Aimless Thoughts: Fear and Loathing in Menasha
(AKA "Requiem for a 2003 Dodge Durango")
Such a long-winded, self-indulgent and definitive statement on life in my early twenties that I might retire Aimless Thoughts for a while. I truly feel like I've said most of what I can say at this age. This piece alone covers most of what I intended to get off my chest when I started blogging - it’s got angry political screeds, small-town Rust Belt melodrama, grief, religion, gambling, a kinda pathetic long-distance relationship, lengthy delineations about books, music, video games, movies and YouTube videos… this is me. This is who I am. Who I was in 2022 through the lens of who I am in 2026. If I died tomorrow you could still know me through these thirty thousand words.
I am an addict, or at least I've got an addictive personality. It runs in the family. Both sides. I never got into drugs and I haven't had a beer since I was four. The only traditional vices I've ever struggled with are sex and, briefly, gambling. But addiction is visible all over the way I conduct myself. If your brain is wired like mine, anything you like can turn addictive. I'm starting to think I’m addicted to driving. I've written nearly 20,000 words about driving by now and whenever I want to reread something of mine, that’s what I go back to.
It’s because driving is so simple. I know the rules of the road, they’re simple, they don't change. In the company of competent peers you’ll never find yourself in a situation driver’s ed didn’t prepare you for. Every drive is the same old thing I fell in love with while skipping classes as a depressed teen. Comfortable familiarity, but for the ever-changing and generally pleasant sights of small-to-medium-sized-town Wisconsin.
Like any good addict, I am, of course, modestly obsessed with the associated paraphernalia. My first truck, a blue-green 2003 Durango I called the Green Machine, literally changed my life. I bought it for two grand at two hundred thousand miles and rode it to almost three hundred. I miss it so bad now. I miss the soft turquoise glow of the dashboard, the roar of that blower I had to replace or repair almost monthly. The petty pride I felt every time I opened her up and got a glimpse of a power steering fluid reservoir I’d installed myself. The torn-up upholstery in the trunk, and the extra room it granted me when I decided to just rip out all the crusty old foam underneath. God, I even miss the cassette-to-aux aux-to-USB-C contraption that let me play music from my phone. The subs were all kinds of fucked up. Music sounded so perfect in that thing.
It broke down for good in early July. My dad left it in his driveway a couple months before towing it. Every time I visited I spent a moment in the driver’s seat. It had one of those little seat-adjuster joysticks, the most bizarrely precise I’ve ever encountered. I had it exactly where I wanted it, the seat was comfortable down to the millimeter. The night before it went away I pulled the joystick up and forwards, crushing my knees against the dash until they bruised.
It’s because driving is so simple. I know the rules of the road, they’re simple, they don't change. In the company of competent peers you’ll never find yourself in a situation driver’s ed didn’t prepare you for. Every drive is the same old thing I fell in love with while skipping classes as a depressed teen. Comfortable familiarity, but for the ever-changing and generally pleasant sights of small-to-medium-sized-town Wisconsin.
Like any good addict, I am, of course, modestly obsessed with the associated paraphernalia. My first truck, a blue-green 2003 Durango I called the Green Machine, literally changed my life. I bought it for two grand at two hundred thousand miles and rode it to almost three hundred. I miss it so bad now. I miss the soft turquoise glow of the dashboard, the roar of that blower I had to replace or repair almost monthly. The petty pride I felt every time I opened her up and got a glimpse of a power steering fluid reservoir I’d installed myself. The torn-up upholstery in the trunk, and the extra room it granted me when I decided to just rip out all the crusty old foam underneath. God, I even miss the cassette-to-aux aux-to-USB-C contraption that let me play music from my phone. The subs were all kinds of fucked up. Music sounded so perfect in that thing.
It broke down for good in early July. My dad left it in his driveway a couple months before towing it. Every time I visited I spent a moment in the driver’s seat. It had one of those little seat-adjuster joysticks, the most bizarrely precise I’ve ever encountered. I had it exactly where I wanted it, the seat was comfortable down to the millimeter. The night before it went away I pulled the joystick up and forwards, crushing my knees against the dash until they bruised.
Driving has been an especially unavoidable fixation since I made those two trips to Nebraska. The latest trip was almost exactly a year ago now. Sometimes it feels like the last big thing I did. Not the last big thing to happen to me. 2025 was an eventful year. But it was a whole year of choices being taken out of my hands. Grandpa died, Lily’s grandma died, I was nearly evicted, my boss shot me down on a promotion I needed. The only choice I had was how I put everything back together. Nebraska was the last thing I chose. For just one night in January I had control, in the form of ten numb fingers on a cold wheel. Being on the road was my decision. Where I went was my decision. My free will was nobody's bitch.
I made those trips at the tail end of my truck’s life. I took my mom’s SUV both times. My old rustbucket wasn’t safe on the highway anymore. Yet every time I remember the long slogs through rural Iowa, or that perfect sunset on the outskirts of Omaha, I'm driving the Durango. I miss that thing. I miss those weird marathon road trips. But the more I drive the sensible, modern Subaru that took its place the more I realize it’s not just the truck I miss. It’s not just the road, either. I want both of them, I crave them like I crave that one more hand in poker, the one that gets you all your money back.
It all comes down to nostalgia, of course. It’s a longing for the ephemeral, delinquent freedom that disappears the moment you realize it’s leaving. Coming of age in the pandemic, I held onto that youthful degeneracy longer than I might have otherwise and, as I’m fond of saying, I made a damn good NEET. All of it came to a head in one three-month period I still haven’t recovered from, a summer I know damn well some of my friends are sick of hearing about. Back then that truck and a deck of cards were objects of Biblical importance and work was an afterthought, a couple hours of minimum wage to pay for gas and gas station snacks. My longest relationship was three months of ancient history. My highest ambition was a blog even shittier than this one. In May, I was the only one in my friend group with a job. In September, I was the only one who wasn’t leaving for college. I'd spent my college savings on the Green Machine. The moment I felt its end approaching I held a cup of slurried, room-temperature chocolate malt up above my head and christened it the Last Free Summer. Pompous, self-mythologizing, kind of hilarious. But I wasn’t wrong.
I’m hoping I can excise some demons with this one. Failing that, I hope writing it down will help me to shut the fuck up about it.
I feel the need to start by emphasizing that this was three years ago. This isn’t some old dude with decades of experience to filter these stories through; I’m in my mid twenties waxing poetic about my early twenties. Don’t expect any great pearls of wisdom. I hope the story is interesting enough to make up for my lack of depth.
It actually started in April 2022. I was ‘working’ at the YMCA, in a role they called Building Supervisor. This paid $13 an hour and, in general, attracted college students and retirees who worked one three-hour shift a week for the free membership. I was the only one with no extracurricular commitments. So, basically, I had very few scheduled shifts but I was always on call. At least once a week somebody called in five minutes before their shift or just plain didn’t show up, and that was my problem. The shifts in question ranged from 5AM-11AM, 4PM-6PM and 6PM-9PM.
On paper, at least. In practice you had to be there early for opening shifts and late for night shifts. Mostly for the same reason: the lights. The YMCA building I worked at was basically three buildings built decades apart, daisy-chained together. The wiring was a mess. Even with the year of experience I had by then, tracking down every switch was an ordeal. One of the most important sets of switches in the building was behind a vending machine, which the cleaning crew would press right up against the wall every night. So you had to shimmy the fucking thing across the floor just to get the lights on.
At night there was also the laundry. They’d fired the whole laundry crew over Covid, so the Building Supervisor - who also handled maintenance and security - had to do laundry for the whole building too. Except most of them were, as I said, college kids and retirees who didn’t actually care all that much. After all, if they left a mess it’d be a week before their next shift. Somebody else could handle it.
Somebody else was me, and I routinely stuck around til ten or eleven cleaning up after them. If I’d been off a whole week I could be in that laundry room until midnight. They didn’t have too many qualms paying me for that extra work, but I was getting sick of it. I was also getting sick of the people. In April I dealt with a Karen who cussed me out in front of a group of kids, stole my nametag, called the cops on me using my full name and called me a retard several times in the process.
The YMCA reviewed the night's security footage and came to the conclusion I'd handled her appropriately. The cops agreed. She got a disorderly conduct and a three-month suspension, I got a more routine work week. For a month, I was their actual, regularly-scheduled Main Guy. They gave me twenty hours a week, five days a week, and told me I’d retain that for a while at least. I also got a small raise. I could’ve lived on it, I’m frugal. At the time I wasn’t getting along with my parents, so this was good news for both of us. Maybe I could move out soon!
June, I was back to another part-time errand-boy. I had fewer shifts than ever, the summer is our slowest season. They were hiring again, and finally throwing some of the bums out, so even being on call wasn’t paying much. I knew I couldn’t trust the YMCA anymore. They’d dangled consistent income in my face for one month and pulled back as soon as possible. This was only my third job, and the most consistent I’d ever managed. I had next to no basis to know whether the Y had screwed me over or if I was just not worth employing. I stumbled into the summer dejected, depressed and broke. And I needed money bad. I had a desire to work, to provide for myself, that I’d simply never felt before.
I was falling in love.
Lily is still the least explicable thing in my life. I have no idea why she tolerates me now, much less what drew her to me back then. To be fair I struggle to quantify exactly why I love her so much. I know I love her. I just don’t know why she was different from all the other faceless names I liked to chat up on the internet back then. I think there was some degree of mutual pity. She’d just been broken up with by a girl she thought for sure she’d be spending her life with. She was at her most shy and self-effacing. I was a standoffish dick who told her upfront I didn’t want anything serious and proceeded to dote on her every whim after a couple days of conversation. She knew I’d caught real feelings months before I did.
In June I was telling her - and myself - that I’d start to consider dating her if I ever found a job I could support the boh of us on. The YMCA wasn’t it, that much was clear, so I created an Indeed page and started asking around. Guy at the front desk knew a Barnes&Noble manager, told her I’d be a good fit not long after I applied. Never even got a phone call about that one.
Thought I’d try my hands volunteering at the local library I'd been going to since I was like, two years old. Found out I had some kind of dyslexic symptom so mild it literally didn’t manifest until I was alphabetizing books for a living. I discovered pretty quick I was good at shelving by Dewey Decimal but the passion had already left me. Couldn’t justify spending money I didn’t have pursuing a degree in library science when I couldn’t even alphabetize books. I kept shelving kids’ nonfiction through August. I loved it. It offered half an hour or more of serene solitude and a chance to feel like I wasn't a complete waste of a life. It was one of the only things I was doing right back then. I don't miss it. I guess I miss being around the library so frequently. Dad still takes me, Lily and grandma once in a while. Back then, though, I was up in the comics section once or twice a week. I discovered and rediscovered some great stuff through them. Moebius, Jeff Lemire, Charles Schulz, Bill Amend, Eddie Brubaker. And Jaime Hernandez. Locas is my favorite comic of all time. I still see a lot of myself in Maggie.
In retrospect I think it's a good thing I biffed both my attempts to turn books into a job. It woulda sucked the fun out of my most enduring hobby. It’s hard to remember why I felt like this was such a stunning failure on my part. But back then that’s exactly what it was. I felt like I had no marketable traits beyond having a shitload of bookshelves in my parents’ basement. When even the library wouldn't have me it might as well have been the end of my life.
A couple phone interviews went nowhere. I remember one night I was texting Lily while I was pulling the basketball hoops up for the volleyball team who played at the YMCA on Thursdays. It took a minute, you had to keep the key turned the whole time, and the court had good wi-fi. So I always texted her while I did that. I can recall her exact words without searching our message history. I told her about this job I really wanted to get, because it paid well and I liked the sound of the work I’d be doing. I said I was scared I’d botch the interview after a whole summer of botching interviews. She said “you’re gonna knock that interview out of the park. You’ve got this. You’ll be perfect at this job, you’re perfect baby. We’ll finally have enough money. We’ll have our little cottage in the woods and life will be perfect”.
Two minutes into the phone interview I told the interviewer I was interested because, among other things, “I’m ready to start working full-time”.
She said, “um, you realize you applied for the part-time position?”
“Oh.”
She was silent a couple seconds then hung up abruptly. The whole call barely lasted three minutes. I was back at the YMCA an hour later. I could barely move, every goddamn object in that building was a reminder. I was unemployable. I’d never be able to take care of the girl who was basically the only thing I had going for me. She was disabled and I might as well have been right there with her. Every time we talked about dating for real I brushed her off. I couldn’t date her in good conscience knowing we’d be living in a box. She was starting to weigh her other options.
The next morning I asked my boss to schedule me the bare minimum, cause I might be starting another job soon.
I have a lot more I could say about the YMCA, about the job search. The time I got looked over in favor of a guy with three teeth, or the sitcom-ass coworkers I had at the YMCA. But this covers the basics, says enough that you can understand exactly how jacked up my life was. I was unlucky in love and couldn’t find work that mattered. All I had was free time and friends.
Sorta. Sean and Jason were back in town for the summer, but Sean was taking summer classes. We did take a trip to my family’s cottage. I think it was the year we watched Over The Top which we still quote almost every time we talk. So it's not like we did nothing together, it just hit different. For the first time those guys felt like adult friends.
The band we started our senior year of high school broke up halfway through a really bleak jam session. I still have the files. The last track ends with Jason taking his hands off the keyboard and exclaiming, “I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels”. Off-mic I remember him being frustrated with me. I don’t recall specifics and keep in mind I tend to interpret most things people tell me as a veiled admission that they're tired of my bullshit, but I remember getting the impression he thought I was holding them back.
He wasn’t wrong. I'm an annoying jackass when you hand me anything I can make noise with. That was kind of the joke early on, Jason and Sean were competent musicians and I was just sitting in the corner screaming into a harmonica. We took too long to realize the joke had run its course.
That band is responsible for some of my best memories with those two. Our last album, with its militaristic rendition of Kokomo and an unironically eerie spoken-word bit by Sean's partner. The Christmas album we did with a harsh noise cover of Silent Night so obnoxious it gave Jason a migraine, yet half the noises I remember us making didn’t come through on the recording. The bizarre track credits like “Vocals - Max, Keyboard - Sean, Snowplow - Jason” and “Vocals - All, Keyboard - Jason, Guitar - Sean, Three Basketballs - Max”. And who could forget the sentence-mixed clip of Jerry Seinfeld saying “I fucked a goose” that we still have on our Discord server's soundboard… fuck, our band was magic. I hate that it went out like it did.
Jason, as it turns out, was the first person to read the first version of this essay I was satisfied to call complete. He and I had a good long conversation about this particular section. He added, “I remember feeling bored with it because it just felt like we were dicking around with no real purpose, but this was right as I was just beginning to start on adult life. I didn't know how precious "dicking around with friends with no purpose" becomes for adults”. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Living at home and desperate for companionship, I started hanging out with some of my brother’s friends. I didn’t actually like most of them but thankfully my brother is the kind of guy who exclusively hangs out with all his boys at once. Especially back then, when most of ‘em had just graduated high school. With nothing at all on their plates, functions in our parents’ garage were almost nightly. They tolerated me, though I didn’t share any of their interests, or know how to keep a conversation going, and I was old enough to buy booze but not cool enough to buy any for them. I did let my brother keep his weed in my room, at least. For a fee.
One of the regulars was Owen, a guy my brother met in kindergarten. Sort’ve a mutual friend, but definitely more his than mine. We gravitated towards one another in the garage through the magnetism that always forms, by necessity, between odd men out. Neither of us drank, we were both easygoing and low-energy compared to the rest of the group (mostly… Owen is a hell of a fighter and organized a backyard boxing competition in our yard the summer before this. He kicked my ass).
The other guys were cheap entertainment. I’ll never forget the night my brother, crossfaded off bottom-shelf booze and some dogshit seeds and stems he got from a dude named Rhino, cried in my arms and called me the nicest person in the world because I went inside to get him a pint of Ben&Jerry’s. Nor will I ever forget the legend of the Drunk n’ Slide - in short, a folding table propped by one set of legs at a 45 degree angle, the surface made slick by vodka. You can imagine how well that one ended. My parents never knew about any of this because they were heavy sleepers and I cleaned up the garage nightly before my dad got up for work at four. These days my coworkers wonder why I handle broken glass so casually when I’m cleaning up a dropped bottle… been there, done that.
We had plenty in common aside from watching drunk teenagers ransack a garage. He and I both had an interest in politics, for one, and held enough of the same core beliefs that we could keep a civil conversation going. He’s a phenomenal mapper, dude can accurately freehand the borders of basically any given nation and then sketch out the story of a civil war or a series of elections happening within those borders. We spent hours poring over his sequences of alternate history maps, and playing a choose-your-own-adventure political drama he wrote called Russia Simulator. Across three whole binders he charted out dozens of alternative Russian histories from the Bolshevik Revolution all the way to a potential second Space Race in the 2100s.
One morning, when he was too tired to take his scooter home, he asked me for a ride. I agreed, he loaded the scooter into the back of the Durango and we hit the road. It was one of those fancy scooters with a wide board, it was really comfortable. He’d emblazoned it with a bunch of stickers, mostly political. Many ironic to some degree; the most sincere of the bunch was its centerpiece, a Tulsi Gabbard bumper sticker. He had - and maintains - a strange love-hate fixation on Tulsi. Every time politics comes up he’ll inevitably hit me with a “Tulsi’s still my girl” or a “Yeah, I’m not sure what she’s doing right now”. I think I feel the same way about Bernie. A lot of you are about to start feeling the same way about Zohran. It’s a lot easier not to play by the rules when you’re not playing the game, that’s all I’ll say.
That’s actually how my side of a lot of our conversations would’ve flowed. Obviously the subjects were different three years ago, but the framing was the same. We spoke in free-flowing streams of consciousness, rambling through a million anecdotes about our favorite and least favorite public figures. My weird mix of flower-child liberal optimism and deep-rooted cynicism found common ground with his authoritarian-leaning lefty masculinism more often than you might think. Of course, a fly on the wall might not be able to parse that through all the layers of irony. The internet gave us some semblance of a common code, of course, and onto that we stapled innumerable inside jokes of our own.
Some of that had already happened by the time we reached Owen’s apartment that night, and he asked me to keep driving. It kept on happening through the whole summer. I’d keep taking him home on the scenic route, we shot increasing volumes of shit and our inside jokes became an entire language of their own. There’s a whole “Durango iceberg” image Owen made to keep track of bits, memes and infamous happenings that have never left the confines of that truck. I’ll keep most of those to myself. You had to be there. They lived and died with the Green Machine. Just know that if I ever use a completely bizarre phrase you’ve never heard before, there’s like at least a four percent chance it’s because of some dumb shit one of us said in the Durango.
Driving home evolved into him asking me to pick him up with the express purpose of bumming around. And me asking him, too, because I didn’t want to be at home most days. My parents were fighting again. I came home from a nice day trip one time to discover dad wasn't talking to mom because she'd hired a contractor to fix some fairly serious structural damage he'd been putting off for most of a decade. The same thing happened when she installed a sink without his help. When they did talk it was to argue. Screaming woke me up more often than an alarm clock.
Usually I tried to force myself in the middle and calm things down. One morning my brother was in my dad's face outside my bedroom door, mom down the hall. I got out of bed, grabbed him by the back of his collar and shouted, “everybody shut the fuck up or I'm calling the cops”. Early one morning when our parents were out my brother asked me to get him Taco Bell. Google told me the ones nearby were all closed. He told me he'd pay me if I went out and checked. I came back and he was pacing the driveway like a coyote stalking prey. He slammed his fist into the window and shouted “where the fuck is my Taco Bell?”. They're closed, I said. That's not an excuse. I kicked the door open and ran to the door. He grabbed dad's old, rusty shovel and took two swings at my head. I ran to the house, locked the door and heard banging behind me. Hours later I came outside to a bloody, splintered crater in the door and two metal chairs lying broken in the yard. That wasn't the only time he did something like this. He's broken a lot of patio furniture. I think I threw that shovel in the Fox River. You're free to check if you're in need of a shovel.
I hate writing shit like this, that shifts the blame onto other people and makes me seem like some kind of victim. Reality of the matter is I'd lived with them for two decades. I knew how stubborn they were. Looking back I think the worst thing I ever did was convince myself they'd ever be able to fix themselves without facing real, painful consequences. I babied them, solved half their problems for them and let them talk as much shit about me as they wanted. They convinced themselves I was the problem because I was always around when shit went down. I never believed it back then. Now, three years past moving out, my parents are more amicable than they've been in twenty years and my brother is a mostly sober God-fearing Catholic with three decent jobs. I left and shit got better.
Every moment I was home I was picking up after them. All I could do to mend my own wounds was pick up shifts and drive like I was headed somewhere better than home. Drives got longer, Owen started packing his MP3 player, a Sandisk Clip Jam with about eighty songs on it. Fifteen of them were variants of John Brown’s Body or the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and he only outright loved one of them: the ragtime Battle Hymn by Smashtrax. It’s a plain, plinky little instrumental take, lacking in the vocal bombast that typifies so many other covers. Reduced to nothing but its most basic elements the Battle Hymn still shines, still goes a-marchin’ on as strong as ever.
He kept that song on loop for hours sometimes, there were entire drives where we listened to nothing else. He told me he sometimes listened to it through entire shifts at his own part-time job stocking a liquor store. I’ve never once found it annoying. It always faded comfortably into the background, like a pleasant, familiar metronome over which we laid our conversations.
The other song from his MP3 Player I’ll never forget was the clean version of American Idiot. Owen introduced me to too many things to count that summer, but I can die knowing I was the one who taught him the simple joy of doing donuts in two and a half tons of metal. One night I told him offhandedly that Minnesotans called doing donuts “whippin’ shitties”. Then, lo and behold, later that night God gifted us with a cul-de-sac called Whipporwill Circle. We lost our shit. I asked him to put on something loud. He's not much of a rock guy; American Idiot was what he had. From that point onwards, whippin’ shitties on Whippoorwill was a staple. We did it whenever we hung out, even when driving wasn’t the main activity. Always, lights would come on and we’d shoot out into the night before anyone could identify us. All they ever heard was Billy Joe Armstrong, all they ever saw were the black donuts we left in our wake. Some of them are still there.
The Durango’s major issues when we scrapped it were all related to steering and suspension. Who coulda seen that coming?
