Harsh Realm

This is from about 26 days after I arrived in Vegas, just before I got into the house I’m renting now. The place I ended up moving into is not the same one mentioned here, but same difference. Yo yo yo yo yo

I have not had any real means of contacting anyone for like 24 hours. This should be resolved shortly and I look forward to speaking with you on the phone soon. Long story short, life is a bitch but I remain alive, mobile, and on track to not be homeless in about 4 1/2 days.

Where to begin. Yesterday started out almost like a good day. After getting like 6 hours of pretty good car-sleep I copped some 99-cent coffee from a nearby bodega and set out to locate the Loose Caboose, which I had left in a residential area where I thought it wouldn't be towed. I had an Airbnb reservation to check into at 3:00, so I knew if I could recover my trailer and get on the road my troubles would soon be over. I found it quickly, but much to my surprise it had been tampered with for the first time since I had been in Vegas. Some tweakers had stolen, for whatever reason, my microwave and a bag of old work clothes, and in the process damaged my bookshelf beyond the point of further use. Alright fine, whatever. I threw the bookshelf aside and started backing up to my trailer, which is difficult to do myself and involves a lot of periodically getting out of my car and checking where I'm at. So I'm doing this while my new Samsung phone is hanging on a charger inside the cab, and I'm leaving the door open for quick access. I get to a point where I've almost got it, so I get out of the car and run back to hitch up the ball... while I'm just out of reach, the wind blows my car door shut and it smashes my phone in the door as it closes. I run over to survey the damage. The screen looks like a mescaline trip. My phone is fucked. Fuck. There's nothing to do but drive to the nearest Boost store and see what they can do for me. I stoically unhitched the Caboose and drove to the Boost on South Maryland Parkway where I had originally gotten the phone. I knew I had insurance but was hesitant to allow my hopes to rise too high; after all, I live in late-Capitalist America, where everything is a scam. But when I got to the store the guy working at the counter happened to be the manager, and he told me pretty much exactly how it works, explaining that my claim would almost certainly be approved and that after a $50 deductible my replacement phone would be shipped and arrive within 24 hours. He was nice enough to let me use his address to mail the phone to, and we used the store computers so I could find and jot down directions to my Airbnb. This last part was tricky; my phone was completely inoperable but I had made enough of a mental note of this guy's Airbnb profile that I was able to deduce the exact address. So I ended up getting there, checked in, and slept before heading back to the Boost store to wait for the arrival of my phone. That's where I'm at now, just hanging out in the vicinity and waiting for something to happen. It's supposedly out for delivery right now. Luckily my gym is across the street.

So, I'm working a full time schedule now, operating the broiler at some trendy on-strip shithole burger joint five days a week, which is exactly what I wanted, kind of. My Airbnb is booked through the 28th, and I'm out of that hostel which was starting to get on my nerves. The night before I broke my phone and the morning of I was corresponding with my new landladies Stephanie and Alessa, and they confirmed that I can count on moving in on the First of March. So, I have to survive the next five days of transience without crashing my car or getting arrested, and then I can move into my new pad and claim victory from my trials.

I've got like $50 in one bank account currently and $100 in another one. I should be getting paid either about $550 this coming Friday or $1100 the Friday after that, not sure which. This doesn't include the $550 I am due from my tax refund; I have not had the time and Internet access to file my taxes but I am hoping to get that done today or tomorrow.

That's the story of my life up to this point. I hope you have found this update enlightening. With any luck I will be sending you a text from my replacement phone within a couple hours.

This is it. I’m at the Love Shack poring over final preparations for the journey to Las Vegas. I’ve been living here for the past few days, since my lease ended, and it’s been fun. I needed the camaraderie after a lonely, sleepless weekend cleaning out my apartment in the dark on acid (the power company shut off my lights because I didn’t pay them). Mark is all cool with me after the whole Ashley incident; he explained that he totally forgave me completely because I had made an effort to reach out to him and that it really shouldn’t have been a big deal anyway. It was good to hear that. Overall, with my life and work in Idaho I’ve done something I can be completely proud of. I achieved success through my voluntary participation in American society for the first time, built a career and a good reputation for myself, performed as a professional artist with a tight band, and learned to drive. Hell, I even beat the whole game at one point; This time last year I had a condo with a fine ass bitch who was down with me, a good job, and a car I owned outright. When it came right down to it, though, she was ready to be done with life and I wasn’t. She wanted to tie the knot, make a baby, and call it right then. I tried to make it work, but I was still consumed with the struggle of my own life, possessed by my enduring impulse to take over/save the world. So, I press on. Thanks to the working class of the Pacific Northwest and their rugged frontier spirit. Stay gold. Thanks to all the Idahomies and the Love Shack crew, thanks to Coeur d’ Alene’s music and art scene. Thanks to any coworker or manager who wasn’t a complete dick to me, and to all the girls I slept with. You are the wind in my sails. I might hit y’all with a dispatch from Pocatello tomorrow if I have time, if not the next time you hear from me I will be a desert dweller once again. BRIGHT LIGHT CITY GONNA SET MY SOUL ON FIRE

Somewhere in America today a single middle-aged man who works in the financial sector parked somewhere to scarf down a quick lunch while skimming the news of the day. He was confronted by headline after headline telling of a polarized public and a mosaic of disparate, fractured Americas struggling to understand one another, and he wondered aloud to himself what the source of this confusion could be. “It sure seems like things used to be simpler,” he thought, “I would like to think we could just sit down and find a solution that works for everyone. I know one thing for sure though, I never would have thought to complain as much as this generation when I was younger.” He was feeding from a wrapper with a Taco Bell logo on it, and gave no thought to the place his lunch was made as he pondered the current state of the country he called home. Where were all these dissatisfied people he kept hearing about, and what were their lives really like? At this moment the man could not recall the faces of any of the working class people he had spoken to that day, even though they had made his breakfast, lunch, and coffee, and washed his car.

