Aimless Thoughts: One More For the Road

2022

On the last day of August I was sitting at the shore of Lake Michigan, letting mild waves pull me into the muck. Kanye West was in my headphones rapping about Chicago. I threw a pebble toward where I thought Menasha probably was. It skipped five or six times as the guy from Coldplay sang, “I'm comin’ home again, maybe we can start again”. I hated the only home I’d ever known. Some eight hours from now I'd be headed back. My north star was a girl in Nebraska.

A month later I got my first full-time job because of her. Broke, futureless youth was finally behind me. In a year I'd have enough vacation accrued to drive down to her. Everything was looking up, assuming the job went well. 

My dad texted me out of the blue: the Covid-era King Gizzard tickets he got me for my birthday in 2020 were still valid, they're coming back to Chicago in October. 

The same week I started my job. Fuck, I couldn't afford another bad first impression. But as far as I was concerned back then, still blissfully ignorant of the decade-long EDM album they were about to inflict, these guys could do no wrong. I had to see them, job be damned. Shit wait, no. I can't ditch the best shot I have at taking care of Lily.

There's a point in every loser's life when it sinks in that they can't be a bum anymore. When their brain has to wrap itself around the fact that they can never be selfish again, forever, because they're not in it for themselves anymore. This was mine, not that you could tell from looking at me. For a couple weeks all I did was play Yakuza 5 and wait for the first schedule to drop. It looked like routine slacker shit but my breath was so bated it coulda been a goddamn tackle box.

Shift number one was the day after the concert. Dad had just enough advance notice to take off. God, this was actually happening! After that fucked up bullshit summer, after two awful years at the YMCA, I was going to see my favorite band right before ditching the Youth Men and their allegedly Christian Association for good. Dad asked “what about Sean's ticket?” Oh, right, he bought a ticket for Sean because 2020 was already long enough ago that he was still into King Gizzard. And still in Menasha. Well, he’s not available.

What about that fella we know down in Chicago? Oh, Christian? The guy that's working three jobs in between trying to make it in the cutthroat Chicago improv scene? I got him Float Along on a whim last Christmas and he liked it, maybe he'd be down. Not a chance in hell he has the time. No, hold on, he might be able to swing it! He's got like 12 hours between a night at a bar and a morning at a restaurant. Depending how tired he is after work he's willing.

We drove to his neighborhood and spent a moment walking between stores that looked cool. I’d saved up a couple months’ pay from the Y, by which I mean I had about two hundred bucks to spend. God, I cleaned shit and puke off the ceiling for that little? Yes, the ceiling. Somebody took a gravity-defying shit on the ceiling. The place was haunted, too. I gotta write more about that fucking job some day. 

I wanted to save as much as possible for band merch, of course, but Reckless Records had the Yakuza 0 soundtrack on vinyl and Zappa’s Hot Rats on CD. So of course I had to get that. Dad agreed to buy me the soundtrack for Christmas, which was nice of him especially considering this entire trip was already a gift. Mom ended up getting me a second copy of the same record. Sometimes having parents who hardly talked to each other wasn’t so bad.

Down the road from Reckless was this bookstore, I think it was called Gallery Books. Its mousy old proprietor stopped you on the way in to tell you the rules. No pictures, no bags, some other stuff I forget. I snagged a few pictures down the sci-fi aisle, which was an entire store out from his desk. Wish I’d managed more, this place was incredible. Incredibly grubby. Water damage in an array of nasty colors, the whole rainbow of filth and decay, littered the ceiling. All the free surfaces were covered with pro-Iraq War political cartoons. They kept their magazines and a handful of comics (mostly underground stuff, I remember there being a lot of Crumb) in cardboard boxes either squeezed between books or lying on the floor. I found copies of a couple books I was looking for here, a couple I wasn’t and a handful of 90s sci-fi mags for good measure. He commented on my copy of Philip Jose Farmer’s Jesus on Mars: “I didn’t know people still read him. He’s a hometown hero, you know? From Peoria!”. Then he watched my fingers close while I entered my PIN.

Leaving the store my dad and I laughed together. I said, “I bet if we tried to come back there tomorrow somebody would tell us the place burned down twenty years ago”. I think he said something about how there’s no way it could burn down with how soggy the ceiling was. It was nice to see him laugh. I haven’t always gotten on with my dad, I won’t hold that back. We butted heads, especially before I moved out. He had good reasons to be as irritable as he was, pulling at least sixty hours at an underfunded government job and coming home to all our bullshit. Think he'd just learned about my brother's booze habit. As an adult I can comfortably recognize he wasn’t always the dad we needed, but also that I had no idea how much shit he was going through to keep us safe and healthy.

I remember overhearing him venting to mom before the concert. He said, “I wish I could be excited to go, but I think he hates me. We barely talk anymore. He doesn't say anything back when I say I love you”. Grandpa's failing health was already in my head a year before the cancer. I started thinking what if dad died tomorrow and the last thing I ever did was refuse to say I love you? Three fucking words. That’s the thing about me: I’m just as stubborn as my parents but I cry easier.

Comic books turned from a hobby to an important part of mending our relationship. Since we started collecting together late in 2021 tension could be cut with a well-placed comment about the Secret Society of Super-Villains. So of course we checked out Chicago Comics around the corner. Christian was almost out of work by then. He said he knew the place. It was right near where he worked so he'd meet us there. Which didn’t give me much time to get a grasp on what I think might be my favorite comic shop on Lake Michigan. Even if I swear to god they have heated floors. Like, the two times I've been there were a chilly late-October afternoon and a tepid evening by the standards of early March. Yet both times I felt like my knees or ass might stick to the floor while I perused their quadruple-decker longbox-cum-filing-cabinet setup. No idea how or why a comic store could afford heated floors but I swear they fucking have ‘em.

Anyhow, I didn't spend as much time or money in this place as I wish I could have. I forget what I even bought. Couple issues of some series I've long since finished collecting and reading and, uh, I might've grabbed a Moto Hagio hardcover? Or at least thought about it? I can't find it on my shelves. Yeah never mind, I think I just got a handful of floppies. Definitely spent some time paging through the Fantagraphics Poe Clan. It was my first time ever holding one of their volumes, or any volume of hardcover manga. Cause I think I mentioned this in the last post but 2022 was the year I went from ‘Junji Ito is kinda neat’ to being a Japanese Comics Guy. Glad I got to take a peek at some Hagio that early. Love her art. I should like, actually buy and read one of her books.*

Christian met us by the front desk. He knew the guy at the counter somehow. I think he was an improv teacher on the side? Nobody in this city has one job. Hm, maybe the housing market should be regulated better. No, no, obviously the government Animorphing into a homeowner’s association is good for everyone.

I got to talking to him myself, mentioned we were seeing King Gizzard that night. He said he liked their boogie-rock album. Which feels like ancient history now, especially as it was released so close to their fan-favorite first foray into metal. I swear it was a big deal at the time, though. It sounds great, the instrumentation is more varied and accomplished than the metal record and it was also a project with significant influence from Ambrose Kenny-Smith. On most albums, he plays harmonica and sings maybe two songs. This album was sort of his baby, which makes it a special one for fans of his.

I told the guy at the counter that if he liked that record, he should check out Ambrose’s side project, the Murlocs. His face was overtaken with an expression of remarkably minor surprise. He already knew about the Murlocs, it happens, and had no idea they were a King Gizzard side-project! You don’t see that too often.

Nor have I often seen a parking garage as shitty as the one tucked awkwardly behind our hotel in Chinatown. Two stories of the tightest quarters possible. Tight by the standards of two tons of steel on wheels, I mean. Once we got out of the car we were fine. Except that if I’m remembering correctly there was no connection between the hotel and the parking garage. You had to walk down the ramp to the sidewalk and then find your way to the front from there. When I think of China the first thing that comes to mind is architecture that’s as janky as it is efficient. Chinatown appears to have inherited the American tradition of terribly inefficient jank. This is the true cost of forcing immigrants to assimilate.

I’m happy to say that, unlike the architecture, the cuisine in Chinatown was legit. We ate at this place next to the venue, a converted factory with like, a fancy steakhouse on the lower level and an Asian import supermarket up top. I gotta emphasize “supermarket” here. The Asian stores back home are holes in the wall. My favorite in Oshkosh is one decent-sized room and a little backroom with a hot deli next to the ramen aisle. This place was the size of a Walmart. The food court housed an entire wall of vendors. We walked past fresh fish on ice, noodles, rice, the whole shebang, looking for the one thing Christian assured us we had to have: an authentic steamed bun. 

We found a place near the registers and decided then to browse the store for a moment while they prepared our food. Ostensibly to look for drinks, but of course I used this as an excuse to grab a box of mochi. I kinda wish I’d given myself more time to peruse the massive drink cooler. It was parallel to the food court and might have had slightly more real estate. Name an Asian beverage, I think you coulda found it there. 

Even in my short brush with this place, I found a new favorite: basil seed drink. Boba gets all the love, but the Asian palate as a whole seems to really dig drinks with stuff floating in them. I’m all for that. Usually I go for Mogu Mogu, which is sorta like Gatorade with fruit snacks in it. Like if you left the pulp in from whatever unholy fruit Gatorade is juiced from. Basil seed drink is a close second. It’s a fruit juice with something that’s both natural and readily identifiable floating in it, a nice change of pace for this kinda drink. The seeds are coated in a gelatin substance that keeps them more buoyant than I imagine they’d be otherwise. It adds to the texture, too; the gel layer surrounding a crunchy little ball of plant matter is an inimitable combination.

And our order was ready! Three servings of steamed buns for something like seven bucks a pop. We were navigating a menu with all Chinese text, and based on the pictures and prices we expected maybe two buns each. Imagine our surprise when we opened the bag and found something like twenty buns between three styrofoam containers. Each one was half the size of my damn face. Back in the day, whenever we ordered the generously-proportioned family-sized box of fries from local fast food joint Tom’s, grandpa would always say, “you could feed the Chinese army with that!”. In this case that phrase was more accurate than usual.

They weren’t all quantity, either. The dough was at that perfect steamed consistency, not too soggy and not too stiff. And they were stuffed. With every bite a whole damn bowl of soup and beef grease dribbled out the sides of the bun. The beef was on the pleasant side of fatty, tender and flavorful as you can get. We scarfed down as many as we could and still had to leave like ten of the things behind. A guy in a Fishing For Fishies shirt two tables over was having the same experience.

We walked under a bridge and a tent city right across from a self-storage unit. Which is the kind of unsubtlety you could never get away with in fiction, no matter how satirical. That unit was in a converted factory right next to the converted factory the concert was in. And I love food markets and venues in converted factories as much as the next guy, but could we get a couple cheap apartments? Maybe a shelter? It’s the kinda shit that makes you question any politician who calls himself Christian.