I also kinda-sorta got into 60s lefty folk through these drives, mostly courtesy of the Chad Mitchell Trio. He turned me on to their songs We Didn’t Know (which would easily be their best-aged song if not for the fucking N-bomb near the end), Your Friendly Liberal Neighborhood Ku Klux Klan (a hilarious satire of the ways racism gets rebranded to seem softer and cuddlier) and A Dying Business (a rousing number about the greed of the funeral industry, something we don’t talk about enough. It’s got the band’s best chorus). I can't say I recommend their version of Draft Dodger Rag, though. Also in the folksy camp is the Squidbillies theme. I remember laughing our asses off listening to it together - it’s got a ton of really funny lines, and the B-52’s cover is ludicrously good.
I also remember feeling a little depressed listening to it alone one night while waiting at the McDonald’s drive-through by my grandparents’ house. Grandpa was slowing down and I figured, a year before his cancer diagnosis, he was probably on his way out. I sat with that song on blaming myself for avoiding him, being such a coward over the man’s mortality. Then I started thinking about where I was, in life and physically. Between jobs and buying McDonald’s; perhaps I’d be applying here before long. The song got to the line about injecting hairspray to get high and misery left my body. You can’t not laugh at that line. At least, I can’t.
Much as Battle Hymn and American Idiot get all the flowers, I never seek them out except when Owen’s in town. When I’m in the mood to relive some of the spirit of this summer, these are the songs I actually seek out.
The spirit of mine and Owen’s summer, at least. Lily and I had different songs. She was skittish about her interests, slow to send me any music. I took the lead, got her hooked on some of King Gizzard’s slower stuff. I broke down in tears one night in the YMCA laundry room and told her Her and I was exactly how I felt about her. “It’s said the one I wed has got a thinking head on her/it wouldn’t hurt to put in work on this angel” - she was in college while I slummed it doing laundry. I, then we, would sit together to God is in the Rhythm after hard nights, licking wounds as warped fifties chords brought us somewhere better. A humid summer breeze always seems to cross my face when that song comes on. That’s why my eyes get wet.
It took until August for her to send me anything, during a weird night on Lake Michigan I’ll come back to. We talked a lot about how scared we were to open up to a new partner. I sent her El Scorcho and screamed “I’m a lot like you” into the wind. She finally sent her own song, Colorado Sunrise by 3oh!3.
I think it was around now, some time that week, when I first heard the looped version of End of Small Sanctuary she plays when she’s sad and just wants to zone out. I’d heard the song before, of course, it just took on added significance because of her - as so many things have by now. I think, aside from her, it’s because it really felt like that moment. Ominous, pained bursts of reverb and a title suggesting the end of one’s small, innocent days. Yeah, that’s your early twenties in a nutshell. I kept spinning those four tracks for an hour. Kanye’s Big Brother came on somehow and I wound up listening to Graduation and Watch the Throne together, sitting in range of the waves, skipping rocks against the surf until my phone died. Homecoming still evokes that night in frightening clarity.
Our mutual friend Tyler was taking me on a third musical journey… music remains important to me now, but it’s never been as social as it was then. I miss that. Sitting around the poker table one night I casually brought up Death Grips, since I’d played the infamous Oh Shit I’m Feelin’ It remix for Owen the other night. He briefly added it to his player, though I can’t recall it ever coming up on shuffle. Harsh music isn’t really for him outside of the gym.
Tyler leaned in a little. “Oh, I’ve been meaning to get into Death Grips!”. It was no secret he was a channer, of course he'd heard of them. I was a little surprised, I hadn’t figured him for a /mu/tant, but I was way the hell excited to indulge his curiosity.
Naturally, as a very put-together and employable person I stayed up until eight in the morning listening to their entire discography again and writing little blurbs about each album.
Within a week, he was hooked and he’d returned the favor with a similar document about Have a Nice Life, a /mu/core staple I had been woefully underversed in. And good lord was I ever missing out! Deathconsciousness is an album I’ll rarely approach these days, it’s long and dreary and I lack the free time and the same picking-at-a-raw-wound mental state I had back then (mostly… what do you think this blog is for?).
Simply put, I’m still sad but nowhere near as sad as the ideal frame of mind for listening to that album. At the time though, Deathconsciousness was a fucking godsend. Jobless, hopeless, terrified of every breath I took. Three years past a suicide attempt and no closer to the future I had in my head when I stepped back from the ledge. The album feels apocalyptic in a completely personal sense, slow, drawn out, rough and intimate. I used to stare up at the parking garage that might’ve claimed my life as Earthmover rolled over me.
Once in a while an album will hit like it’s a rake you just stepped on - it collides with you in a way you weren’t prepared for, and the impact rattles your brain such that you’ll never think or feel in the way you did before the impact. The early 2020s graced me with a lot of those. Summer 2023 would be soundtracked by Ada Rook’s Ugly Death Angel Curse No Redemption I Love You, a wild cybergrind whirlwind that left me wondering why something like this hadn’t already existed. It felt like the miseries of that summer’s worst days, while simultaneously helping me reconnect with the half-forgotten child who’d skipped math to listen to Nero’s Day at Disneyland (finding out Rook regularly collaborates with the gal behind that project was a trip). As far as my rake albums go, nothing beats Angel Curse. But Deathconsciousness comes close. It was the album for that moment.
It’s not even the only album Tyler introduced me to. In amongst the 1-3 minute audio files in his Mp3 player, Owen had a thirty-minute file called Chinoiseries. It consisted of a bunch of alluring hip-hop instrumentals, old-school crate-digger shit but built from Chinese records. Familiar production techniques applied to foreign material, yeah that’s exactly my shit.
I remember me, Owen, Tyler and his younger brother Caleb driving through some cornfields outside of Zion, Wisconsin (we’ll come back to that) listening to Machine Girl, Chinoiseries and Chad Mitchell one night. Think that was also the first time I heard Machine Girl. 2022 was the best summer for music since the Summer of Love.
Early in the morning when I didn’t want to be home, I used to step outside with my headphones on and hang out in the yard. Music up loud, nobody’s awake. I was alone with the sounds brought into my life by the couple of people I actually liked. Sometimes one of the neighborhood’s outdoor cats would rub up against my leg, or I’d see an owl or a fox. I never just sit outside listening to music anymore. I should start doing that again.
One night Owen came to the Durango with a case of chips in his hand, asked if I knew how to play Texas hold ‘em. I didn’t, but I’d be down to learn. We bummed a ways and parked at the Shepherd Park-facing Loop the Lake trailhead. I opened the back gate and chucked a chair on the asphalt, facing him in the roughed-up back of my truck. Standing about 5’4” he fit pretty well back there, though neither of us were comfortable. That’s how I learned to play poker. And how I got fleeced out of twenty bucks.
It wouldn’t be long until poker wound up at a garage function. I think we were driving around in the lead-up to one of my brother’s bigger parties and he told me he was gonna bring his poker set. It turned into a regular part of the itinerary. By the end of the summer my brother’s casual get-togethers had become poker nights. One night I mentioned in passing that Batman used to fight a group of poker-themed villains called the Royal Fush Gang. At least two separate group chats still exist with that name.
Me, Owen and Caleb all went to the mall ninja store at the Fox River Mall one day that summer to get knives, because Owen thought switchblades were badass. I remember you could get hilts with confederate flags or pot leaves on them, but not one with pot and a confederate flag. They’re missing out on an entire subcategory of dumbass!
We all walked out with plain marbled hilts. Maybe we wouldn’t have if the guy at the counter hadn’t rushed us out the moment the clock hit closing time. Just for the store, mind you, not the entire mall. A girl with purple hair and a short, tight dress sat on a bench facing the store. We were hardly twenty feet away when time I turned back to see him usher her under the half-rolled store gate. My man got laid in the weeb sword store. God, the shit you see when you’re unemployed.
We sat in the Durango, marveling at how sharp these cheaply-made blades were, testing them out by shredding the boxes they’d come in. Owen said the style of knife we’d bought was technically called a stiletto, not a switchblade. Since we all had stilettos now, he posited, we should call ourselves something cool like the Stiletto Gang. I pointed out that stilettos were a kind of high-heel, so that might come across more like we were a gang of crossdressers. We just kept calling ourselves the Royal Flush Gang.
We sat in the Durango, marveling at how sharp these cheaply-made blades were, testing them out by shredding the boxes they’d come in. Owen said the style of knife we’d bought was technically called a stiletto, not a switchblade. Since we all had stilettos now, he posited, we should call ourselves something cool like the Stiletto Gang. I pointed out that stilettos were a kind of high-heel, so that might come across more like we were a gang of crossdressers. We just kept calling ourselves the Royal Flush Gang.
Our knives were immediately put to use in carving up a table. My parents had a couple of old card tables in the garage, white plastic just starting to yellow. They’d seen us through countless birthday parties and Halloween get-togethers, held innumerable Little Caesars’ boxes and Dairy Queen cakes for us. An old particle board table in the corner often shared the load. Damn near every night in the summer of ‘22, I’d drive my dad’s car or my truck out of the garage and one or two card tables would take its place. We commiserated from the comfort of plastic chairs, though I often opted for the wobbly metal school chair that came with the particle board table.
We carved whole worlds of obscure inside jokes into our favorite of the two card tables. Tyler, who always carried a giant-ass Bowie knife on him for some reason, joined us from time to time. He was the only one who ever put an actual hole in that table. I remember being a little surprised that it was hollow, and that it made a popping sound when he broke the surface.
Tyler’s dad taught Owen and his sons how to play. During one of their first-ever games he was drunk in the other room. Owen asked him what to do when there’s a tie and the pot is uneven. The answer, if you’re unfamiliar, is to place the spare chip into the next hand’s pot. This was communicated to them through a slurred, “BONUS CHIP!” and few minutes of joyous laughter. We all carved BONUS CHIP into the table, turned it into a tradition. If you played even one hand with us you had to scrawl that utterance into the white plastic felt of my burgeoning garage casino. The day before most of the Gang went off to college, every core member carved another BONUS CHIP to play off the good times. God, what good times they were. I get butterflies in my stomach even thinking about a piece of furniture we used back then.
My dad was pretty pissed when he finally found that table last year.
Poker players are superstitious. That’s news to nobody. We all believe there are ghosts in the machine, obtuse means through which to accrue God’s favor on the matter of the outcome of a card game. To quote Jon Bois, poker doesn’t care. It never stopped us. The pros do it, so why shouldn’t the Royal Flush Gang? For the first month and a half, something like May through early July, we played every game with the same deck of cards that came with Owen’s briefcase. They spoiled fast, no thanks to me. I have an issue, I guess you could say I don’t know my own strength though the truth is more that I over- or under-shoot the amount of force I actually need to use to hold something. I come off clumsy with heavy objects and employ what the Gang came to refer to as “gorilla grip” with small, light objects like cards. With how frequently they were passed between so many guys, I can’t take all the blame, but I think a compelling case could be made that our cards woulda lasted a little longer without the gorilla grip to worry about.
It got to a point where, through specific folds on the backs of certain cards, one could make safe assumptions about an opponent’s hands. Some cards were particularly identifiable - the four of hearts had a thick, stubby white line near the edge, following one of the central creases. The nine of hearts had three diagonal slashes near the top left. None of these are superstitions, but the fact I can still rattle those details off nearly four years later should give you an idea of the level of obsessive pattern recognition we were working with here.
Queens are a bad omen. Well, trips queens. A pair? You got it in the bag. Queens as part of a full house or a straight? No problem, as long as there’s just two Queens in that full house. But if you get pocket queens and see one on the table, you better fold. This has yet to fail me; trips queens only ever show themselves as the dangling light of an anglerfish named How Did That Motherfucker Get a Straight? As an aside on a similar note, the first time my brother played he folded on the flop and we all gave him shit. When the round was over he showed us his cards and screamed, “what was I gonna do with pocket ones?” Beginners’ luck is real.
So is, to invoke Jon Bois again (go watch the Pretty Good episode about poker if you haven’t, he’s the best storyteller on YouTube and that video contains some of his best work (his all-time best writing is Fool Time episode 3 (note that I haven’t read 17776 yet))), the idea of embracing chaos. Just like I did with that last sentence. I try not to do stuff like that, sorry. Talking to me in person is as frustrating a process as you probably think it is.
Anyways, our poker superstitions weren’t always tied to binary good or bad luck. One was a wholly ambivalent harbinger of chaos, a sign not of good or bad times but of shifting fortunes. If you ever drew the Jack of Spades, you’d be rich or ruined within a single hand. That bastard ended as many incredible reigns as it preceded. Never a dull hand was played with the Jack in somebody’s hands, though the end results of that hand often left one of us pining for a boring streak. Owen noticed the pattern and christened it the Lord of Locusts. The name suggests doom in a way that doesn’t entirely befit a fortune-forcaster of such non-binary morality, but we all liked it and none could disagree that it fit. The energy at the table always hit a nail-biting fever pitch when the Lord showed itself.
I assumed the Lord of Locusts was a mythological reference, but it turned out Owen’d actually gotten the name from classic fantasy comic Bone. I went out and bought a copy, and read the thing in a manner of weeks. It’s a favorite of mine, rushed as the ending is (but seriously - how can you make a thousand-page story feel rushed? Jeff Smith works in mysterious ways). The concept alone is sheer brilliance, placing classic comedy cartoon characters into an old-school epic fantasy a la Lord of the Rings. It’s derivative of both and the results are wholly unique. Nothing else reads quite like it. I guess it’s a little like Cerebus for non-masochists. I wish more of it had the energy of the Great Cow Race. The low-stakes fantasy hijinks just before the plot kicks into gear are where Smith’s writing and art truly excel, I think. Then again I read it with Owen and we’re both lovers of slice-of-life and fantasy fiction, so it’s possible I’m biased!
I shared my copy of the complete edition around the Royal Flush Gang after I finished, and it ended up as one of the longer book-club type things I’ve run. Some time in early 2023 Bone was returned to me with a mysterious brown stain on the bottom and what I’m pretty sure was a pubic hair between the pages. I think Carlos was the last one who had it. He was barely part of the group and he still somehow found time to fuck one of my books.
Sharing is caring, and sharing is also the other reason my library is worth a lot less than you might assume.
Most of my poker winnings (not that winning was common for me, especially against Owen - the man is ridiculous at cards) went straight to the Green Machine. I loved that thing but it was a hell of a gas guzzler. When I got rid of her this summer I was going through something like a tank every nine days; back then it woulda been a tank or two a week. I walked to work so generally speaking, if I was on my own I tossed five or ten bucks in the tank and if I was with Owen I’d fill the tank full. Every drive, our first destination was the Moto Mart on the corner of Depere and Third. The one right next to Studio 6d6, this incredibly ratty ex-industrial shack that I guess is just a workspace for a dude who makes spray-paint art and D&D stuff?
Stuff like that is the reason I struggle so bad with the idea of ever leaving the Rust Belt. Our industrial era’s already come and gone and boy do we ever know how to make the end of life as we knew it look good. If the people in charge here were smart they wouldn’t be gentrifying that personality out of existence, they’d be leaning into the fact that we’re living in the coziest circle of Hell. Of course, that’d take some kind of cooperation with the non-whites and the poor whites, and we all know the government would never go for that.
Speaking of poor whites: me and Owen. Coupla jackass nerds near the base of the totem pole who went to the gas station as a form of entertainment. It really doesn’t get much more Menasha than that. Even when the tank was full our nights started at Moto. Always at some ungodly hour - you were more likely, as a passenger in the Green Machine, to catch a sunrise than a sunset. Because of that, we only ever got familiar with the graveyard shift. Back then it was mostly this tall, quiet guy and a friendly middle-aged woman. At some point we realized we couldn’t remember either of their names, so we decided to give the two of them nicknames: Tallguy and Girl. We used to bet on who’d be working that night. Loser had to buy snacks. It was usually Tallguy; the bets only got particularly interesting when a third guy entered the picture. I can’t recall if we ever gave him a name.
We still visit the Moto whenever Owen’s in town, hell, we still use drives as a means of catching up. These days it’s usually earlier in the day. So far as I know, Tallguy and Girl still work there, we just rarely catch ‘em. It’s sort of weird. We still give every new employee we see a name. For the record, we’ve never addressed them by these names or been annoying about it. It’s a strange private joke. We chose different avenues of annoyance when they were actually around.
Mostly, the two of us would loiter together in the Moto for countless tens of minutes, bumbling around without a care in the world and laughing our asses off at a random assortment of things. Strange-looking foods, snacks we knew tasted like ass, meanders down the aisles of odds and ends every high-end gas station convenience store has on hand… if you’ve ever been an aimless loser you know the drill. The Moto’s standout feature, I think, is the sub-room in the corner with fishing supplies including several tanks of live bait. We spent a lot of time in there, cracking jokes about eating minnows while whoever was at the desk shot us an exasperated look.
Then there was the poker game. One night Owen sat down in the passenger seat and greeted me in Mandarin. We drove around for a bit, me giving him the usual run-down of what had been happening in the two or three days since we’d last driven, and he kept responding in goddamn Mandarin. He said some conglomeration of words ending in “Moto”. Hell, I’m low on fuel and curious what his game is. Let’s go to Moto.
We pulled up and he shoved his poker case in my face. “Pooka?” Huh? He reiterated, “pooka?” I guess he’s talking about poker. I asked him if he wanted to play poker in the truck, for old time’s sake. He pointed at the convenience store. “Pooka!”
So we walked into a gas station convenience store with a briefcase at two in the morning and we played ourselves a couple hands of Texas hold ‘em. He didn’t speak a word of English through the whole game, which didn’t hurt my odds any. I had him closer to the rope than I typically manage and we agreed to call it quits when a couple hands in a row ended in ties. We both put the exact amounts into our wallets that we’d started with and then almost simultaneously slammed a penny apiece onto the table. Ending in a tie was bullshit, we both knew that. One more hand for one penny more than the other guy had.
It was the only time I ever beat him.
Speaking of poor whites: me and Owen. Coupla jackass nerds near the base of the totem pole who went to the gas station as a form of entertainment. It really doesn’t get much more Menasha than that. Even when the tank was full our nights started at Moto. Always at some ungodly hour - you were more likely, as a passenger in the Green Machine, to catch a sunrise than a sunset. Because of that, we only ever got familiar with the graveyard shift. Back then it was mostly this tall, quiet guy and a friendly middle-aged woman. At some point we realized we couldn’t remember either of their names, so we decided to give the two of them nicknames: Tallguy and Girl. We used to bet on who’d be working that night. Loser had to buy snacks. It was usually Tallguy; the bets only got particularly interesting when a third guy entered the picture. I can’t recall if we ever gave him a name.
We still visit the Moto whenever Owen’s in town, hell, we still use drives as a means of catching up. These days it’s usually earlier in the day. So far as I know, Tallguy and Girl still work there, we just rarely catch ‘em. It’s sort of weird. We still give every new employee we see a name. For the record, we’ve never addressed them by these names or been annoying about it. It’s a strange private joke. We chose different avenues of annoyance when they were actually around.
Mostly, the two of us would loiter together in the Moto for countless tens of minutes, bumbling around without a care in the world and laughing our asses off at a random assortment of things. Strange-looking foods, snacks we knew tasted like ass, meanders down the aisles of odds and ends every high-end gas station convenience store has on hand… if you’ve ever been an aimless loser you know the drill. The Moto’s standout feature, I think, is the sub-room in the corner with fishing supplies including several tanks of live bait. We spent a lot of time in there, cracking jokes about eating minnows while whoever was at the desk shot us an exasperated look.
Then there was the poker game. One night Owen sat down in the passenger seat and greeted me in Mandarin. We drove around for a bit, me giving him the usual run-down of what had been happening in the two or three days since we’d last driven, and he kept responding in goddamn Mandarin. He said some conglomeration of words ending in “Moto”. Hell, I’m low on fuel and curious what his game is. Let’s go to Moto.
We pulled up and he shoved his poker case in my face. “Pooka?” Huh? He reiterated, “pooka?” I guess he’s talking about poker. I asked him if he wanted to play poker in the truck, for old time’s sake. He pointed at the convenience store. “Pooka!”
So we walked into a gas station convenience store with a briefcase at two in the morning and we played ourselves a couple hands of Texas hold ‘em. He didn’t speak a word of English through the whole game, which didn’t hurt my odds any. I had him closer to the rope than I typically manage and we agreed to call it quits when a couple hands in a row ended in ties. We both put the exact amounts into our wallets that we’d started with and then almost simultaneously slammed a penny apiece onto the table. Ending in a tie was bullshit, we both knew that. One more hand for one penny more than the other guy had.
It was the only time I ever beat him.
I can’t imagine what the people who work at that Moto think of us. Most of them probably saw us walking around giggling at snack foods and took us for stoners. One time I bought a Moto Mart-branded ballcap and lighter (the ballcap was fifteen bucks and it’s pretty high-quality. The lighter cost three quarters and it sucks) and I was giggling and glancing over to Owen through the whole transaction. There was something innately funny about stuff branded after a local-ish gas station chain. I still chuckle when I look at either of them. But yeah Tallguy definitely thought I was high that night.
If you wanted to call us stoners you wouldn’t have been short on evidence, though the truth is both of us were stone-cold sober. It was something we talked about a lot, actually. I was trying to work out why my aversion to drugs existed in the first place and whether it made my bum-ass hippie-ass self a hypocrite. He was around drugs a lot more than me, he went to more parties and functions. He was sober going into the summer and spent a lot of it chewing on where to draw the line. He believed in the rule of law for the most part, but he also thought a legal drinking age as high as 21 was bull.
He’d come to associate most drinking with the “freakish” behavior of the folks down at the apartment we called the Prole Den, but he also learned he liked a gin and tonic from time to time. That’s still the only booze he touches, in saner quantities than basically anyone we know. I remember I felt like I’d failed him morally, since he was one of my only sober friends and the only person I knew who was as willing as me to talk shit on drinking culture. Now I’m wondering what the hell I thought was so bad about a dude enjoying some gin now and again. Working full-time has really helped me pull my head out of my ass.
