps they've been in once before and they were laughed out. Perhaps they don't understand the use in swimming, perhaps they can't swim. Or perhaps they're afraid of something else...

Those in the water... how they laugh, how they play, how they carry on. Time does not exist around them, worries do not exist around them, nothing exists in that deep, dark pool except reflections of themselves staring back up, holding their attention, keeping them wanting more.

I was born in a time when there was nothing. This is also known as a time before the internet, a sort of prehistory; a time when the closest things to "computers" were secret languages whispered across keyboards at the altar of DOS. Mine was the last generation to know the difference between a miserable reality consumed by hours of boredom, and the fantasy we live in now, strangled by the ever-lulling tentacles of sexual appetite, social excess, circuses of bread and sport, and the Internet. My generation went from making the occasional phone call from a device bolted to the wall, to pagers, to cell phones, to smartphones, to shit implanted into your hands, arms and legs each letting you know there's someone out there commenting on your Facebook status. We went from blindness and anonymity to the constant all-seeing, ever-wakeful self-absorption of an unerasable, omnipotent ONLINE. We used to know the difference between 'me' offline and 'me' online - but we are not wired to focus on all things at once, our eyes are on the front of our skulls. We see what's there on the screen and everything else becomes blurry along the periphery until this "reality" becomes reality. All that matters are the words we're reading, the emotions we're feeling and the potential for soothing pleasure at our fingertips. It is as real as everything else because it exists, and it reacts to us, and we react to it. Whether the magic of an algorithm convinces us to buy an additional shirt, or whether our newsfeed reaffirms our political leaning, it's there, staring us in the face, jaws wide open and smiling. 

Sitting outside of the water, I'm just another ugly nerd that won't swim. I can't see myself in the reflection of that black mirror. I can't understand what it's like to slip down smoothly into the water of ever-self-expression. There is no need, or want, to slide away from the firm ground. There is no draw to stay under, even if it means frantically pulling the hair of those drowning at my feet in a vain effort to not remain alone out here in the wilderness by the lake.

In all of my misanthropic hypocritical majesty, I really do watch from the edge, helpless, dumb, uncertain and often yearning to be a part of the merriment. By no means am I happy with who I am. By no means am I sure that I'm right, or wrong, or anything. By no means do I possess the answers amidst the chaos, the ever turning, ever suffering, ever loving world. Yet when I peer out over the water and I see those beautiful naked people, I wonder if they know what's happening to them. I watch as their identities are stripped away like so many articles of clothing. I watch as they dip their toes into self-pornography. I watch them staking their lives on 'Likes', or tearing themselves to pieces over 'comments'. And once they've immersed themselves into the fantasy, they never, ever want to leave, even when it means peering into their own helplessly lost reflections through exhaustion until water finally fills their lungs.

It is lonely here outside of the water, away from the laughing and splashing and wonderful nakedness. I'm just another post-grunge-post-GenX-post-modern-pre-millennial who thinks he has it figured out, as if I know what's going on and I'm too cool to get involved; the proto-hipster wearing a beard, glasses, and flannel. But then I'm not kidding myself, either. I'm just as guilty of living in a fantasy, driven by the desires found on the internet.

About a week ago, I was hanging out at the UP classification yard, as I'm wont to do, taking pictures of switchers lining up cars and their train-engine brethren idling nearby. I like to post those pictures at the Railroad Picture Archives for other weirdos like me to drool over. In fact, right now, for good or ill, I'm probably one of the only people regularly posting pictures of trains in Des Moines.

So along came some foreign power, a BNSF road engine, leading a UP Big Mac toward a cut of cars to couple up before heading out of the yard. It's a little unusual to see BNSF at the UP yard because BNSF doesn't have any lines, or yards, in Des Moines. So I lifted my hand to my head and saluted a wave - something I typically do as an acknowledgement to the engineer as if to say, "Hi there! Nice to see you." We made eye contact, he lifted his hand, and pushed out his middle finger and thumb. He left it hanging there for a good few seconds, looked in his mirror and continued onward in reverse, trailing out of sight. 

For a moment, I refused to let it phase me - I took the shot without his hand gesture. But as I trotted back to my car, I thought, "Goddamnit, what a jerk. What's his problem, anyway?" And then I laughed. I'm living in a fantasy, too; this romantic idea that trains and their engineers are somehow beyond the weaknesses of other humans, gods aloft the iron road. If it was me, and I'd been having a shitty day, and some dumbass freak is hanging out in a crummy yard at the fringe of Des Moines (a fringe of its own), and this guy waves at me with a camera dangling around his neck, I'd probably have made much ruder, more direct gestures.