I recently took a gig at Jimmy John’s in an even smaller town just North of Coeur d’ Alene. I am planning to relocate to Las Vegas in about 1.5 months to make some real music, money, and art -related moves, and I need some extra money saved for the move. I am working five days a week as a cook at a downtown restaurant right now, which I like, but it’s just not enough money to fund my immediate endeavors. I decided to bite the bullet and get yet another retarded corporate job to fill out my schedule. I mean, I applied to some pretty cool places, but due to the time frame I basically had no choice but to take the first thing that came my way. This place didn’t even interview me.

ring ring

“Hello?” “Hey yeah I do need someone for mornings on Wednesday and Thursday. So just come in at 10, we’ll have a shirt for you and stuff. But there’s two training videos you have to watch, they’re like two and a half hours each-” “Wait a minute, I’m sorry- who is this?” “Sorry, my bad. This is Justin from Jimmy John’s.” “Oh, good to hear from you!” “Yeah, we just had someone leave and I’m actually tryna bring on two new people. So, you can come on down really anytime between now and then and watch those videos. I know it’s shitty but you get a sandwich for doing it and you also get paid so...” “Yeah man, sounds great. At the latest I’ll be by at 7:30am on Wednesday.” “Haha. Alright buddy.”

click When I got there Wednesday morning Justin looked tired and his face was red and puffy. “I’ve been out sick for two days, man. Today was the first day I had to wake up to an alarm clock again. Fucking sucked. Anyway, let’s get you set up with this video.” He wasted no time pulling out a Samsung tablet and setting it up on the table, where I watched my new owner personally explain how to uphold the Jimmy John’s brand for over 145 minutes. I was full of coffee and broke up my piss breaks to make the video go by faster. In every city there is a working-class underbelly composed of various spheres of fast-food workers, dishwashers and cooks, low-rent security guards, parking attendants, and other people working in marginalized industries, barely or not quite making ends meet while at the same time trying to get to a better stage in their lives. In different cities these circles overlap and mix to different degrees, but combined this working-class, service-industry group often comprises the largest single sector of the economy by number of employees. In Coeur d’ Alene the service industry contingent is particularly diverse, lively, and tight-knit. You’ve got some local cooks and bartenders who have been at it forever, some hardcore burnout kids from the surrounding areas, inexperienced waiters and pretty 19-year old servers who are more likely to be middle class, from out-of-state, and/or attending classes at NIC, literally anyone who had a kid at an economically disadvantageous time and just needs a steady job, and my favorite, the rotating cast of misfits, cluess 18-year-olds, tweakers, and lost souls who staff our local fast-food restaurants, chain stores, and corporate entities with the absolute laxest hiring standards and highest turnover. I’ve been embedded with this cohort since moving to Coeur d’ Alene, and I’ve had the chance to interact with people from across the spectrum. While I mostly try to work slightly higher-wage, less-corporate line cook jobs, work is somewhat spotty in this town and I’ve ended up working whack ass places both on accident and out of desperation. In turn, many of my friends work for Hagadone Hospitality, the owner of the massive resort I refer to as Dracula’s Castle, and my long time girlfriend Katie was a manager at McDonald’s. My point being, I’ve been taking notes. Inside, Jimmy John’s was a sterile, mechanized assembly line for the conversion of offsite manufactured product into end-sale revenue, with the elimination of individual thought, habit, and work style as an incidental byproduct of the corporate auditing process. In this regard it was pretty similar to Subway, Domino’s, Jamba Juice, or any one of these interchangeable corporate-shell companies that make up at least half of the world’s food economy now. Remember that people in America’s towns and inner cities live and die in these chain stores, feeding their children with paychecks stamped with beaming logos. I don’t take this corporate homogenization lightly. Our work is our life. Don’t let them take it from you. College dropout who prepared for an economy that wasn’t there, Retiree returning to work because his savings wasn’t enough, inner-city single mother who just doesn’t have a better way to fund the upbringing of her child...

If you step outside today in most populous areas of the United States the world looks rather shitty. There’s a McDonald’s, Wendy’s, or Carl’s Jr. on every block, at least one, and people are rushing between working shitty jobs and spending their money on shitty things. A person’s life is made up of their time, money, and actions. The world we inhabit is made up of human lives. When jobs are shitty, lives are shitty. Working-class life in Coeur d’ Alene is in some ways a microcosm of the dystopian future that I fear may soon await most of the country. The inequities would be almost comical if it weren’t causing palpable suffering to thousands of people every day and stifling untold human potential.