As for other stuff, Owen was a stickler for the law. Pot was out, tobacco was an occasional indulgence and he wanted to try menthols. Told me he’d pay me to buy him a pack, but I turned him down. Which really makes me question where my boundaries were back then. Early in the summer my brother and his friends spent a week up north and they forgot to bring my dad’s old, dust-collecting tackle box. It had been sitting in the garage for years, hadn’t been used since my dad figured out neither of us were all that interested in fishing. Working eighty-hour weeks you only have time for the hobbies your kids like immediately. Well, my brother had come along and made that box the centerpiece of a new hobby he’d found a passion for (though he was by no means a connoisseur; see again the dude named Rhino).
Anyhow, yeah, I snuck the tackle box up there in the Green Machine for something like ten bucks. As it so happens the cushions in the middle row of seats pull out to the exact right position to fit a tackle box beneath em. No air holes or anything, you couldn’t see an atom of the thing. Unless you opened the door, but it wouldn’t have been visible to a cop and that’s all that mattered.
It’s hard to believe I had integrity at all, but in my defense I’ve still only touched the zany zucchini once in my life and I didn’t like the experience. I’m stubborn as hell about my own personal morals, but I don’t care what you do. I’m no snitch, and I’m certainly no Evangelical. And I wasn’t really in a position to turn down ten bucks, either.
Our parents were actually up there with them for the first couple days of the trip, and they were rarin’ to get out and do some stuff with all of us. The Durango was the only single vehicle big enough, so the moment I got through the doors they sprung “we’re taking the Durango out to the lake” on me. Well, shit. I excused myself awkwardly, said something about needing to make room. Everyone else was already packed and ready for action, of course. They’d be out in a minute. My brother was on the other side of the room, face red as it wound up later when he got a sunburn. I ran out to the Durango, popped the seats up and found a hole in the cottage’s foundation to toss the tackle box through. A second later mom walked out the door and asked why I hadn’t started the truck yet.
The other “I SWEAR I’ve never touched pot, officer” story, the really well-worn one, happened during my job hunt near the tail end of August. My brother was real bad at covering his tracks, but he was at least smart enough to know not to smoke in an enclosed space. Usually. One time he smoked a fat, stinky-ass joint right next to a vent in the basement. I yelled at him and we spent a couple hours burning a dozen candles before mom and dad got home.
A couple weeks later I got hit with some real bad luck. It started off as good luck: for once the garage was free, I could park the Durango inside! Not only that, I had a promising job interview the next day! I left the windows down and went to bed as soon as I could.
My brother was going through it, I think he got into it with a girl he was into. He got wasted in the garage that night. Didn’t bother to leave the door up, didn’t even open the window. So I walked out there in my crisp new dress pants and my swanky button-up and sat my ass down in a car that’d been put through what can only be described as a reverse hotboxing. I didn’t get that job.
I called up Owen that night, probably about as depressed as my brother had been when he decided to stink up the garage and asked him to go on a drive. Told him not to wear anything nice. I’d changed into the ratty green button-up I usually wore back then, a size too big with a trout pattern. (I remember one time I visited a friend's apartment wearing that shirt under an Adidas hoodie. His girlfriend said she assumed it was some kinda basketball sweatsuit until she saw the button-up underneath it - then she said, “now I think you're running from the law”. I think she's trying to become a comedian now. She was certainly funny enough).
Owen got in, got a whiff and laughed, “you weren’t kidding”. Despite the heat we opted to roll all three functional windows down. Moto was our first stop and, perhaps due to a contact high, we decided to buy a thing of whip cream. I was the driver so naturally Owen had first dibs. In fact, I only took a couple squirts at first.
We were bumming around by my grandparents’ house, somewhere in the expanse of suburbs you hit when Valley becomes Roeland. Tree-heavy suburbs, the kind with a lot of those hippie-dippy street like Bob-O-Link, Hemlock and Thistle Down, always feel a little like a parallel world to me. A tinge of the forest I love contrasted against the economic class most responsible for eliminating trees wherever they’re inconvenient or unsightly. Some of the public space and greenery I want from a better world, but with the hell of suburban conformity still rearing its ugly head.
Somewhere in that neck of purgatory is a footbridge over state highway 441. We were coming up Carpenter, commenting on a set of weird homemade political lawn signs and laughing our asses off. I finally relented on Owen’s offers of whip cream and ended up with a shitload of the stuff all over my face, chest and hands. The wheel wound up sticky as all hell. I pulled over in a fit of laughter and wheezed, “fuck, this would be so hard to explain to a cop”.
Carpenter ends on a curve into East Park Hills, the street where everyone has a lovely view of some trees doing a bad job of covering up a noise wall. Right on the elbow of that curve is the only damn sidewalk in the whole neighborhood, about ten feet of concrete leading to a long, winding ramp with a remarkably leisurely incline toward a disconcertingly bare-bones bridge. It’s literally just some concrete slabs, concrete supports and metal rails and it’s going over the worst stretch of highway in the area.
We thought this was cool as fuck and just had to stop. We ran up the ramp, discovering that there was a metal staircase at its first bend that just led into somebody’s yard, (also cool as hell - this is what suburbia could be, god damnit!) and then stood up above the highway for a bit daring one another to piss off the edge. There weren’t any passing cars that time of night, but neither of us had the balls to try. I kinda regret that. Most of my juvenile delinquent phase was spent being too chickenshit to do any actual delinquency.
I did at least take some great pictures that night. The piss-yellow glow of the coupla shoddy lights up there grants them a kind of dreamlike quality. This was one of the last nights of August. The day had begun as another in a long line of recent failures and it ended in a drive we still talk about. Owen and I still send each other “the bridge pictures” and joke about the Green Machine smelling like the green stuff. I went home laughing that day. Especially when I checked Google Maps and discovered ANOTHER street called Whip-poor-will at the other side of the bridge!
It helps that Owen had played a pretty funny piece of audio for me that night. Yeah, I guess I should talk about the other media he had on his MP3 player now. Most of what occupied the thing’s eight gigs of memory were podcasts and audio versions of YouTube videos. His taste is all over the map. ContraPoints had some real estate on his SD card for a time, now reduced down to the cover of the Battle Hymn she did at the end of some video or another. He never really played her around me, nor anything that might’ve been representative of our actual beliefs (not that I’m a big fan of ContraPoints in particular, but you know what I mean).
The explicit, kinda normie-edgy Stiff Socks podcast figured heavily in some of our drives, including the one where we got driven out of the Fox River Mall parking lot by night security. It’s not always to my taste or even his, but a boring job gave him time to sift through the sand and curate its best episodes for his collection. I was real familiar with the podcast’s two hosts before long, but the real star of his MP3 player was an unmedicated nut from Canada.
Years ago, a young Owen was in the obligatory Deep Web phase everybody like me and him goes through. One of the videos he came across was a rambling, seemingly unscripted thirty-minute screed about the wonders and horrors of the Tor Browser, a collection of every urban legend associated with the Deep Web from red rooms to mail-order hitmen to the Human Experiment (for the uninitiated: a website where some dude claimed he was kidnapping homeless people and using them as lab rats in a series of warehouses. This one keeps me up at night more than anything else, even though we don’t even know if the website ever existed to begin with. The only existing evidence is a handful of screenshots, all of which are just text from what I recall. It was probably just, like, SCP for edgelords but it still churns my stomach).
This was all relayed to the viewer amidst a nigh-incomprehensible flurry of chan slang, EDM and edgy mid-2010s humor, delivered by a squeaky-voiced nerd with a thick Canadian accent. It’s charming stuff if you’ve got thick skin or rose-tinted glasses. Around 2021 nostalgia prompted him to search for that video again, but it was gone. Or, the official upload was. Somebody had posted a mirror, through which he learned that the original uploader was a guy named Sassy and Opinionated (aka SassyOP), who was either banned from YouTube or deleted his channel because the algo was screwing him over.
Thankfully, there are (mostly) complete archives over on the Internet Archive and BitChute. Owen went down the rabbit hole, devouring every SassyOP original he could get his hands on. Most were instant MP3 player fodder, for one simple reason: this motherfucker is weird. His subject matter isn’t that out there. He did videos on the history of internet culture, then shifted gears into right-wing conspiracy videos before ending things with a chapter-by-chapter Berserk review as YouTube started hounding him for his politics. That all sounds like things a million dudes have done, right?
Well, yeah. But Sassy brought to his videos a heady blend of bluntly-stated fringe opinions, personal stories, painfully long tangents and countless undiagnosed mental illnesses that were guaranteed to go down smooth. He also, hilariously, modulated his voice but only sometimes. So there’s a bunch of videos where he sounds like a regular Canadian twig boy, then you’ll hit one where he’s been pitch-shifted up or down a couple octaves. We used to joke that he’d try and obscure his identity whenever he forgot to take his meds, whenever the fear of being watched got to him again. I wish I could say I couldn’t relate, but I’m a faggot and it’s 2026.
On the internet, government robots have gone well beyond selling data. Now they can identify wrongthink completely automatically. In the real world, I’m so numb to Flock cameras I’ve come into the habit of counting them. Our corporate-owned military is assisted by corporate-owned hit squads like Blackwater, the CIA and the police. Payment processors have aggressively obtained an effective monopoly on who spends money and what they can spend it on, and they've begun to crack down on where their services can be used. They can bar individuals, companies or entire industries from making any money. This can effectively illegalize something without any (direct) government involvement, rendering the Constitution as obsolete as a troubleshooting guide to Windows 95. People still argue against that kind of comment because the Constitution only applies to the government but the government in 2026 is a totally symbolic vassal state owned by corporate interests. The crazy people are the ones who don’t feel someone breathing down their necks (god, you know the situation is dire when my political commentary goes beyond joking about rich people being pedophiles).
His greatest hits, the videos we and others still talk about, were the long-ass ones. Between the short-form histories and introductions to internet and nerd topics, Sassy would occasionally spew something feature-length into the world. These come off completely unscripted, like he’s following a rough series of bullet points and refusing to pare down any of his tangents.
The channel’s best video, a four-hour history of MMA, includes delineations about his lack of success with women, Joe Rogan’s secret plan to replace the white race with racially inferior Italians (part of a wider and more on-topic rant about pigeons) and how Chris-Chan’s decades-long crashout could’ve been prevented if his dad had helped him get laid as a teen (this was before she transitioned and fucked her mom). It hits the perfect balance, just deranged enough to be hilarious without going off the deep end as in “The History of Those Who Rule Over Us All”. That video is nearly nine hours long, contains unlistenable voice modulation and the first seven hours are just a list of names. Owen went through a phase where he attempted to listen to it, from the start, every day at work until he built a tolerance to it. He tells me the last two hours are actually “super based”. I’ll take his word for it.
You might think, based on that last comment, that Owen was significantly more receptive to this guy’s views than I was. It’s true that I’m more of a lefty than him, but I gotta say in between the lunacy Sassy is one of the more agreeable right-wing YouTubers I’ve listened to. He’s got segments talking about how the ruling class use antisemitism to force Jews into being scapegoats, an entire video about predatory lending practices and he even spent a while in his MMA video arguing against “trannies” being barred from womens’ sports because training while low-T is the most miserable thing he ever tried to do. You look past the weird shit about mixed-race kids and “the gay mafia” and there’s a surprising bit of common ground.
Naturally, these days he’s returned to YouTube as a kinda shitty blackpilled incel channel which, hilariously, flew under the radar as a Yu-Gi-Oh channel for its first year. He’s still got the sauce from time to time, the two-hour incel culture breakdown and the “how to get a job in trucking” video scratched a similar itch. But between that he’s doing Yu-Gi-Oh shit and weird thirst traps breaking down iconic sexy comic book women. It’s just not the same.
Naturally, these days he’s returned to YouTube as a kinda shitty blackpilled incel channel which, hilariously, flew under the radar as a Yu-Gi-Oh channel for its first year. He’s still got the sauce from time to time, the two-hour incel culture breakdown and the “how to get a job in trucking” video scratched a similar itch. But between that he’s doing Yu-Gi-Oh shit and weird thirst traps breaking down iconic sexy comic book women. It’s just not the same.
But then maybe the thing that’s missing is three years, a short man and a green truck.
Boy, I can never forget the Durango. Endless humid nights on endless country highways. Shooting off down Commercial, doing donuts in the middle school parking lot then getting lost somewhere just beyond Oshkosh. Winding up someplace with long, curvy roads to nowhere, where streetlights are rare, where your best landmarks are empty storefronts and dim gas station signage. Where you struggle to remember there’s a college town thirty minutes away and have to keep an eye on the gas tank ‘cause the concept of civilization outright vanished a couple miles past the M_BIL.
Even when you’re in town in the wee small hours, nothing feels right. The lights are humming and flickering for nobody, for a crowd of two dipshit kids and a homeless man on a bike. The only cars you'll spot are driven by sad-looking first-shifters, the kinds of people I once prayed I’d never become. And the street sweepers are out. The things have looked the same for decades. They’ve always let out the same sort of high whine as their brushes did away with the day’s detritus. It's usually the only sound on the air. In the early morning din it can travel as far as couple blocks. Their operators always give you the look of a frightened animal, letting you know they chose this job because they don’t want to be seen or known.
In a famous Simpsons gag Bart’s bike is cleaned, and subsequently wrangled, by a malicious street sweeper operator. A 1980 Far Side panel shows a jogger huffing and puffing trying to outrun one. That comic tended to place animals and creatures above humans. The impression I always got is that the humble street sweeper was just as much a cryptid as Bigfoot or King King, a curious animal like a deep-sea fish. These are things we know exist, we understand what they look like and what they do, but we rarely encounter them. I always knew I’d stayed up too late when I heard that soft electric whir, the shuffling of a million bristles against concrete. They were harbingers of the morning, the sole residents of a world left on hold. Sometimes they were the only proof I had that the world still had other people in it. When the dust settles at the end of days, I imagine they’ll be there to sweep it up.
Even when you’re in town in the wee small hours, nothing feels right. The lights are humming and flickering for nobody, for a crowd of two dipshit kids and a homeless man on a bike. The only cars you'll spot are driven by sad-looking first-shifters, the kinds of people I once prayed I’d never become. And the street sweepers are out. The things have looked the same for decades. They’ve always let out the same sort of high whine as their brushes did away with the day’s detritus. It's usually the only sound on the air. In the early morning din it can travel as far as couple blocks. Their operators always give you the look of a frightened animal, letting you know they chose this job because they don’t want to be seen or known.
In a famous Simpsons gag Bart’s bike is cleaned, and subsequently wrangled, by a malicious street sweeper operator. A 1980 Far Side panel shows a jogger huffing and puffing trying to outrun one. That comic tended to place animals and creatures above humans. The impression I always got is that the humble street sweeper was just as much a cryptid as Bigfoot or King King, a curious animal like a deep-sea fish. These are things we know exist, we understand what they look like and what they do, but we rarely encounter them. I always knew I’d stayed up too late when I heard that soft electric whir, the shuffling of a million bristles against concrete. They were harbingers of the morning, the sole residents of a world left on hold. Sometimes they were the only proof I had that the world still had other people in it. When the dust settles at the end of days, I imagine they’ll be there to sweep it up.
Earlier I said I’d refrain from explaining our inside jokes, but I have to make one exception. In the parlance of Owen and I circa ‘22, the names of certain countries and concepts held a strange personal significance through which we manufactured a wholly ironic pseudo-spirituality. Geopolitics were big on Owen’s Minecraft realm; our most popular minigame was Tyler’s first-person shooter with maps themed for Vietnam and Iraq. Historically or politically-themed builds and map art (custom paintings created through building an image across the “chunk” of the game world the map covers) of varying degrees of good taste were commonplace. The “White People Suburbs” area inspired a term for conformist suburbia that’s spread beyond the friends of mine who actually know Owen.
Then there was a nation-building survival mode in which each empire was named randomly for a real concept, group or country. The two most prominent factions at a point were called Zion and Xhosa, words that would become inscribed in Owen’s in-game mythology. Zion won, and thus according to their version of events Zion is a creator deity and Xhosa was his great foe, a being of ill-defined chaos who sent legions of dog-like things called Synapsids to lay waste to mankind. A brave Villager named Euchariah may or may not have stood in their way. Before continuing I’d like to say I have nothing against the Xhosa people and I’m not a supporter of Zionism or any brand of nationalism. Nor was I back then. We were only being stupid, not malicious.
Through this pulping of other people’s words we developed a lingo in which Euchariah could be invoked in contexts ranging from conspiratorial rants to games of rock-paper-scissors (the original Euchariah NPC, prior to all this lore, had been programmed to play rock-paper-scissors against players), and the “Euchariah, Euchariah, Grinch is gonna get ya” song from the Grinch Halloween special briefly became a chant. Zion, meanwhile, developed an air of prestige. You can imagine how it felt, then, to discover an unincorporated community called Zion outside of Oshkosh.
We made two pilgrimages to the town’s church, one of its only noteworthy institutions and the one conveniently located just across from the telephone pole where the town’s sign was affixed. Owen posed for photos in front of both. It’s a gorgeous building, with the lily-white wood and tall boxy steeple you’d expect from a rural church but with a cross up top brighter than any streetlight, molten-white and higher than anything else in the sky. It’s impossible to see it and not believe the thing is beckoning you. The town’s entire supply of electricity is right up there in an unflinching ode to God, as if He’s screaming straight down at you from Heaven that this nowhere patch of dirt is where you go if you want to join Him.
I stole a number off their signboard, a 1 that snapped cleanly in two as I pulled it free. Sometimes I wonder what Saint Peter will have to say about that.
Although I guess ol’ Pete would’ve had bigger fish to fry. Religion was the only topic Owen and I talked about more than politics. We were, we quickly identified, both undergoing spiritual crises. I’d been in a weird spot since the lockdowns - really, I’d been in a weird spot my whole life. I was raised by Catholics, my mom was devout enough she was almost a nun before she realized she wanted kids. She also never made me go to church, not even around the holidays. She understood from an early age I had no attention span and little respect for authority, and to her credit she dealt with that pretty well. Instead I was raised with the whole “nature is my church” thing. God was in the rhythm, as King Gizzard once said. Religion was a means to explain what was good in life and little else.
There were hiccups along the way. I took things very literally as a kid, so when Satan and Hell were explained to me at age four I remember being horrified of every mistake I’d made and waking my mom up in tears. I’d stayed awake and bug-eyed, images of Hell dancing across the ceiling. I pictured a grand bridge of rock over a colossal flaming gorge. On one side, Satan sat on his throne. At the other was a pantry stocked with infinite cans of baked beans. I liked baked beans a lot as a kid, no idea why that was the first food I associated with the land down under. I think I was horrified of the implication that they’d all come out of the cans already cooked because of the fire. Which raises the question of why that was scary, but we don’t have the time of day. When my mom came running in I started babbling incoherently about “the bridge” and “the beans”, which I thought would make sense to the person who’d told me about Hell.
She figured it out eventually and comforted me by saying Satan was only as powerful as our belief in him, which probably meant something along the lines of “believe in God and Satan can’t getcha” but I took it to mean, in short, that when it came to spirituality the entire cosmos rested on what you believed. So at age four I simply stopped believing in Hell. Something like a decade later I became depressed and began fearing eternal life of any sort. Egged on by the “atheist” YouTubers of the day, I also stopped believing in Heaven. For about a year I became my school’s resident annoying atheist. My cousin shot himself that summer, and I went through this whole crisis where I realized I’d been kind of a weird lame nuisance the last couple times he saw me. So I changed courses and became a more normal kind of atheist, soft-spoken and willing to laugh at religion but without all the science-evangelism, pointless arguments and thinking online skeptics were the smartest people alive (like half the ones I used to follow are Christian influencers now, it’s a grift! Everyone on the internet is a fucking grifter!)
That’s the path I probably would’ve continued down if Covid hadn't hit. Like a lot of people, Covid left me with a lot of free time and a lot of hollow fearful holes in my brain that needed to be filled. I needed to believe in something. Christianity was out the window, after so long as my family’s token atheist I’d be admitting defeat if I crossed that Rubicon. But as a more mature, thoughtful adult I now realized that I’d never actually ceased being a Christian. The Bible is a book of rules and morals wrapped up in metaphor and myth. My parents had taught me those morals even if they’d never taken me to church. What I’d stopped believing in wasn’t Christianity, it was the existence of God - which was never the point of the book to begin with. I was, and remain, a Christian regardless of whether I believe in the myths themselves.
Semi-conscious of that fact, I began assembling a pantheon of every religious story that had ever meant anything to me. David and Goliath was a good one, the Flood sticks out, I like that bit about the camel and the needle. The old-school stories of Satan, demons and the like where they were petty dicks as often as they were outright evil. Vonnegut ensured I’d never forget Lot’s wife.
Reincarnation is a neat idea, regardless how I feel about karma. The bits of the Bible about Jesus himself are mostly pretty good. I like the Sermon on the Mount - once again, thank Kurt. I kinda reverse-engineered being a “red-letter Christian” without knowing that term. And the ancient Jewish people were cooking like nothing else when they came up with the Golem. Golems are my favorite thing in any religion. I think Pratchett probably got the ball rolling on that one, and the Fantastic Four. Men of clay, purpose-built to serve the innocent over themselves. In that aimless time I found them aspirational. Now I find them tragic and sympathetic.
Weighing averages, my spiritual charcuterie board was predictably dominated by familiar Christian and Jewish influences. There was a point in time, as I told Owen one night, that I felt I’d need to lock myself in one box or the other some day. He helped me shake off that last dose of my chronically literal thinking. Through our talks I accepted that strict boxes only benefit marketers and government agencies, that I could be a person who’d benefitted from the stories told by various religions without being religious at all. That’s where I’m still at.
Owen, meanwhile, was raised an atheist and in search of greater meaning. He approached religion with the same philosophy, looking for moral and spiritual guidance as opposed to literally believing the face-value text of the books. Summer ‘22 was his first step toward Catholicism, which he was particularly attracted to for its strict adherence to codes, guidelines and power structures. Order is very important to him, as is having a clearly-spoken shepherd to turn to in times of uncertainty.
I asked him for a comment on his conversion to Catholicism while writing this. He said, “I don't think there's enough evidence to prove supernatural claims. However, I'm not an atheist any longer since I realized it's equally silly to be 100% sure of no immaterial reality [...] I wish I could believe in God. [...] The Church is my refuge from a chaotic world. It gives me routines and order; every mass is the same, from Neenasha to Ames to Fairbanks, Alaska. I've been walking 3 miles thru the ice and snow, once a week, to attend Sacred Heart Cathedral (the most Northern US Catholic cathedral, SHOUT OUT!) It gives me peace and reminds me of virtues.”
