Back in the early days of this blog — now almost 20 years ago, kin you believe it? — I used to repurpose spam emails I received as accidental poetry. Then the bit got old and spam filters got better and I moved on. But lately I have a new source of material: a 4-year-old boy who likes to get ahold of his mom’s phone and text my wife, his grandmother. Most of what he sends is random strings of letters, but then sometimes he makes use of the autocomplete feature and gets something like this:
Only this week did I learn of the death, one year ago today, of Kenji “Damo” Suzuki. We weren’t close; I knew him from his work with CAN in the early 1970s, which I only discovered by tracing back from the bands they’d influenced, most notably Pavement.
I thought of CAN this week as people adopted the spoon as symbol of resistance to the man some people call the Space Nazi. I used to think that was an exaggeration, but apparently not. I am going to call him That Other Fucking Guy; while the president sits in the Oval signing executive orders that he hasn’t read, TOFG has been running around trying to dismember the government like Jeffrey Dahmer with a bunch of laptop-toting interns in tow.
Nobody likes bureaucracy and no doubt there is a lot of waste that needs to be cut. But the way it’s being done is capricious, cruel, and I think illegal. The worst part of it is TOFG’s childish glee as he announces USAID has been fed “into the wood chipper” or that the Department of Education no longer exists. These are the livelihoods of thousands of people we’re talking about, asshole. Wipe that fucking smirk off your face.
Lately when I watch or read the news I feel like Mr. Furious. I get really, really angry, and that anger makes me feel powerful and I start to think, “I must go do something about this!” Then I remember that my only superpower is getting really angry.
I’m not saying there’s nothing we can do. Or maybe I am saying that? Certainly it feels that way. We’ve known the current shitstorm was coming since early November, which is no more or less helpful than knowing a hurricane is coming and having no place to flee to. You batten down what you can and hope for the best.
Sometimes it’s hard to know whether to be angry or collapse laughing. Like the other day, the Dealmaker-in-Chief went on TV and said that the U.S. government would take over the Gaza strip, move out all the Palestinians, and redevelop it into the “the Riviera of the Middle East.” I’ve seen the clip over and over and every time I want to squeeze my own head with both hands till it pops like a pimple. Even by his standards this is so off-the-charts insane that you start to wonder, is he taking the piss? Is that where we are, where the President of the United States does surrealist standup while Bibi Netanyahu smirks coquetteishly at his side?
I guess not. I think he is serious, harking back to all his years as a developer who would announce grandiose projects that either never got off the ground or faceplanted spectacularly. This will be one of the former, as the whole concept is predicated on a war crime of inconceivable proportions.
And there I go again, using that word, when clearly it does not mean what I used to think it means. Time for a vocabulary update I guess.
Where am I going with this? Absolutely nowhere, just blowing off steam. Hope your weekend is going well.
Books Acquired: The Crack in Space, Philip K. Dick Alien, Alan Dean Foster Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe Thomas Ligotti Cup of Gold, John Steinbeck Cat’s Cradle (hardcover), Kurt Vonnegut Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Cornell Woolrich
Progress Made: VALIS, Philip K. Dick The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald The Black Count, Tom Reiss The Bewildering Effect of Cabbages, Michael Rymaszewski The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
Books Finished: Lucky Loser, Russ Buettner & Suzanne Craig Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
This afternoon I’ve been watching the Warriors game on one channel and the end of the Republic on the other, which is weird. There is a distinct Phildickianness to the news these days, and you’d think someone who’d bent his brain as much as I have would be ready for it. But I’m still adjusting. So for now I’m going to put all that aside and continue with business as usual.
Let me just ask, though, does Elon Musk not seem like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel? Did we somehow slip over into a universe he created? It bears thinking about.
I was sad to finish Travels with Charley, as Mr. Steinbeck was so agreeable a companion. As Marc Bolan said,
Book after book I get hooked Every time the writer Talks to me like a friend
So I went out and bought another one of his books, but I don’t expect the same experience, as Cup of Gold is a novel, not a memoir. I had somehow not really read Steinbeck until now — save Tortilla Flat, many many years ago — so I’ve got some catching up to do.
I wasn’t so disappointed to finish Lucky Loser: How D—-d T—p Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, which was an illuminating but also frustrating read. That Fucking Guy’s whole act is so transparent, and has been for so long, that it’s just infuriating that people continue to fall for it. It would be funny if it hadn’t led to the current moment, where he and his unelected Boer buddy are taking a sledgehammer to the Constitution. Just yesterday they apparently shut down USAID, without notice or proper authority, heedless of who will starve as a result.