Christian, dad and I got in line between some burly metalheads and a couple college hipster twinks. In front of us, “they’d better do their heavy stuff”. Behind us, “we better hear some of their jazz jams”. This band’s frequent releases and genre-switching have lent them a certain reputation. Many are the fans who only truly love one sound, which often means one album. Maybe a single or a couple throwaways, even. Ride-or-die fans are rarer beasts. The most open-minded rock fans, and arguably the ones with the lowest standards.

Still, gotta wonder how either group felt about the opening act. After an intermission soundtracked by such perennial classics as Lime in the Coconut and Temporary Secretary, wispy folk guitarist Leah Senior took to the stage for thirty minutes of soft, feminine acoustic ballads. She’s from the same label as King Gizzard, they’re good friends who share a lot of fans, but I’m always left with the impression your average Gizzhead still thinks cooties exist. He’s the kinda guy who calls himself a feminist but wouldn’t be caught dead listening to a female artist who wasn’t a well-established part of a Canon. This is doubly true following their metal album and their Covid-era mainstream popularity. “I like the music in spite of their politics” is a more common sentiment than ever, and the definition of ‘politics’ here, naturally, includes wholly apolitical art by women. But they’re totally okay with King Gizzard’s climate change lyrics so long as they’re buried deep in the mix beneath sick riffs.

Real ones knew why Leah Senior was there. I wound up lost in the crowd next to a bigger dork than even I. Dad went to the bathroom before the show, Christian headed for the loft. The venue was great, by the way. Some seating around the edges, mostly a big-ass pit with a freely available balcony to one side. Yeah, despite Stu’s still-quoted “classist fuckin venue” remark, nothing was off-limits to anyone so long as you were willing to fight the crowd.

Which is how I wound up where I did, mere feet from the stage next to an old head with inch-thick glasses. Every so often he’d interrupt his gentle, middle-aged moshing to ask me if I’d caught this or that little detail. He told me, after a rare song, when they’d last played it. When they made their live debut of then-recent album cut Lava, he made sure to inform me. You can hear me, immediately following that, screaming “YEAH!” in some bootleg concert videos. I'm the shrillest voice.

Leah got back on stage and, for the third time ever in North America, spoke the words, “there is a secret I’ve been keeping…”. Some people were confused. I saw uncertain glances through the audience, lip-read baffled murmurs through the sound of my own shrieks. The old dude was losing his mind. Somewhere behind us a tiny woman climbed up on a couch, leaning against her six-foot-six goth girlfriend's shoulders. Somebody was trying in vain to get a circle pit going. All this chaos and Leah continued unabated, as though there was truly nothing in her soul but the secret of the Lord of Lightning. She became the character she plays on King Gizzard’s albums, the Reticent Raconteur, the spectral storyteller haunting their world. For fifteen or twenty minutes, a fantasy became real in an old Chinatown factory.

The Lord of Lightning suite had never been part of their setlist prior to Covid. It debuted in late 2021 and since it necessitated a guest artist I’d always figured they’d never play it outside of their home country. I would've probably been right until they blew up over quarantine. Now they’d attained a higher status, a higher budget, higher ambitions for their live shows. They wanted to make skyrocketing ticket prices worth it, and by God did they ever. The live Lord of Lightning is still a top 5 live music moment for me I think. And that’s coming from a show that ended with the closer to my favorite of their albums, Float Along, and opened with two of their best metal tracks cascading into a fifteen-minute jam version of another of my favorite deep cuts.

If you’re familiar with the band you might’ve also heard the tale that a girl at this show smoked two joints by herself and needed medical attention. I can confirm that rumor. From what I saw, the venue handled it pretty well. I’d like to hear her side of the story.

Early March 2026

Every March we take mom out to eat at her favorite Indian restaurant. In February she clocked the calendar in my bathroom and told me we might pass this year, since I was working on her birthday. She seemed pretty firm about it. I reminded her that we'd gone on my closest day off every year since I started working full-time, and she changed her mind on the spot. Gotta wonder if she was going through something else that day.

This was Lily's second year accompanying us. She got something she loved last year and couldn’t remember what it was. Annoying, because most Indian food doesn't agree with her. She probably would be like anything else. Then she asked what was in vindaloo and went, “oh wait that actually sounds great”. Her mood shifted on the spot. She loved it, I kinda want to learn how to make it myself.

Wouldn't be the first dish I've swiped from this place. Last year I slammed back two whole plates of garlic naan with mint chutney and Googled “mint chutney recipe” the moment I got home. I got pretty good at making it, but nothing beats restaurant quality, right? I was so excited to taste the real thing again, I requested two orders before anyone else could open their month.

It tasted just like mine. Like, I couldn't detect any substantial difference. Mine maybe airs a little heavier on the chilis, it's runnier, I butter the naan more. That’s all negotiable. The flavor and feeling were close to identical.

This is a… satisfying outcome. Nothing hits like knowing you've perfected something people get paid to make; knowing you can whip up a cheaper, fresher version of a food you love no matter where you are. It's equal parts troubling. Once you scale that mountain, you have to live your life with a favorite food redefined. An indulgence becomes pedestrian. There is no better version of that dish in the world. Better recipes, maybe, but between you and the restaurant there exists only one food.

For once I thought to keep all that in my head at dinner. I figured mom's birthday would be better off without the culinary version of that asshole who knows how all the magic tricks are done. I left it at a pleasant expression and, “oh wow, this is really close to how I make it at home! That's cool.” Mom seemed proud of me. She and Lily were in the middle of a conversation. Lily was venting to her about Badgercare, Wisconsin’s Medicaid program. It’s good insurance in theory, but like all government aid, getting any aid from them is a full-time job.

I made a comment to the effect of, “half the reason I want to get civilly married before we have a real wedding is so you can stop dealing with that fucking insurance”. Lily, usually the most awkward, shy woman in the room, responded without mincing a word that she wanted to use Badgercare to cover her bottom surgery. Mom said she wanted to ask if Lily was post-op but didn’t know how to breach the subject. Apparently a character in that month’s book club book had a vaginoplasty and she “learned a lot” about the subject. Hey fuck it we’re done eating let’s talk about neovagina dilation while we wait for our bill. You gotta keep it wide open for like ten hours a day the first year you have it, and then half that for the next year - and after the first year sex counts as dilation I guess. Then, and only then, will you maybe get a full range of sensations back in your genitals. That alone, I said, should be enough to dismiss the morons who think this is something you can do casually as somebody who doesn't know for sure it's what they want. And also the idiots who think bottom surgery should be the standard for considering somebody a Real Woman. And the pieces of shit who think this is some frivolous surgery you get as part of a fetish. And any dipshit who's ever said trans people are lazy cause of the trans unemployment rate. And every piece of shit who has a problem with anyone as sweet as my girl. And can I get more garlic naan and chutney to distract my mouth from an incoming rant about the government?

Lily used to hate how directly my family talks about sensitive shit. She told me the way we talked to her when she was upset felt pushy and aggressive. Not ten years ago my mom was the “as long as it’s not my kids” kind of Catholic. Lily’s about to be 28 and stresses about aging, like her best and most interesting years are behind her. I’m sure mom’s had the same thought. But just look at the two of ‘em now, man! Handling hard conversations with aplomb, living life as the best versions of themselves. Watch ‘em fuckin soar. It’s never too late.

Late March 2026

Sean was in town for some medical business the day we got back from Chicago. Somehow, he found a couple minutes to swing by my place. Probably because his mom was watching Artemis for us. He told me he’s finally got a job that utilizes his degree. Which is starting to push me back into the role of the guy who never moved out of their hometown and stuck with a mediocre fake job for teenagers. Eh, at least I’m a published writer. More on that when the book comes out, hopefully this summer.

I was telling him I wanted to write this blog post. “I always hear from people who journal that their favorite entries are the happy ones. Like, they usually write when they’re stressed but the couple good days they wrote about are always their favorites to revisit. My shit’s kinda miserable. Like, a lot of the road trip stories are fun. I love writing stuff like that. It makes me happy to write about those days where a million cool things happened to me. But most of Fear and Loathing especially was so cynical. I don’t want that to be all I can look back on when I’m forty.”

“I don't think it was very cynical at all,” He said. “The ending was like, ‘God bless us everyone’, if we all put in a little work we can make the world better. That's as optimistic as it gets.”

“I never saw that as optimism, I guess. It's just born from practicality.” I shrugged. “I want to live in a better world and it's not gonna get better if we sit around and do nothing. If I have a chance to preach about working hard for your loved ones I'll always get on that soapbox.” What I wish I'd said was, practicality is what happens to an optimistic person once they've got a little life behind them. “It doesn't get better than this” matures into “yes it does, here's how”.

Sean agreed in his sage, wise-beyond-his-years way. He looked down at the pavement in front of my house. “There’s an owl pellet here if you want to dissect it.”

Early March 2026

Lily’s mom said, “well, you be careful down in Chicago.”

“We will, don't worry, we'll only go a hundred down the freeway.” Lily laughed.

“I'm not talking about the traffic. Chicago's full of wackos. Bangers. They're shootin’ people.”

I said, “there’s crazy people everywhere.” Left it at that. You know how sometimes in video games a prompt will come up that's obviously a bad idea but you really want to press the button anyway? Like in Hitman when a cop is patting you down you have the option to punch him in the head? That's how I feel sometimes talking to Lily's parents. They're supportive of her as a trans woman, mostly they're really lovely people. They're just also the kind of Republicans who think everywhere beyond small-town America is a ghetto hellhole where everyone has a gun - but not in the heroic, rural sense of everyone having a gun. You shoulda heard them when Lily mentioned we wanted to go to Japan some day (nah… the worst one is still all the “if the Big Beautiful Bill passes you guys won't be strugglin like you are now” as if we're not on food stamps and Medicaid. Or maybe “this is why we wanted to keep you away from those hormones” when anti-trans legislation started hitting).

I try to be respectful, not just out of civility. It's because I know where Lily came from. When she moved in with me Oshkosh was a big city to her. Of course people like that think about Chicago the way a Lovecraft protagonist reckons with the existence of Nyarlathotep. Or the way Lovecraft reckoned with big cities. And looking at it sans politics for a second: context is a big deal. It's easy for them to see Chicago or Minneapolis as crime-ridden shitholes for the same reason I see their home states of West Virginia and Florida as state-sized meth labs. When you don’t live somewhere, when you don't know where the safe areas are, the entire map might as well say Here Be Monsters. There's crime everywhere. There's decent folks everywhere, too, somehow. Gotta remember that.

If you think I spend too much of my writing empathizing with conservatism, I'm a working-class minority in a purple state. Of course I fucking do. I don't blame anyone who’s got something to say about that, but I gotta assume you grew up on a floor with fewer eggshells. 

Chicago, March 6

Speaking of writers, I suppose I should mention the circumstances that led us to the Windy City. Remember my first-ever road trip blog, where I kept my motivation up my sleeves until I was in Nebraska? I loved writing that. I also hate re-reading it.