I'll be continuing to quote that as I proceed, his writing is worth reprinting. Even if I don't agree or align with everything he says, it makes for fascinating conversation and I'm proud to say I contributed in some small way to the path he's chosen for himself. He's gained a lot through Catholicism. Especially community and a clear life purpose, both things us in the secular world struggle with.
Like, seriously, how can we complain on the left about the death of third places and simultaneously balk at the number of young folks who've started attending church as adults? Churches are the only place left where you're not expected to buy something and go on your way (remember when malls let you loiter? I miss that). They’re community for the sake of community. Regardless of the average pastor's politics, and regardless of the fact that organized religion is still ultimately about control and conformity, the church is one of the only institutions we have left that favors humans over profit.
And yeah, yeah, I'm aware there are a number of progressive churches that are more than accepting of people like me. I think in another life I'd probably belong to one of those. Lily is currently living as a trans Catholic and she's as happy as she's ever been. The issue for people like me is the bridges have already been burned. There's a belief we and religion don't belong together which has been consistently enforced by most major organizations, especially the Abrahamic ones. Not that the big Buddhist-led governments are doing much better these days, China’s probably got the most evil government around, but you know what I mean. This is because, as I said, the endgame of religion - like every form of centralized authority - is conformity.
The culture of conformity is inseparable from organized religion and leads to unconscious biases that persist even in - and honestly especially in - liberal churches. Believing God is on your side is a dangerous path to follow, and it's led to my falling out with most of my liberal Christian friends. They're the demographic with the highest rate of well-intentioned idiots. People who can never accept that they might still be bigoted in some way cause they had a dream one time where a Caucasian incarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth told them they weren't racist.
But don't let my cynicism rule the moment. Religion has also changed many lives for the better. Owen says, “Christianity is an ideology of the working class if applied directly - the Church opposes communism [the ideology Owen spent much of his teens ascribing to], but it also opposes extreme interest rates on loans, recently reaffirmed by Pope Leo, excess wealth, and treating people as means to ends. It is very humanist in this sense.” Through engaging with Christianity I’ve seen him develop a care for man that he'd never had before.
Back then he always placed economic issues above social problems. As a Catholic, those scales are balancing themselves. It’s not entirely driven by agreeing with the conservative Catholic majority, either. It’s happening in part through being presented with inherent contradictions. His own words - “I generally don't like to think a lot about abortion/LGBTQ stuff, mainly cuz the dissonance is too high between the Church I so love, and the family/friends I so love.” - seem noncommittal, but I know what I’ve seen interacting with him in person. The dude’s more accepting than he was in ‘22.
I can tell you that for sure because I remember the conversations we had at the hours surrounding dusk in cornfields, gas station parking lots and planned development labyrinths. Our conversations often turned to disagreement. Despite reaching similar conclusions on many topics, we’re different people with different philosophies. We reached those conclusions in wildly different ways.
Disgust, he’s told me many times, is his strongest emotion. He said, “this is totally illogical but part of my worldview I think. I have a really high "disgust reflex" [...] You may know this about me, it's always been a part of me, but I can't look at bugs/mice and get spooked really easy. I think I told u at [liquor store] one time, I was working the back and saw a dead mouse, I literally jumped and SPRINTED away. broke direct orders from my boss and did not go back there for a week. I also can’t handle any red/pink in my meat [...] Sexual morality is probably alot of influences, but partly my disgust-reflex. Sex is just innately disgusting [...] I won't say this impulse is logical, but it certainly affects my worldview”.
Disgust, then, is defined as a complex series of biases both logical and illogical. He’s sometimes frighteningly conscious of every single hangup life has ever inflicted upon him, even those that hardly affect him at all. Results may vary. A full consciousness of his disgust toward greed has served him well.
But then there’s his skepticism about Indian rights on the basis that it’s unfair to have miniature non-American nations operating under different sets of rules, exceptions to what us average Americans are allowed - particularly the hogging of gambling operations by a plurality of Indian capitalists. We argued about Indian reservations almost every day for a week. I remember one night he seemed tetchy after bringing it up with his parents. After that his commitment to the issue started to feel like parody; we’d come close to the subject and then we’d both groan “Indian reservations!” like it was the name of some loathsome sitcom dad who’d just walked into the room.
This belief was born from a wider conflict over his identity. Coming to terms as an adult with his status as a working-class white man made shit weird for him. In his later teen years he adopted mostly communistic beliefs, as I said, and built up a self-image as the kind of hard-working, socialist union man who’d once briefly ruled parts of this country. He told me one time he thought he’d have been great as a mafia tough working on behalf of a dirty union. I replied by telling him about Owen “Owney” Madden, the mafia don short king who involved himself in booze, boxing and gambling. I still think he might be his second coming.
Owen had another historical figure in mind. He identified strongly with the infamous fightin’ man from Alabam’, George Wallace. Another little guy, Wallace ran Alabama on a platform whose achievements included over a dozen trade schools, massive boosts to the state’s manufacturing economy, enormous spending on public infrastructure and healthcare, and some of the most heinous segregation in the country. Wallace’s other achievements are commendable and I wonder what he could’ve accomplished had he not been distracted by his racism. He spent God knows how much time and taxpayer money on racism - what if that, too, had gone to the schools?
Owen argued that Wallace wasn’t distracted by race, that he was merely letting Alabama take its course, providing social programs without weighing in on identity politics that were irrelevant to the struggle of the working class. Which isn’t true, he worked hard to make Alabama more racist. It’s his legacy. Every single time I’ve ever heard him mentioned, it’s as “segregationist George Wallace”. Race distracted him more than it did just about anyone else in the country.
We butted heads about that, too, but once again it morphed into a joke before long. It became clear that, to him, minority issues were more of a thought experiment than something he took hard stances on - he was all about the economy at the end of the day. When he looked at figures like Wallace he was focused on their more admirable accomplishments almost exclusively, asking “what would I be willing to sacrifice to have that?” It's an interesting position and a privilege I can only dream of having had. I won't drag this out any longer than I have to, I think the conversations that stemmed from my closeted past self's apprehensions belong nowhere but the Durango.
Argument turned to conversation which turned to Owen being one of the first people I ever came out to that Winter. I told him just the other day, on our first drive since he returned from Alaska, that the life he's lived should've primed him to avoid people like me, and yet he's among the most respectful guys I've met. He might be the only friend of mine who's never asked one of those awkward questions you get from straight people, and even when he asks things that might qualify they come from a place of wanting to know more. Everything does, with him. He likes to put himself in other peoples’ shoes, he's naturally curious in a way I envy. And regardless of any weird shit he might've said, hey, I prefer honesty. He's the polar opposite of a performative Christian. We need more of that.
I just hope I haven’t cast him as unlikable. We butt heads, yeah, sometimes he says something dumb. When he’s comfortable with somebody he’s not afraid to exorcise some of his demons even if he has to fully embody them to get ‘em out of his system. I do the same thing. When I’m comfortable with somebody I challenge their beliefs, and I seek out friends who challenge me. Argument is a great way to broaden your horizons, hell, for stubborn assholes like me it can be the ONLY way out of a bubble. Presenting new, hypothetical viewpoints you're either interested in or want to poke holes in while in a safe environment, a controlled confrontation with somebody you're intimately familiar with confronting, can lead you to some great places. It's the same principle behind why I used to call myself a fag as a joke, basically.
It’s something grandpa had in him, too. He was a stubborn, crotchety old liberal who made friends with conservatives so he could spend more of his life bickering. He started growing his hair out a little this summer, had kind of a hippie Santa Claus look. I remember him proclaiming to a conservative uncle, “I'm getting ready to take to the streets if Trump comes back.”
One of the first guys dad talked to at his funeral laughed his ass off recounting an argument they’d had, which ended in grandpa name-checking some politician and telling him, “if you’ve never heard of him, you can’t have this conversation”. Then he loaned him a book about the politician in question.
I hope a couple decades down the line Owen has that conversation at my funeral.
One of the first guys dad talked to at his funeral laughed his ass off recounting an argument they’d had, which ended in grandpa name-checking some politician and telling him, “if you’ve never heard of him, you can’t have this conversation”. Then he loaned him a book about the politician in question.
I hope a couple decades down the line Owen has that conversation at my funeral.
Regardless of some of what I just said, Owen has put in his work. He’s grown into the kind of guy who works hard for his local communities through the church, but beyond that we used to pull some goofy little heists together. The government and the petit bourgeois probably lost dozens of dollars off our backs. So, ya know, he’s done more to fight the power than most of the people who might take issue with him.
Mostly, we stole traffic cones. How could we not? They’re lightweight and plentiful, and also one of the most plainly hilarious things to have in your house. I still have a big barrel cone in my room. We planned these heists out in advance. I lowered all the seats in the Durango and laid tarps and blankets down. We’d wait until road work was going on in a place where we knew all the speed traps, so that cops were never an issue. The barrel cone was the hairiest it ever got. That one came from a torn-up stretch of asphalt in front of St. Mary’s Cemetery. Which isn’t where grandpa is buried, but it is right across from Chicago’s House of Hoagies, to whom he was a loyal patron.
Owen hadn’t started working out yet and I hadn’t started stocking the soda aisle of a grocery store yet, and so we both learned fast that those barrels are goddamn heavy. Not only that, the black “base” is a completely separate skirt element, not actually attached to the main body in any way. It snagged on my foot, the trailer hitch, the bottom of the trunk, the tarp beneath it, the tarp we tried to drape over it… and not a moment after we’d got back to driving a cop crested the bridge just behind us, completely unaware of what he’d just missed.
We also did yard signs, everything from business to politics. Once we encountered two neighboring houses, one with a bajillion Democrat signs and the other with as many Republican. We joked about swapping their places, and hey, this is my essay. I decide how I tell my story. We did that shit and it was funny as hell. The one sign we both agreed not to steal was this plain white yard sign near Jefferson Park on which somebody had scrawled BLACK AFRICAN MUSIC. That one fucking rocked, I wish whoever owned the house would put it up again.
One night at the cottage my brother got trashed off the tackle box and we all went and boosted a couple NO TRESPASSING signs together. He took a dump right in front of one that said, VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT. Can you believe he doesn’t remember that? Yeah, I can too.
I want to end this section with something I will neither admit to nor deny having done, and I’ll phrase it in the form of a question. Did you know a lot of people leave the keys in their boats, sometimes even right in the ignition? Did you know the trailers they’re sitting on are usually unlocked or poorly locked and facing right towards the street? Did you know most boat landings are in areas remote or middle class enough that cops don’t often come by ‘em? And did you know it’s not that hard, in the grand scheme of things, for a stupid twenty-something to learn how to drive a boat on the fly at two in the morning?
I admit to nothing.
“Did you ask your brother about those parts?”
“No.”
“Will you ever let him read them?”
“I'd prefer he didn’t. I know I usually try and let people read this stuff ahead of time but I don't wanna start anything between us again, or remind him of those days. He's been doin’ good.”
“Got it.”
“And I guess I know he wouldn't get it. Like, what I'm trying to do by writing all this down. You get what I'm going for, and we're cool. So I'm okay sharing it with you.”
“Yeah. I got what you were trying to do. It's written well, I think I like it. I think you kinda turned me into a villain. I’m normal for most of it and then I get converted into a Catholic extremist.”
“Yeah, that’s something I was trying to avoid but I think it’s another victim of the structure. I like having all the argument stuff in one place, I think it’s cool for flow, but it does kinda end shit on a sour note.”
“I understand why you felt the need to write it. You can do what you want.”
“Nah, that's an early draft. It’s like, a load of raw emotions I blew at three in the morning. I’m gonna go back and clean it up.”
“I don’t mind.”
“But I don’t think the way it’s written right now is true. I gotta go back and add the logic. It’s all heightened emotion right now, it doesn’t really represent who you are.”
“I’m kinda surprised you even asked about my faith. Most people react to that like how people don’t really want to listen to dreams.”
“Well I like listening to people talk about dreams, too. Spanny even animated one of mine, remember?”
“Oh, interesting. So you’re biased.”
“I think it’s got a lot to do with how well you know somebody. Like, I guess people who are deep in their faith in general are a red flag to a lot of normies nowadays. Like what I said about bridges being burned. But yeah, I think it’s how well you know somebody and how interested you are in their worldview.”
“That makes sense.”
“Like, I find your worldview fascinating. You’ve got a really unique perspective and you’ve reshaped my own beliefs a ton. The way you see the world and the conclusions you draw is kinda inherently interesting to me. And I guess it’s probably cause I’m autistic, too. I’m naturally bad at seeing through other peoples’ eyes. I think hearing somebody describe a worldview completely different from mine makes me feel more human.”
“That’s good. Put that in the essay.”
“Eh, I’ll probably forget it by the time we get home.”
“Where even are we?”
“Fuck if I know. I lost track back in Greenville. Hey, did you ever finish that tangent about Alaska?”
“No.... So, they don’t call it mass, they call it liturgy. And there’s no pews, they just stand around.”
“Where do they put the bibles and hymn books?”
“That’s the thing, it’s not communalistic like Catholicism. They just stand there and listen. There’s a choir, but they’re the only ones singing.”
“Crazy.”
“It was interesting, but I couldn’t live without the communal spirit of Catholicism.”
“I get that. I’m coming around to your collectivism, I think. Through an individualist lens. Centralized authority always beats individuals down, but if we all had each others’ backs maybe we’d be doing better.”
“That’s kind of a cool fusion. Oh, and I met the Archbishop.”
“No kidding?”
“During my first liturgy. He had this crazy outfit on. He had a full gold robe and a crown, and a two-foot beard. He was like six-five and standing on this platform so he looked even taller.”
“I’m just picturing Tallguy as a wizard. God, that fit sounds - that sounds like historical Catholic shit.”
“Yeah, Orthodox Christians are all about tradition. They believe everything they’re doing is how it would’ve been done in the old times. It’s their thing. Like the Catholic thing is order. They like mystery, too. Like in Catholicism the transubstantiation happens right out in the open. They do it in another room where you can’t see it.”
“I don’t trust that.”
“They seemed trustworthy, but I didn’t like it, yeah. It wasn’t the same.”
“I feel like that could be the Orthodox version of the secret agent thing of killing a dude in the confession booth. Wonder if that’s happened in any Russian spy movies.”
“That’d be cool. A poisoned eucharist.”
“It’s weird hearing you say eucharist. Not Euchariah.”
I find it too easy to focus on just Owen when I think of Summer ‘22. We hung out almost daily, one or two of our drives approached twelve hours. The way I live my life and see the world now is still heavily indebted to what we talked about in the Durango. When we hang out these days, it’s always a drive. Hanging out with that guy was one of the most impactful things I did back then. I’m not quite done talking about it, but as we approach the end of the essay and - loosely, I know I flitted around a bit - the end of the summer, I wanted to talk about a couple of my life’s other keystone species. Particularly four old men. (I realize I write about men a lot, even though most of my friends are women… it takes more for me to bond with a guy, so I guess when it does happen it tends to really happen).
One afternoon at the end of everything I was at Saint Vincent De Paul’s looking for some cheap paperbacks. They’re one of the last remaining thrift stores who haven’t caught the scalper bug, they seem like solid people compared to your average thrift shop. I obviously have my issues with organized religion, but by God, Christians can run the hell out of a thrift shop.
I was standing up after perusing the store’s paltry science fiction section, where I’d just found a vintage copy of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War for something like seventy-five cents. This Mark Twain-lookin guy was obviously trying to get through, I gave him a little space. He asked, “what’s your favorite science fiction book?”
“I’ll be honest, I haven’t read much sci-fi lately. Kinda just coming back to it.”
“Do you have a favorite author?”
“Uh, I like Kurt Vonnegut.”
“Vonnegut! No way! He’s my favorite. People always said he looked like Mark Twain.” You ever look in a mirror?
“Y’know, he really did.” We got to talking about resurrection a little bit, and about Kurt. Po-te-weet, Mother Night, So It Goes. The whole nine yards. He told me his favorite novel, though, wasn’t by his favorite novelist. It was Dune. More impassioned rambling followed, ending with, “My name is actually Paul, just like the guy in the book!”
I told him my name was Max. It was the first time I ever gave that name to a stranger. Many drive-thru workers would follow in his footsteps. Sometimes I wonder if Paul wasn’t a name he chose for himself. Especially because Kurt had a Paul, too: Proteus, from his first novel. Proteus and the Paul from the thrift store were both rebels in their own specific and somewhat mundane ways. Paul told me excitedly about how dumpster diving was perfectly legal (I should know - my mom and her sisters were once adept at it!) and he actually got most of his food out of peoples’ trash. He also said he’d scored nine unopened smartphones in the past year, some of which had been great Christmas and birthday gifts. We spoke about how wasteful people were, throwing out so much good food and expensive technology.
We got into our respective personal lives a little. I’ll spare his, just know it’s exactly as strange as you’d hope. I got to spinning my own yarn, I was miserable at work, hated my home life, thought there might be something wrong with my head I hadn’t figured out yet, and I was trying to be a writer. There were about ten thousand words of a novel on my hard drive and I’d done a bit of a short story too. He told me everyone had something wrong with their head, that it was nothing to be ashamed of. Then he rattled off the medications he took daily and led me to the nonfiction section. Leafed through a few old magazines until he found a picture he’d taken, because he takes pictures for fishing mags as a side thing. Of course he did. Then he pointed me toward a crusty old style guide, told me I should never give up on writing and went on his merry way.
I still have that book, I’ve learned a lot from it. It’s one of the strangest and most tangential ways in which Vonnegut affected my life that year. I just told some guy (albeit a guy who looked like Kurt Vonnegut) that I was getting into his books and we had one of the greatest conversations I’ve had in the 2020s. As socially awkward as I am, this is the reason I’m such a staunch advocate for getting out and talking to people.
There was another talkative Paul back then, a guy who owned his own bookstore. Paul Skenandore, an eighty-something Oneida man who never looked or acted nearly that old. He was a prominent figure in the community if you were bookish in any way. His store, Shenandoah Books, served the people of Appleton for nearly forty years. He was friends with some of the area’s other local booksellers, and kind of a big deal with local Indian politics as well. I seem to remember him telling my dad once that he’d been rushed off-stage at some local college or event after some hard truths had made some of the white attendees uncomfortable. It sounded like a hell of a story - I wish I hadn’t had my face buried in an old sci-fi book while he was telling it.
He wasn’t ever shy about his beliefs. My first time visiting the store, after I paid he said, “I almost forgot my propaganda!” and handed me a sheaf of printer paper held together with a paperclip. It was all poetry and politics on a variety of subjects, mostly Indian-related if memory serves correctly, with kind of a libertarian bent. A particular phrase has stuck with me since I first read it:
Centralized Authority
is evil
or will become evil
regardless of the
reason you start the group
History continues to prove him right. And the Propaganda wasn’t limited to this zine of his, either. A lion’s share of the nonfiction selection was Indian-related books, and the store’s walls were a damn museum of Oneida cultural objects. The man practiced what he preached, and boy did he ever preach. Not just about politics, either, he could talk about anything. I asked him once if he had a specific back-issue of a science fiction magazine with a story I’d been wanting to read and he gave me the entire backstory as to why he didn’t accept magazines anymore. In brief, they stopped selling a while ago and he was sick of letting them languish. Sans the pile of murder mystery mags sitting next to his desk, nearly equal to its height. Apparently he had a Guy for those.The store was, like all good bookstores, a shrine to its owner’s life. Paul was well-spoken, knowledgeable on a million diverse subjects and conversations with him could go basically anywhere. His shelves reflected that, winding and dubiously organized things that really felt like they could lead you to any book ever written, so long as you were patient. Some of the shelves were well-organized. On others you’d find The Autobiography of Malcolm X right next to Eragon. I remember the shelves to the left of the main entrance (though I usually came in through the back door, where there was an actual parking lot) being particularly cluttered. A charming miscellany, topped off with a small VHS section right by the door. I was always tempted by his hardcover set of James Blish’s Trek novels. He was a Trek guy, I’ll never forget it. First time in the store he told me and dad we had to be out by six sharp, because he had to be home for Star Trek. I miss that store, and like another man in my life I wish I’d been slightly older when it was open, old enough I didn’t feel so awkward talking to adults.
This was also the summer grandpa and I started collecting Kurt Vonnegut novels. He had a card catalog, stored in an old recipe card box, on which he recorded every book he’d ever read sorted by author. In the margins he’d scribble out a sentence or two about most of them. That’s how I got into Graham Greene, he showed me the Graham Greene card and told me to start with Our Man in Havana. Which was the right choice, though every one of them feels alluring presented in impeccable penmanship on a small, yellowed card. Examples:
Our Man in Havana (1958)
Vacuum-spy
A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
African leper hospital - M. Querry
Brighton Rock (1938)
Psycho boy gang leader. Not good
He took a card from that box and asked me to help him compile a list of every Vonnegut novel - no nonfiction or short stories, just novels. It turns out the good folks over at ee0r.com (https://ee0r.com/vonnegut.html) already did basically what we were looking to do. The parentheses following each entry on the list contain a short numerical key to the book’s place in Vonnegut’s body of work. A 4 indicates short stories, a 3 is a script, and a 1 is a novel. Interestingly, the final few numbers denote which recurring elements of Vonnegut’s loose “universe” appear in a given work. 7 for low-brow science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, 9 for Midland City, and, since he’d already used up all 10 Arabic numerals, a letter A for Ilium, NY. Which are probably the three most important, but I can’t say I’m not disappointed by the exclusion of, say, Tralfamadore or this site’s namesake, Eliot Rosewater. That was grandpa’s favorite Vonnegut for years, he’d bowl over laughing repeating “po-te-weet”. Rereading it in 2022 he told me it wasn’t as funny as he’d recalled. Po-te-weet still killed him.Killed him. I remember he was wheezing a little more when he laughed, just once in a while. I was still trying to tell myself I was paranoid, he was active for his age, he probably had another decade in him. Why do I ever deny my gut? I’m looking at a picture of our completed Vonnegut collection, fourteen books on his dining room table. About ten feet behind them is a portrait of the Last Supper, thirteen men at a table. He never got around to Timequake.
