Aimless Thoughts: 6:16 in Menasha

 I woke up today, well-rested for once, and immediately began pestering my roommate about the only modern cultural event to have ever capture my full attention: the public feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. It wasn't the fight itself that got my attention; as usual Drake's disses were anemic from start to finish. Kendrick shot him point blank right at the start. Every track after Euphoria was just him pissing on the spot where the body dropped.
        What got me invested, instead, was my own long-standing distaste for Drake. There was something special about watching the world finally come to my side against Canada's worst export. Every track against him was pure aural catharsis, Push's "surgical summer" finally fulfilled most of a decade later. I went through the whole beef again, song-by-song, and on this gloomy day Meet the Grahams fit my mood best. It's vicious, pulsing with ominous hateful life, the piano sounds like it could strike me and fill my body with venom. Staring out the window, watching animals pass by my secluded front yard as rain drew closer, it just kinda made sense. I don't know that I could explain it.
        I still had it in my head two hours later while I drove up to my grandparents' place. All through Oshkosh Kendrick's voice dominated my subconscious, reminding me exactly what kind of man Dennis raised. Stopped at the comic book store, picked up the first issue of Zatanna: Bring Down the House which even my Russian judge friends have told me is quite good. Didn't get the variant cover I wanted, but oh well. Got meat at Wagner's Market on the way out of town.
        I took the lake road into town, which adds a few minutes and a great view of Lake Winnebago for every one of 'em. That takes you through the ass end of Neenah, the odd mix of old-ish commercial development and newfangled suburban hell that my friend Jason used to call the Southern Wastes. There used to be a great bookstore where Pappa's Pub is now. St. Vinnie's across the street still has books dirt cheap, as long as you don't mind their godawful paper stickers. Sort of wish I'd stopped in.
        It's only a couple minutes between that part of Neenah and Little Detroit. Jason and his Southern Wastes were still on my mind by the time my truck stumbled over the shittiest railroad crossing in Neenasha. We'd just come out this way a week prior, because the city just tore down the school where we met. I grabbed a piece of concrete from the wreckage then we drove around for an hour. He made some joke about LD being the "wrong side of the tracks". I replied mentioning LD, as I defined it, was situated between two sets of tracks. That, we agreed, must be why LD was the lower-middle-class cozy-armpit it was. It was on both sides of the tracks at once. Wish I'd thought of that before my last post came out.
        After that I was driving through Menasha, the commercial sprawl part of town, far from the focus of my last post. Passed by Somerville Flag, a store with signage that mostly consisted of FLAGS in big block letters. I used to joke with friends about buying the building and turning it into a gay bar, keeping the exterior entirely unchanged save removing the letter L from all signage. Still think that's a good idea. Down the road from there is an Asian market. Their prices can be funky but they've got all kinds of snacks I can't find anywhere else. Wish I'd grabbed some stuff but most of what I'm after is refrigerated anyways.
        Then I was in Fox Crossing, at my grandparents' place. I'm trying to see them more these days on account of grandpa has cancer. Seeing him hurts more as the months goes on. He's always been snappy, but half a year of chemo in he's lost all the humor and insight that made him complete. Now he's just irritable and easily confused. It's hard to see the man who did my taxes and helped me fall in love with Kurt Vonnegut and Graham Greene, who had a card catalogue of every book he ever read with hand-written summaries and notes in the margins. The way he's refusing to eat, occasionally lashing out an any mention of food, has me worried he's not far from giving up entirely. Guy's a twig now, and he used to be almost as fat as me. I've only ever lost people to suicide before, I'm so used to the sudden band-aid pull. Grieving somebody before they're gone doesn't feel right. The last time I saw him, my dad mentioned bringing him to a baseball game and he said "I'm never leaving this city again".
        Grandma was having an increasingly rare lucid day, so we went to the library. The Menasha-Fox Crossing area library is currently being housed at some unused corner of the recently closed UWO Fox Cities campus. It's an auditorium, I think, but in practice it's more like a widened lump of hallway with a stage at one end. As a library the space is functional. Obviously not ideal, but also obviously a step up from the Appleton Public Library which has been temporarily housed in a Best Buy for several years now.
        On our way into the building there were two men in the parking lot. They were both black, and both about a head shorter than me. One wore a hoodie endorsing Trump for president; the other had a lanyard with a tag on it with the red, white and blue logo of some presumably conservative organization. They both held clipboards. The guy with the lanyard was talking to an older woman, too quietly for me to here. The other one wasn't doing anything, but didn't approach me.
        Here, on a college campus in its final year of operation, were some organization's token minorities pestering whoever was still around to hear them about one of the two beloathed, senile pedophiles vying for power this November. A voice in the back of my head said, louder than ever before, "this is what a dying country looks like".

(I don't think I could explain the purpose of this piece, I've just been moody lately and felt like trying to turn it into some kind of art. Hope somebody gets something out of it.)