Outside of the water, we have to be careful, too. We can't dip our toes in only to slide forward headlong, gulping a lungfull of god. We have to remember that the reflection in the water below is a ghost. It only exists to reflect us back to ourselves; a hoary mirror in which we've been gazing ever since. But those jovial satyrs and nymphs frollicking in the water? They're a long time sleeping, and it's going to be cold, uncomfortable and embarrassing to get out now. Why try? Better to just keep plunging down and drinking in. Because what else is there now, but the reflection? And which direction are we travelling, but deeper and deeper into this lake?

Beware the fantasy. Beware your reflection.

The Nightmare is Over... It Has Only Just Begun.

As a writer, I should have words to describe to you what I've endured over the last eight months. And while I can relate to some of you what it's like to wake up early, work a demanding eight hour day knocking the socks off of the corporate world with all of the intellect and energy I've ever had, only to turn around and work late into each night using my hands and my heart, and every single ounce of my waning determination, to help two other super-humans erect a haunted attraction, my words would merely tell the story of someone driven, not of the pain, the fear and the sacrifice.

I don't pretend I know about hard work. I've watched the men in my life literally work themselves into crippling pain. Mike, Dwain, and Donny worked and worked, and worked and worked. I couldn't imagine what it's like to work like they did, and do - Mike is STILL working, and let's just say he needs some time off. I've had it easy, and I'm grateful that I was able to share a hammer, a drill and a saw with a Terminator like Aaron Barnum and a maniac like my business partner Ian Miller, and together, throw ourselves - literally - headlong into the most demanding work I've ever endured, including construction, carpentry, steel and iron work, painting, set decoration, lifting and moving, code research and adherence, ADA compliance, the political arena, financing, personnel management, contracts, accounting, and knowing your customer.

I don't pretend I know about fear. I don't pretend I know about sacrifice. My grandfather, who passed through the veil a year ago, went to Germany and was blown up. When he woke as a living corpse among piles of burnt and twisted pieces of human meat, he managed to walk through bombed out villages, over muddy and rutted roads, through gunfire and shell explosions, not to mention roving wolfpacks and black SS death squads - alone - until he reached his platoon. Medics patched him up, gave him some ammunition and returned him to fight in a war against genocide and mass domination. He liberated broken, filthy human skeletons from death camps where they awaited extinction. He witnessed fields of corpses frozen like logs, filled by the bodies of Germans and Americans after battles untold. He was awarded the bronze star for crossing through a machine gun alley of German soldiers in order to gather radio equipment that kept his group from being split off, hunted and shot dead by the advancing Wehrmacht. He never told us stories. He never discussed the farm boy he left on the beaches of France. And even when pressed, he never spoke ill of the Germans. He once told me, "We knew they were fighting for their country, just like we were fighting for ours. We didn't like Hitler, and not all of them did either. They were just like us, and we tried to treat them that way." 

So what is sacrifice and fear to me, when I was doing something I loved? I lost sleep, I lost weight, I stopped writing and reading, I stopped taking photos and I stopped chasing trains. In fact, I stopped being 'me'. And yet, here I am less than a year later... and how could I compare it?

Yet, I did endure. I did my best not to complain. I continued through illness and injury, through uncertainty and anxiety. I muted my 'self' so that I could lend a hand in creating, what we hope is, a flag bearer for the state of Iowa. 

The ideas continue to flow. There are more props to build, more sets to create, more actors to train, more chemicals to mix for more recipes to test out, more projects to propose, finance and execute. We have competitors that don't necessarily like us and we're currently exploring, at best, tentative relationships because we want Des Moines to be a regional destination for haunted attractions, fun houses and escape chambers. And with our success, and the success of our competitors, our city has a chance to attract other larger organizations, different businesses, more citizens, bigger communities, better-represented cultures. We want to see Des Moines become the shining beacon of a growing Midwest.

And all we had to do was stop being us for a year. The year is over. We are us again. But we're not, and we will never be. The nightmare is over so that it can finally begin for real.

There's Coming a Time...

For the second time in as many months, I've seen a child enter a coffee shop selling things to customers. Neither child looked alike, they were different ages and ethnicities, but both looked desperate, confused, empty. Scared. Scared...in Des Moines, Iowa, the middle of America, there are children walking around scared selling their own shit.