This is what I meant when I said he’ll haunt everything I write. I can look back at a picture we took and come away with some semi-cogent rant that makes me sound as sane as those people who think they saw Jesus in their toast. Grief has done weird things to me. I wish I could write in plain English that I took the time to help a man I loved put together a collection of books we could read together. He used to keep them on a big oak desk in the basement, one from the old library with a little shelf space built in. It’s one of the things he willed to me, alongside the novels themselves, all his books actually, and his comic books.
I don’t know that I’ll be able to bring myself to read the books he left unread any time soon, and I don’t know how to close this section. Well, in addition to the card catalogue he decided to keep detailed full-page notes on every chapter of every Vonnegut novel, since Kurt deserves special treatment. A burgundy file folder of these notes, about two pages per novel, is another of the items I wound up with when grandpa passed. On top are four blank sheets of paper. His handwriting gets looser with each passing book. It’s impossible to forget that these are among the final words he wrote.
His notes are sprawling and incomplete looks at the plots of the books at hand, written as he was reading and thus plainly biased in favor of what stood out to him. He was especially enthusiastic upon finishing Player Piano, telling me several times that “everything he said came true”. Automation and modern over-convenience were some of his biggest concerns to the end. He never inserts his opinions too directly into these notes, they’re all more literate than that, and all more concerned with performing their most basic function as a reminder of what happens in these books. His loathing of automation still comes through clear as day in passages like “Shah of Bratphur visits the home of the Hagstromms. A look at the ridiculous conveniences created by the machines” and “mankind vs. machines = Indians vs. Whiteman”.
His notes for Slaughterhouse-Five chapter 10 end, “Reference about daily births and deaths worldwide. Of the dead - ‘they all want dignity’”.
I hope my words have given you dignity.
One of Vonnegut’s best writing techniques, grandpa and I agreed, is the way he'd keep his prose interesting by speckling in less text-heavy segments - poems, lists, that sorta thing - to interrupt the monotony. I've specifically employed that technique a couple times in the preceding section and don't want that to go unnoticed. Like I said last time, grandpa didn’t teach me English. What he did do was teach me how to write.
As writing goes, I was mostly stuck on this ball and chain I’d been struggling with for a year. I still thought I should write full-time, and following a failure to get a bad short story published I started on a bad novel in the same universe. The long and short of it is, two centuries following a simultaneous devastating solar flare and eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera America has rebuilt and balkanized. When the volcano erupted it left much of the West uninhabitable and sprinkled the inhospitable land with a resource more valuable than gold: magic. The leaders of semi-independent city-states hold a monopoly on access to magic, and to the newly-reconstructed internet. Like a lot of my writing its best feature is the joyously stupid blend of whimsy and grimdark.
Into this world stepped a private detective with self-image issues. He wanted to prove he could solve a big conspiracy case all on his own, even as his friends ended up having to step in every time he fucked himself into a corner. His friends were the more interesting characters. There’s this anti-authority packrat girl who’s got a little home in a parallel universe where she has rooms upon rooms of stuff the government wishes she didn’t have. She helps run a kind of neo-hippie bar where they get a lot of their information, because it’s the one place the Man doesn’t know about (for now…)
Some of this is really strong, and I still like the characters. It suffers, though, from obviously being a product I intended to sell. I played it too safe because I viewed it as a potential avenue through which to make a living instead of a story I was passionate about. By the end of the summer my storytelling had gone non-commercial (mostly… I did start work on my first YouTube video around August. But that still doesn’t make me money so I don’t think it counts yet).
The biggest thing was ZQ, a homebrewed tabletop game I’d been developing and running on and off since the seventh grade. It’d been refined by 2022 into a streamlined, simplistic “beer and pretzels” game, though it started life as a grittier attempt at an analog version of one of those survival video games. That’s obvious in the setting, which once again leans into that grim-whimsy territory I was talking about. ZQ is about the world ending because of an alien invasion, except the aliens are classic fantasy monsters led by goblins. The end of modern civilization, for unclear reasons, also ushers in the return of magic. Which should sound familiar, because technically ZQ and my novel are set in alternative timelines within the same universe.
Sean and Jason were my main players, and in Summer ‘22 I added a second campaign with the Royal Flush Gang. Well, Owen, Tyler and Caleb. Their campaign was set ten years after the initial invasion, unlike Sean and Jason’s which started right as the goblins touched ground. Their characters were all young enough to have been born practically feral, and the way they interacted with the world reflected that. They were my problem party. But a very fun problem party, I’ll admit.
Problems I threw at them included a sketchy rural strip club where all the strippers had been turned to werewolves who couldn’t leave because the club was caught in a time loop (this is what my writing is like when I’m not trying to play it safe… I should go all out more often). An NPC they liked turned out to be a mole and they let him live, which came back to bite them in some kinda cosmically surreal ways that were cooler in my head. It ended in a mech battle, at least. Owen once dressed up as his character and brought a deck of cards to the table, demanding to play poker with an NPC he'd taken a bad loan from.
Tyler derailed our Halloween one-shot in the most legendary way possible. The campaign was set in a haunted mansion, and he didn’t trust the front door. Caleb and Owen walked in and he could see they were fine, but his character couldn’t. So he spent the first thirty minutes of the game scouring the perimeter looking for a shovel. Eventually I relented and added a previously nonexistent shovel to the map. He started trying to dig his way into the basement. Then he asked me a question about a weapon he’d obtained during that time travel story. “Anything I hit with this moves forward in time one minute. Can I use it on myself?” No reason not to. He started hitting himself while digging, but since he wasn’t also hitting the matter around him he wound up ankle-deep in dirt.
ZQ is the only creative outlet from back then I’m still actively working on. I think one day I’d like to publicize it, I’m really happy with the thing. It was the escape I needed, and it gave us something besides poker to do. The guys really liked it for a while, too. Owen drew a street-level view of the main map, and caricatures of every major character. It’s the most invested anyone’s ever gotten in anything I’ve made, I think. I could sit here telling ZQ stories for hours. Wish we still had time to run it.
In August I celebrated Owen’s birthday for the first time. It’s the weirdest birthday I’ve ever been invited to, which is mostly on me. A couple days prior I’d gone to the Memories Antique Mall in Little Chute. I love this place, been going since it opened. Not for the antiques, which are cool but I’m a little below the antiquing income bracket. My main draw is the vendor Cult of Geek. He’s got two booths and a case these days. His presence and success has turned into a weird micro-ecosystem of geek culture vendors within the mall. They do usually offer some more typical antique shop fare - vinyl records (albeit usually newer albums and nerdy movie soundtracks), old comics, vintage toys (so long as it’s connected to a franchise we still care about), VHS tapes, that sorta thing. Cult in particular has a good selection of tacky Hawaiian shirts, which aren’t vintage but are something a lot of older guys enjoy.
I came for the paperbacks. He’s got a great smattering of them throughout his booths, old and new, mostly genre in nature. It’s standard stuff for this kinda vendor, the bulk of it is tie-ins to old TV shows and movies. The entire TekWar series has lingered untouched for years. Not far down from them is a cheap metal media rack with a laminated printer-paper label that says BRITISH TV. Red Dwarf, Primeval and Blake’s 7 are all there, as the bread sandwiching in the goliath Doctor Who section. DVDs, CDs and paperbacks, plus the 90s Virgin and BBC stuff I collect. The bulk of my New Adventures come from here, and they got the ball rolling on my Eighth Doctor collection too.
That day I bought The Scarlet Empress, Paul Magrs’ first foray into licensed fiction. I couldn’t afford much else but, for the sake of completism, went to the end of the aisle, which had two endcaps I liked. Both had solid collections of CDs, one also offered board games and more genre paperbacks. That’s where I got my copy of the Cardigans’ First Band on the Moon. The one opposite that has a pegboard full of cheap toys and games. Usually nothing good. Today I saw something I had to have.
For just four bucks, the Operation Iraqi Freedom U.S. Military Heroes Playing Card Set. The perfect gift for my politics geek poker friend. I want to clarify this isn’t the set of Iraqi Freedom playing cards with a weirdly long Wikipedia article, those are more officially-sanctioned and based entirely on the Bad Guys of the war. This one is all-American and bootleg as fuck. Colin Powell’s card calls him Colon Powell, and the Jokers are Osama Bin Laden. This is some beautiful Bush-era jank.
So of course we had to play a game with this deck. It wouldn’t be poker. Owen’s birthday fell at, and instigated, the end of the Royal Flush Gang’s brief Tweeners stint. In short, Tweeners is a game where a card is dealt to either side of the player’s card, and you have to bet on whether your card will be in between those two. Everything has the same values as poker, Aces are low-high and all that. If you lose, your money is added to a pot that the next player has a shot at. It’s been a bit so excuse my rusty memory, but I think if you draw a card that ties either your card or either of the community cards you not only lose, you double your bet. It’s a simple, fast-paced game with the potential for massive, instantaneous payouts. It seemed the perfect remedy for poker burnout.
Until the Cursed George Bush Deck hit. This particular game wasn’t actually a Flush Gang affair. It was played in the kitchen while Owen was visiting my brother. I gifted him the cards and the three of us decided to break ‘em in with a quick, casual game of Tweeners. One of us goaded our mom into joining. Like her mother, she’s more of a gambler than she cares to admit.
For the first thirty minutes that was obvious. She’d racked up a solid chunk of change, a decent lead. Owen drew for her next turn - Two low, Queen high. Basically impossible to fumble. I groaned and told Owen he had to shuffle better next round. Mom bet big. Her card hit the table.
A Queen.
The pot made its way back to me, inflated from five bucks to thirty in just two hands. Ace low, King high. I bet big, no fucking way I lose this. Two Kings had already hit this round.
And there’s the fourth King.
We’re all betting small now. Mom goes all in - about two bucks at this point - and gets pushed by a couple Twos. That’s it for low-value chips. She calls for dad in the living room, “honey, get the change jar!” He takes one look at the pot, sighs and goes back to watching Moonshiners. Mom grabs the change jar herself and chucks a pile of quarters into the pot. By my next hand I’ve broken out my wallet and slipped a couple singles under the mound.
The pot comes around to me again and somebody’s put a Jackson down. Our deck is close to the bottom, I think all the face cards have come up. I throw a dollar in on Two low, Ten high and lose it to an Ace I’d forgotten about. My brother gets the same hand and ends up pushed by a Ten.
Mom stands up after she loses another five. “These cards are possessed!” She grabs a cross off the wall and asks dad to grab the holy water they keep in the closet. He listens this time. She splashes some across the cards and leads us in prayer. Together we say, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, whatever is in these cards, begone!” She sat back down and the game went back to Owen, then to me. Two low, seven high. Fuck it, I’m all in. If I lose, I’m done with this stupid game.
And that’s how I won a hundred bucks off an exorcism.
Well, I had some money to blow and I wanted to treat Owen. On a whim I Googled bubble tea, remembering he mentioned he liked it and hadn’t had any in a while. Turns out a place had just opened in Appleton. We still try to go when he’s in town. On the far wall there’s a mural. Mostly local stuff, a Green Bay Packer and a Cheesehead, but the biggest is the anime girl in the bottom right. The ZQ group decided that that was the canonical face of Mary, a female NPC they all jokingly drooled over. We still call her Mary.
There’s this picture on my phone. I took it at one in the afternoon on August 6th. It’s a photo of the YMCA’s solarium, an extension of the cafe with a great view of a kinda shitty patch of the Fox River. I spent most of my time back there because it didn’t see much use and it was one of the only rooms in the building that got decent internet. Aside from the laundry room, which was also where the modem was hooked up.
It isn’t a very good picture. More than half of it is floor. An American flag is drooped over its pole next to a stone column and a couple potted plants. To the left is a table placed off-center from one of the hanging lights, which is in turn awkwardly off-center at the top of the frame in my picture. Just kinda hovering there. And it’s cloudy as hell outside.
It’d take a bit to explain why this of all things is my favorite photo I’ve ever taken. In the years since I’ve developed a decent eye and snapped some cool shots. I look at those pictures once in a while. I come back to this one weekly. I’m gonna do my best to spin that yarn, but like much of this essay you had to be there.
Lily and I were fighting in July. Back then things were going great in Nebraska. Lily hadn’t been taken off government assistance yet so they could afford the house and she had enough left over to buy herself anything she wanted. I was treated weekly to updates on her side of the house, still in progress at the time. She and Alex did the floors, she painted the walls herself. They were lavender and decked with dozens of posters and shelves, a museum of hippie nerd knicknacks spanning her whole life. Right of her computer desk she had a corkboard with all the holiday cards she’d received since she moved in. That’s still in Nebraska.
She was satisfied down there and I wasn’t in any position to move her anyway. Ignoring how broke I was, I couldn’t move down to Nebraska with some strange woman my parents had never met. I’d hardly talked to Alex and she seemed hesitant to introduce us. I didn’t like what I’d heard anyways. Any time she brought me up Alex would twist her words to make me the bad guy. One time I went to the zoo with my dad and they asked Lily why I hadn’t used that time and money to visit her. Anyway, I kinda liked how insulated me and Lily were. I didn't know her friends, she didn't know mine. At a point where my relationships were growing complicated, where I was in half a dozen social circles and had problems with all of them, she was simple. Singular, pure. It’s kind of amazing this relationship ever turned into something healthy.
And drugs were a raw wound for me with all the abuse going on in my life at the time. Early in the summer a Royal Flush Gang outing ended with a guy I’d known since elementary school passed out in my back seat after one hit off a bad joint, another Rhino original. After that I got pretty harsh on Lily about weed. So we’d kinda mutually agreed not to talk about weed or moving. Shit was so bitter by July that just mentioning living together in any capacity would either start a fight or end a conversation.
On August sixth I was sitting in the YMCA solarium, delirious at the tail of a morning shift. I sent some long-winded screed to Lily about how despite everything I wanted this to work. I closed it, “and we’re gonna live in a house one day with one story and a pool table and it’s all gonna be okay”.
She said, “one day if you want to live together hopefully that could work out…”
“I know it’d be a big thing and lots of problems but I hope it can happen”
“I really want to make you happy… I guess I never thought about living alone with just my partner but if it makes you happy that most important<3”
“it would make me very happy… you’re too selfless”
“I’ve never cared much about what happens to me honestly… I just dont think i really matter in the grand scheme of things… a long as I can make everyone else happy <3”
“well you do matter. a lot”
“I just know if we live alone it’ll be difficult… not on me… im particular. ands things I have to have to be Mello. And I do like… drugs sometimes… and I can’t be an adult. I don’t like driving or bills and I can’t really work… my anxiety is really bad and I’m goraphobic so i stay home… I just dont think you’ll be happy living with me”
“babe I don’t expect you to do any of those things. all you need to do is love me. I can do work and everything and I will be happy. you make me happy ok? the idea of living with you is the only thing that gets me through sometimes. I don’t think id be nice to live with either but you want to live with me right? we’re always our worst critics.”
“I’m just useless to live with…”
“you don’t have to be useful. I’m not employing you im loving you”
“I just dont wanna burden you. and wisconsin drug laws are scary… geez. sorry im not trying to be rude or talk about something you hate”
“well it matters to you”
“I know just I’d never force you to take or do anything you didn’t wanna. I’ve done/do mushrooms cause it gives me a break and let’s me be happy for awhile. And the weed is for the same purpose but if I don’t wanna be loopy like mushrooms. It’s just a me thing I wouldn’t ever hurt you or force you to do anything. So i just hope you trust that”
“I do trust that. I trust you. if it makes you feel any better I probably wouldn’t stay in wisconsin forever. some of my friends are talking about going to minnesota after college and weed is way less illegal over there. but yeah that’s a big thing and I understand you needing a break and I don’t wanna take that away from you and I didn’t even consider that”
“I’m glad. I just know you have a history and if it bothered you I would rather quit”
“I’ve softened on it recently tbh. the idea of doing drugs myself still svares me but ‘m fine. especially if it makes you feel better. and maybe if I live with you I’d even soften enough that we could… do it together”
“Aww baby… I’d never force that but if you did I’d hold your hand and be right there with you. We’d take it slow. I don’t want your first time to be a negative experience. And I’m responsible. I wouldn’t touch anything other than weed and shrooms. And maybe acid like one time”
“what are shrooms like?” I asked her. She spent the rest of my shift telling me. She was something I’d never known, a smart and responsible drug user who really did just do it for a break from clinical anxiety. It settled my dumb ass way the hell down. Reading through those texts again I think this is when Lily started to consider living with me, too. That’s why I love that picture I took while she was talking about shrooms, why I still remember August 6th. In about thirty minutes Lily and I got our shit together. Twenty-five months later she moved into my house.
It isn’t a very good picture. More than half of it is floor. An American flag is drooped over its pole next to a stone column and a couple potted plants. To the left is a table placed off-center from one of the hanging lights, which is in turn awkwardly off-center at the top of the frame in my picture. Just kinda hovering there. And it’s cloudy as hell outside.
It’d take a bit to explain why this of all things is my favorite photo I’ve ever taken. In the years since I’ve developed a decent eye and snapped some cool shots. I look at those pictures once in a while. I come back to this one weekly. I’m gonna do my best to spin that yarn, but like much of this essay you had to be there.
Lily and I were fighting in July. Back then things were going great in Nebraska. Lily hadn’t been taken off government assistance yet so they could afford the house and she had enough left over to buy herself anything she wanted. I was treated weekly to updates on her side of the house, still in progress at the time. She and Alex did the floors, she painted the walls herself. They were lavender and decked with dozens of posters and shelves, a museum of hippie nerd knicknacks spanning her whole life. Right of her computer desk she had a corkboard with all the holiday cards she’d received since she moved in. That’s still in Nebraska.
She was satisfied down there and I wasn’t in any position to move her anyway. Ignoring how broke I was, I couldn’t move down to Nebraska with some strange woman my parents had never met. I’d hardly talked to Alex and she seemed hesitant to introduce us. I didn’t like what I’d heard anyways. Any time she brought me up Alex would twist her words to make me the bad guy. One time I went to the zoo with my dad and they asked Lily why I hadn’t used that time and money to visit her. Anyway, I kinda liked how insulated me and Lily were. I didn't know her friends, she didn't know mine. At a point where my relationships were growing complicated, where I was in half a dozen social circles and had problems with all of them, she was simple. Singular, pure. It’s kind of amazing this relationship ever turned into something healthy.
And drugs were a raw wound for me with all the abuse going on in my life at the time. Early in the summer a Royal Flush Gang outing ended with a guy I’d known since elementary school passed out in my back seat after one hit off a bad joint, another Rhino original. After that I got pretty harsh on Lily about weed. So we’d kinda mutually agreed not to talk about weed or moving. Shit was so bitter by July that just mentioning living together in any capacity would either start a fight or end a conversation.
On August sixth I was sitting in the YMCA solarium, delirious at the tail of a morning shift. I sent some long-winded screed to Lily about how despite everything I wanted this to work. I closed it, “and we’re gonna live in a house one day with one story and a pool table and it’s all gonna be okay”.
She said, “one day if you want to live together hopefully that could work out…”
“I know it’d be a big thing and lots of problems but I hope it can happen”
“I really want to make you happy… I guess I never thought about living alone with just my partner but if it makes you happy that most important<3”
“it would make me very happy… you’re too selfless”
“I’ve never cared much about what happens to me honestly… I just dont think i really matter in the grand scheme of things… a long as I can make everyone else happy <3”
“well you do matter. a lot”
“I just know if we live alone it’ll be difficult… not on me… im particular. ands things I have to have to be Mello. And I do like… drugs sometimes… and I can’t be an adult. I don’t like driving or bills and I can’t really work… my anxiety is really bad and I’m goraphobic so i stay home… I just dont think you’ll be happy living with me”
“babe I don’t expect you to do any of those things. all you need to do is love me. I can do work and everything and I will be happy. you make me happy ok? the idea of living with you is the only thing that gets me through sometimes. I don’t think id be nice to live with either but you want to live with me right? we’re always our worst critics.”
“I’m just useless to live with…”
“you don’t have to be useful. I’m not employing you im loving you”
“I just dont wanna burden you. and wisconsin drug laws are scary… geez. sorry im not trying to be rude or talk about something you hate”
“well it matters to you”
“I know just I’d never force you to take or do anything you didn’t wanna. I’ve done/do mushrooms cause it gives me a break and let’s me be happy for awhile. And the weed is for the same purpose but if I don’t wanna be loopy like mushrooms. It’s just a me thing I wouldn’t ever hurt you or force you to do anything. So i just hope you trust that”
“I do trust that. I trust you. if it makes you feel any better I probably wouldn’t stay in wisconsin forever. some of my friends are talking about going to minnesota after college and weed is way less illegal over there. but yeah that’s a big thing and I understand you needing a break and I don’t wanna take that away from you and I didn’t even consider that”
“I’m glad. I just know you have a history and if it bothered you I would rather quit”
“I’ve softened on it recently tbh. the idea of doing drugs myself still svares me but ‘m fine. especially if it makes you feel better. and maybe if I live with you I’d even soften enough that we could… do it together”
“Aww baby… I’d never force that but if you did I’d hold your hand and be right there with you. We’d take it slow. I don’t want your first time to be a negative experience. And I’m responsible. I wouldn’t touch anything other than weed and shrooms. And maybe acid like one time”
“what are shrooms like?” I asked her. She spent the rest of my shift telling me. She was something I’d never known, a smart and responsible drug user who really did just do it for a break from clinical anxiety. It settled my dumb ass way the hell down. Reading through those texts again I think this is when Lily started to consider living with me, too. That’s why I love that picture I took while she was talking about shrooms, why I still remember August 6th. In about thirty minutes Lily and I got our shit together. Twenty-five months later she moved into my house.
That night after work I was in the tub. I miss baths. After a hard day I’d fill up the tub and read comics until the water turned cold. My dad and brother used to stay up watching sports and talking until one or two in the morning. Even though the bathroom was in the bullseye center of the house you couldn’t hear them half as loud as you could in my bedroom, the only other room with a door. It was a little chunk of paradise.
When I got out of the bath Lily was telling me she told Alex some of what I’d said about them. They apologized and said they were actually excited to meet me. They also set up a Minecraft server for us! Until I could afford to move her in for real, we figured, playing house in the ol’ block game was as good a surrogate as they came. The news of the server came around one in the morning on August 7th. Lily spent the next couple weeks of her life whipping up a custom modpack, 115 mods in 1.15. I don’t think that was on purpose, but it’s cool right?