The huge influx of outside money necessitates a massive service industry, but the work is highly seasonal. People at the bottom, most often the people born and raised in the area, are reduced to fighting over scraps; rents are relatively high and no establishment pays more than they absolutely have to, especially since Idaho’s minimum wage of $7.25 sets the bar pretty low. Middle management positions that offer some tentative financial security are a far off dream for most, and those who attain them are forced to guard their status to the point of assholery, bullying subordinates into submission and withholding valuable knowledge. The huge amount of property tax revenue enables the right wing government to fund a massive police force. The town’s drug subcultures remain extant, but are kept in check by a police and court system that actively preys on the underclass for revenue and to justify their salaries. This is the American Police State 101: There are more than enough businesses paying more than enough taxes, so the availability of public funds isn’t an issue. What these businesses require, however, is an endless supply of cheap labor, and the police fill this need by maintaining a permanently marginalized population of people who are not housing secure, people of color, people with substance abuse issues, and anyone who has to miss work because of court appearances or fail a background check. These people, who society blames for their own problems, are continually re-arrested for suffering from the afflictions of poverty and thereby kept in a state of economic desperation. All in all, ordinary working brothers and sisters are largely prevented from sharing in the leisure opportunities and scenic beauty of Coeur d’ Alene that bourgeoisie tourists from around the world come to enjoy, all because of the false promises of economic justice that are so pervasive across the United States. I will give you a specific example. I have what would be considered a pretty good job for this area and I make $12.50 an hour. Extrapolated to one year, that’s $26,000. However, I made barely over $18,000 last year, I know because I just did my taxes. That’s like $1,500 a month. Rent on an apartment like mine is $1,000, though in my case I was splitting it with somebody. And in reality I worked over 5 jobs, some of them weird tip jobs like delivery driving, and never knew quite how much money was coming in. Needless to say nearly all of it was sucked up by bills, paying to fix shit on my car, and court expenses. These are the harsh realities of working class life in America. Jobs like Jimmy John's shouldn't exist as we currently know them. If a college kid or a single mother needs to get an entry-level job at a place like Jack in the Box or Wal-Mart because they have limited options and need to fund important things in their lives because they are adults, then they can be paid $15 a goddamn fucking hour or some kind of meaningful indexed minimum wage that enables them to actually do those things. Like eat, for instance, or acquire further training. If prices go up on prepared foods and service industry-based luxuries- fuck, it astounds me that people talk like that would be the worst thing imaginable. Have you seen our cities? This country has become an absolute corporate shitscape. These dumb corporate jobs, these cheap simulations of luxury, there needs to be less of them, they need to pay their employees better, they should probably be a little more expensive, and they need to provide at least a hope of a better future for everyone involved. Why anyone would oppose accomplishing that through legislation is beyond me. These companies have become the most profitable firms in human history off the labor and hard-earned money of ordinary Americans, and they have only used their profits to further decimate the working class. Money has to stay circulating for the economy to work. It moves upstream through consumer spending, and it moves downstream through paychecks. Right now the paychecks aren't big enough to keep the whole population in a state of healthy economic activity. Capitalists aren't going to start paying out more on their own. It's their job to protect their bottom line. The people need to use a combination of collective bargaining and legislation to protect their interests and to force more money out of the corporate machine. Because our government is now owned by corporations through legalized bribery, this will necessarily entail rooting out corruption from the Federal level down and making the bribery of representatives illegal. Not an easy task, but nothing worthwhile is. What are you gonna do, sit on your ass? How pathetic would that be. A sandwich maker at a chain sandwich shop could easily have a dignified existence. It doesn't have to be a terrible job. Make sandwiches, whatever, talk to people, get paid. As long as you have some sense of autonomy at the workplace, you have a chance to be good at what you do, you feel the people around you want you to succeed, and it enables you to actually live your life, there's nothing wrong with that. One could easily design the job at Jimmy John's so that it doesn't suck. But it would necessarily cost Jimmy John's more money. They wouldn't be able to schedule 8 grown ass men per day to work four hour shifts and weird split shifts, not train them at all, make them sign mandatory arbitration clauses so they can't sue or organize, make them pay for their own meals, no benefits,... your life emanates from your job. If your job sucks, your life sucks. Some conservatives will tell you that that's the point of Capitalism. Life has to suck so that you are motivated to make it not suck; in other words, the economy makes you work to achieve a dignified existence and your work fuels the economy. I happen to think this model is asinine and outdated. Healthy humans are largely self-motivated and they like to do work and make money. These corporations are not helping to train healthy, hard-working humans with these entry level jobs, they are wasting people's time in dead-end positions, systematically devaluing the labor of the working class. People can tell when they are being fucked over and treated as if they are expendable, and they don’t respond well to it. When your life sucks due to a lack of funds and you can't connect the dots, you can't pay a security deposit, you can't fix your car, you can't go back to school even though you want to, that's wasted human potential. Time, work, effort, and creativity are the things that our world is made of. Right now the corporate machine is devouring human life and shitting it into the ocean, and nobody is even saying anything about it. The great lie sold to the working class by the elite in this country is that the market forces of Capitalism will naturally and necessarily create the perfect meritocracy and by extension the perfect civil society. This lie is projected to the individual as "Work hard for your masters and you will be recognized and rewarded with your very own piece of the wealthiest society in human history." It's a perfect swindle, designed to make ordinary people identify with wealth that they don't have. Workers compete for their place in the paycheck stream by putting on appearances and throwing each other under the bus instead of actually working, managers are forced to cut labor costs and encourage high turnover instead of training and motivating existing employees, executives outsource, subcontract, and issue ever-more demanding corporate standards without regard to human life or dignity, and everybody blames the person immediately below or above them for the shitty state of things. THERE ARE BETTER MODELS. Social science has come a long way. THERE ARE THINGS THAT CAN BE DONE. I know what some of those things are but not all of them. I am not a scientist, I am a writer. My main job is to point out how full of shit everyone is. But there are people developing kickass solutions to the things that are making human life suck, and you need to listen to those people. The only people who are definitely wrong are the ones saying that the current system is fine and we don't need to do anything, or worse, that giving more money and power to the corporations is the answer.  The corporations, as long as they have the unrestricted freedom to do so, will always find creative ways to staff their buildings that are cheaper than hiring and developing long-term employees who are paid a good salary. The corporations created this backassward world of ours, now the people will have to do something to change it. A simple place to start would be taking seriously the notion that everyone who has a full time job deserves at least an economy-class ticket to a decent life that offers some degree of choice and autonomy. Say, enough income to comfortably rent an apartment, stock the fridge, and finance a preowned car. You could accomplish this by creating a good federal minimum wage that is indexed against housing costs, alongside a robust social safety net and other worker protections such as standardizing work contracts so that employees who desire full-time employment or consistent hours have some guarantee that their expectations will be fulfilled. That's not really a lot to ask. All the modern western democracies do this, even ones that do dumb shit all the time like Great Britain and Australia. Can we be smarter than Australia, the country that elected Tony Abbott? I guess time will tell.