Like in ‘22 were in Chicago to see a show with Christian. As in, a show featuring Christian. He's down to just the one job now, earning his rent down at the Annoyance Theater on Belmont. It's a second-story bar with a stage in the back, a well-respected hole in the wide, weird wall that is the Chicago comedy scene. Like most Chicago comedy they're big on improv and blue humor. Annoyance productions include Co-Ed Prison Sluts, Splatter Theater and We Took Edibles an Hour Ago.

He and his roommates have been working their asses off for the past couple years. Seldom did his name reach top billing, save a co-written Batman parody that wound up cut short by Warner and his Brothers. But this year, Christian wrote, directed and starred in a play of his own. An original IP this time, so there's no risk of another cease-and-desist. I knew a little about it going in. It was a raunchy comedy called Pigskin, set in a vaguely-defined The Past and focused on high-school football. I knew the Chicago-area musical awards were sending judges on the first night, and he thought it’d be too raunchy for their tastes. And I knew I wanted to see the final show, because that was the night he planned to transcribe for the official script book. Months of collaborative comedy would result in the tightest possible version of the show, in theory. Assuming the actors had as much passion for the project as he did. Guess I’d be finding out in a few hours.

Meantime, the show was at 7 and we got to Chicago around noon. Lily and I had to use the bathroom. We’d explained the Starbucks thing, and it’s the same case in big cities for different reasons. Out in the country Starbucks is the only chain woke enough for genderless single-occupant bathrooms; in the city they don’t come off quite so progressive but they are the only guys on the block who can afford a toilet. And there just happened to be a Starbucks right next to a place my dad was hankering to visit.

Alley Cats Comics is only my second-favorite comic shop in Chicago, but it’s got the best vibes. Living up to the name, it’s literally in the back of an alley. There’s a little sign arching the alley gate and a chalk signboard on the sidewalk. Today it had a picture of Zoidberg saying, “apparently we’re TikTok famous!”. To get to the comic store you have to squeeze down a tight corridor, slimmer than mine or Lily’s shoulders, which immediately put me in the mood for comics. By which I mean it brought to mind my first-ever Japanese comic, that fucking Junji Ito short I stumbled into right before bed at six in the morning while I was bingeing articles and videos about the Nutty Putty Cave. Sometimes I miss high school.

The alley doubles in width, albeit most of that space is occupied by a staircase down to some basement or another. Doubt it sees much use; the door is plastered in stickers. After that you reach a little courtyard with some outdoor seating for a restaurant, which I presume also sees some use by geeks like me cause it’s just to the right of the storefront. It’s a whole-ass storefront, too, bay windows and everything. Looks like somebody just pushed it back a hundred feet from the road. You don’t see bullshit architecture like that up in Menasha.

My big-city culture shock continues inside; I can’t think of a single comic shop like this in Wisconsin. For one, the music. The standard for comic shops is like, having Star Trek on a TV or playing a top 40 station. This place was blaring punk, some folk punk. “They were rockin’ out in there”, as my dad put it. Gotta love it.

Like Chicago Comics they’ve got a filing cabinet longbox situation, but four stories tall and covered in woodgrain. It’s adorable. The “local creators” section has a bunch of people in it, and some of them feel like actual comics instead of an HVAC guy who bangs out twenty pages whenever he happens to catch a video about how Marvel Is Woke Now. There’s a full wall of graphic novels, too, feeding into a nice manga section. Through the center runs an enormous rack of new comics, and I love how they sort them here. Every current book is placed with the newest issue on top and back issues behind it. I felt the way you feel when you think your headphones have gone to shit only to realize the aux just got pushed out a little: it’s so fucking obvious, and it makes everything better! Why don’t we all do this? Do Alley Cats have the technique patented?

One side is Marvel and DC, the other side is indies. That’s the other thing I love about big-city comic shops, they have the space to give indies some breathing room. Nothing caught my eye this time, albeit mostly because I spent a lot of time on manga and back issues. Lily finally completed her set of Legacy of Vader and came close to a complete Absolute Batman; I got a few Gerber Man-Things and the first issue of Dirty Plotte.

The table up front, a mixture of their new manga section and a couple small publishers, caught my eye too. I browsed their respectable Peow2 selection looking for a specific book I wanted from that publisher, I forget which one. It wasn't  their Stop! Hibari-Kun translation; I preordered that the moment it was announced. I always feel kinda guilty ordering something online if I see it at a small bookstore later. Same thing happened at Appleton’s Power House Comics when I preordered the Doctor Who Magazine backup strip reprints. As far as I know there’s still a copy of The Return of the Daleks there if anyone in the Fox Cities is interested.

Lily ducked into this weird little alcove to sit down, a tiny room full of books on magic and a bunch of witchy knick-knacks. Plus some Warhammer stuff I think? I don’t know that I could go any deeper than that without resurrecting the Annoying Atheist side of my personality. Despite my taste in women, I find a lot of that witch/wicca/pagan/magick stuff boring if not offputting, for the same reason basically as astrology or Joe Rog-

No, sorry, I said I wasn’t gonna do that. Lily likes witch shit and she found me a cool dragon skull-shaped gem. She also found a sticker that said “Doctor Who” in the style of the Doctor Pepper logo, which is almost as rad as my Doctor Who Seinfeld sticker. While she was digging through stickers and gems I was perusing the manga. Mom handed me a lesbian hentai from the LGBT manga section that Lily had told her she was looking for, and boy do I ever wish I had been around for that conversation. Hell of a way to learn there was an LGBT manga section. I’d been looking for volume 1 of Welcome Back Alice which I'd had no luck with up north.

Around this point a couple of kids, probably like twelve to fourteen, walked in and began to peruse the all-ages shelf. One of them picked up a copy of Jeff Smith's Bone and proclaimed, “whatchu know about Bone?” He spent some five or ten minutes proselytizing to his friends about this comic he read back in elementary school. Making sure, in that way only teens can manage, to make five years sound like a lifetime ago. I'm glad kids are still reading Bone. Shit, I'm glad kids are reading ANYTHING these days 

Then I went back to general manga and discovered, atop the half-height shelf at the end of the section, a curious sign. Well, a piece of laminated paper. Sitting centered between half a dozen of those meme images of cats with overexaggerated crying eyes were the words “Wallow with Willow”. Who is Willow? What's she wallowing about? Oh, shit, is that a copy of infamous hentai manga Metamorphosis to the left of it? For the uninitiated, it's a sort of “deconstruction” of the casual sexual violence associated with hentai, in which the female protagonist suffers horribly on account of being a real person instead of a porn character. Back in the day teenage gooner–cum-edgelords used to send it to one another as the 2010s weeb equivalent of a shock website. As those people grew up, a lot of them formed a level of genuine empathy for the protagonist, unshackled from her meme status. This has resulted in, basically, two camps: some who loathe the comic and others, like myself (and presumably whoever Willow is) who have a begrudging respect for it. I've considered purchasing a physical copy before. Don't know I have the balls to buy one physically.

Yeah, I don’t. But also on Willow's shelf are Luana Vecchio's Doll Parts and Lovesick, a duo of comparatively tame works about a deep web red room dominatrix. Lily picked up an issue of Doll Parts a year ago, thought it was too disturbing for her tastes and put it back on the shelf. Since that day she hasn't stopped thinking about it. Whenever we see it in a comic book store she asks me once more if she should buy it, before talking herself out of it. It’s haunted her mind as all of these morbid stories seem to; she knows she can't handle them but she really, really wishes she could.

I ended up grabbing Lychee Light Club from Willow's shelf. This one I don’t have a story for. No idea what it's about, I've avoided spoilers. Somebody told me I'd like it. And unlike some context-less recommendations it's stuck in my head thanks to the name. Fuckin love lychees. With that I went to the counter. Two women (fems, at least) stood behind it. I don’t know both of them were trans, but they were both queer for sure. Lily smiled to me in the store just before she retired to the witch room, “I've seen more trans people in the last thirty minutes than I have in my entire life, and I'm not getting any weird stares”.

One of them had this really nice muted yellow skirt on. She saw the copy of the new The Darkness comic I'd picked up for Lily and gave me the rundown about the original series. It was a Witchblade spinoff, which I didn't know, and it was passed between writers because the Witchblade guy was too busy with that series. The reboot was all him. For now. Who knows what the future holds with this stuff though? The younger girl next to her said she only knew about the Darkness video game, which is exactly where Lily and I were until the reboot came out. That same woman also complimented my Lychee and Welcome Back Alice books so I presume she's Willow? And that makes me feel like I shoulda grabbed the fuckin Metamorphosis book, cause if she's promoting it I surely shouldn't have felt embarrassed at all to buy it from her.

Eh, water under the bridge. They did another thing I wish every comic shop would do, too: bagged and boarded all my comics for me. God, that rocks. On the way out a woman stopped me and asked if I worked here. I said no. Something in the back of my head said “I wish”. Would love to make enough off writing that I could afford to work at a comic store. God, imagine if I could talk about comics all day instead of the fucking store credit card. Regardless of my employment status, she asked me what manga I would recommend.

“What kinda stories do you like in general?”

“I like sci-fi and mysteries. Crime stories. No romance, none of that.”

“Like hard sci-fi?”

“Mhm.”

“Not much of that in manga but I really liked the first bit of Planetes. I've heard the rest of it is good. As for crime stories, I think Don't Call It Mystery is one of the best manga out right now. It's got great characters and super satisfying mysteries. I'd ask other people, my taste is just my taste of course, but I think either of those would be a good starting point.”

I really do hope she likes those series if she reads ‘em. And I gotta get back to Planetes! And I really shoulda asked if Willow's got like, a blog or something. Queer women talking about fucked up art is basically the only thing I go online for these days. Can never have too much of that.

Right before I checked out, Lily and my mom left to check out a dispensary down the road. Like, a full-on legal dispensary, not just a smoke shop with delta gummies. From what I heard security was tight and the products were good. And the products were consumed in their entirety within the state of Illinois. We had none left by the time we returned home.

Mom, ever the world's most tourist-ass tourist, wanted to take a picture. They made her delete it before leaving. And then I showed her how to extract pictures from her camera roll, just so I could sate my curiosity. It kinda just looks like a normal weed store, down to those wooly mossy hexagons they all have on the walls. They did have a potted plant with a little Spaceman Spiff cutout in it, which was pretty cool. 

I met up with the girls while dad went to grab the car. This was following a weird miscommunication where I couldn't figure out whether they were still in the dispensary or not, and I kept going in and out which pissed off the security guard. I showed mom the Adventures of Skooks “boy am I glad we're out here and he's in there and we're out here and he's out here and we're in there” clip to explain why I kept saying that.

Lily and mom started talking about why Lily started using weed. She's bad at handling stress, she said. That's a pretty conservative way of describing clinical anxiety. Mom replied, “I don't think you're bad at handling anything. I think you two are young and going through stuff everyone goes through. And you're so emotional now because you’ve got estrogen in your body. That's why women are so hysterical. You get used to it when you're older. Being a mom forced me to toughen up.”

I joked, “maybe I should try that.”

Lily and my mom both said, “I think you'd be a great mom.”