Last month, while I was in Smokey Row off of MLK, a chubby white boy from the neighborhood who couldn't have been older than 12 was walking up to each table and chair and barely-breathing customer, and asking if someone wanted to buy a video game he was holding for $10, or $8, or anything they wanted to give him, any dollars. With each solicitation, he received a warm rejection - but a rejection nonetheless. At the time, I had regretted being so cold to him. I was quite cold, too. I'm not sure why. I think maybe his awkward situation scared me - to be a child wandering among strangers trying to sell a video game for cash, and then walking a long way home (he went over the horizon) empty handed seemed too much for me. I still feel guilty the way I stared him in the eyes, paused and said, "No." I think in my reasoning, I was trying to scare him away. As if my cold reaction would thrust him into the world of strange adults, and he would turn back home before someone really hurt him. But it didn't. He was numb to me. Jesus Christ.

Today, at Caribou in Ankeny, a much younger boy, brown skin, maybe Latino, no older than seven, walked in and began soliciting homemade chocolate covered apples for $5. He had a bin of them, maybe a baker's dozen. He looked positively frightened. He stuttered. He wasn't sure what to say in response to anything, "How much are they? Where did you get these?" All of it fell on deaf ears as he gyrated around uncomfortably, smashing his hands together in front of him and awkwardly pursing his lips, not making eye contact.

Homemade chocolate covered apples? I didn't see where he came from, and I couldn't make out where he went off to, but there are some apartments west of here, so it's possible he'd come down from them. He didn't want to be here. No way in hell. Someone sent him.

What does this mean? It means people are trying to make money. They're trying to find a way. They're willing to take a slight risk to make a living. But this isn't the goddamn turn of the 20th century - or is it? Is this that same "turn of the century" in the 21st? Are we at that time of great poverty and greater risks? Are two world wars looming ahead of us before things settle back down? 

A friend of mine and I had lunch together today at a place off Hubble, a pupusaria over by Leachman Lumber. We rarely talk politics, but something that came up was the strange state of affairs we're entering.

We're entering a time in our country that's pivotal. We're beginning to realize that the sickness with which we've become accustomed cannot continue. We're blaming that ape Trump, but he's simply the conduit. We're beginning to realize that business cannot continue as usual. We can't continue with systematic racism, shooting every black man, woman and child in the back while they're on the ground in handcuffs. We can't continue with legal slave labor by hiring illegal immigrants, stealing their human rights and forcing them to work on our farms or in our construction outfits without paying them a living wage. In fact, as it turns out, we may be realizing that we need to start paying everyone a living wage. And we can't continue shitting all over women by not paying them, by forcing them into stereotypes and gender roles, by raping them and covering it up (fuck your school, release those goddamned numbers you money grubbing universities), and on and on.

We're somehow coming to terms with the fact that white men cannot continue to control everything. They simply cannot.

And maybe these little boys selling things in coffee shops is the trickle before the dam bursts? Maybe a scarier time, or at least one of great uncertainty, is edging closer and closer.

No maybe about it. 

It's a Matter of Survival

As I drove to the bank this morning, I realized something about myself. 

Most people take photos of other people; either people doing shit or just a bunch of people standing around, or maybe even just one person being 'interesting'. You might say I realized most people find other people interesting - interesting enough to take their pictures.

It turns out, most of my pictures, the vast majority, are taken of things; e.g. train engines, abandoned buildings, a wig I found in the gutter, a pair of blown-out shoes in the woods, an old bridge grown over by shrubs and trees. In fact, you might say that I find groups of people as interesting as groups of pigeons - it's not to say that they aren't interesting, but the only time I watch pigeons is when they're getting run over by trains in Chicago. In fact, if I could spend a whole day being invisible, I would - and I wouldn't spend that time interacting with people, either, I'd be reading books, taking pictures and walking places without a bunch of eyes following me.

In fact, let me relate a short story. When I was a teenager, I got it in my head to dress up and go out walking. From the outside, it seemed an obvious cry for attention - I was dressed in a long fur-lined women's coat, sunglasses, a dust mask, jeans, boots, gloves, and a hat. Who wouldn't notice that? Yet, what seemed so "obvious" to me was anything but to everyone else. In my mind, being dressed like that made me invisible; I was literally incognito. After the police picked me up and took me home (my walk only lasted 20 minutes) my parents insisted it was me trying to garner attention, and their reaction is typical. It took me another ten years to learn that in order to become invisible, you have to pretend to do normal things like everyone else; you have to inject yourself into their world, wear a smile, laugh at their jokes, even force feed yourself some of their entertainment. Whatever you do, don't try to hide because that makes other humans salivate.

But I'm not about to defend my interests, or really my disinterests. Frankly, I am the oddball, and my behavior should be the exception. Human beings are social creatures, they do not, and should not, isolate themselves from others. Human beings require connection with other humans, and usually they need a large network of friends and family. I'm one of those people that only needs a connection with about five people, and that's only in order for me to be 'happy' - I can survive without anyone, to be honest, but I choose this life.