I hope things get better for the working people of Coeur d’ Alene, and I plan to come back to this area for Barter Faire and shit next year. But I’m not going to spend the rest of my life fighting the impossible uphill battle that it would be to try to bring socioeconomic justice to North Idaho. I hate cops. I hate cops hate cops hate cops. I haaaate cooooops. I’m getting the fuck out of here. I need to get out while I’m ahead and try to make some real money somewhere else. I leave on Saturday. The Desert Cruiser is fully outfitted. See you on the other side.

So, I'm moving to Las Vegas in between 13 and 20 days from now. If you don't know, now you know. The reasons for this move are as numerous as they are absurd as they are bittersweet. The volatility and seasonality of the restaurant work scene in this town has made it extremely difficult to save money and make material strides at the rate that I would like; Winter rolls in, and suddenly the money all dries up and it's twice as much of a pain in the ass to get around town and look for jobs. Then when Summer comes back around you're so busy playing catch-up and repairing the damage to your car and bullshit that you don't have time to enjoy how awesome the Summers are. That, and the Police just make it way too hard to live; you actually get tickets and Sheriff's labor for weed possession, and I also got booked on a misdemeanor similar to disturbing the peace last year that would not have warranted police contact in any enlightened society. I need to get to where there's bundles of money for young cooks to make, no snow to shovel, and where the pigs are less aggessive. I'm definitely gonna be coming back for Barter Faire next year, but it will be with a pile of money put away and new tires on my car.

My Nevada mission will be similar to my Idaho mission for the most part; play in a band, write, make art, establish connections, build myself up; the main difference is that my orientation will be a little more political this time around. When I moved to Idaho to find stabilitiy in my life, I put my politics on the backburner temporarily. But when I achieve a more prosperous stability in Nevada, I intend to throw some of that prosperity at revolution. Start or join a club of some kind maybe, a reading group or propaganda network. ---

What I don't know is where I'm going to live, which might end up being nowhere for awhile. I have a potential job lined up at an on-strip restaurant right now, which is the first step in finding an apartment, but I need to get that letter of intent and time is drawing close. Which doesn't particularly scare me. As long as I'm making money I'm not losing ground. I just bought a utility trailer made out of the bed of an old pickup for my Cadillac, so I know how I'm gonna get all my stuff down there. If I have to bum around for a week or two sleeping in my car or the hostels before I find an apartment, big fucking deal. I haven't been in hunter-gatherer fucking guerilla survival mode in awhile and I always enjoy it. This is shaping up to be one of the most exciting turns yet in a life that has been one exciting or despairing turn after another. All I know is this: 50 years after Hunter S. Thompson took to Las Vegas in a boat of a Cadillac to draft his wry critique of the American society on a shitload of drugs, I myself am now driving a boat of a Cadillac to Las Vegas to draft a wry critique of American society on a shitload of drugs. My next dispatch may be from the Mojave desert. Life is a ride where you die at the end. May as well get a story or two out of it.

I started seeing this girl we’ll call Victoria a little while ago, and it was a fun little fling that ran its course and came to a close by me being an asshole as usual. Or maybe you will think differently, I don’t know. I have reasons behind all the whack ass shit I do. I often try to follow the Golden Rule and do to people as I would want them to do to me, but it doesn’t work out because I’m fucking crazy and how I would want the world to work is vastly different from how it works in practice. Anyway, some decent sex was had and I don’t think anyone’s feelings were really hurt in the long run. Enjoy.

Victoria was a goth chick I would always see at punk shows hanging out with Devin’s friends and she would invariably be wearing this cute nun outfit with lots of makeup and rosary earrings and shit. Devin and his friends belong to a cohort of mostly but not entirely queer and trans kids Coeur d’ Alene and nearby towns. Some of them are in high school and some of them are a bit older than that, but a lot of them like going to these shows and were big supporters of the band Bitch Fits, so I had aligned myself with this group fairly closely. Victoria was very talkative with a short attention span and a high voice, so I had always assumed she was around 16, but we got to talking after dancing to Greet Death at Calypsos and I found out she was 22. She’s into the Cure, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, old horror movies, good shit like that. Victoria said she had dated guys and girls and that she was comfortable with any pronouns; it seemed like she was just beginning to experiment with gender fluidity. I am a straight cis male and I can’t directly relate to gender dysphoria, but I empathize with these groups in a lot of ways and I consider their cause to be at the frontlines of the wider battle over human rights, liberalism, and culture. We ended up running into each other on Tubbs Hill once or twice and I found her to be pretty alright for someone to talk to. I mean, I don’t often get to converse with that many people who know the deep, deep cuts off the third Cure album.