After that we drove out of what I'm pretty sure was the Swedish part of the city, judging from the Swedish flag water tower. Next stop our hotel, the City Suites on Belmont, just down the road from the Annoyance. My parents always stay there when they visit Chicago, and it didn't take long to figure out why. It's charmingly old-fashioned. The elevator is small and rickety. They have framed pictures on the walls of those skyscrapers from that Wilco album edited to look exactly like the album art. Our room was hot when we walked in. Admittedly, it was a warm day for early March, but it was sweltering in that room. We quickly uncovered that all three of the old radiators had been left on. That's probably a fire hazard; it also kinda fuckin rocks. The bathroom floor was uneven, bordering on concave, with wine-red tiles. Love that. Our room even came with a scenic view of the fire escape, probably a good thing what with the radiators.

We walked down to the corner store just before the show, scrounged up some ice cream and THC sodas and got ready. By which I mean Lily and my dad got high together and me and mom were giggling along too hard to play chaperone. I showed dad the Skooks clip too while he was stoned, he thought it was great. Mom helped Lily do her makeup. Lily’s done like, lipstick and some basic stuff before but tonight mom gave her the full treatment. She used - I don’t know what it’s called, bare with me - this matte flesh-tone powder to conceal some of the flush in Lily’s cheeks, and to make her skin smoother in the niches it’s hard to shave. She also imparted some advice on Lily from the perspective of a cis woman with q fuzzy face. And put on some eye shadow, told her how to avoid making it gaudy. It’s been weird and satisfying to watch my mom turn into such an enthusiastic ally.

On the walk to the Annoyance we passed under some scaffolding framing an empty lot. Hm, this feels familiar. Oh shit, is that where that bookstore used to be? In a sense it actually did disappear the moment I looked away from it! I was right! The proprietor, whom it must be assumed is undead, is surely off haunting some other dilapidated pasture by now. I wonder whereabouts it might be, and how many of the ghastly, bodiless souls of ancient political cartoons he's managed to sneak onto the walls.

The Annoyance isn't far from that empty lot. It's also not much more to look at. One of those places that crams a ton into a tight space. It's got a cool sign out front, a big hunk of classic neon tubes. Just below that is the door into a barren ground level. To the right, stairs leading up to the Annoyance and down to an unlabeled black door. A little sign post by the elevator was shilling something called the Lipstick Lounge… maybe that was down there? I saw a couple people coming and going, it's definitely occupied. By what, I couldn't tell you. I think the world is more fun when you let it keep a few cards to its chest.

We went up the elevator, presented our tickets and ordered a round of Cokes, or maybe RC. I think they had RC on tap, yeah. Late as we were the only seat left was this nice couch in the corner. Lily and I took a seat together, enjoying our view of an overburdened twig of a telephone pole. Placards around the bar area implored patrons to donate to Minnesota immigrant funds. I get the feeling Chicago is busy enough with its own ICE problems, but it’s cool to see beleaguered communities standing together. There’s been a little more of that lately. Divide and conquer isn’t working so well, I think, now that the ‘conquer’ has been made so flagrant.

Just like that it was showtime. The Annoyance’s theater is a mid-sized stage in a room behind the bar, not big enough for most plays but too big for a lot of small-stage shows. Christian was telling me about that after the show, how the biggest logistical problem with taking the show on tour was just finding other places with the right size stage. I meant to ask him more about the writing process. I’ve only ever written prose. Writing with resource limitations (space restraints, effects budget, hardware) in mind is something that’s always fascinated me. He pulled it off well, too; the fifteen-odd cast members filled the stage effortlessly.

I don’t want to call the show top-heavy, because the second half is a riot. But one of my favorite jokes and most of my favorite songs were right up front. The plot is, in short, that Christian’s character is a recent transfer to a high school where football matters more than anything. Eternal benchwarmer Benji introduces himself and starts inspecting the unnamed new guy. He says, “too ugly for theater, but too pretty to fully develop your frontal lobe after high school - you must be trying out for the football team!” I kinda hate that the like, single clean joke is my favorite. It goes against everything the play stands for, and frankly a lot of what I stand for as a fan of edgy, transgressive art. But it’s funny as hell, right? Just a good well-observed bit of characterization for both guys.

Oh, and on the topic of dirty humor - it’s not as dirty as I expected, actually. The humor is like, one of the good episodes of American Dad? I wish it’d gone a little further but at the same time, there are limits especially when it’s real humans and they have to perform the show on repeat for months at a time. People have boundaries. It strikes a good balance and, hey, it was funny. That’s all you can ask of a comedy.

I’m glad we saw closing night, everyone had perfected their jokes. The “where are they now” section at the end was immaculate. The nameless hero goes on to become Jeffery Epstein, Benji gets a job as the head of the ATF. All the physical comedy was mastered down to a science; a lot of the training montage bits turn into awkward dry-humping and my favorite character, the poor theater kid turned MVP who lugs a refrigerator in place of a backpack (he lives in the junkyard, it’s a long story) managed some good bits with his cardboard fridge. 

I think a lot of Seabass’ lines were improv, too. That’s my other favorite character. Played by a woman in drag, Seabass (they call him that ‘cause he’s swimmin’ in pussy. See also Frankie Mermaid from the Velocipastor. I wonder if Seabass is a reference to Velocipastor, if they’re both referencing something else I’m not familiar with, or if it’s a case of convergent evolution) is dressing as her brother to fill in for him after he went missing. Her bit is straightforward, the guys will be talking and she interjects with some impressively awkward dudebro shit to try and fit in. The “explaining where the clit is” and “maybe guys should talk about their feelings more - uhh I mean I FUCK BITCHES AM I RIGHT FELLAS” bits are both killer.

Oh, there was also an understudy playing the PTA mom that night. She owned that role, I was shocked to learn she was filling in. The Southern passive-aggression was on point and her rapid shuffle-walk is the best bit of physical comedy in the show. She’s one of two real stand-out fill-ins, from what I understand. A prior show featured a substitute kicker. The kicker’s story is that he has PTSD after killing the former quarterback. His main actor does all these Shakespearean monologues lamenting his guilt. The lights dim, he’s in the spotlight, it’s all very dramatic. One night Christian’s roommate filled in for him, cut all the Shakespeare shit and instead reveled in murder. The spotlight fell and he shouted “I’m crazy, I killed him dead, I’ll do it again!”. Which I imagine derailed the story a little but who cares, that’s great.

So’s the music. Introducing the premise is the catchy Game of Inches - “it’s a ga-a-ame of inches, a ga-a-ame of inches/life’s a game of inches, football is our life, and everyone could use another inch!” accompanied by the universal “small penis” gesture. Editing this halfway through June it’s still in my fucking head. Rock Hard D, which communicates the need for a solid defence through air-humping, seems to be the fan favorite and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree if not for Benji’s Next Man Up. It’s an unironically emotional number, the guy puts his heart into it. I dunno, I really empathize with guys like him. Lifelong losers, comically incompetent benchwarmers desperate to prove themselves. The joke about him having to talk himself through tying his shoes probably did a lot to endear him to me; I still don’t know how to tie a set of bunny-ears. Lily’s been teaching me. I almost got it the other night! How do people do that every day, man? You gotta do so much at the same time with both of your hands. Why did we decide this was better than slip-on shoes? Fuck, I'll take some wooden clogs. 

Anyway yeah I liked the show. He’s talking about touring in the fall, and I hear the PAC in Appleton has an appropriately-sized stage. I imagine most of my dozen-odd readers are Wisconsinites given how regionally specific some of my writing is… if so, come on down! The show’s a good time. Glad I got to see it, especially as in general I’ve been way more interested in live performance lately. It’s the one kind of art left where AI has no foothold. 

Fitting, cause it’s the oldest form of storytelling. From the moment man invented language he was killing animals just to create costumes and props. Back then maybe it was more practical; it was religion or cautionary tales, not a comedy about a game (which is like 3 layers of human imagination deep; games and comedy are both things with no purpose in nature. We only invented them after we had our basic needs met. It’s the kinda thing that makes me question how people can believe we don’t have free will - if we were creatures of instincts we woulda never invented comedy, music or football, let alone written a comedy musical about football). But the point still stands - this is an ancient and deeply human practice and a place where we still Don’t Serve Your Kind. It feels good.

The strangest and most human detail of them all: while chatting with Christian in the bar he asked if we were staying for his roommates’ one-night-only “very weird” show, Conner & Brady Summon a Demon. We declined on the basis that the chairs sucked and our backs all hurt. I offered to pitch in ten bucks to get the place some new chairs, and he told me apparently there were studies that proved you laughed more when you were a little uncomfortable. I wish I’d asked for a source. And I wish I'd brought a tylenol cause this show sounds great. Check out the description: Conner & Brady have been friends for over a decade, but they have never summoned a demon together. This one night only variety seance will be multiple real attempts to reach the deceased. They will try different methods and will have some help. But the ultimate goal and point of the show is to really summon a demonic presence to preside over the Annoyance Theatre for all of eternity.

We stopped at a bar on the way home where I took time to appreciate one of the world’s other untouched bastions of humanity: bathroom graffiti. Etched into the wall with a key or a boxcutter was the phrase FUCK TRUMP FUCK ICE FUCK THE PACKERS. See what I mean? A robot could never come up with such a glorious distillation of this city’s soul.

The next day we had all to ourselves. We communed on the couch after dad folded it back up (he has a Thing for sleeping on couches, fold-out or otherwise, even and especially when better options exist). Lily was tired, she wanted an easy day in. Dad and I, meanwhile, had an itinerary of stuff we’d found on Google Maps over the past few weeks. All centered around Books4cause, a place Colin sent me a Tiktok video about without even knowing we were going to Chicago. It’s Chicago’s only free bookstore, apparently. For no money at all you can yoink a limited number of books from the shelves daily. They take unsolicited donations and sell a percentage of donated items online (presumably anything particularly collectible?) to pay rent. I wonder what that side of the operation looks like. I’ve really never heard of anything like this before.

The library I used to volunteer at has a “Friends of the Neenah Public Library Book Sale” cart where donated books can be purchased for a dollar, but that’s different. The public library gets government funding, probably a fair few private donations, they make plenty from late fees (I should know, I’ve racked up plenty!) and they’re more transparent about the sales side of things. Like I said, you gotta assume from what's in the store that they toss most valuable donations onto eBay. Desirable books are present, though limited to tattered mass-market copies (found a Graham Greene grandpa never read, can't wait to give that a go). The comic section is about two plastic pails of stuff that might not even make it to the dollar bin at a comic shop. Still found some nice stuff. I got a pamphlet of Poe's House of Usher illustrated by Richard Corben and a chewed-up copy of the American Flagg Blizzard of ‘32 issue. Read it during the last big blizzard later in March. Neither of these are bad comics, in fact Corben illustrating Poe is awesome. They're also comics that are probably worth less than their cover price.