Minecraft brings us to another case of you having had to be there. Maybe some day I’ll do a world tour on YouTube, I dunno. As it stands writing about Minecraft is like dancing about architecture. It’s one of the most purely visual works of art I think anyone has ever made. There’s no narrative to put words to or nothin’. Just buildings and memories.
I guess writing about weird buildings and good memories is a lot of my usual wheelhouse though, ain’t it? Shit, let’s give this a shot. The modpack was a kitchen sink focused on magic mods, with a light tech element mostly in the form of the obligatory Create (adds a technology system that's more tactile and visually in-line with the base game than most of its contemporaries) and Tinkers’ Construct (greatly expands the toolmaking system with an actual forge mechanic and countless customization options). We also had basically every worthwhile biome mod installed, it really invigorated my sense of exploration. Minecraft doesn’t usually manage that anymore. I’ve been playing it since 2012, I sometimes feel I’ve seen everything worth seeing.
Spawn was gorgeous all on its own. We wound up at the edge of a large continent, on a beach by a mighty hill. We stayed our first night in some ill-defined ruin buried in the sand, something made of vanilla materials with loot connected to two separate magic mods so who knows where that came from. At sunup we started digging. Night fell once more and now we slept through it on a cobblestone foundation atop a hollowed-out hill.
She dug through the next couple days while I built a frame from stone and filled it in with wood planks. Logs from a modded tree made for good rafters. With the chisel mod, I think, I turned marble into black-and-white tiles and turned a little turret I’d built for texture into a kitchen. The doorway was out one block, with a little overhang I remember being pretty proud of. I forget why. This first story would be mostly dedicated to storage. The second, slightly smaller in profile, was our bedroom. Using drying racks (an item you can use to hang any item on the wall, without the ugly backdrop you get from a frame) I created a kind of pattern along the wall using TConstruct tool heads. I strung lights from a string light mod across the ceiling and made a chest of drawers for the items we didn’t want to lose in the storage behemoth below.
Over a couple days I turned her initial, entirely hollow mineshaft into my lair. At the far end was a laboratory, the only part of the basement one would call “finished” in a real home. It had a wood floor, I think just vanilla oak because that melded with the Create stuff. Most of one side was a window, I busted through the side of the hill and recreated its shape in glass. To one wall were a couple of barrels, from some brewing mod that didn’t end up working but left us with a handful of cool decorative blocks. To the other, my workbench. I’m no good with my hands in real life, my fine motor control is shit, so this kind of thing is way up my alley in video games.
The great thing about the workbench is it was 100% practical. I built the usual array of Tinkers’ Construct tables and hid chests behind or beneath them with relevant materials. I also had a purposefully cluttered-looking slouched pile of chests with all the other stuff I wanted to keep in arm’s reach. Some Create gadgets to aid in crafting came later. As did a cuckoo clock from the same mod. I miss that room.
Exiting the lab, I built a hallway with four rooms. The right-hand side (left-hand if you’re coming from upstairs) was just more storage and my TConstruct crucible. The left was where I had my fun. Immediately left of the lab I built a sauna. I think I achieved the steam effects by hiding campfires under slabs? Since slabs aren't considered full blocks I think that would've allowed the smoke to come through them, making the room look steamy. Not sure. I know it used spruce planks that I had to go on a bit of an adventure for. The door I used was the one from the Carpenters’ Blocks mod with the tall, narrow window in the center. Inside I had two layers of stairs, one in the floor to simulate gutters and one above that for seating. In the middle was the completely aesthetic steamer, a furnace and a pipe from Create, I think. More pipes ran along the ceiling for effect. It was a great room, still among the best I’ve designed.
Its neighbor was our portal room, plenty cool in its own right. The portal itself was nothing special, aside from being wider than it was tall to fit the scale of the room. The lead-up was where the magic happened. I took advantage of that newly-added blue fire (I think we had a mod that ported 1.16 stuff into 1.15?). The whole floor was recessed half a block, with fire running down either side. Slabs of stone kept it contained, giving an impression of two half-block fireplaces the length of the room. The shortened floor also gave the portal a little added intimidation factor.
All of these rooms were a facade suspended within a mostly hollow space, Lily and I hollowed out the entire goddamn mountain to run my Create gadgets through the house (mostly the basement but I put some in the kitchen too). A windmill, of a rather cute design if I may say so myself, generated most of my power early on. I also filled the shore with water wheels. These were connected to a series of spokes that wound through rooms that hadn’t at all been designed with them in mind, all without compromising their efficacy or the aesthetic appeal of the house. It’s an engineering feat I spent a literal week of my life on, which most serious Create players would scoff at but which I still feel a great deal of pride for.
This was mostly in service of an extensive auto-crafter and conveyer belt system under the stairs. I will admit that this part of the house wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but once again it was under the stairs! With the autocrafter and so much storage in place down there, we were finally able to free up the main floor of the house. I put in a couch and table of acacia wood, and a small veranda. The last thing I completed before the server shut its doors was a room of marble, pillars and a constricted mockery of a vaulted ceiling, into which I poured a small pool. Lily used the pool as an entrance to her underground farm, I think. Which we also had somewhere under the hollow hill. Fuck, we were so space efficient.
Beyond the house I didn’t build much. A lot of the grassland between the house and our beach spawn was turned into a vast sea of crops, Lily’s big project. It started with wheat and a couple bits from Pam’s Harvestcraft, before turning into a virtual cornucopia containing basically every vegetable I could name plus two apple trees. Out there one night I fought a vampire from the Vampirism mod and wound up with an unbreakable sword. I built a big, winding acacia staircase down the side of the hill, with a cobblestone frame like the house’s and a small landing halfway down with a table courtesy of good ol Mr. Crayfish.
By the shore I turned those ruins into a little gazebo and built a completely aesthetic tool shed down where the windmill stood. Come Halloween I replaced it with an enormous Jack o’ Lantern. At Christmas I built a weird-ass tree. It had a 2x2 Spruce base and Spruce leaves, but they all spilled down from the top like a big shawl. More of a conical weeping willow than anything, but we decorated it all the same. This year I started some stupid argument while getting the Christmas ornaments up from our basement and all I could think about was our first Christmas, longing for physicality, just typing to one another because I didn’t want my parents to hear me talking to anyone.
There was also the river, my great unfinished final project. See, the way the world generated there are these two little divots into the shore which connect to a line of terrain mostly level with the sea. Within that span were a couple of small, pre-existing pools of water. I decided that should be a river. I plotted my course, digging out a silhouette based on the depth of the existing ponds (which I drained before work commenced). The final block of terrain separating the river from the ocean remained in place during construction. I planned to place ice across the entire thing, taking advantage of the freezer from I think Thermal Expansion, before breaking that last block of wall and letting the ocean in. We shuttered the server before that happened, starting a new one in a newer version of Minecraft a couple months later, which we never spent half as much time on. At least I had time to install a grove of cherry trees at one bank of the river.
Actually living with Lily has been great. I still miss this. It’s not like we don’t still play video games, I just stayed up til sunrise playing Halo Reach with her the other night. It just hits different when we can do whatever we want with each other. It used to be that a virtual world was the only world where we could be together. Now I wake up with her in my arms and a dog at my feet. Or between my legs. Or I wake up being bitten by a dog whom I just rolled over onto.
Point is, building a little house that we could live in, creating something for the two of us, meant more to me in the days before I cooked dinner for two every night. Having the ability to “talk” “face” to “face” meant more before I could look her in the eyes and say words with my mouth. And I guess I kinda long for this, now. I remember when we could only talk for real when my parents were out of town. We had to plan conversations in advance, make sure we didn't have plans. Just to talk for a few hours. We’d never waste a word, never take this time for granted. I never let myself turn conversations into arguments. We just talked. Well, sometimes we watched movies. We were both shy-ass nerds, after all.
One night she showed me a media server of movies she’d bootlegged from DVDs and landed on The Shape of Water. She said she’d been waiting to see it because she wanted to watch it with somebody she could imagine spending her life with. I cried, before, after and during the movie. We’ve watched like, three movies together just this week. I forget sometimes how precious that time was. How rare a commodity her voice used to be. God, I never even played Minecraft while we talked. I just wanted conversation.
The voices I heard playing Minecraft mostly came from YouTube. I’ve mentioned on this blog before that my favorite YouTube channel is hazel. I woulda just discovered her around now, like half a year prior I think. She does long-form videos about niche anime and weeb culture topics. A couple times a year, if that, with no sponsorships, no hocking merch besides her music, and often including the kinds of subject matter that get people demonetized. God knows how she stays afloat but that backbone is exactly what drew me to her and I can’t imagine I’m alone cause I've seen her channel grow into a staple of this particular weird internet niche in just a couple years. Sometimes, integrity pays off. Love to see it.
A lot of the early videos that I would’ve been watching don’t exist anymore. I remember specifically that I checked out a video on the manga Sing Yesterday For Me right before that aforementioned weird night on Lake Michigan. Still gotta read that series. I think I have it on my laptop somewhere.
One that does still exist is the two-hour video on Elfen Lied, which I've heard cited even beyond the niches you'd probably expect it to be relevant to. The bit on the idea of a “trauma bitch” character really resonated with a lot of online fan spaces (briefly - an “edgy” female/fem character who ends up reading as more cathartic than the author intended). I remember I definitely picked up what was being put down there, while I was out looking for spruce trees. Elfen Lied is, as it happens, an old favorite of Lily’s. I don’t know if I ever sent her that video. Huh. Yeah, I haven’t. Why the hell not?
Anyway yeah I really fuck with this channel and between Minecraft and listening to MP3 versions of some of her less visual videos on the drives to Nebraska it’s also a body of work that really takes me back to this point in my life and my relationship with Lily. Good fuckin times, man.
It’s not the only thing I had playing back then. The video Super Eyepatch Wolf did on fucking Riverdale of all things soundtracked the construction of my lab, and the accidental flooding of my lab when I hit some groundwater. I built my crucible around Halloween listening to some eerie history videos I wish I could track down. One was about an obscure and gruesome Catholic saint whose name escapes me. The last video I ever did was Scott the Woz’s Christmas special, while working on digging out the river. That woulda been right before the server shut down. I don’t think either of us were ready to part with it. But we wanted to play on a newer version of Minecraft and couldn’t convert the world, and I had a real job by December. So down it went, and up went a new version about a year later once I’d figured out how to do work-life balance.
I was also playing the Yakuza games for the first time. All of them, from Zero to Five, over the course of a couple months. God I miss being unemployed. It’s the first series I got into after leaving Twitter so my opinions on it were unspoilt by community tomfoolery. I still found myself drawn to the bizarrely long review-cum-plot-summaries from Tehsnakerer. Sometimes while playing Minecraft. Mostly while undertaking the tedium of selling my childhood Lego on eBay. I kept some of it, of course, I still collect Lego and plenty of it is too precious to part with. For every piece like that are a thousand left mouldering in the basement for ten or fifteen years.
I pulled up a tote weighing some thirty pounds and spent a few days individually cleaning every piece before placing them, in a randomized order, within one of eighteen two-pound bags. The endgame, selling Lego and some of my books, was to raise some money to leave home and sell some shit I figured would be hard to move into a hypothetical apartment. They sold quick, though by the end of the process I was burnt out and I’d burnt through all the Yakuza reviews. Which is why I still had so much Lego to move when I left home a year later.
This was the most serious I ever took eBay. I made decent cash without ever turning into a scalper. I had all day to go out and hunt for actually good deals I knew I could profit from without screwing anyone. I was also very good at photographing flaws in books, which folks appreciated. My best find was the entire Peach Girl manga and the sequel series for a buck apiece. I sold em for half of cover price, mostly to the same person. I looked up the buyer’s username and found a corresponding Instagram where she was excitedly posting about finally having the complete run. Still makes me happy to think about.
So does Yakuza, which I guess is how I wanna end this section. Cause at the time, at the tail end of the summer, I was playing Yakuza 5. That’s infamously the longest one in the series. To put it in context, it took me from mid-August to late September to beat it after chugging through all of its predecessors in three months. Some modern entries are similar in playtime but fail to match its bulk, its perceived hugeness. They all have one or two playable characters and still limit themselves to about one or two simplistic side activities per character.
This game had five playable characters. Each one had their very own unique fighting style, a simplistic side activity alongside a side-mode with its own storyline, and a unique city to explore. Each of those side modes was a fully-fledged game, not the half-assed asset recycling we get in modern entries. One of them drove a taxi and occasionally did street racing. Another could hunt wild game in the mountains. The other two, my favorites, offered baseball and a dancing rhythm game.
They went big with this one as a potential finale because the studio was in danger of bankruptcy, which you can feel in the story. A sense of desperation, fear and finality loom. One playable character is a homeless ex-con running from cops and crooks alike, and another is a sleazy night-life journalist who rents a shack on the roof of a building. Kiryu, the series’ mascot, has taken a false identity and run from his family to an alienating new city where he lives as a cab driver. He sends money to the orphanage he once ran and spends most of his story struggling with himself and pushing away the many, many people who want to help him while longing for family on the other side of the country.
Tonally the game is moody. The jankily overbearing early 2010s video game lighting acts almost like a series of oppressive searchlights in the daytime, and at night the dingy sleaze of the setting is on full display. Everything feels worn down, the world feels more like a shambling corpse than it did in the zombie apocalypse spin-off they’d done the year prior. Even the racing minigame is a little slow and gloomy, you’re just racing through spaghetti nests of overpasses. Far from the bright, natural terrain of fully-fledged Sega racing titles like my GOAT Super Hang On.
The whole thing hit my mood pretty damn hard. It felt like the game I should've been playing in 2022. Especially this one scene near the end. The long and short is that the broke night life journalist I mentioned above is Shinada, a former baseball player forced out of the league for no good reason. He’s fallen in love with one of the sex workers he writes about, a woman named Milky who’s reaching the age where men with no taste no longer find her attractive. Shinada can’t find a legit job, all he knows is bats and balls. Like every fictional sex worker, Milky wishes she could’ve been a teacher.
They’re up on the rooftop together at night, lamenting the lives that passed them by after Shinada got his face caved in by one of many men he’s in debt to. Milky asks, “remember the first night you came into my club?”
“It was the loneliest night of my life. I needed to talk to someone, anyone, who didn’t know who I was [...] It was just work for you. But me? Feeling your warmth against my skin… it might’ve just saved my life. Say… let’s run away, just the two of us!”
“Ooh, like something out of a movie! [...] If I’m gonna start over, I want to be an elementary school teacher!”
“You can do it! Nothing’s stopping you! You can start fresh! And what should I be? That’s a toughie.” After he says that, Milky’s phone rings. She’s got a customer waiting for her. She heads down the stairs and turns back to Shinada, leaving him with, “it’s too late to run away.” Transcribing all that, reading it without the accompanying stellar vocal performances, it’s maybe a little cliche. It still hits my damn heart, I don’t care. It’s how I felt at the time. I’d bombed the library, the dream job, and wound up in a low-paying piece of shit job. I was barely working, stuck in a place I hated being, taking whatever money I could find. All I could think to do was run away with a girl who had reasons she couldn’t.
The initial reveal trailers for the next Yakuza game, and I think also the next Pikmin game, came out ahead of one of my last shifts at the YMCA. I still hadn’t found a job, I just told my boss to start scheduling me as though another job was on the horizon. I was training this guy Dylan, one of two hired to replace me. He knew about Pikmin. He and his girlfriend modded their old Wii (you gotta be cool as fuck to tell somebody you just met that you own a modded Wii. Like, I barely knew his name yet. This was the first fact I’d heard about his life. I aspire to that). We talked about Pikmin and Yakuza, and how in general so many actually cool-looking games had been announced in such a short span. He told me his grandpa left him with the first draft of a sci-fi novel, which he spent his free time editing. God, I wish I’d kept in touch with that dude. At the time it made sense. I stopped talking to everyone I knew from the Y. Tabula rasa.
I’ve talked a little before about my family’s vacations. We went to cheap hotels in cities within driving distance and most of what we did in those places was swim in the hotel pool and take hikes wherever it was free. My brother complained about this as he got older. It never bugged me, I’m as low-key and cheap as the trips we took. Exploring hiking trails half-forgotten by the city’s underfunded government and appreciating lesser-known local lore are things I still love doing. This series started with a blog post where I ranted about a bookstore in goddamn Milwaukee followed by five thousand words about a walk I took through the neighborhood I grew up in. This crap still inspires me, obviously.
Still, there’s something to be said about a vacation with an actual budget. Nearly every August, somewhere between my dad’s birthday and the end of summer break, we’d take a trip up to Wisconsin’s less flashy tourist trap, Door County. While Wisconsin Dells has left its own mark on me (a more tangible one, even - it’s the main setting for Wisconsin Hells), Door County is way more my speed. It’s a long peninsula with Lake Michigan on either side. Tourists come here in droves, but mostly to take it easy. There are plenty of great lakeside hiking trails, cherry orchards, lighthouses, beaches, boat trips, cheese shops and wineries. The towns are all pretty cutely small and quaint, some run-down in the way only nautical cities can be.
Naturally we shacked up in one of those towns. Algoma is a city of three thousand that’s just outside of Door County and hotels are much cheaper because of that. Even though Door County is like, literally right there. Sturgeon Bay is twenty minutes north I think. That’s weird, right? The economy is weird. Algomans could be making a lot more money off of people like us. Although we’d probably skip their town right by if they tried thar. It’d be reduced to another gas station town like Neola. It’s got a pretty cool gas station, too, in a historical building. Think it used to have one of those really old-style pumps too. Maybe it still does.
That’s not far down the road from Algoma Beach Motel, where we stayed. It’s right on the shore of Lake Michigan and is in fact beachfront property, though the beach was a lot longer when I was a kid. Damned erosion, it doesn’t spare a single thought for the value of real estate. I remember one year the water ran straight from the grass to the lake after heavy rainfall, parting the beach like the Red Sea and leaving us kids with a lot of mucky sand to play with. And a stagnant puddle our parents didn’t like us playing so close to.
My favorite game was clinging to the large rocks which were just barely visible over the water, seeing how long I could hold out against the waves. I’m shocked I never broke any bones doing that. Especially because the beach in front of the motel was mostly clear of rocks, I assume because they moved ‘em. All the best rocks were down where the coast was still overgrown and uncivilized, save a rusty old car somewhere beneath dense foliage. My mom liked walking down there and let me play on the rocks so long as I wore a life jacket and didn’t go too far out. This is how I learned to swim parallel to the shore if you feel the water dragging you out to sea.
There was also an actual boardwalk that started something like a hundred feet down from the hotel. We made a point to walk it as a whole family one night every year. That was a nice boardwalk, well-lit and easygoing. It leads to the marina, but there’s a little to do on the land, too. There’s a little playground with a decently tall slide and some pretty cool climbing structures. The main attraction was Algoma’s claim to fame, the Pierhead Lighthouse. I used to have a painting of it hanging above my bed at my parents’ house. Right above the spot where I habitually scratched the paint off the wall while I was trying to sleep. It’s tall, wide and painted an eyecatching scarlet that looks fantastic against a deep blue sky. It’s also situated at the terminal point of a pretty long, and not particularly pretty, breakwater. They don’t really show you that in a lot of the promotional shots. It’s a pretty awful walk on a windy day.
Most of the area is taken up by a big asphalt parking lot, though there’s a little green spot at the shore called Christmas Tree Point. It’s like, a couple trees and a plaque commemorating the Christmas tree shipping industry that a lot of Algoma was built on. Including the obligatory shipwreck, of course. Wouldn’t be a Great Lakes town without a shipwreck. Down closer to the marina is this little structure, a roof and some chainlink fence, in which freshly-caught fish are prepared. Google tells me that this is owned by a company that charters fishing boats, which makes sense. It stunk the whole area up like hell, even when it wasn’t in use.
We used to go to another fishmonger, Bearcat’s, before it burned down. I actually kinda liked how it smelled in there, more smoked fish than raw carcass. I never got anything. The taste of fish has never really done much for me. That’s my dad and brother’s thing. They’d always buy me a pack of these chocolate-covered Door County cherries from the company Cherry De-Lite. The bag is just a plain plastic bag with a big sticker on it, big local business energy. I never see them sold anywhere else but I swear it’s like, legally mandated that every business in or near Door County stock ‘em. They’re damn good cherries. Last year my parents took a trip to Door County around my birthday and their gift to me that year was a bag of ‘em.
I also used to get a pack at the winery. Door County's wine industry ain't exactly a commercial rival for California's or, more relevant, Wisconsin's beer industry. But it is a massive tourist draw and, from what I understand, a community that has produced some quality wines. So of course touristy wineries are a dime a dozen. Because it's a product you can’t share with the kids they'll never beat out cheese stores, but because this is Wisconsin our parents took us on winery tours years before we knew what a touristy cheese shop even looked like. Some of my earliest memories are in Algoma’s Von Sitel Winery. The stairwell up to the mostly empty second floor has this mural of kids stomping on grapes. I remember giggling at that, and my parents explaining what they were doing. I asked them if they’d let me do that, cause it looked fun. They said sure. Still haven’t gotten my wooden tub of wine grapes. Those bastards.
We only did the paid tour once as a family. Every other year we’d just poke our heads into all the parts of the building that weren’t roped off, and asked employees annoying questions once in a while. They had these bowls of wine crackers on the counter by the registers. My parents would buy a few bags of Cherry De-Lite cherries, scoop up a handful of wine crackers and we’d sit at this table made of old wine corks to eat our “meal”. Sometimes they bought a bottle of wine, before mom started trying to get sober. We kept going after that. By the time I was about twelve, we literally just went to the winery to loiter and eat crackers.
The thing that mesmerized me most as a kid was the Arensbak trolls. I wanna say those little bastards go all the way back to my earliest memories, haunting the murky background fog of pleasant dreams like that singing animatronic Christmas tree my mom set up the first December I could walk. They’ve influenced my taste for sure. They’re made in a small studio in Tennessee as part of a family tradition-turned-business dating back to the fifties. Every one of them shares a similar construction, with most elements sourced directly from nature. Their bodies are cylinders, probably small logs, completely encased in dense fur. The eyes are seeds or nuts, many walk with canes made from twigs. They’ve got big acorn noses and style their hair with pinecones.