I forget how she ended up coming over the first time, but I think we just watched some Documentary Now!, ate a quarter of a seroquel each, and passed out. Seroquel is a sedating atypical antipsychotic I got from Devin that makes great drug for when you just want to hibernate for like 9-12 hours. I probably didn’t want to make a move in case I was misreading things and she didn’t want to sexualize the relationship at all. When she wanted to spend the night again though, I decided I was being silly and she definitely wanted to fuck. I pulled that black skirt right off her tight little ass. I asked her, “Do you want to go condom or no condom?” She said “Put the condom on. I don’t know where you’ve been!” I put her down on the Tiny Bed, missionary, grabbed her feet, and went at it. She said it hurt at first; it took some trial and error to find an angle that worked, but we managed to get a few minutes of smooth sailing. I don’t remember if I even came. Overall I was thrilled to have a new sex friend but left kind of confused. Was she really a straight girl, or just straight-curious? I had to find out. The next time I was determined to rock it doggy style which proved to be the right decision. She gasped “Ooooh!” at the first few pumps and when I smacked her ass she buried her face in the pillow finally began bellowing the muffled chorus of  “Fuuuuuck yeah... Fuck me, Daddy!” I roped all over her ass and back, barely getting the condom off in time. I decided doggy style was the way to go. I also decided she wasn’t very good at sex but that’s okay.

We would have little hookups like this about every other night for awhile. It was a cool little thing because she would work until midnight or so at Michael’s, and during the same time we were having super late nights at the restaurant. I would text her when I was getting off work, she would text me back and be at my house in a few minutes. Sometimes we wouldn’t even have sex and would just watch Seinfeld or something, take a seroquel, and pass out. But usually we would be fuck in between the Seinfeld and the seroquel. During this time Victoria was pretty much my only date; I was working a lot and trying to get my life in order, so I wasn’t trying to go out and hook up with anyone else. I usually take pride in being a rugged individualist and not needing other people at all, but the fact is I get very lonely sometimes and when I get to bring somebody cool into my would I cherish it for however long it lasts. She asked me once, “What are we? Like, are we homies or what?” I basically told her that she was the best new friend I had made in a long time, but that I had just gotten out of a gnarly relationship and was working on my personal life, and I hoped she could understand. We went into a conversation about polyamory and hookup culture, and talking to her helped me understand the human race just a little bit better. I asked her if I should tell her if I am seeing somebody else, or if she didn’t want to hear about it. She basically said, “Oh, I don’t care, I just don’t want gratuitous details.” I matched with a girl named Abigail on Tinder during this time and from her pix I thought she was really cute. We went back and forth on Instagram from time to time but hadn’t hooked up yet. Remember I’m a busy man. One day I was just waking up at 11AM or so after a long night and I had a couple messages from Victoria on my phone. She had the day off and she really wanted to hang out apparently; I was trying to get some stuff done so I said I’d let her know in a little bit. But ultimately I did feel like I owed her some company so I ended up meeting up with her at the thrift store. We hung out together and went thrift store browsing for awhile, then when we got bored we left and got strawberry lemonade at Del Taco before heading back to my pad to kick it. We get home with our Del Taco and settle in for a couple chop bowls and some Documentary Now. I fucking love Victoria and this has been a great Summer evening, but this is just about the time when I start to worry about getting too close.  She hit me up first today, like most days, and she tries to kiss me all the time, but we seem to be under a functional understanding that neither of us wants to be in a relationship. I sure as fuck don't, but this thing with Victoria is something I could get a little too comfortable with, especially with how busy I have been lately. You know how it is when you keep seeing the same person out of convenience. We had just been unpacking our stuff and blabbing for about 15 or 20 minutes when my phone made the sounds it makes when something happens on Instagram. I take my phone out to look at it. It's Abigail, the cute girl I matched with on Tinder who I have been thinking about banging. She's in Post Falls and she wants me to pick her up. Fuck. I looked over at Victoria. She's sipping her strawberry lemonade and flipping through Hulu. This is where my brain went stupid doo-doo dumb.

I thought, "Well, I told her we're just homies. Any one of my guy friends would understand if some cute Instagram girl wanted me to pick her up. She said she could be cool, I guess it's time to find out what the real rules are."

I sat next to her. "Hey, Victoria, this girl from Instagram hit me up and she wants me to pick her up from Post Falls, is that cool?"

"So... you want me to leave?"

"You don't have to leave right this second or anything but yeah we're probably tryna smash so...it's your call pretty much."

"OH,,,,MY,,,,GOD THIS IS THE MOST DISRESPECTFUL THING ANYONE- NO, NEVER MIND. I'M LEAVING RIGHT NOW. FUCK YOU. SERIOUSLY. FUCK YOU!"

fuuuuuck. I shouldn't have done that.

She threw her strawberry lemonade on my doorstep on her way out.

Never mind Abigail, Victoria is the point of this story. It was a learning experience for me. As I've been trying get as much female company as I reasonably can, my perspectives on who I am and how to respect people I encounter have been evolving. Men of my generation don't have much to go off of. We weren't taught about these things by trustworthy sources. But dammit, we're trying.  This was a case where I had every right to do whatever I wanted. My house, my time, my choices. I had a choice to do something selfish and disrespect Victoria by blowing her off or to maybe make a small compromise to make someone happy by spending the rest of the evening with her. I regret the choice that I made; Victoria meant more to me than that, and I don't really care that much about fucking some thick girl from Instagram. If I didn't know that about myself before, I do now. I sent her a text apologizing for hurting her feelings immediately afterward, and a month or so later I sent her a longer one where told her that I she is a special person to me and specifically expressed my regret for being a dickhead. What can you do.