None of this is meant to disparage Books4cause, I had a great time in the place and I'm sure their work is greatly appreciated especially with public libraries facing a wave of unearned scrutiny (as I said to Jason recently: politicians brainwashing poor people into believing public education was a plot to brainwash poor people is the most disturbingly effective conspiracy I've lived to see). I'm just curious and a little perplexed. The whole attitude of the staff and owners appears to be one of mutual community aid; posters dot the store with slogans like “the future is mutual aid”. That's not a common mindset where I'm from, certainly not mainstream enough to prop up an entire storefront. Even if it's not genuine, if this insanely unprofitable-looking business is somehow a grift, it's not a mindset you could even grift off of in the Fox Valley. So like, godspeed to this weird-ass store.

Books4cause was, we'd ascertained online, part of what was once the Polish section of Chicago. Streets are named for famous Polacks and Polish-owned businesses abound. Some Hispanics are moving in too, dad pointed out. I said, “we were basically the original Mexicans after all”. He said, “yeah, the Italians, the Irish, the Polish, then the Mexicans. All running from something…” then the light turned green and he lost his voice in traffic. The energy of this area is ramshackle as you might have guessed from a quarter perpetually run by underdogs. Not sketchy, necessarily, just scuzzy in that hasn't-been-gentrified way; the way even a lot of the “nice” parts of Milwaukee still look. There's not as much of that over on Belmont. It was sorely missed.

We visited a Polish deli where the signage was in Polish, the employees spoke Polish and a rack up front was stocked with Polish-language magazines and papers. The one woman who spoke English had a strong accent. It made me wonder how many of Chicago's Poles are still English-second-language. I'm only like fourth or third generation, grandpa was a proud Polack. I don't think he knew much Polish, and the only words I know are the swears. Which gets you pretty far with most Poles, in my experience, but y'know… I'd like to know more. 

I hate how efficiently the American machine strips anyone who isn't an English-speaking Western European of their culture. Less than a hundred years after my family got here I have an English-sounding name and the only remnants of my family's culture exist in my cooking - I come from a long line of men who excel in the kitchen. Aside from not necessarily being a man, I like to think I've done well in carrying that tradition on. 

I've noticed a lot of men slightly younger than me have whiplashed around to a view of masculinity that sees cooking as feminine and emasculating. All I gotta say to that is: check out the forearms on any motherfucker who uses a cutting board regularly. But seriously, fellas, knowing how to take care of yourself is always masculine as fuck and it makes you more attractive to women. If you can't make, say, five decent meals on your own stop reading and learn to do that. Better yourself. Never let any asshole convince you that self-reliance is weakness.

Back to little Poland: marginalization works differently for different people. Specifically, it works in a weird way for minority whites. If you're black or Asian you're expected to remain within your particular cultural box. Black people have to like rap music, Asians have to eat rice, otherwise your people think you're too white and, though you might gain some social standing, many white people will also look you over in favor of more ‘exotic’ peers. Meanwhile white minorities are expected not to behave within the bounds of their culture. 

There's kind of a cultural cringe surrounding any whiteness that extends beyond the English-descended culture of the American elites. Especially now that many white cultures have been partly co-opted by racists (“Pagan” is practically a dogwhistle and the less I say about terms like “Roman” or “Nordic” the better). At the same time your average working-class Caucasian is being priced out of many signifiers of White Americana (read: Consumer Culture), leaving us, effectively, either house-poor or cultureless. No wonder so many of us fill in the blanks with Qanon and RFK. This is all a long-winded way of saying I assume the days of Polish-speaking establishments are numbered, and I will forever cherish that I got a chance to visit one.

Helps that the food was bomb. We didn't get any fresh meat, not having a cooler on hand. Poked around a lot at the perishables, at least. Off from the deli/import side of the store was a room carrying standard produce, canned goods and other such mundane grocery fare. This place obviously means a lot to a lot of people, a lot of Poles who feel more comfortable in a small, Polish-speaking grocer. At the back of that room, floating in a couple old wooden barrels (concealing modern plastic barrels), were picked fish, vegetables and sauerkraut (which I now know is called kapusta kiszona). Dad said, “man, grandpa would've loved that!”.

We returned to the main room and poked our heads around the imported candies. Lots of alcohol-filled chocolates. I like booze candy when it's done right. Glorioso's in Milwaukee carried these amazing Italian liquor hard candies until around 2025, floral and sugary with alcohol as a comfortably warm undercurrent. I should see about ordering them online some time (I have since discovered that the ones I liked were from the brand Cedrinca, and they’re sold out everywhere. That sucks so fucking bad man). 

Alcohol filling in chocolate is usually too boozy for me, though, so I gave it a pass. Instead I walked out with a bag of Krówki Milanowskie milky fudges (more like a light, crumbly caramel than a fudge), these amazing chocolate-covered orange jelly discs that I can't for the life of me remember the name of, and two bottles of Tymbark cherry-apple juice. It tastes strongly of cherry for one sip, then the next sip is all apple. Whenever I looked down at the bottle I half-expected to see layers of separated liquids like that old school science experiment with all the different oils. Everything was good and, best of all, nobody else thought so. My old man-ish taste in candy works wonders when I've got company.

While I was throwing back caramels dad started patting himself down. “Where the hell is my phone?” We retraced our steps and came back empty-handed. Alright, so it's with the Uber driver. Mom and him share an email, she might be able to contact the guy. Meanwhile, I had to download the app to get us a ride home. Two blocks from Books4cause, well after I'd told her we were just gonna cut our losses and Uber back to the hotel, mom texted us, “I have him on the phone, he's coming to pick you up”.

Long story short, he could hardly speak English and he had bills to pay. Trying to even explain to him that we could meet him at the hotel was an uphill battle, to say nothing of convincing him to actually show up. I think he thought mom was accusing him of stealing the phone? She has that sorta tone of voice.

While we were standing outside waiting for him, we observed a cavalcade of communists congregating among commuters by the train station. Like, the official Communist Party, I’m pretty sure, out in the open handing pamphlets to a surprisingly receptive public. I wonder how many votes they get in Chicago?

Hm, looking on Wikipedia Chicago's electoral history looks exactly as fucking boring as you'd expect. About 80% Democrat, 10% Republican, give or take a couple percentage points with about 2% to spare for independents. Nearly 5% independent in 2016, of course, because everyone was sick of both parties back then.

I sure felt sick of the Democrats now that I had the time to take in my surroundings. I looked up at the spikes obsessively installed on every surface more than a couple feet off the ground. Nearsightedness turned them into a fuzzy outline, a coat of fur, surrounding the infrastructure. At the station's threshold my eyes met a spike-topped camera. We stared at each other a little while. It told me what I needed to remember: this is still a police state. It kept pigeons in line up top and people down below. What an efficient piece of shit. No matter what the city's leaders like to tout, no matter which of the establishment's members or mechanisms they pretend to be against, they still piss on everything that belongs to them like all the world's political animals. They're the same bastard with a friendlier face. 

 So let's bring back hating everyone with power. Enough of this hyper-partisan shit, let's go back to raging equally against the entire machine. Put your bodies upon all the apparatus and make it stop. I still can't believe a fucking Linkin Park song sampled that speech. That album is full of bizarre sample pulls, actually. For instance, it's the reason a lot of clips of the famous Oppenheimer “I am become death” quote on YouTube get hit with copyright strikes.

To recall a phrase I uttered nearly two years ago, when I barely knew how to write a personal essay: this is still what a dying country looks like.

At least we've got comics. Chicago Comics was still as great as I remembered. They might even be cooler (not in terms of temperature, the floor was still scaldning). Against one wall, standing in front of some themed shortboxes, they've got this sculpture that reads as a suit of armor if you're not looking close. The body and head are metal, there are faucets in place of breasts and a rusted-out gearbox over one eye. A floor drain acts as the belt buckle to a miniskirt made of keys, which barely covers two legs made of magazine clippings and a torn piece of flexible duct.

I observed that whilst perusing their longbox cabinets, which unfortunately didn’t net me many white whales. One random middle issue of Peach Momoko's Demon Wars still eludes me, somehow, and Age of Reptiles was a no-show. Continually bitter at a lack of Kabuki, because a dollar-bin pull of The Alchemy #2 is my favorite single issue I’ve read all year. Just a conversation between two women but the dialogue is given so much care and the art is so damn stylish! I gotta know more! And a great letters page, too, a rarity in the 2000s. Since then all I’ve turned up is an early one-shot I didn’t much care for, all action with little style or substance. This series is popular enough for one of those fat hardcover omnibus volumes, why can’t I find the back-issues?

I stumbled into the first issue of Vortex sci-fi series Kelvin Mace, which I've been curious about. It's fine, very much a punkish b&w comic of its era. The introductory and backmatter material from creators Ty Templeton and Klaus Schönefeld are charming in that edgy 80s way. They talk shit about each other as much as they talk about the comic, it's great. Looking it up, issue 2 sounds awesome. It's entirely by Schönefeld, doesn't resolve the first issue's cliffhanger and it's full-color with Moebius-ish art. It was also one of the last things he created before dying of a heart attack at twenty-four. The man died younger than me, with more talent in one bone than I have in my whole body, and still nobody's heard of him ‘cause he never got to branch out past the ill-fated Vortex. What a travesty. I should check out the Stig's Inferno series he and Templeton did at Eclipse.

Among the pricey, collectible comics they had lined up above the longboxes were an old Howard the Duck fanzine and an issue of the Two Live Crew comic. The latter was published by Fantagraphics’ Eros division, which was mostly but not entirely used to publish (really bad) porn. I remain irascibly curious as to how and why the rap group Two Live Crew worked on a porn comic. I mean, I know Fantagraphics back then was a super edgy underground publisher and Two Live Crew traded in aggression and shock value, but like, it should be assumed that a comic publisher reaches a different kind of counterculture than a rap group, right? God, I should've bought that. I gotta know!

Other than pamphlets, I bought a cheap-o copy of modern Fantagraphics graphic novel Mr. Lightbulb. It's thick as fuck, the art is great and the creator's a Pole with a nice scratchy Slav-jank sheen to his art, but the price tag pushed me away. Also picked up the new Kago Brain Damage collection, shelved just under a like 800-page book called The History of Hentai Manga. They're very unashamed of the sexual side of comics in this store, and good on them. I mean, this is a medium whose biggest stars all dress in tight latex, whose first and most iconic female lead fights by tying you up with a rope that forces you to submit to her will. Off the top of my head, at least Ditko did actual porn comics. 

Whether or not the big corporations who own the IP want to admit it, sex and kink is the foundation of this art form. Every year DC and Marvel bring out these chaste, pandering Pride Month books and every year I look back at the aggressively homoerotic cover art of the Reagan years, wondering where we went wrong. On that note, the LGBT shelf prominently displayed a couple novels from Gretchen Felker-Martin, whom you may recall as the trans woman whose Red Hood book was shot down last-minute over a comment about Charlie Kirk. Remember when people were getting fired and fucking arrested over that guy? Most people didn't know who he was until he died, I never heard a positive word even from the Republicans in my life. The government was never subtle about the fact they sacrificed him to force even greater levels of draconian surveillance through congress, and to serve as a sloppy distraction from the pedocracy's Epstein problem (didn't Kirk even say he feared GOP backlash for not budging on the Epstein angle? Or am I misremembering him as cooler than he actually was?). The Twin Towers of our times in every way but the most important one: picking a target that's equally inoffensive to all political demographics.

