Mourning In America

It’s time to pony up, fuck boys.

I woke up today angry. Not angry like the 49ers just lost again, or angry like my girlfriend blew some dude in a dirty bar bathroom stall. Angry deep down in a piece of me I’d forgotten was there. Back in the part of me that started looking at this country and thinking, ‘What the fuck are any of you people doing!?’ way back when I just an edgy teenager that thought I knew everything and could solve every issue if people would just listen. A part of me that died years ago when I realized that nobody cared. Nobody spent any energy learning. They picked a team, chose a color, and thought taking an hour out of their day once every four years equated to doing their civic duty.

This morning I felt that part of me come back to life. At first I just wanted to lash out. It feels good to lash out, at least in the moment. It’s instant gratification. It’s catharsis after the last 18 months have proved, if nothing else, people are batshit crazy. But lashing out doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t serve any purpose. Catharsis is actually the only thing it’s good for, and even then it’s more like jacking off dry all day. It might feel good but you’re just going to rip all the skin off your dick so it itches all day while you’re walking around with it stuffed in your boxer briefs, until it starts itching while the skin slowly grows back. It’s a false answer. It’s an emotional response. Emotional responses are what got us here in the first place.

I’m seeing a lot of calls for unity. Facebook is rife with people who are weary and exhausted of a long political cycle that essentially came down to being hammered at the bar at last call and just going home with whoever you could get to drive you there. They want back their puppies and their memes and they want to argue over Game of Thrones and the Walking Dead and they want all this nasty political stuff to go away. I’ve seen at least a dozen people write that they’re so tired of all the hate. That’s actually the only thing I’ve seen.

Well, sorry. While I will say this is no time for wild rhetoric or mindless ranting, as the anger subsides from a wildfire into a smouldering ember in the cold light of dawn, I can tell you right now I will not let it lie. I’m not going to attack you. I’m not going to argue that Clinton won the popular vote, or talk about the (many) failings of Donald Trump. I’m not going to compare anyone to Hitler. In fact, I stand by statements I made before the election. The best thing about the whole sordid affair is that Hillary Clinton honored her word and respected the democratic process, conceding defeat with grace, and doing her part to ensure a peaceful transition of power. As dramatically displeased with the result as I may be, that is paramount. It is one of, if not the most, pivotal keystones our nation is built upon.

That being said, fuck this. This is not good enough, and I personally apologize. I apologize to Mexican Americans. I apologize to Muslims. I apologize to women. I apologize to the LGBT community. I was silent for most of this election. I just want to live my life. I want to have a job, and do it well, and make a little money, and get laid sometimes, and get drunk, and maybe play video games or go for a hike or something. That is still what I want. As I write this, I’m already dreading the fact that it may be that no one reads it, but if someone does, it’ll probably start a stupid argument that I don’t want to have. I don’t want to deal with that. And I didn’t, for 18 months. I just quietly read, and watched, with ever growing horror, and kept telling myself, ‘This isn’t going to happen. There is no mother fucking way this is going to happen.’

Well, it happened. So I can’t be quiet anymore. While this is not the time to hate, or be violent, or insult and attack those that felt differently than we did, it is absolutely time to go to work. It is time to find what common ground there is to be found. It is time to be better than Republicans for the last eight years and let the government do its job as much as possible. And it is time to choose the things that cannot afford compromise and rage against letting them destroy what has been built. Both are equally important.

More importantly, though, is this is not the end. This can’t be the end. This isn’t a fight that’s over; it’s just begun. The time to ensure that this bullshit never happens again- and I’m talking to liberals, conservatives, independents, ALL of us -is right now. Fucking today. This morning. It’s time to not be quiet. It’s time to get involved. It’s time realize that posting memes on Facebook and voting once every four years isn’t participating. It’s time to be informed. It’s time to hold the media, both the mainstream media and liberal/conservative blogs and alt-news sources, to a much higher standard. Nobody was happy with where we got. This is just as true for the people who voted for Trump as anyone, and it’s the one thing I think we can agree on.

Well, it’s time to pony  up, fuck boys. It’s on us. And it starts now. Let’s not just tear our clothes off and throw rocks at the big mean looking thing we don’t understand. Let’s not just set shit on fire. Let’s be better. Let’s do it together.

And let’s start right now.

Blue Hat Billy Cat and the Gentrification of the (neighbor)Hood

Tonight I saw a cat wearing a hat. When I say cat, I mean a dude, a guy, a bro, a bad hombre. I don’t actually know that he was bad. I have half a sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t at all. That isn’t the point. He was some guy wearing one of the crispest hats I’ve ever seen. This thing looked like it came right off the rack and that it had come straight off the truck and straight off the factory floor- each step, this hat was just running through the process, skipping customs, we’re talking Presidential levels of access to fast travel. We’re talking Skyrim fast travel, without the loading screens. Like Anthony Bourdain with a box of shrimp.

Okay, so I’m not entirely sure Anthony Bourdain would make it through customs with a box of shrimp.

In any case, this hat was fresh the way you hope your pizza will be every time you go to Little Ceasars and slap down a fiver (plus two bucks, because fuck you, pizzaflation is real suckers). But his hat wasn’t like Little Ceasars pizza, because it actually was that fresh, and didn’t immediately fill me with shame and regret after wearing it. Or seeing him wear it. I didn’t jack this dude and wear his hat, despite how fresh it was.

The only reason any of this stuck out to me was because the rest of his outfit was the exact opposite of his hat. He was rocking a blue jumpsuit and I have a sneaking suspicion that the fucking thing was made of velvet or some other whackadoo shit like that. At least it used to be blue. I don’t know what you’d call that color now. I googled it and google just said ‘Fuck I don’t know bro, nasty bluish-brown’. When you stump Google you know you’re off the rails. This kid also had a filthy wife beater on.

I couldn’t help but wonder, what set of circumstances creates such a creature who can be at once so obsessively dedicated to his hat-wear and so totally ambivalent to the rest of his attire? I feel genuine concern about it. I wanted to take him over to the Laundromat and flip him some quarters but I’m half certain if I had offered it would have ended with me getting shanked prison-style in the parking lot of Little Ceasars. I mean, obviously with that ridiculous analogy I used early this happened at Little Ceasars. For one thing, nobody is busy thinking about their god-awful pizza when they aren’t eating it, and for two that is the only kind of place where you’d see somebody like this. Even the Hood Mart, as previously mentioned by yours truly, has a different class of negligent vagabond. And the entire neighborhood may soon lose all these sorts of colorful characters, as half of the run-down gut bombers along Watt have been torn down and rebuilt and the rest are in some various stage of remodel or reconstruction. They’re upscaling the fuck out of us. I’m witnessing gentrification.

I won’t miss the cockroach and piss stained AM/PM. And if I was stupid enough to eat at Taco Bell, I’m sure I could find a thing or two to complain about in their old building too. But I’ll miss Fresh Fuckin’ Hat Guy. That dude is a god damn original. That dude doesn’t go to Starbucks and make jokes about pumpkin spiced latte and talk about having a Case of the Mondays. That dude pays meticulous attention to his hat, even if it means wading through what I assume must have been a literal river of shit to do so. He argues about the freshness of his Little Ceasars pizza and suspects the old fragile death-bag working the register has some nefarious intent when it comes to his food.

He might make people uncomfortable, but at least he isn’t fucking boring, and he certainly isn’t sterile.

Are they cleaning up the hood? Shit, I doubt it. But there certainly has been a questionable level of facelifting going on. Is that inherently bad? I don’t know. I’m not here to provide depth or insight.

But I’m gonna miss Blue Hat Billy Cat.