A Drawer Of Ugly Heads

CONGRATULATIONS, everybody! We only have 10 days to fight the FCC & the repeal of #NetNeutrality!

Thanks to John Oliver there’s a SUPER easy way to do this Do you enjoy Netflix? Do you find yourself spending too much time on FB? If net neutrality goes away, our Internet bills go up and we give power to companies like Comcast and Spectrum.

The farmers were disappearing. I can’t remember if it was before or after the bees started dying.

The sad, fairly simple chain of events was easy to trace from beginning to end. The farmers were broke. Most were forced into increasingly desperate chemical measures to wring every last cent out of the earth. Every year they would produce a higher yield, but the markets paid them less money. Eventually, they found themselves selling their harvests at a loss. They found themselves in a dark corner and, one by one, they disappeared back into the earth. Victims of a strange famine of greed.

Meanwhile, in town, everyone was moving into 8x8 foot hovels that provided one cot, free wi-fi and 59 cent double cheeseburgers.

At my father’s funeral, I saw the last bee I can remember seeing. My father had taken his monthly dosage of painkillers in one night along with a box of wine. The next morning, when all the snow had melted they found him dead in an oak tree still clinging to a large branch overlooking the back 80-acre field. It had been fallow for over a year, but I like to imagine that with a head full of pills and cheap red wine that my father imagined the corn as eight feet tall and dancing in the wind. The tassels full of bees and the birds singing one last song.

At the cemetery, the priest was droning on with a half-hearted eulogy when suddenly he stopped. There was a bee buzzing around the casket. We’d been told that all the bees within the tri-county area were gone for good. We all watched quietly as the bee landed on the casket and disappeared under the lid.

A strange hole opened up in my head as I began to break down all the boxes, plastic wrap and clamshell containers. I worried that the animals would get stuck in the bags and packaging. So I cut them into long strips but I still worried that the animals could become entangled. So I cut them into small squares.

I spent most of the rest of the week cutting packages into smaller and smaller pieces until I was left with nothing but a fine dust which I accidentally inhaled.

A note found in a Syrian boy’s diary:

He’s not

Querétaro, 2014