I later learned that Victoria went on some kind of tour badmouthing me to all of her friends, including Devin, Nasha, and that whole group. Apparently she was trying to make hay out of some story I told her about an encounter I had with an underage girl when I was 21. Remember, this is not something that she has any firsthand knowledge of. Victoria has every right to think I'm an asshole and to tell other people as much, but invoking business you know nothing about to try to inflict revenge on somebody for something that happened during a private encounter, that's pretty fucking weak. Bitch Fits and all these people are my friends; they have no bigger straight cis male ally than myself. It would be a shame if my relationship with that scene were damaged because Victoria feels it necessary to embark on a smear campaign, because her feelinggs were hurt. Fuck it though, I can't control what somebody else does. I can only control what I do. And I'm about to move to Vegas anyway. I feel a little bad about hurting Victoria's feelings, but I learned a valuable lesson about not being an asshole to people I have sex with and I feel like it's going to serve me well.

Strive for understanding. Empathy is a candle in the dark.

Prepare to enter the post-reality reality.

The President of the United States is a TV celebrity turned fascist autocrat. That one’s hard enough to wrap your head around. Now he’s been caught using American diplomatic resources to personally enrich himself and benefit his reelection campaign. We kind of saw that coming, but the good news is that we have a process to restore sanity to our political order.

Unfortunately, that process appears likely to do the exact opposite. Despite these violations of the Constitution being blatant, egregious, and in full public view, and the fact that removing a clearly incompetent person from an important post should not be a contentious issue, the political will to remove Donald Trump from office seems scant. As of this writing the impeachment trial in the Senate is projected to result in acquittal or mistrial. The American people deserve a Government that will work for them, and if this criminal remains in office the chances of them having that in the next four to ten years dwindles to almost zero. When I talk about the tendency of Advanced Capitalism to distort the very fabric of reality, this is exactly what I mean. Human beings are ultimately malleable; they can be convinced of things that aren’t true, and they can become very endeared to untrue beliefs. In a Capitalist system there is always a monetary interest in what people believe; TV stations chase ratings and sponsorships, politicians chase votes and corporate contributions. THE ONLY REASON any American believes Donald Trump is anything other than a farcical blowhard and a criminal is because of corporate propaganda spread by the monetary interests involved in holding up the Republican Party. Party leaders know the man is incompetent, they have been quoted as saying that, but it just doesn’t matter. ExxonMobile wants tax cuts, the corporate media wants tax cuts, and the Republican party is in the business of turning out tax cuts to the highest bidder. Together they form a cabal that has a vested interest in controlling what millions of Americans believe. Right now they want to avoid the appearance of a defeat for the Republican party so that they can continue pushing tax cuts and other corporate-sponsored legislation. This has never been about ideology, it’s about petty dominance, rich people consolidating wealth for their own sake. How did we let this come about? Well, we designed a shitty system. This is what happens when everything is tied to money and money isn’t tied to anything real. It is not the job of the corporate media to inform the citizenry. They are publicly traded corporations; their job is to increase their stock value, and they do that very well. So, you have Fox News, which I unfortunately have to watch at the gym every day, attempting to generate an alternate reality in which the Democrats are engaged in a hundreds-person Deep State conspiracy to fabricate evidence en masse to have Trump removed from office due to a personal vendetta. Fox News makes money by retention of viewership, not by sober presentation of the facts. I’m not a Democrat and I have no love for the Democratic Party, but come on, man. This is about facts, dammit, it’s about being smart and choosing the right path forward for the country. Some of the media outlets are doing an okay job presenting the facts of this case, but that’s not going to be enough. The Republican party has unfortunately been way smarter than the Democratic over the past few decades at engineering an electoral landscape that virtually guarantees victory. The Republicans who will be deciding Trump’s fate in the Senate reside in heavily gerrymandered districts where everybody watches Fox News. The Fox News contingent of the Republican party knows that they can’t fool all the people, or even a majority of the people, but the way things are set up they may be able to fool a plurality that is large enough to gain electoral control and thereby define the reality that everybody else lives in. This trial in the Senate will be a referendum on Bizarro World. We need to be moving forward, not backward. The Federal Government needs to be looking out for the interests of American people. We need to heed climate science and we need to be honest and open in our diplomacy. I happen to know that these concepts are real, and I believe in them. But reality is determined by consensus. In the 1930’s the NDSAP was able to convince the German population that Adolf Hitler was a strong and competent leader devoted to workers rights, and for over a decade all of the Earth suffered under this false interpretation of reality. Now big business interests are trying to convince Americans that their fascist clown president is something other than a criminal. They will likely succeed. That is a grim future that we all have to prepare for. Brace for impact. If Donald Trump is not convicted then the post-reality reality is confirmed. Which is a postmodern way of saying that big business has all our balls and brains in a vice. This could mean a lot of things for the future of life on Earth, and none of them are good. The impeachment trial of Donald Trump is the next front in the ongoing war between the Corporatocracy and the rest of humanity. Which side are you on? Death to America

I am a working-class punk. I have been working as a cook for the last four years, trying to build skills that will enable me to move anywhere in the world and ply my trade while funding my other endeavors.

