Kill Ya Masters

The other day I was at the Fred Meyer liquor store value buying trash vodka because, COVID, you know? While I was in line everyone held to the social distancing "norms" but at the register curious things were happening. There was a lady, older, maybe 50 buying garbage beer and a pint of 90 proof peppermint schnapps and having an animated conversation with the other register customer who seemed like he was an acquaintance the lady had not seen in some time. The lady wore shorts, flip-flops, a mask, blue nitrile gloves, and had her phone in her hand while she paid with cash for which she received change with the other. Later, as I was exiting the liquor store the same lady was at the self-checkout, purchasing the rest of her items that she had not brought with her into the liquor store. I went home, got faded, and puzzled over this woman and her life and the merest fraction of it that I had observed.

Here's a mask I found while out walking the other day. It's on a path that is destined to be an elevated and paved walk/bikeway that runs parallel to the Glenn here in town. I have since been back to this location and found the mask absent, to places unknown. I've been thinking a lot about the apocalyptic, Revelations nature my mother would have framed to the current reality. More so, especially in light of Mother's Day, and I'm glad she's gone, been gone some time. I carry her around with me always, thinking about how the neighbor who throws his cigarette butts over his privacy fence into my garden beds as someone she would label as "white trash" but knowing that if he were any other color she'd have called him a "nigger" at worst or a "creole" at best. It's funny how the past coils around you and stings your mind. I am reminded of not being able to eat a dinner of spaghetti as a child because I watched an Ethiopian famine aid commercial. She'd lauded my empathy, if memory serves. I try to think about her and how she'd bracket the world in 2020 with all the writing on the wall as it always has been - famine, war, pestilence, death.

Simon Hanselmann has a new comic collection out. It's titled "Bad Gateway" and can be found, if in stock, at the store and it is fabulous. Owl has moved out, shit's getting real, employment might be a necessity. The above photo is from the penultimate newest collection titled "Amsterdam". It's so good, watching someone out in the world doing a thing at which they are passionate and capable and truthful, and to watch real, even if shitty characters, live out their lives in a different dimension than my own. My god, is it great to feel what Mogg feels when betrayed, what Megg's motivations are given her mental health history, what Werewolf Jones's cravings are RE: his awful need to blot out reality. They, the characters, are terrible and that is the idea maybe, that we too are equally complicit in that vast reservoir of terribleness, in each our own way, in that we can step back and reflect on how we are all trash, all of us, and in need of serious mending.  

We, and by we I mean A, bought Uly a butterfly kit to while away his time during the quarantine/shelter in place. They're the painted lady variety and the facility whence they came was located in North Carolina. These butterflies apparently migrate to AK and can over summer here to do various butterfly things. They only live a year and the first one popped out of its chrysalis just today, a grotesque and magnificent metamorphosis from the crawling grub it was when we unboxed the kit. Butterflies have been around since literally forever and watching its coiled and extruding proboscis unsettled, the stuff of interdimensional nightmares, yet fascinating in all its horror. This was life. I was afraid. Disgusted. Enthralled. Impassioned enough to write about it. As one should be, I suppose.

RTJ have a new album forthcoming and the two new singles available that I've found, "Ooh La La" and "Yankee and the Brave", are hardcore worth it. They rap about an apocalypse that won't happen, an uprising of the down-trodden, a revolution to invert the reins-controllers and the have-nots. It's great stuff, inspiring and idealistic in scope, a great crying out against the vast corrupt powers of old and evil as Hunter S. would say. It's definitely a message around which one could congregate and perhaps figuratively storm the bulwarks of all the shitty and the bad in this nation. I listen to it and know that the kind of mass anarchism Killer Mike and El-P advocate won't happen, but isn't it pretty to think so. So I take my value trash vodka and go home and write this for you all, in the hope that maybe you can go find something new that you had not known previously and dive into something headlong that maybe might not be your jam but only because you don't know it yet. Good luck out there.