I promise I'm reaching a point, but first, imagine the kinds of people who can't forge friendships, or those who prefer not to: schizophrenics, psychopaths; violent offenders locked in solitary confinement, the maniac who comes out at night to stalk innocents, drunks absorbed in their daily crutch; the dregs of society, et al. And let's be honest, many of them want friends, look for paths into society, need some kind of connection and human touch. Even Al Capone wanted fame, fortune and friends; even John Wayne Gacy belonged to the local Jaycees. 

So my behavior is unusual, it's not something to which one should aspire, but to which one should recoil. 

So why in the hell are we sitting silently as Donald Trump signs into law an executive order that bans over 130 million potential American leaders, artists, scientists, soldiers, teachers, writers, cooks, comedians, doctors, gardeners, salesman, mechanics, musicians, miners, janitors, and train engineers? Why would we allow ourselves to become so isolated? Why are we allowing this imbecile to turn our country into a prison?

I don't like being in the position where my paranoid conspiracies become real. I don't like acknowledging the possibility that we're heading down a path with no way to turn around, where we either rise up and kill our masters, or find ourselves at the other end of a bloody and burnt tunnel, where the United States is no longer united, where regions are split up into smaller, contained 'countries', where the fall of the Soviet Union will look like a bloodless Eastern European holiday.

If I'm the one saying this, you better fucking listen up. I can't stand other people, don't need them, don't care for them. I wish I could drive down empty roads and shop in empty stores. But even I know better than to isolate this country from the rest of the world. Even I know better than to ban millions from entering. Even I know where we're headed - a big goddamn nightmare. Better start learning how to live on rice and dirty water because you'll be lucky to have that.

Goddamn Power's Out

I've had one hell of a bout with writer's block the past eighteen months. Two thousand and sixteen was a dry spell if I've ever seen one. I can't get my thoughts together, I can't focus on anything. I'll write for a few minutes and then the well runs dry. Just like that, snap! It's like a carpenter with all his tools and a room full of lumber, and he just looks at it and says, "Fuck it, I don't know what the hell I'm doing in here." I'm like a boxer with a broken nose - doesn't mean they're gonna pull me from the fight, but to win this fight now would be more than unusual. 

Hunter Thompson was a good writer. He wasn't necessarily prolific, but when he died in 2005, he left a letter that, read from the perspective of a 'fellow' writer, gives you chills. Thompson had written some masterpieces, disguised as inebriated odysseys, including Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary. Yet in his later years, he was releasing compilations and collections of his previous work. Growing up with him, in a way, you wanted some new material, something to sink your teeth into. When he wasn't producing, you almost felt afraid he wouldn't produce again.

Hunter Thompson did, in fact, produce some works in the 1990's and 2000's, but naturally it wasn't at the caliber of his previous work. And you know what - he knew it. In his final letter, penned to his wife, Thompson said:

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won’t hurt.

As a writer, one who can't find the spark anymore, who struggles with everything, who feels numb in the front side of his head like an icepick's been jammed up through his nose, I read those words above and they touched me. As Thompson might say, albeit taken far out of context, I got 'the fear'.

I can't know what Hunter was going through, but what I can say is that writing brings you a confidence, light heartedness and satisfaction unlike anything else in this world. And when it's gone...it's hard. Really hard.

The world is dead around you. People stink. Food tastes off. Music puts you to sleep. Movies seem contrived, as do most books. Every step you take feels useless. The sun rises, but you can't feel it on your face. You're invited, often unwillingly, to events, but you don't care whether you go or not. You stare people in the face and you say anything you can to avoid conversation, to avoid connection, to avoid interaction. Everything everyone says hurts, exhausts you, makes you feel bitchy. You just want to curl up and die. And at the very least, among those of us with tools to cope, you begin to realize you're staring down a void; the Abyss.

And all for what? To write again? Yeah. Fuck yeah. Writing is breathing, and I'm struggling to keep my eyes open sometimes.

tsuD eht setiB enO rehtonA

"Now it's your world. You are the center of everything. In the past, politicians wanted to change things. Including you. The new system listens to you. Observes you. Understands you. And gives you what it knows you want. If you liked that, then you will love this. And nothing need ever change. All around you are two-dimensional images of people who died long ago. They say, 'Don't bother with the future. Stay here with us. Forever.'"

- Massive Attack v Adam Curtis

Debbie Reynolds. Carrie Fisher. George Michaels. Just three more to add to the pile of comforting memories. If you haven't already rushed out to purchase some piece of their legacy, at least sit glued to your phone reliving their contributions long enough to miss what's going on outside.

Meanwhile, as our leaders promote the myths that keep our society running, they certainly don't believe them. They continue to find ways to control the forces of selfish individualism. Sleep tight.