When I was a kid I was almost pressured into becoming a scientist; at the very least, with my high test scores it was assumed that I would readily enter the information economy as a high achiever. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I would always think about where my talents might have the most impact. I had immense compassion and love for the human race, and I thought that using my analytical abilities in the field of chemistry or physics to solve the problems of humanity would be my calling. Then I got to high school and started reading Chomsky, Taibbi, Eric Schlosser, Freakonomics, books by the Crimethinc. Collective, and the list goes on. When learning about the world I would try to answer questions that had been troubling me privately about apparent contradictions in society. Why do people fall victim to drug abuse despite being informed of the dangers? Why is poverty still rampant in the wealthiest society in human history? Why do people spend their whole lives doing things that they hate and that they know are doing no good for the world? Why do some people hate sexual minorities even though they obviously pose no danger? I learned that all these questions have very reasonable academic answers, and that the reason these answers are not widely known is that their concealment perpetuates a cyclical game of human dominance. I didn’t want to believe it was possible that the most esteemed people in our society would betray the public service for a motive as vulgar as money or power, but I slowly came to understand that almost all human behavior can be understood as power struggle and that the people who are currently dominant always have an incentive to deceive, to misinform, and to manipulate to maintain their dominance.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black – but getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.” - John Erlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon

Drugs are not bad, consciousness alteration is a natural impulse. It is the responsibility of the culture to educate people about drugs and to guide people into safe, productive lives. The reason that we have failed is that the culture was hijacked by big business in order to wage a war for social control that has killed millions of Americans. Rather than setting and achieving meaningful public health goals, the Federal Government concerned itself with heavy-handed enforcement of prohibition laws in order to jail political opponents. Now our entire society buys into a false narrative. Poverty still exists in the U.S. because setting a living wage, nationalizing healthcare, or subsidizing housing would necessarily impact the profits of major political donors. Social responsibility requires everybody to contribute proportionally. If you’re somebody who is bribing politicians, you don’t care about anything but money. You will pay as little as possible, and if that means convincing voters that socialism is impossible or that nationalized healthcare is the devil, then that’s a worthwhile investment. People waste their lives because the work that is being given to us is garbage; the owning class, the people who determine what work is to be done, don’t care about the planet, or about creativity, or about egalitarianism... they care about their bottom line, which means turning your life into a computer program. People get angry about sexual minorities because they are being pitted against each other; if you get people riled up about the culture war and convince them that they are being threatened by things they don’t understand, they will be too distracted to notice that their lives are being turned into a computer program.

I had always been angry that the people around me seemed so uncurious and complacent in the face of a material existence that was strikingly banal; their empty lives were cause for outrage, we should all be unified in struggle and we should know the cause and goal of our struggle. Instead what I heard was, “Sell out. Find something to do where somebody will pay you a lot of money and you can have an easy life.” This statement is the end of life on Earth. I refused to be a part of this horror, this extinction of all that is good. We are a post-scarcity civilization; we can pull more than enough shit out of the ground to feed and clothe everybody. It’s time that, as a society, we seriously asked ourselves “What now?” The problems facing us are not scientific, we know what things we have to do as a species and we’re not doing those things because of petty dominance and political games. The challenge of our times is getting humanity on the same page.

We’re intelligent primates that have built a complex technological society around ourselves in order to control our environment. While our civilization looks to the stars, our basest instincts and tendencies as a species were forged over millions of years in fields, caves, and forests. It’s a fascinating corner of space-time to inhabit. We have comprehensive knowledge of psychoactives that enable us to take apart and examine our own minds, and the freedom to explore ourselves and each other in ways that would have defied comprehension to our forefathers. Yet, one fact remains unchanged: the ruling class is only interested in exploiting our lowest behavioral tendencies in order to create an endless supply of cheap labor. To reach our full potential as a species, it is absolutely necessary to become conscious of our situation and to begin ruling ourselves with reason rather than letting others rule us with wealth. The good news is that the cultural programs that have served as instruments of social control in Western society are now crumbling as their absurdity and inherent contradictions become increasingly obvious.

Take sex, for instance. The Puritanism from which our post-Christian dominant culture is derived leaves no room for full elaboration of women’s sexual desire. Women have historically been viewed largely as social currency, are expected to experience attraction along social and class lines. Any insinuation to the contrary could be taken as vulgar or offensive, and women who deviated from this norm were stigmatized as indiscreet or as being prostitutes. With very few exceptions, speaking frankly about women’s sexuality from a female perspective was completely taboo until avant-garde artists of the early 20th century began commenting on the subject. In America in the 1950’s, many men did not know what a clitoris was and many women did not have a correct understanding of what an orgasm was. Forget about prioritizing women’s sexual pleasure; “frigidity,” or the experience of revulsion and inability to orgasm during coitis, was treated as a female sexual dysfunction, rather than a sign that society was failing to meet women’s psychological needs.

(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09589236.2016.1152957?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=cjgs20 )

(https://msmagazine.com/2010/07/23/what-wasnt-so-great-about-the-1950s-part-ii-sex/)

Fast forward to the 1970’s and women’s liberation begins taking over both the workplace and the bedroom. When women demand and receive comparable respect to men in the workplace, they achieve a new level of financial independence, and with that, sexual independence. When women work, men aren’t able to wield material dependence as a sexual weapon, and you see women beginning to define themselves for the first time. Turns out, they like to get fucked really hard.  It is now widely accepted, and has been my experience, that women’s sexual needs are generally at least equal to that of men and often much greater. And women will exercise various preferences in their choice of partners; just as men will check a woman out and subconsciously extrapolate about sexual performance based on what they see, so do women. This goes back to our basest instincts, long before the dominant culture. Even before complex culture people were fucking, and they were fucking largely based on physical fitness. Another evolutionary driver may have been that rape was probably commonplace in prehistoric societies. A female’s sex life in a hunter-gatherer society might have involved a lot of submission to intimidating males and being the victim of some physical violence. Tendencies toward such submission may have increased reproductive fitness, which may explain why submission and fear tend to be linked to arousal in heterosexual women and why BDSM is so enduringly popular. And there are many factors to mate selection of course, attraction is complex and multi-faceted, but the mere revelation of this fact, and the loss of patriarchal dominance over women’s choices, was a shock that straight society is still reeling from. And no wonder. The dominant culture doesn’t offer any productive path to understanding these revelations. It just stubbornly applies yesterday’s models to today’s world. What we are experiencing now is a state of friction between the people who are lucid enough to realize this and the people who are not.