Well, but that’s what it all comes down to, ain't it? The half-assed Pride Month comics. The toning down of any hint of sexuality while refusing to change the actually objectionable bits of comic book sexuality or the sexism still rooted in the culture and industry. These companies are run by shareholders now. The same shareholders who sell all those cameras and put all that money into AI surveillance networks. Censorship and surveillance are the same thing.

On the surface, hey, maybe it seems like things are getting better. The big companies are still doing Pride Month books, after all. We’re still here, still a group it’s politically safe to pander to. Here's the thing: corporations are only doing queer stories because we're an established consumer demographic. They created the internet without fully realizing how unfettered its early years would be, and that happy accident allowed the rapid mainstreaming of a million niche forms of expression. Queerness was one of many byproducts. Now they're doing their best to profit from that expression but if you look at how their less visible tendrils are moving, you'll see a bunch of panicked executives and politicians trying to force a genie back in its bottle. 

The whole notion of a Globalist Elite is kinda hilarious to me, cause the goal of politicians in this century has always been to bring the monoculture back. One nation under the almighty dollar is easier to profit from. See also: those bits in the Epstein Files about how sexy trans people are. The overwhelming implication is that the current anti-trans movement was spurned on by efforts to further marginalize trans people, forcing more of them into sex work and thus into the clutches of the sex traffickers who run our government. The goal is to censor us into marginalization so we have no other option but the sex trade operated by the billionaire rape cult. You gotta remember they don't want to ban homosexuality, gender diversity, porn, drugs, any of it. The endgame is a monopoly on their abuse. They want to be the only ones with the power to rape us and sell us poison. They’ve convinced generations of conservatives that selling their kids to the rape machine is a form of protection against an imagined Big Faggot. And really “rape machine” is an understatement; the Epstein Files allude to everything from cannibalism to forced gender transition to Most Dangerous Game-style human hunting… Anything they've ever accused my people of, they've been proliferating this whole time. Sleek, corporate blood libel.

Shit, this wasn't meant to be a serious one. I was talking about comics a paragraph or two ago. Surveillance states suck and the human soul is a beautiful thing being crushed under American state capitalism. Hm, speaking of surveillance states I picked issue 1 of Is Ted OK? off the new indies rack. It looked okay when I was in the store, the art was solid and the writing didn't seem too bad. Some funny jabs at current affairs in there, like an ad urging parents to enlist their unborn children into the military. That's good shit, presented well through scratchy lines and subtle colors. What the hell, it's a couple bucks. Little did I know I'd just stumbled into my favorite comic of the year. I mean, I've only read up to issue 2 of 6 thus far, but god damn did Dave Chisholm ever put together an incredible opening volley (checking in from June: it kinda loses something starting in issue 3 once it develops an actual story but it’s still really great). The premise in short: Sarah works for the, ah, unsubtly named Ayn-Styne Corporation. I mean, really, invoking Ayn Rand within a soundalike for a historically important scientist? You know from page one exactly what you’re getting.

Sarah's job is monitoring problem employee Ted through the company's internal camera networks. Ted is a paranoid crackpot. He rants to himself, wanders around his workplace, might be suicidal. The corporate overlords brush off what Sarah sees as significant warning signs, prompting her to begin stalking him in her downtime. This leads to her causing his car to crash, only for him to turn up for work without a scratch on him. Things get stranger from there. It's fucking great. Apparently Chisholm started work on it in 2021 but aside from the effort on display it's not obvious. This comic is deeply contemporary and full of the kind of earnest, human soul the megacorporations are desperate to eradicate. Give it a look.

We left as the sun set. Lily pointed me to a fat pigeon bobbing around a pothole. It hardly reacted to me it until I was dangerously close… though I suppose the only predators they have here are cars and spikes. Maybe the El, too? Does that thing run fast enough to hit pigeons? Lily and I shot these questions back and forth while marveling at the sheer mass of the bird in front of us. I'm serious, it was approaching chicken sized. An old, sharp-dressed man standing at the lip of an alley laughed the knowing sort of laugh that comes to city residents with age. It says “I know you’re not from here” with undertones of “sometimes I miss being you, but not really.”. 

I did a double take passing a light post by the empty lot. “Hey, hold on, I know that album cover!”

“Hm?” Lily almost stumbled into me.

“That’s Stage Four by Touche Amore. I listened to it like every day the month grandpa died.”

“Oh, like, stage four cancer?”

“Yeah, it's like… it's a hardcore punk band. The singer's mom had cancer, and she died while he was performing. He wrote an album about it, it ended up being their big break-out thing. I can't imagine how bad that'd fuck you up. Like, I'm sure it's awesome that you have this artistic tribute to her that so many people love, that so many people you've never met know she existed. And you can pay your bills too, which is more than you can say about most hardcore groups. But like, the rest of your career you're the guy whose mom died, and you gotta keep singing about it.”

“It says they're playing the whole album here next month for the tenth anniversary.”

“See what I fuckin’ mean?”

“Would you want to see them?”

“God, that'd be great. But we can hardly afford one trip down here, and fuck knows if I can swing the vacation.”

“Would that be a good birthday present for you?”

“Oh- yeah, yeah, that would rock.” And we'll come back to that. The poster was sharing real estate with local shows, and I guess I felt bad seeing this decently popular Californian band here outcompeting the indigenous species. For my own peace of mind, so I don't feel like an asshole, here's a short list of band names I can make out on the blurry photos I took of a couple eye-catching posters: 

• The Head Caution

• Wrex

• Guns&Ammunition

• Carnivore Mommy

• Kozmic Kicks

• Routine Fuss

• Lilac Lament

• Unvirgin Mary

• andDJs Deathshead and Viscera Spit. 

Those last four (accompanied by a third band whose name I couldn't decipher, fuck I wish I'd taken better photos) were all performing together at an event called RELEASE THE BATS. This was being hosted at a venue called Not Not (ask a goth for address!). I googled a bit and couldn't find the address online. Good on the Chicago goths for keeping so tight-lipped, man, I didn't know shit like that was still possible in the internet age. I guess when you're in a city full of millions obscurity ain't so hard to fathom.

Which has been on my mind lately. You catch so many context-less fragments of conversation just walking down the street here. Restaurants, stores, everything is close-quarters. You’re forced into other peoples’ lives by default. Nothing short of a Kanye-sized ego could make you feel like Chicago's main character. Back home it’s easy to feel differently. When you’re filling up your tank at a small-town gas station you might be doing the most important and interesting thing anyone is doing there. Big cities make you check yourself. In a history where even Al goddamn Capone only gets a chapter or two, you'd be lucky to be a footnote. 

I used to find that disconcerting. It's hard to remember why. Coming from a metropolitan area with a total population that’s just barely six digits, I suppose confronting the scope of the world made me feel inhuman. To leave a place where it seemed like most people knew me or my family in some capacity felt unnatural. Living isolated in small towns cultivates a snowflake mentality, which at one point I draped over myself like a weighted blanket. Then I went and lived some life. Spent four years flunking out of high school and four years functionally unemployed. Kept bumping into people who remembered things I wish they didn’t. Small towns never let you escape your past. As I tried to redefine who I was, comfortable familiarity turned into frustration whenever somebody told me he recognized me from the one class we took together in seventh grade.

The anonymity of big cities is humanizing to me now. I felt more individual than ever, to be reminded that I exist alongside billions just as individual as myself. Every one of these people is doing their own thing. Lily felt more respected and comfortable as a trans person, and the people who might not have fucked with her had a million other people to contend with. She didn’t get stares like she does up here. In our time down there we became butterflies sans hurricane.

That’s still hard even to my adult brain, sometimes. I want to feel I’ve made a difference, and in small towns you can get that feeling so easily. Go to some local mom and pop shop any day but the weekend, you mighta just put them in the black for the day. You’ll probably be the only person in there, you’ll get the full attention that comes with that. You can help organize events in your community, vote in local elections that directly affect you and come down to one or two voters. You can start a little garden and share the harvest. You could, without trying very hard, wind up on the front page of a local paper. What the hell would I have to do to make the news in Chicago?

I think I’m still too caught up in that pop-culture hero mindset, the Luke Skywalker mentality. The idea that differences must be made by one person. A city is a big-ass creature powered by millions of human beings working together. You could never build a skyscraper or even an unimpressive slouch like the Annoyance on your own. Every building is a reminder of what organizing can accomplish. So I guess at the end of the day even this less glamorous aspect is probably good for me to be thinking about.

People have spilled a lot of ink and moralized to hell and back about how out of touch city folk are with nature. I can't say I entirely disagree; Chicago needs more trees. But in a weird way I think the way cities work is closer to nature, or at least to what it might have felt like to live in a tribe. Living on top of people you’d never talk to otherwise, existing together in a group that extends beyond family and close friends. With how fucking paranoid and isolated the big social media corporations have abused people into becoming, having that kind of experience is more important than ever. 

And I know that's romantic, I know that’s a sunny view of this place, a tourist’s perspective. The point of view of somebody who’s never been to the south side. I’m sure Chicago's earned Chiraq. Violence aside, when you're in a particularly bad way, these same facets of the place can be oppressive. It’s easy to feel lost and alienated. Nobody knows you when you’re down and out, doubly so when you’re in a city where everyone already has a billion people to keep track of. It’s hard to help the homeless when you’re juggling jobs to keep from joining them. The government would rather spend money making their lives worse in the hopes they freeze to death. But I dunno. A feeling being romantic, naive and conditional doesn't stop it from being true or worthwhile, does it?

At A Thrift Store, While I'm Browsing Comics

Lily and mom hit the weed store down the road from the hotel, which was a lot less discrete than the actual dispensary. Cheaper, too. Still, they only purchased enough to entertain themselves within this legal state. Who could even begin to fathom breaking this country's weird-ass drug laws? I mean, who can even fathom how the fuck our weed laws work to begin with? You practically have to have a law degree just to get high in peace, and you gotta be a fuckin biochemist to be trans. No wonder those bastards spend so much time bitchin about public education.

Lily and mom are in a thrift store now, I'm not sure of the name and I'm on work wi-fi so I can't be fucked to Google maps it. Mom is egging Lily into buying a top she'd look cute in. The man at the register, speaking in the gayest voice you can imagine, compliments Lily's Hazbin Hotel hoodie. She smiles, turns around and gets a compliment from a trans woman. The best bit of her high is kicking in now, she's finally over her discomfort and alienation at this big fucked-up rats nest we call a city. She turns to mom, grinning, and says, “this is our people!”