Still, there’s something to be said about a vacation with an actual budget. Nearly every August, somewhere between my dad’s birthday and the end of summer break, we’d take a trip up to Wisconsin’s less flashy tourist trap, Door County. While Wisconsin Dells has left its own mark on me (a more tangible one, even - it’s the main setting for Wisconsin Hells), Door County is way more my speed. It’s a long peninsula with Lake Michigan on either side. Tourists come here in droves, but mostly to take it easy. There are plenty of great lakeside hiking trails, cherry orchards, lighthouses, beaches, boat trips, cheese shops and wineries. The towns are all pretty cutely small and quaint, some run-down in the way only nautical cities can be.
Naturally we shacked up in one of those towns. Algoma is a city of three thousand that’s just outside of Door County and hotels are much cheaper because of that. Even though Door County is like, literally right there. Sturgeon Bay is twenty minutes north I think. That’s weird, right? The economy is weird. Algomans could be making a lot more money off of people like us. Although we’d probably skip their town right by if they tried thar. It’d be reduced to another gas station town like Neola. It’s got a pretty cool gas station, too, in a historical building. Think it used to have one of those really old-style pumps too. Maybe it still does.
That’s not far down the road from Algoma Beach Motel, where we stayed. It’s right on the shore of Lake Michigan and is in fact beachfront property, though the beach was a lot longer when I was a kid. Damned erosion, it doesn’t spare a single thought for the value of real estate. I remember one year the water ran straight from the grass to the lake after heavy rainfall, parting the beach like the Red Sea and leaving us kids with a lot of mucky sand to play with. And a stagnant puddle our parents didn’t like us playing so close to.
My favorite game was clinging to the large rocks which were just barely visible over the water, seeing how long I could hold out against the waves. I’m shocked I never broke any bones doing that. Especially because the beach in front of the motel was mostly clear of rocks, I assume because they moved ‘em. All the best rocks were down where the coast was still overgrown and uncivilized, save a rusty old car somewhere beneath dense foliage. My mom liked walking down there and let me play on the rocks so long as I wore a life jacket and didn’t go too far out. This is how I learned to swim parallel to the shore if you feel the water dragging you out to sea.
There was also an actual boardwalk that started something like a hundred feet down from the hotel. We made a point to walk it as a whole family one night every year. That was a nice boardwalk, well-lit and easygoing. It leads to the marina, but there’s a little to do on the land, too. There’s a little playground with a decently tall slide and some pretty cool climbing structures. The main attraction was Algoma’s claim to fame, the Pierhead Lighthouse. I used to have a painting of it hanging above my bed at my parents’ house. Right above the spot where I habitually scratched the paint off the wall while I was trying to sleep. It’s tall, wide and painted an eyecatching scarlet that looks fantastic against a deep blue sky. It’s also situated at the terminal point of a pretty long, and not particularly pretty, breakwater. They don’t really show you that in a lot of the promotional shots. It’s a pretty awful walk on a windy day.
Most of the area is taken up by a big asphalt parking lot, though there’s a little green spot at the shore called Christmas Tree Point. It’s like, a couple trees and a plaque commemorating the Christmas tree shipping industry that a lot of Algoma was built on. Including the obligatory shipwreck, of course. Wouldn’t be a Great Lakes town without a shipwreck. Down closer to the marina is this little structure, a roof and some chainlink fence, in which freshly-caught fish are prepared. Google tells me that this is owned by a company that charters fishing boats, which makes sense. It stunk the whole area up like hell, even when it wasn’t in use.
We used to go to another fishmonger, Bearcat’s, before it burned down. I actually kinda liked how it smelled in there, more smoked fish than raw carcass. I never got anything. The taste of fish has never really done much for me. That’s my dad and brother’s thing. They’d always buy me a pack of these chocolate-covered Door County cherries from the company Cherry De-Lite. The bag is just a plain plastic bag with a big sticker on it, big local business energy. I never see them sold anywhere else but I swear it’s like, legally mandated that every business in or near Door County stock ‘em. They’re damn good cherries. Last year my parents took a trip to Door County around my birthday and their gift to me that year was a bag of ‘em.
I also used to get a pack at the winery. Door County's wine industry ain't exactly a commercial rival for California's or, more relevant, Wisconsin's beer industry. But it is a massive tourist draw and, from what I understand, a community that has produced some quality wines. So of course touristy wineries are a dime a dozen. Because it's a product you can’t share with the kids they'll never beat out cheese stores, but because this is Wisconsin our parents took us on winery tours years before we knew what a touristy cheese shop even looked like. Some of my earliest memories are in Algoma’s Von Sitel Winery. The stairwell up to the mostly empty second floor has this mural of kids stomping on grapes. I remember giggling at that, and my parents explaining what they were doing. I asked them if they’d let me do that, cause it looked fun. They said sure. Still haven’t gotten my wooden tub of wine grapes. Those bastards.
We only did the paid tour once as a family. Every other year we’d just poke our heads into all the parts of the building that weren’t roped off, and asked employees annoying questions once in a while. They had these bowls of wine crackers on the counter by the registers. My parents would buy a few bags of Cherry De-Lite cherries, scoop up a handful of wine crackers and we’d sit at this table made of old wine corks to eat our “meal”. Sometimes they bought a bottle of wine, before mom started trying to get sober. We kept going after that. By the time I was about twelve, we literally just went to the winery to loiter and eat crackers.
The thing that mesmerized me most as a kid was the Arensbak trolls. I wanna say those little bastards go all the way back to my earliest memories, haunting the murky background fog of pleasant dreams like that singing animatronic Christmas tree my mom set up the first December I could walk. They’ve influenced my taste for sure. They’re made in a small studio in Tennessee as part of a family tradition-turned-business dating back to the fifties. Every one of them shares a similar construction, with most elements sourced directly from nature. Their bodies are cylinders, probably small logs, completely encased in dense fur. The eyes are seeds or nuts, many walk with canes made from twigs. They’ve got big acorn noses and style their hair with pinecones.
This kinda thing is commonplace and kitschy now, but apparently when the Arensbaks came over from Denmark in the 50s it was new to America. The craftsmanship exceeds what you usually expect from this kind of knicknack, I can say that much. I always assumed they were made in Door County, by somebody the Von Stiehl proprietors knew, and they remain inextricably tied to that place in my memory.
‘22 would’ve been our first time visiting the place post-Covid. The crackers were gone, I think they’d stopped selling cherries. And I think they might’ve roped off the stairwell too. True to the pandemic era, there wasn’t much to do but drink. Did finally buy one of those trolls, though. I got one of the hippies. We were disappointed by the lack of crackers, but not so much that it ruined our day. We took a nice walk at the Eagle Bluff lighthouse and took the tour. It’s a really cool place. The memory is distant and indistinct enough by now that I won’t try to describe it further, except to say I remember it feeling more quaintly functional than most lighthouses I’d been to. Just an old house, beige brick walls and the essentials, that happened to have a kinda squat light tower off to one side. If I’d been a lighthouse keeper, this is the lighthouse I’d like to have kept.
My dad and I came back the next day for a longer walk, a longstanding tradition for us since mom and my brother (and Lily, these days) like their walks shorter. We stumble hours through paths that look more than anything like deer trails and talk about like, comic books or some shit. He looks for mushrooms, I take pictures. You’ll notice at this point that I take a lot of pictures and post almost none of them, for the simple reason that I find uploading pictures and fitting them into a website’s format tedious. I take them for myself, and for friends and family.
Dad and I hit the nature center on the way out. It was a one-room hut on a slab, I think basically just an additional wing of a garage, but it had a decent amount to learn. Including a like, I wanna say flash card set quizzing you on the state iconography of Wisconsin. Dad got to grillin’ me.
“State fossil?”
“Trilobite.”
“State bird?”
“Robin.”
“Fish?”
“Uhh, I think it’s musky?”
“Yep! Topsoil?”
“Antigo silt loam.”
“...”
“...”
“How the hell do you know that?”
I didn’t explain myself then, I won’t explain myself now. Sean and Jason know. Nobody else needs to. He asked a couple times, then conversation drifted to topics more interesting than topsoil and before long we were back at the motel. Then on the road to Al Johnson’s, the Swedish restaurant famous for having a grass roof that live goats graze on. I always get a burger because I’m a damn prude with no taste for Swedish cuisine. Nah, I’d probably like it, I just hate to turn down a hamburger if it’s an option. I ever mention I’m autistic?
They’d just put in a big outdoor patio with a bar. I think they called it a beer garden, but I don’t think it quite matches what that name usually describes? I’m no expert. Whatever it was, it’s where we ate lunch that day. From memory, the bar had its own menu and I ordered mac n’ cheese topped with bacon and chives. Loaded baked potato stuff. It was alright. The view was fantastic, Al Johnson’s is right across from the lake - and the public library, too. They might’ve been having a book sale that day, I remember there was some reason I regretted not dropping in.
Looking at Google Maps that building was more of a community center sorta place than a library, so maybe the library just held a book sale there. In any case while I was making my way down the streets to Al Johnson’s after fumbling my cursor placement, I discovered that a little ways down the block you can see a guy flipping two birds to some jackoff in a butt-ugly pickup. I think that warrants breaking my no pictures rule:
‘22 would’ve been our first time visiting the place post-Covid. The crackers were gone, I think they’d stopped selling cherries. And I think they might’ve roped off the stairwell too. True to the pandemic era, there wasn’t much to do but drink. Did finally buy one of those trolls, though. I got one of the hippies. We were disappointed by the lack of crackers, but not so much that it ruined our day. We took a nice walk at the Eagle Bluff lighthouse and took the tour. It’s a really cool place. The memory is distant and indistinct enough by now that I won’t try to describe it further, except to say I remember it feeling more quaintly functional than most lighthouses I’d been to. Just an old house, beige brick walls and the essentials, that happened to have a kinda squat light tower off to one side. If I’d been a lighthouse keeper, this is the lighthouse I’d like to have kept.
My dad and I came back the next day for a longer walk, a longstanding tradition for us since mom and my brother (and Lily, these days) like their walks shorter. We stumble hours through paths that look more than anything like deer trails and talk about like, comic books or some shit. He looks for mushrooms, I take pictures. You’ll notice at this point that I take a lot of pictures and post almost none of them, for the simple reason that I find uploading pictures and fitting them into a website’s format tedious. I take them for myself, and for friends and family.
Dad and I hit the nature center on the way out. It was a one-room hut on a slab, I think basically just an additional wing of a garage, but it had a decent amount to learn. Including a like, I wanna say flash card set quizzing you on the state iconography of Wisconsin. Dad got to grillin’ me.
“State fossil?”
“Trilobite.”
“State bird?”
“Robin.”
“Fish?”
“Uhh, I think it’s musky?”
“Yep! Topsoil?”
“Antigo silt loam.”
“...”
“...”
“How the hell do you know that?”
I didn’t explain myself then, I won’t explain myself now. Sean and Jason know. Nobody else needs to. He asked a couple times, then conversation drifted to topics more interesting than topsoil and before long we were back at the motel. Then on the road to Al Johnson’s, the Swedish restaurant famous for having a grass roof that live goats graze on. I always get a burger because I’m a damn prude with no taste for Swedish cuisine. Nah, I’d probably like it, I just hate to turn down a hamburger if it’s an option. I ever mention I’m autistic?
They’d just put in a big outdoor patio with a bar. I think they called it a beer garden, but I don’t think it quite matches what that name usually describes? I’m no expert. Whatever it was, it’s where we ate lunch that day. From memory, the bar had its own menu and I ordered mac n’ cheese topped with bacon and chives. Loaded baked potato stuff. It was alright. The view was fantastic, Al Johnson’s is right across from the lake - and the public library, too. They might’ve been having a book sale that day, I remember there was some reason I regretted not dropping in.
Looking at Google Maps that building was more of a community center sorta place than a library, so maybe the library just held a book sale there. In any case while I was making my way down the streets to Al Johnson’s after fumbling my cursor placement, I discovered that a little ways down the block you can see a guy flipping two birds to some jackoff in a butt-ugly pickup. I think that warrants breaking my no pictures rule:
We hit a big checklist of all our other usual spots that day, too, which is how my parents always tried to run these trips. Go through the regular motions in one jam-packed day so your schedule is free every other day to rest or try something new. I always inevitably dreaded the one busy day as a fat kid with weak knees. Looking at it now, as a fat adult with strong knees (the weakness all migrated to my ankles), I think it’s brilliant. That’s how I try to play things on my days off - one at home, one outside.
The regular activity was centered in Sturgeon Bay, the big city in Door County. From memory it really ain’t much to look at beyond the touristy main drag. Kind of an industrial town, built around its valuable location on Lake Michigan. The bay it’s named for is a wedge in the Door peninsula about half its width. Dig a lil canal and bam, you’ve got yourself an important port. Passing through the Sturgeon Bay Canal has saved a lot of ships a lot of time. And, of course, inevitably made the city a lot of money. Everyone comes through here. Just passing through the bridge over the canal I’ve spotted Coast Guard ships, a gambling boat, a couple tugboats and a hovercraft.
Downtown’s not all too big, or at least I don’t think it is. Most of what we do is in walking distance of the candy shop on the corner we always start out at. From memory they’re pretty overpriced, don’t deal as heavily as most mom and pop candy stores in homemade candy, and their obligatory novelty wares still include crap like candy mustaches and bacon-flavored toothpaste. They do also sell big latex praying mantis masks, and the homemade sweets they do have are pretty good. So it all evens out.
I’d always talk my family into hitting the museum, which I think only I really loved. But man that museum rocks. They fit a lot into a small space. You walk in and there’s a big nature diorama to the right, with a bunch of taxidermied woodland creatures doing woodland creature shit in the vicinity of a tree. From there, I think there’s like three half-stories? God, I gotta go back there, the layout doesn’t really make sense in my head.
There’s a ramp down to a basement that I think is mostly aboveground. It’s like a walk-in cabinet of curiosity, a menagerie of glass cases containing Life As It Was. You know the deal if you’ve ever been to a local museum. What stands out to me is the old phone booth you can enter. My brother and I used to take turns sitting inside, pretending to call people. Some people might take this opportunity to comment on how much more easily amused kids were before phones. I’ll remind those people that the object of amusement in the booth was a phone.
At the surface level by the ramp were a couple small-scale exhibits. A model of a sailing ship and, I think, a little piece on the area’s military history including photos of trench foot. Museums really loved those little gross-out elements for a time. In my experience, so do kids. Morbid curiosity is the one thing that consistently gets kids excited about learning. Kids are curious in general, and attracted to anything that lets them feel a little scared without real-world consequences. Helps train your brain for real danger. Also, history is just more exciting when you don’t gloss over the ugly shit! Makes it feel more like it’s something normal people lived through, less like a myth. Which is important.
The stairs by the ramp led to a little loft area, probably the least exciting display. It’s a fairly clinical room lined with small cases of minutiae. I remember thinking the case of match boxes branded after local businesses was pretty cool. But to the left of the entrance was a big room with a bunch of police and fire stuff, where you could lock yourself inside of an old-timey prison cell. That was another place my brother and I spent a lot of time.
I can recall a couple of bookstores in Sturgeon Bay. Like every decent-sized Wisconsin city, they used to have a Book Land. Those suckers were an institution. My brother, my dad and I used to walk to the one in downtown Neenah by way of the train bridge. One of the company’s final holdouts was Pages and Pipes in Appleton, which got by a little longer because it also sold tobacco products. We used to park under a billboard in an empty lot about two blocks from College Avenue. I always joked that they were called Pages and Pipes because they ran a plumbing business on the side. I don’t think anyone ever thought that was funny. Which unfortunately is the kind of thing that makes me double down on a joke. I asked the clerk how to unclog a sink one time.
The Book Land in Sturgeon Bay was another holdout, surviving to 2017. One year I bought a Lego set with one of those little boats that actually floated, and played with it on the beach. That rocked. The last year it was open I bought the Halo novel Last Light, the first by Star Wars writer Troy Denning. TLDR: for a while Halo became an insufferable series to follow because you basically had to be invested in the books, comics and audio dramas to understand the games, and the stories of all of them suffered as a result. Last Light was totally standalone and wound up as kind of a prototype for turning the books back into their own independent thing. I remember it felt fresh back then, and of course breezy action-adventure sci-fi is basically guaranteed to make a good beach read.
So I guess it musta been 2018 we went to the other bookstore, which wasn’t around any year after that. It was like, one room with some shelves off to the side. The selection was pretty curated, the people who ran the place had a cool-seeming book club, you can tell exactly why it wasn’t economically viable but the vibes were nice. I got a copy of The Man in the High Castle there. Which my mom actually read out on the beach, because she finished her own book. She liked it fine.
Downtown’s not all too big, or at least I don’t think it is. Most of what we do is in walking distance of the candy shop on the corner we always start out at. From memory they’re pretty overpriced, don’t deal as heavily as most mom and pop candy stores in homemade candy, and their obligatory novelty wares still include crap like candy mustaches and bacon-flavored toothpaste. They do also sell big latex praying mantis masks, and the homemade sweets they do have are pretty good. So it all evens out.
I’d always talk my family into hitting the museum, which I think only I really loved. But man that museum rocks. They fit a lot into a small space. You walk in and there’s a big nature diorama to the right, with a bunch of taxidermied woodland creatures doing woodland creature shit in the vicinity of a tree. From there, I think there’s like three half-stories? God, I gotta go back there, the layout doesn’t really make sense in my head.
There’s a ramp down to a basement that I think is mostly aboveground. It’s like a walk-in cabinet of curiosity, a menagerie of glass cases containing Life As It Was. You know the deal if you’ve ever been to a local museum. What stands out to me is the old phone booth you can enter. My brother and I used to take turns sitting inside, pretending to call people. Some people might take this opportunity to comment on how much more easily amused kids were before phones. I’ll remind those people that the object of amusement in the booth was a phone.
At the surface level by the ramp were a couple small-scale exhibits. A model of a sailing ship and, I think, a little piece on the area’s military history including photos of trench foot. Museums really loved those little gross-out elements for a time. In my experience, so do kids. Morbid curiosity is the one thing that consistently gets kids excited about learning. Kids are curious in general, and attracted to anything that lets them feel a little scared without real-world consequences. Helps train your brain for real danger. Also, history is just more exciting when you don’t gloss over the ugly shit! Makes it feel more like it’s something normal people lived through, less like a myth. Which is important.
The stairs by the ramp led to a little loft area, probably the least exciting display. It’s a fairly clinical room lined with small cases of minutiae. I remember thinking the case of match boxes branded after local businesses was pretty cool. But to the left of the entrance was a big room with a bunch of police and fire stuff, where you could lock yourself inside of an old-timey prison cell. That was another place my brother and I spent a lot of time.
I can recall a couple of bookstores in Sturgeon Bay. Like every decent-sized Wisconsin city, they used to have a Book Land. Those suckers were an institution. My brother, my dad and I used to walk to the one in downtown Neenah by way of the train bridge. One of the company’s final holdouts was Pages and Pipes in Appleton, which got by a little longer because it also sold tobacco products. We used to park under a billboard in an empty lot about two blocks from College Avenue. I always joked that they were called Pages and Pipes because they ran a plumbing business on the side. I don’t think anyone ever thought that was funny. Which unfortunately is the kind of thing that makes me double down on a joke. I asked the clerk how to unclog a sink one time.
The Book Land in Sturgeon Bay was another holdout, surviving to 2017. One year I bought a Lego set with one of those little boats that actually floated, and played with it on the beach. That rocked. The last year it was open I bought the Halo novel Last Light, the first by Star Wars writer Troy Denning. TLDR: for a while Halo became an insufferable series to follow because you basically had to be invested in the books, comics and audio dramas to understand the games, and the stories of all of them suffered as a result. Last Light was totally standalone and wound up as kind of a prototype for turning the books back into their own independent thing. I remember it felt fresh back then, and of course breezy action-adventure sci-fi is basically guaranteed to make a good beach read.
So I guess it musta been 2018 we went to the other bookstore, which wasn’t around any year after that. It was like, one room with some shelves off to the side. The selection was pretty curated, the people who ran the place had a cool-seeming book club, you can tell exactly why it wasn’t economically viable but the vibes were nice. I got a copy of The Man in the High Castle there. Which my mom actually read out on the beach, because she finished her own book. She liked it fine.
Years prior to any of this I remember going to a different bookstore in the same area. It was a historical building, with wood-paneled walls and shelves up to the ceiling. An old radiator wheezed away down the hall from some old atlases and framed maps. One room had a floor inset a couple feet. It had a coffee table in the center and two levels of shelving built into the wall. I can find no evidence of this place existing and don’t remember what I bought there (this is unusual for me… what can I say, I’m lame). I think it might have been Novel Bay depending on how long that place has been open. Some of its details might’ve melded in my head with Milwaukee’s Downtown Books and a couple half-remembered bookstores in other states that I only visited once. This is such a muddled memory for me and whatever place I’m remembering seems really fucking cool - I wish I could recall or dig up anything more definitive.
So that’s our big vacation. We went to a tourist town to buy candy and books and visit a museum. The only stop left before the motel was Renard’s Cheese, our tourist trap cheese store of choice. Their tomato basil cheese is excellent on a burger, the string cheese and curds slap, and their offerings in the realm of bread and olive oil are always a pleasant aside.
We parked our car at the motel and took a walk around town just past sunset. The beachside boardwalk runs parallel to a sidewalk with a pretty nice visitor center and a huge monument to emergency service workers who died in the line of duty. Concrete blocks list names in rows around a statue of two firefighters, a man and a woman. That’s another thing about this town I found really cool when I was a kid.
By now all the businesses were closed, save a gas station we swung by for snacks. We were literally just walking for the hell of it. Some storefront down there had the Lego fisherman’s hut, which my parents made sure to point out to me. But the real star of the show was this weird tourist trap, I think it was just some cornball T-shirt store. Like all the best tourist traps their product was crap but they mysteriously went all out on one random piece of decor. This time it was a life-sized man made of sponges, grinning at us with a length of jagged, bone-white coral.