As you are probably aware, Nancy Pelosi announced yesterday the opening of an official impeachment inquiry relating to dealings made between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The prospect of a Trump impeachment is obviously titillating to many on the left, but I’m not celebrating just yet. There are a lot of theories as to what is going on behind the scenes here, and there are many potential outcomes to this recent turn of events, not all of them positive. Let’s scope this shit.

This particular inquiry concerns a phone call between Presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky which was also the subject of a whistleblower complaint that first came to light, as far as I know, about a week ago. The basic charge is essentially that Donald Trump urged the Ukrainian president to probe Joe Biden and his son for allegedly mishandling US funds during a trip to Kiev in 2016. As some of you may remember, this story is very similar to the allegations that Trump managed to successfully deflect during the Russia-Mueller report days. There is also a more serious charge that President Donald Trump withheld US aid to Ukraine, which had already been approved by Congress, as leverage pending a promise to this effect by Zelensky.

This is way fucked. The first charge would constitute collusion with a foreign power for political gain, which is a serious crime punishable by up to three years in prison. Based on transcripts that have been released by the White House, there is no real legal debate on this one. The President is on tape colluding with a foreign power to influence an American election. The second charge enhances the first, and adds an element of abuse of power to the case; indeed, there is significant circumstantial evidence that Donald Trump instructed chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to withhold $391 million in military aid to Ukraine one week ahead of the planned phonecall, presumably to incentivize Zelensky to cooperate with Trump’s demands. Ukraine is currently fighting a war to prevent annexation by Russia, making Zelensky’s decision to play ball a rational one, and Donald Trump’s attempted extortion all the more disgusting. Obviously all of this means nothing without a political will to impeach Donald Trump. Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses before and he almost certainly will again. He is still in office because impeachment does not serve the agenda of the people who are in the position to actually turn the screws. However, it seems based on some things that have been taking place at the Capitol this week that those fortunes may be changing. Which is precisely why I am skeptical about the motivations of some of the people involved. Release of the original whistleblower report would give Congress and the public a better idea of what we are dealing with here. Chuck Schumer introduced a nonbinding resolution to demand the release of that report and interestingly the resolution was unanimously adopted by the US Senate. Unanimously! And the resolution could have been easily blocked by majority leader Mitch McConnell. Usually the Republicans don’t mind voting on party lines on this sort of thing, and the fact that they didn’t in this case shows at the very least that Trump is far from having the support of his caucus. It shows either that Republicans have suddenly become passionate about demanding transparency from the executive branch on principle (not likely), or that all these people called each other before this vote and have some reason for wanting impeachment efforts to proceed. Years of paying attention to this shit have showed me this is how American politics usually works. And it’s not hard to see what some of their reasons might be. Donald Trump is a wounded bird and a bumbling idiot who is unlikely to survive another election; it seems very likely to me that members the Republican caucus may be privately conspiring to get rid of Donald Trump so that they don’t have to run him in 2020. It’s easy to see how this would appeal to a lot of Republicans in Congress; Mike Pence is less embarrassing and almost certainly a safer bet for reelection. On the other side, Nancy Pelosi would love to be immortalized by having led successful impeachment efforts against the orange archdemon; she has been hesitant about impeachment up until now but now she has reason to believe it could actually happen. If Donald Trump gets impeached, we are left with a Pence presidency. 1.5 years of Mike Pence scares me and the thought Mike Pence winning in 2020 terrifies me. Donald Trump becoming President of the United States in 2016 was not a happy turn of events, but Donald Trump is in some ways a better foe for the left than a Republican insider president. He is the id of American conservativism exposed with no filter and no brain. He can’t get anything done outside of telling his immigration services to round up people, and he boasts about things other Republicans and corrupt politicians know to keep quiet. I’m kind of good with Donald trump right now because he should be pretty easy to beat, and if you beat him you defeat not only the Right’s backassward, kleptocratic ideas but the lizard-brain place that those ideas come from. Plus, say what you want about Donald Trump, he hasn’t gotten us into a war yet. Are you sure Mike Pence won’t? Impeaching Donald Trump could mean 5.5 years of Mike Pence, like another Bush but likely worse. Are we comfortable rolling the dice on that right now? Everyone on the left should be asking that. What I want to keep the focus on is this: our public servants are not serving the public, and this is a function of our broken democracy. Therefore, it is safe to assume in this case that whatever is going on behind the scenes, if Donald Trump gets removed from office it will not be due to anyone’s commitment to legal principle but due to a convergence of political will. For all the bloat and stagnation we see in Congress, if both Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi want the same thing to happen, they are likely to find a way to make that thing happen. We will see how right I am. If articles of impeachment are formally invoked, and the House votes by a simple majority to impeach Donald Trump, his fate will go to trial in the Senate. These hearings will be presided over by majority leader Mitch McConnell, who presumably could simply decline to bring the President up on the charges. It’s anybody’s guess how this could all proceed from here. The investigation could uncover evidence of more crimes, the President could resign at any time, Mitch McConnell could cause a constitutional crisis by refusing to take action... betting begins now! The future of democracy hangs in the balance. But what else is new? Death to America