8 P.M. Ukai Sushi & Ramen

I let Lily choose where we ate Sunday, because she’d mentioned wanting to try one of the Asian joints near the hotel and I’d passed a few that looked cool on the way back from the Polish joint. She took a peek at Google Maps and landed on the same one I would’ve probably chosen, Ukai Sushi and Ramen. Neither one of us had had non-instant ramen before, both of us are lame fucking weebs who’d always wanted to try. No time like the present!

The communists had vacated the train station, unfortunately. Shame, I wanted to sample their literature. Dad said he’d taken a pamphlet from a protester the last time he was in Chicago, and he was disappointed when he got home and realized he’d lost it. The guy who handed it to him was so happy to spread whatever message it conveyed. Dude really cared. I hope dad finds his pamphlet some day. Surely it’s got more heart than your average propaganda.

Conversation got heavy over dinner as it usually does when my parents are involved. I forget how it started. I remember Lily saying, “Before I met Max, I was happy to waste away in West Virginia. They saved my life.” She turned to me, “I really mean that.”

“We’re all happy you didn’t.” Mom said between bites of chicken. “This chicken is so much better. It’s so sad when young people kill themselves. They don’t even know what their lives will be like yet, their brains aren’t even developed.”

I said, “Jake died ten years ago this year, right?”

Dad nodded. “He would've been thirty this summer.” The day Jake shot himself was the first time I ever saw dad cry. His cheeks were pale red and soaked, voice was so high I didn’t know until I looked at him if he was laughing or crying. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a man cry like that.

“Losing a sibling is terrible.” Mom said, focused intently on her curry.

“I remember your sister’s funeral.” I told her. “It’s one of my first memories. I looked down at her in the coffin and I thought, ‘that’s not her’. It kinda… it hit me.”

“Do you remember her before that?” Mom asked.

“Yeah. A little. I remember her house. She had that lighthouse night light.”

“My uncle died- Max, have I told you that story?” Lily asked. “You can have the rest of my ramen if you want.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m full.”

“Okay.”

“My uncle… they thought he killed himself. He was a loner, he just liked riding his ATV. One day he got drunk and took a corner too fast, hit a tree. They thought it might have been suicide at first, but it was probably an accident.”

“I’m sorry. I know you’ve told me he died before but I had no idea it was… Jesus, that’s awful.” I put a hand on her leg. We sat in silence for a moment. I slurped a noodle a little too loud after a losing battle with my chopsticks.

“You know, in Japan slurping noodles is actually viewed really positively.” Lily’s face really comes to life when she gets to talk about this kind of stuff. “Over here it’s considered rude and obnoxious, but a Japanese chef just hears that you’re loving his food.”

I slurped louder. Lily continued. “I could tell you a faux pas we could’ve committed earlier too.” She grabbed her chopsticks and rolled them between her palms. “Doing this with cheap chopsticks gets the splinters off of them. And that makes people mad ‘cause you’re saying they have cheap chopsticks.”

“You really know your stuff.” Dad said. He was done with his sushi. I was most of the way through Lily's ramen bowl, slurping up broth and very purposefully saving a thick, fatty piece of pork stomach for last.

Lily fingered the last of her shrimp tempura and explained, “before I met Max I thought I might want to live in Japan. I was going for an English major or, what’s the thing after major?”

“Masters?”
“I thought I wanted to get a Masters in English. I liked writing a lot back then. And I could go to Japan and teach English.” She sounded so wistful. I wasn’t sure if it was the bittersweet happy memories or the legal weed.

“English teachers over there don’t make much, ya know.” I said. God, I can be obnoxious. “You’d be paying off that degree your whole life.”

“It wouldn’t be about the money. Back then my choices were be miserable in West Virginia or go somewhere else where I could maybe be happy.” She said. “Do you want my last tempura?”

“Nah. I’m, uh, really startin’ to feel the two bowls of fatty ramen.” I laughed. “They’re about ready to close ‘er down, anyway. Guess that’s a sign.”

10 A.M. Graham Crackers Comics

I woke up early, not long after dad, and couldn't get back to sleep. He said “there's another comic shop by the parking garage, a Graham Crackers”. I spent my morning packing, letting mom and Lily sleep in until checkout time. While they checked out and dad grabbed the car, I headed over to Graham Crackers. It's a chain in the Midwest, I've been to a couple and I notice they almost always situate themselves within blocks of a mom-and-pop operation. There's one down the street from Alley Cats, too. The vibe is definitely regional chain-ish, it's got less distinctive flavor than any given individually-owned store. Except, curiously, the one in Madison which has a sizable SF paperback section and a lot of Cthulhu Mythos zines. Their prices aren’t great either, but that's universal in the big city. Gentrification don't pay for itself.

This particular store was the most plainly functional I've seen. Some well-stocked new comics racks and a table of bins in the center. Not exactly inspiring stuff next to Chicago Comics. Didn't find much except an issue of Howard the Duck MAX. I'm only talking about it at all because I liked the clerk. I asked him about Absolute Batman back-issues and got the usual “everyone already snatched em up”, but then he kept on talkin. He said, “Absolute is doing so well. They're making better decisions than Ultimate” - that's the ill-fated Ultimate Marvel imprint from 2024, killed off unceremoniously just two years after its inception.

“God, that Ultimate run was such a bummer. The cancelation felt so last-minute. I mean, they did that one summer crossover event that gave the impression like it'd stick around a bit and then bam!”

“At least Peter Parker got to be married for two years. They'll never do that again.” He sighed, like you might while discussing a real-life friend's divorce.

“God, you're probably right. It sucks cause I just read Hickman only came back cause it was a two-year thing.”

“Cause he got screwed over on X-Men?”

“Yeah. So I'm guessin’ everyone had a two-year plan and then they got into what they were doing so they kinda forgot it was about to get canned. So like, it couldn't have existed without that two year cancellation, but that also killed the vibe.”**

Hope I haven't been prattling on too much about comics in this one. I try to avoid these sorts of “I just watched X movie” rants, they're one of the worst bits of the early Aimless Thoughts. I can't help myself in this case, though. I make a point to hit comic shops when I travel and I happen to have found a ton of exciting stuff lately. It feels fun to let go and rant about whatever I want sometimes, especially after the really heavy political rants earlier in this piece (not to mention Fear and Loathing, which is still weighing on me months after writing it).

April 10, 2026. Back in the City Suites

A month later we were back in the windy city on Lily’s dime. Since the government decided she, a woman with multiple qualifying disabilities, isn't disabled enough to qualify for disability, her parents have been sending her a substantial cut of their social security payments. Which ain't half as much as disability, but it gets us well above paycheck-to-paycheck at least. Even so, we still had to wrangle half the hotel payment out of my mom. It takes a lot to see the world.

Anyone who read Fear and Loathing will be unsurprised to know I enjoyed the drive. Most of the space between Oshkosh and Chicago is rural, and for a couple dozen miles the highway is the same route you'd take to get to Nebraska through Iowa. That's a deeply nostalgic stretch of road for me. Hey, it's also the road I was on the first time I drove the Durango back to Menasha. I think it was also the first highway I ever drove on.

The strangest thing to discover on this drive, after a month spent bracing myself for the scourge that is city driving, was how much worse Milwaukee was than Chicago. The main drag through Milwaukee opens with a death spiral of bridges where half the drivers are drunk and the other half are just plain stupid. Once you get into the city proper you're contending with roads that run straight through the trolley tracks and approximately half of the one-way streets in Wisconsin.

We got to stop at one of those overpass oasi on the way down. Lily had never been to one. She bought me Aunty Anne's pretzels, a favorite snack she hadn't had in years. I failed to win her a crane game plush. We sat and marveled at the cars going by beneath us. I made some middle-aged-man-ish observations about how cool a piece of infrastructure this was, and how I sure am glad we're going south cause the traffic headed north looks awful. Closed things out with an obligatory rant about Illinois gas prices, god, can ya believe the price for regular starts with a four? Yeah I'd kill for those prices now.

Chicago driving was actually pretty chill. It kinda felt like driving in Oshkosh or Green Bay but with more people. Everyone was more sensible than in Milwaukee. Trying to get into the parking garage I had to spin the block a couple times cause the sign you can see from the way I was approaching says EXIT ONLY. Yeah the fucking ENTRANCE ONLY is right next door, it doesn't take a genius to figure that out and hey, I am demonstrably not a genius.

A brief thought before I cut to the chase: the parking garage used license plate-scanning technology to automatically record how long you'd been parked there, which is a pretty cool use of that dystopian Flock bullshit. Maybe regulating the tech enough that only parking garages can use it could be good?

I dressed in my favorite work shirt, a comfy plain black button-up. I had it all the way to the collar, as at work, then questioned myself. Why the hell should I be so civilized in this place, so far from home, so far from anyone who expects me to be Better Than That? My cousin Jake was in front of me, suddenly. Sitting in the bleachers of a football stadium at some fucking terrible school at the Wisconsin-Illinois border. We were there to see his brothers play. Less than two months down the road, he was gonna shoot himself. We never talked again. I had a button-up on then, too; top button undone, collar popped. Out of laziness more than any fashion statement, mind you.

Jake flashed this shit-eating grin and said, “you look like a pimp!”. He explained himself as he brought my collar down to size and buttoned it all the way. You never remember stuff like that, do you? When someone dies you never stop to recall the times he was a bit of a dick. The times he chased you around grandma and grandpa’s house or mispronounced your made-up superhero’s name in as many ways as he could think of. You see all those made-up scenes in photos where he’s smiling next to you in front of the sign for his favorite restaurant and that image becomes the man. What did he do in life? He smiled. He stood next to me. He went to some Brewers games. God, but he was just past twenty-one when he checked out. At his age I was playing poker in gas stations and stealing boats. No wonder he was immature. 

“At his age”. Jesus, man. Fuck. I'm looking at the last photo we were ever in together. He looks younger than my little brother. And he will be tomorrow, and he will be a decade from tomorrow. Trapped in amber a month past drinking age. Every day I'm older than what he allowed himself, and I forget more. I remember knowing him as I am now, so that I'm the older cousin who teased him and stole his toys while he ran around playing superhero. I remember waking up on my twenty-second birthday, realizing I was older than him. Spent the rest of the day damn near catatonic. You can't tell from the photos.

I’m back in the present now, smoothing my collar down. In his memory I button the sucker up all the way for just a moment. Then I unbuttoned my chest and slipped on a pair of black sweatpants. All black, a purposeful choice. I habitually deny myself any significant amount of self-expression, whether that be clothes, styled hair, tattoos, whatever. I feel I haven't earned it. You could call it Catholic guilt, I guess, except my still-Catholic brother is a sneakerhead. It's just a shitty personality trait, an offshoot of my desire to convince myself I'm less than human. Being away from home got me to let go of that for a night. I'm trying to let that stick, finally; styling my hair more and working harder on outfits that look decent. People have noticed the shift, which is exactly what I didn't want, but what the fuck? Maybe I’m ready to be human. Before leaving I helped Lily with her makeup. I know how to do a bit of makeup now. A lot has happened since that first trip.