And just like that we were back at the motel. So I guess it’s finally time to talk about that place. My parents mighta cheaped out on a lot of our trips, but here they splurged on the big condo. It was at the end of a block of smaller condos, had its own wooden patio with a gorgeous view of the motel office and the big, ugly lump of asphalt that connected the parking lot to the street. I always thought the basketball hoop and the maintenance shack were a little too close to that thing.
The whole condo had a specific smell, somewhere between cheap cleaning products and questioning whether the place had been cleaned recently. It was strongest in the entryway and the kitchen. I’ve come to find it weirdly comforting, probably because I spent so much time in the kitchen. That room and the living room, where I slept, were conjoined. Because I stay up so much later than my family, I spent hours in there by myself. Not doing the thing you’re probably imagining a teenager/twentysomething would do alone at two in the morning. I always felt guilty thinking about the people who had to clean up after idiots like me.
Even limited to chaste activities I didn’t always mind my noise late at night, which made this place perfect. The two bedrooms were down past a bend in the hallway. Noise pollution never reached their ears. I could do whatever I wanted, indulge in the simple things in life. In the kitchen, a simple kitchenette with a table and a bar it shared with the living room, I made myself midnight snacks and watched YouTube videos on dogshit public wi-fi.
At the bar (for some reason the stools were on the kitchen side, even though surely the idea is you’d serve food to the living room from there) I’d spread out one of the enormous Panini Doctor Who graphic novels and absorb the most underrated wing of the series’ expanded universe in all its glory. If you’re curious I specifically read Endgame, Nemesis of the Daleks and Oblivion up there. Even though I read most of these at home, I associate the Doctor Who Magazine strip with Algoma more than anything else. The stories collected in Oblivion justify that association on their own, I think; Beautiful Freak might be the only Doctor Who story I could claim changed the trajectory of my life. Also the only piece of Doctor Who media I've ever forced Lily to endure.
Basically, a closeted lesbian who’s terrified of swimming swaps bodies with a fish girl. She has to get used to the water or she’ll die, which is all a big obvious metaphor rendered with excellent art. I read it there when I was 17 and deeply closeted, during a trip I was forced into following a particularly ugly fight with my parents. They were worried I would kill myself if they left me home alone and, much as I resented being around them, they were right. That year I mostly just sat on the pull-out couch staring out at the lake. Whenever my parents tried to talk to me, or take me out to do anything, I got mad and stormed off somewhere else. It's a weird thing to put so much weight on but yeah that seven-page Doctor Who comic did me some real good.*
The living room was where they really doubled down on the condo’s curiously oceanic nautical theme (it’s hardly unique in this regard - the Great Lakes Region seems to really long for salty sea air, while also selling those “UNSALTED AND SHARK FREE” shirts. Hypocrites). To the left is a couch with a framed picture of a bunch of nautical knots on it, I think (maybe that one’s at the entrance, actually?). To the right, shelves of seashells and other odds and ends with an old CRT television between them. On the ceiling they had this rail system with a bunch of little spotlights on it, the only ceiling lights the room had. Which was kinda rad. They were always talking about updating the condo. To hell with that, we need more weird-ass motels.
But if they want any suggestions, I always wished they’d put more stock into specifically Lake Michigan decor. The couple books on the shelves fit the bill. They had one about shipwrecks, one about ghost ships I think. Big coffee table hardcovers with lots of pictures. There was also a book about grilling because the living room had a sliding door that opened up to a balcony with a grill. Yeah, a balcony, because the Beach Motel was built on a hill. The lowest level was right on the beach, everything above that you had to walk down a flight of stairs between the two buildings. Always fun when you’ve got no shoes on in the summer.
The other features of the condo’s balcony were a dead tomato plant, a plastic picnic table (I’d love to know how they got that up there) and a big, chunky ancient security camera angled toward a hole in the boards above one of the lower-level rooms. You gotta wonder about that. Maybe the proprietors used to have issues with people specifically in that one room. It’s cursed!
I used to read on that picnic table a lot. And ohh man did I ever listen to a lot of music on the balcony. Not because I didn’t want to be there, like at home, but because it just feels really good to listen to music outside. Especially on a beach, on the shore of one of the world’s most incredible bodies of freshwater. Shit just sounds better when you’re looking down from an old wooden balcony, a splinter in your bare foot, watching low-wind waves meet the shore in slow motion.
We parked our car at the motel and took a walk around town just past sunset. The beachside boardwalk runs parallel to a sidewalk with a pretty nice visitor center and a huge monument to emergency service workers who died in the line of duty. Concrete blocks list names in rows around a statue of two firefighters, a man and a woman. That’s another thing about this town I found really cool when I was a kid.
By now all the businesses were closed, save a gas station we swung by for snacks. We were literally just walking for the hell of it. Some storefront down there had the Lego fisherman’s hut, which my parents made sure to point out to me. But the real star of the show was this weird tourist trap, I think it was just some cornball T-shirt store. Like all the best tourist traps their product was crap but they mysteriously went all out on one random piece of decor. This time it was a life-sized man made of sponges, grinning at us with a length of jagged, bone-white coral.
And just like that we were back at the motel. So I guess it’s finally time to talk about that place. My parents mighta cheaped out on a lot of our trips, but here they splurged on the big condo. It was at the end of a block of smaller condos, had its own wooden patio with a gorgeous view of the motel office and the big, ugly lump of asphalt that connected the parking lot to the street. I always thought the basketball hoop and the maintenance shack were a little too close to that thing.
The whole condo had a specific smell, somewhere between cheap cleaning products and questioning whether the place had been cleaned recently. It was strongest in the entryway and the kitchen. I’ve come to find it weirdly comforting, probably because I spent so much time in the kitchen. That room and the living room, where I slept, were conjoined. Because I stay up so much later than my family, I spent hours in there by myself. Not doing the thing you’re probably imagining a teenager/twentysomething would do alone at two in the morning. I always felt guilty thinking about the people who had to clean up after idiots like me.
Even limited to chaste activities I didn’t always mind my noise late at night, which made this place perfect. The two bedrooms were down past a bend in the hallway. Noise pollution never reached their ears. I could do whatever I wanted, indulge in the simple things in life. In the kitchen, a simple kitchenette with a table and a bar it shared with the living room, I made myself midnight snacks and watched YouTube videos on dogshit public wi-fi.
At the bar (for some reason the stools were on the kitchen side, even though surely the idea is you’d serve food to the living room from there) I’d spread out one of the enormous Panini Doctor Who graphic novels and absorb the most underrated wing of the series’ expanded universe in all its glory. If you’re curious I specifically read Endgame, Nemesis of the Daleks and Oblivion up there. Even though I read most of these at home, I associate the Doctor Who Magazine strip with Algoma more than anything else. The stories collected in Oblivion justify that association on their own, I think; Beautiful Freak might be the only Doctor Who story I could claim changed the trajectory of my life. Also the only piece of Doctor Who media I've ever forced Lily to endure.
Basically, a closeted lesbian who’s terrified of swimming swaps bodies with a fish girl. She has to get used to the water or she’ll die, which is all a big obvious metaphor rendered with excellent art. I read it there when I was 17 and deeply closeted, during a trip I was forced into following a particularly ugly fight with my parents. They were worried I would kill myself if they left me home alone and, much as I resented being around them, they were right. That year I mostly just sat on the pull-out couch staring out at the lake. Whenever my parents tried to talk to me, or take me out to do anything, I got mad and stormed off somewhere else. It's a weird thing to put so much weight on but yeah that seven-page Doctor Who comic did me some real good.*
The living room was where they really doubled down on the condo’s curiously oceanic nautical theme (it’s hardly unique in this regard - the Great Lakes Region seems to really long for salty sea air, while also selling those “UNSALTED AND SHARK FREE” shirts. Hypocrites). To the left is a couch with a framed picture of a bunch of nautical knots on it, I think (maybe that one’s at the entrance, actually?). To the right, shelves of seashells and other odds and ends with an old CRT television between them. On the ceiling they had this rail system with a bunch of little spotlights on it, the only ceiling lights the room had. Which was kinda rad. They were always talking about updating the condo. To hell with that, we need more weird-ass motels.
But if they want any suggestions, I always wished they’d put more stock into specifically Lake Michigan decor. The couple books on the shelves fit the bill. They had one about shipwrecks, one about ghost ships I think. Big coffee table hardcovers with lots of pictures. There was also a book about grilling because the living room had a sliding door that opened up to a balcony with a grill. Yeah, a balcony, because the Beach Motel was built on a hill. The lowest level was right on the beach, everything above that you had to walk down a flight of stairs between the two buildings. Always fun when you’ve got no shoes on in the summer.
The other features of the condo’s balcony were a dead tomato plant, a plastic picnic table (I’d love to know how they got that up there) and a big, chunky ancient security camera angled toward a hole in the boards above one of the lower-level rooms. You gotta wonder about that. Maybe the proprietors used to have issues with people specifically in that one room. It’s cursed!
I used to read on that picnic table a lot. And ohh man did I ever listen to a lot of music on the balcony. Not because I didn’t want to be there, like at home, but because it just feels really good to listen to music outside. Especially on a beach, on the shore of one of the world’s most incredible bodies of freshwater. Shit just sounds better when you’re looking down from an old wooden balcony, a splinter in your bare foot, watching low-wind waves meet the shore in slow motion.
I listened to Government Plates, my least favorite Death Grips album, and got into it in a way I haven’t managed since. The first half of their double album Powers That B, too. I remember talking to Colin’s girlfriend Eileen about that one. We had this theory that the first half in particular is sonically offputting even by their standards to draw attention away from the more personal lyrics present on both sides. Kinda like how I frontload these essays with rants about inane garbage before I get to the stuff that actually matters.
Like the nights I spent out with Lily on the balcony. We never talked; the master bedroom also looked out to the lake and whenever my parents fell asleep she was unavailable. We just texted, which is okay too. Or it was back then, before I’d had time to get used to her voice. I sent her photographs of the beach at sunset and at night. We’d come into the habit of talking about our fears more openly since August 6th. The future would hurt, that was our only certainty. I’d just gotten a promising phone call from a grocery store Owen’s dad worked at. Lily was making plans to introduce me to people in a way we could all be comfortable with. And once I had a job we could start to save up for a visit, either down there or up here, and we’d all get along and it’d be perfect and my stupid self conscious control freakiness wouldn’t ruin anything ever again.
My last night in Algoma, the last night of August, a cold wind was blowing in from the lake. I stood still and spread my arms, let myself feel the wind on my face. It’s stronger and colder two stories up. I took it as the first harbinger of summer’s end, even though cold winds at night are common. Hair flying back behind my headphones, a song Lily sent me echoing in the hollow spaces between my ears, I stumbled down those pebbly concrete stairs to the beach and just sat there for God knows how long. I guess I wanted to be down there for one or two songs, but Lily fell asleep and I couldn’t force myself up. I knew what climbing back up to my room would entail… changing into a pair of pants without mud caked on the ass, for one. And going to sleep just to check out and go home first thing in the morning.
So on the beach I remained. I built myself a little seat of muck and felt the waves tear it away. I scooched closer to the water and started skipping pebbles. Kanye had come on my playlist at this point. Just background music until I hit a song I always used to write off. If you’re not familiar, and I really don’t begrudge anyone who chooses to ignore Kanye these days, Homecoming is a song about Chicago. The chorus goes, “baby, do you remember when/fireworks at Lake Michigan/now I’m comin home again/maybe we can start again”.
That shit hit so hard. I was taking Lily seriously, I was about to land a job, I was about to go home with a sense of optimism I hadn’t had in so long. The summer was dead and my life had just begun. It was time to start again. No more bumming around stealing traffic cones, no more scraping up dough through gambling and part-time laundry. I was gonna make this work. A month later I was in Chicago to see King Gizzard right before my first shift working a full-time job. The timing was tight but weirdly perfect, they scheduled me the day after the concert. I came home, bought my first-ever pair of chinos and one of my friends told me I looked like a hungover electrician.
Like the nights I spent out with Lily on the balcony. We never talked; the master bedroom also looked out to the lake and whenever my parents fell asleep she was unavailable. We just texted, which is okay too. Or it was back then, before I’d had time to get used to her voice. I sent her photographs of the beach at sunset and at night. We’d come into the habit of talking about our fears more openly since August 6th. The future would hurt, that was our only certainty. I’d just gotten a promising phone call from a grocery store Owen’s dad worked at. Lily was making plans to introduce me to people in a way we could all be comfortable with. And once I had a job we could start to save up for a visit, either down there or up here, and we’d all get along and it’d be perfect and my stupid self conscious control freakiness wouldn’t ruin anything ever again.
My last night in Algoma, the last night of August, a cold wind was blowing in from the lake. I stood still and spread my arms, let myself feel the wind on my face. It’s stronger and colder two stories up. I took it as the first harbinger of summer’s end, even though cold winds at night are common. Hair flying back behind my headphones, a song Lily sent me echoing in the hollow spaces between my ears, I stumbled down those pebbly concrete stairs to the beach and just sat there for God knows how long. I guess I wanted to be down there for one or two songs, but Lily fell asleep and I couldn’t force myself up. I knew what climbing back up to my room would entail… changing into a pair of pants without mud caked on the ass, for one. And going to sleep just to check out and go home first thing in the morning.
So on the beach I remained. I built myself a little seat of muck and felt the waves tear it away. I scooched closer to the water and started skipping pebbles. Kanye had come on my playlist at this point. Just background music until I hit a song I always used to write off. If you’re not familiar, and I really don’t begrudge anyone who chooses to ignore Kanye these days, Homecoming is a song about Chicago. The chorus goes, “baby, do you remember when/fireworks at Lake Michigan/now I’m comin home again/maybe we can start again”.
That shit hit so hard. I was taking Lily seriously, I was about to land a job, I was about to go home with a sense of optimism I hadn’t had in so long. The summer was dead and my life had just begun. It was time to start again. No more bumming around stealing traffic cones, no more scraping up dough through gambling and part-time laundry. I was gonna make this work. A month later I was in Chicago to see King Gizzard right before my first shift working a full-time job. The timing was tight but weirdly perfect, they scheduled me the day after the concert. I came home, bought my first-ever pair of chinos and one of my friends told me I looked like a hungover electrician.
Owen came home from school in December and we, for the first time, exchanged Christmas gifts. We have a tradition now of getting each other sorta strange, niche and personal presents. In 2026 he gifted me a Chick tract he got straight from a local celebrity Alaskan Jesus freak, and I sent him a program he can use to download age-restricted YouTube videos so he can finally complete his SassyOP collection. We hadn’t really set that standard yet in ‘22. He just told me during a drive that he’d got me something. I didn’t know what to expect.
I unwrapped a small picture frame in which he’d placed the now well-worn Lord of Locusts. Below him was a quote - “may good fortune fall upon you and your people”.
In June 2025 Owen was home from school again. I texted him “drive?” one night. He said I could pick him up from a garage poker session at some guy’s house I’d never been to. It was out in the White People Suburbs, kind of a nice rural area except for the depressing cookie-cutter houses. When I pulled up Caleb decided to join us. I don’t talk to him much anymore, good to see what he’s up to. Pretty smart kid from what I can gather, he and Tyler are both well versed in philosophy. He told us a story about meeting a classmate none of us had seen since middle school, who it turned out was a conspiracy nut now. She believed she was being hunted by both anarchists and Nazis. I wish we still lived in a world where that felt far-fetched.
I regaled them with the story of what had happened to my traffic cone collection. Dad cleaned out the garage and made me take them all to my place. I don’t have the space for all of them here, I told him. He basically said tough shit. I told Caleb to check the trunk, where I’d stashed all but the barrel cone I planned to hold on to.
We spent the rest of the night driving around to road work sites around Neenah, placing cones wherever they felt… picturesque is a strong word. So is scenic. Nah fuck it, we put the cones wherever they felt scenic. Then I drove the boys home. That was right before the Durango broke down. The last song I ever heard through her speakers was Dancing With Your Eyes Closed by Jane Remover. I think that’s a good song to go out on.
I get why I already feel so nostalgic about this part of my life. These were my last moments of freedom and I knew it, I was fully conscious of childhood’s end and took advantage of every moment. Everything that defines who I am now was starting to solidify. I had the opportunity to live like a kid one last time and I took it. Along the way I made friends and made myself into a halfway decent person. I set out to act stupid and wound up acting more mature than I’d ever been before.
But also, in the past twelve months my grandpa died, the government's been fucking my ass monthly, and I spent half a year with the threat of eviction hanging over my head. One of my closest friends lives in Minneapolis, which the government has decided to turn into a warzone to keep Epstein's name out of the news. In all the years he lived there I never bothered to visit.
Lily and I planned on it on our way back from Nebraska last January, but I was too tired. That led to an awkward re-routing in Iowa that ended up putting an extra hour or two onto the trip anyways. I'll regret that until I die. The other night he made some vague comment in a text message that he was trying to “rapidly enter the Canadian workforce”. After months of emotional sterility I broke down crying in Lily's lap. I told her I guess I figured we'd be neighbors forever once we got shit sorted out… I said I never want to take her for granted like that.
I'm back in a rut, one lacking the obvious escape route I had last time. Back then I thought I just needed a job. I just needed enough money to scrape by and I'd be alright. I've learned since that it's never enough. You can do everything right and still end up with a newly divorced landlord who wants to pave over your house to build his dream home. I spent all that time trying to keep my parents together and I still wound up a child of divorce.
No feasible amount of money can save you. If anything unexpected pops up you're boned. You can't leave work early, take time off, turn down overtime, show any level of weakness. The vultures come the moment you even think about limping. The machine is profitable even in recessions. It never stops. This won't end until my entire economic class has been eradicated and replaced by lobotomized AI, robots with billions of gigabytes of information in their heads and the mental capacities of a four-year-old - which is still too old for a lot of the people running this racket.
Writing this took my head to a lot of places I try to ignore. I've thought more about spirituality in the past couple months than I have since 2022. I started writing this to wax nostalgic about my coming of age and in revisiting that point in my life I inadvertently came of age again. I've kept thinking about that line I wrote about how I was no closer in 2022 to the future I imagined when I decided I shouldn't jump off a parking garage.
A part of my head is still up there, feeling the wind in my face seven stories up. A part of me is still laughing to their own stupid juvenile self about petty, pointless theft. Still more of me is back in July 2024 hearing from Lily's roommate that she tried to shoot herself while I was sleeping. Like Billy Pilgrim I come unstuck in time. Like him, I handle it pretty poorly.
Still, when I'm stuck in the present I feel content. All I ever set out to do when I wake up is keep breathing, keep Lily alive and keep a roof over our heads. I can only do so much. I try to do it right. I like to think it’s making the world around me a little better.
I cook at home almost every night and bring the leftovers to my family. I grow some of my own food. Plan to start growing more this year. I try to practice what I preach and live as proof that my beliefs work. Owen does too. He organizes for the church and the college Catholic organization, he brings his beliefs into every job and every work of art I've ever seen him do. My brother has also gone Cath in the years since 2022, and now he's got a job working with underprivileged kids from bad homes. I don't think it's a Jesusy thing but you never know. All I really care about is those kids are better off because of my brother, and I never figured I’d get to say that about him. I've sent some unneeded old Lego his way. The kids seem to like it.
I think this is what real progress is made of, becoming self-sufficient and caring for the people around you. Those goddamn Flock cameras are turning into a good example of that; news stories of communities coming together to protest them are becoming more common. City by city, those fuckers are being unplugged. The reason third parties are so worthless in America is because they do jack shit between running stunt candidates for president. Fuck that, let's help each other. There is material good you can be doing at a small, local level. They want us to stay inside and bitch at one another on the internet. Loving thy neighbor and having fun with the homies is a good first step to get out of this mess.
Owen and my brother found God. I found a disabled girl from Nebraska. We both have a purpose and a community now, and I think that's what the government truly fears and loathes. In Menasha. Shut up Max.
Coda: me and Grandma in February 2026
“Alright, I think I got all the books I want from downstairs. He had a lot of good stuff down there! Notes in all the margins. Even in like, cookbooks. He was so detailed with that.”
“Oh, grandpa and his books… did I tell you about that book I want to write?”
“I think so, yeah. It's a good story.”
“I think it would really help some children, some young children who are scared of losing their grandpa or their parents. But it makes me so sad. What would your cousin do if she lost her newborn son?”
“She'd be devastated.”
“It doesn't have to be a grandparent. I think everyone is scared of that. It could help anyone. But it makes me so sad.”
“You don't have to talk about it if it's gonna make you cry.”
“Okay. I'll talk about it a little. Just a little. It would be, I'd be the grandma, and a-a, a child, grandson, would ask, ‘where's grandpa? W-where did grandpa go? Where's grandpa?’ - I'm not crying, I'm just pretending - ‘Grandpa is, you know about Noah's Ark, God built a ship and Noah put all the animals on it, and took ‘em to Heaven. Grandpa is o-on the ship, he's going to Heaven, he saw his grandpa again, and these people he hasn't seen in a long time, and he's meeting his family again and he's an angel and he's out helping people now, it’s kind of like his job.’”
“I bet he helps the angels file their taxes.”
“HAH! You're probably right. Grandpa and his taxes…”
“I'll proofread it if you ever write it.”
“It just makes me so sad. But I think it would help people. Children. ‘Where's grandpa?’ ‘Oh, you know where grandpa is, Woofy**. He used to play with you all the time. We used to play with you all the time. We did, we used to play with you, Woofy. You know where he is.’”
*I should write about Doctor Who comics some time. Seems like a niche the internet needs more of, especially now that Altered Vistas is down. I probably discovered that site not long after my first encounter with Abslom Daak in Algoma, come to think of it. Their old, janky 3d-modeled reconstruction of his incomplete third comic was a sight to behold. Too many Doctor Who fan sites have gone down recently. Hell, the digital fanzine Terrible Zodin recently called it quits because they consider social media the natural evolution of fanzine culture. The editors of that publication are responsible for dozens of well-considered and thoughtful articles, and the way I remember it their zine is practically a who's who of the smartest people in fandom… I'm still wrapping my head around how they think a tweet could ever measure up. The final issue includes an incredible article about how Rose Tyler would've been entitled to redundancy pay after the events of Rose… you don't get shit that niche on social media! The density of niche information in zines is something you don't really see much anymore. I miss the internet I grew up on.
**My brother’s favorite childhood stuffed dog
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