It was doors at 7, Lily misread and thought the show started at 7, we got an Uber at 6:30 (and thank you dad for losing your phone, so I didn't have to learn how to use Uber on what I thought was a time crunch!). So we were sitting around in line (there was a mural of Robin Williams and the genie from Aladdin on the venue wall, and a bookstore down the road I wish we could've hit) for most of an hour, then sitting in the venue for most of an hour.

We sat in the far back, as I was still recovering from a concussion I attained between trips. Eh, “recovering” is pushing it, I think I got diagnosed like a week prior? It's moreso I went to a hardcore show with a concussion. If you're ever in a similar situation: take Tylenol (double your usual dose if possible) at doors and drink at least one bottle of water the moment the opener comes on. I offer that advice in lieu of “don't see a punk band while you have a concussion you fucking moron” because this was the best night of my life.

Since Stage Four is barely thirty minutes they're touring with two opening acts. I didn't know that at first, and there was this awkward moment where I saw somebody else's logo on the stage and went “ah fuck I somehow bumbled into the wrong venue”. You might think that was the concussion talking but no, that level of second-guessing is pretty average for me. It usually winds up making me look even dumber than I actually am.

Then this scruffy trans girl came on stage and said “hey this band is called Greet Death, we're happy to be here with Touche Amore tonight”, and I was like “oh it's the opener”. She had this really charmingly awkward stage presence, telling weird anecdotes between every song. The one I remember is something about her having just switched from Coke Zero to regular, full-sugar Coke. Her energy levels were a mess from the sugar, apparently. Lily was sitting down behind me; hardcore isn't her jam. She'd heard like, two Touche Amore songs in her life, so of course you couldn't pay her to pay attention to the opener.

Unless that opener was Greet Death, her new favorite band. Not a minute into their first track she was standing up, recording it on her phone. At the time I thought it wasn't quite my thing - they play grungy shoegaze, with wispy, delicate vocals and the sad kind of fuzz guitar. I wanted something heavier that night. All I got was a few harsher lines in one higher-tempo track. I could at least appreciate the drums, with a kick mic'd so high you felt like the vibrations might shatter your ribs. That shit kills. And in case the appreciation I expressed for Have a Nice Life last time around didn't make it obvious, I have a spot in my heart for shoegaze. I came around hard on this band. At this rate their Entertainment is gonna wind up as my most-played song of the year.

Opener number two were the guys who actually had their logo up behind the drums: One Step Closer. It's, ah, a little hard to google them courtesy of Linkin Park. Who I actually like a lot, despite some of my comments earlier in this piece. Their first four records are all solid as fuck. My tastes have changed since I was deep into their work, but I'll always hold it in high regard.

Anyway MAKE SOME FUCKIN NOISE CHICAGOOOO. The singer looked like he weighed about five pounds, he flung himself around the stage like a fucking pinball and every time he didn't have any singing to worry about he'd fill time asking CHICAGOOOOO to TURN IT THE FUCK UP. Aside from basically begging the crowd for MORE CROWDSURFING (once is fine, it lets everyone know it's okay; anything more looks desperate) I think this guy was great. He made sure we had a great time and lived it up as much as we could before those goddamn buzzkills in Touche Amore came on to play their emo bullshit. One Step Closer were my favorite live act of the night; they're also the one I've spent the least time playing since the show. You gotta be in that moment to appreciate music like that, or at least I do. It's an emotion that only exists while the show is happening. The headache-blood-rush of elation in a room heated to a boil by thousands of bodies, each one moving in time with a band you'd swear were playing past the speed of sound if you couldn't hear ‘em. I could never hope to capture it in words, or recapture the feeling through the studio cuts.

And somehow Touche Amore were just as good. Jesus Christ I hope I have half Jeremy Bolm's energy at 40. He's running around the stage, flailing to the beat, screaming his heart out, passing the mic to us. I mouth the words, syncing lips to his - to ours, to the audience's collective expression of grief. Hoping that's enough to channel whatever it is that fills the room when thousands come together to feel the same feelings as one. I felt a hand on my shoulder. For a second it was weak, thin as paper. Then it was Lily's. She brought it down to my hand, squeezing her palm to mine. Finally, I let go. Something broke, something changed. Like the moment my truck’s leaf spring let up for good and nearly threw me off the road, or the rustiest chain on a swingset sending your knee straight to Hell. I cried in public.

It’d be easy to tell you which line opened the floodgates. It’s on Displacement. It isn’t a line most people single out. For me, it’s the most blood-curdling line on the whole record. I think if you know me well you could identify it. I just don’t see much artistry in breaking that moment of grief and catharsis down to a science. I cried, I cried in public for thirty fucking minutes. Isn’t that enough? 

In its place I’ll give you a line on New Halloween that almost did it. On the studio version the second verse opens “I skip over songs cause they’re too hard to hear/like track 2 on Benji or What Sarah Said” - the songs referenced are both extremely harrowing numbers about women dying. In concert he swapped “track 2 on Benji” for “A Crow Looked At Me”, the Mt. Eerie album Phil Elverum wrote after losing his wife to cancer. It came out a year after Stage Four and it’s had a long shelf life as the definitive most difficult grief album. I’ve never listened to it in full, probably never will. I’m a blubbering mess by the two minute mark on I’ll Get By from PBTT, no way in hell I could handle Crow. Dead wife/girlfriend songs are a sore spot for me. Lily’s only here now cause her old roommate disassembled every gun she had access to.

Or at least, I think Jeremy changed the line? I was way in the back, remember. Can’t find any video of this show and he doesn’t do it in any of the shows from this tour that have made their way to YouTube. Maybe I’m hearing shit, but I got something out of it whatever the case may be. Subbing in a new song or album that’s too difficult to hear as grief changes you over the years is something I’ve already had a lot of experience with. It was comforting to see that reflected in music.

Jeremy’s voice broke whenever he took the mic between songs. He talked about the process of relearning album cuts they hadn’t played since the late 2010s. About the eternal process of grieving, and his gratitude to the hardcore community for the way they come together in grief. I’m new here, I’ll admit it. Until recently you could’ve safely called me a poser. He namechecked Bo Lueders, as One Step Closer had, and I’ll admit to not being all that familiar with his work. Still, I’ve heard his name enough and even if I hadn't I'd understand what Jeremy was getting at: this community is one of the most emotionally open and mature I’ve seen in too fucking long. The way people came together to grieve Lueders, the way everyone came out tonight, united in grief… that's a rare thing. Not every community can do that. Jeremy went on to thank both openers, as any decent main act should. Called Greet Death’s new record the best album of 2025 and said One Step Closer reminded him of the acts like Title Fight that came up with Touche Amore. High praise.

The show ended on thirty minutes of tracks from other albums old and new, mostly their punkier stuff. Which makes sense, I get the impression from what little I've sampled of their pre-S4 discography that they sorta stumbled into emo by accident. I hail firmly from the emo side of the aisle, but don't take that as dismissal of the punkier hardcore. There's tons of good shit out there. I definitely liked what I heard from Touche Amore. Spent a lot of time on it back at the hotel room, actually. Ended up delving into this old track Wehatefredphelpsdotcom, a take on Fred Phelps’ website godhatesfagsdotcom. When the bastard finally packed it in, they put out a tee for charity with GOOD RIDDANCE below his face.

Bolm's response to backlash reads, in part: “Here we are years later, and the man has died. We got messages saying we should reprint the design, so we thought "we'll do an updated version and have the proceeds go to benefit what the man lived the last years of his life trying to dismantle.” [...] Is it in poor taste? Depends on your taste buds. Poor taste to me is creating an evil cult to protest funerals, discriminate love, and whose website is godhatesfags.com if you wanna just slightly scratch the surface.”

Which I think is the moment it finally hit me, “oh this isn't gonna be another one-album wonder, is it?” There’s more backbone in that abridged version of his statement than some bands display over decades. And maybe he's changed his stance on some of the finer details after losing someone so close to him, I don't know. I just know he said what he said and, so far as I can tell, continues to be a stand-up guy. I mean fuck, touring with a trans vocalist in this fucking political climate is proof enough of that.

I've spent enough of this essay bitching about powerful bigots. And probably also too much of it ranting about small-time artists I like, if we're being real, but I love trying to raise up artists I love with what little voice I have. Having tried and failed to make it as a writer, I know the struggle and I wanna support anyone who has the balls to embark on that rocky road. Touche Amore are big enough to have somebody else at their merch table. One Step Closer and Greet Death, on the other hand, were doing it themselves. I got a picture with two of the guys from OSC. Unfortunately not the fill-in bassist, their friend Nate, whom Lily and I agreed was the most arresting performer on the stage in his own quiet way. It's an awkward photo and I stand out like the quiet, oversized dork I am, but I think it's pretty neat. I mean, all my photos are awkward. I'm awkward, especially when I'm having fun. The pictures from this trip are of a particular quality of jank. But like I said, photos lie. This was the best fucking weekend of my life.

Lily spent a while talking to the drummer from Greet Death. He was as unthreatening and soft-spoken as a guy can get, so of course they found common ground. She asked him about the tee they had paying homage to the Final Fantasy Aerith death scene, unfortunately out of stock in either of our sizes. He said they'd be printing more, which I guess means we gotta catch em again some day. You won't hear me complaining. I bought her a tee of their previous album cover. Last minute she turned, scurried back to the merch table and bought their vinyl. She said she felt a need to support them more because they played good music, seemed nice and weren't getting as much love as OSC and TA. Which is what happens when you play a different genre than the main act, of course, but for the record they're being well-received by the online TA community. The comments under their own music videos on YouTube are full of “I saw them open for Touche Amore and they made a fan of me”. You can count me among their numbers. 

In the hotel room Lily said, “it hurt to see you cry.”

“I hope you know how much that helped me, at least.”

“You've never cried in public before.”

“I don't know if that counts. Nobody was paying me any mind. Nobody noticed.”

“Nobody would've cared at the funeral.”

Cutaway: in the hotel

Got a message from my landlady, who was checking our mail and keeping Artemis company. She told me a package had arrived for me, sent a photo: it was the box of Faction Paradox novels I’d ordered from the UK something like a week prior. Obverse Books have the most bizarrely efficient overseas shipping I’ve ever seen, nobody else I’ve ordered from compares. Nearly every package I order from them arrives in under two weeks. They also pay for any additional shipping if Brexit and the American tariff bullshit tacks on any unexpected fees. Aside from being a fan of their publications I feel it’s worth pointing out that, customer service-wise, they’re the best I’ve ever dealt with.

April 11. Out and about

While Lily slept I called the front desk, letting them know we wouldn't be checking out until one. Woke myself up with some cheap hotel lobby tea and read a comic - Iron Man: Legacy of Doom. It’s an Arthurian thing, vaguely. As a kid I bought the third issue from that comic shop they used to have at the Brin in Menasha. Iron Man fights a giant monster made of eyes. Probably singlehandedly responsible for my interest in body horror, it’s my favorite childhood comic. The other issues, I discovered that morning, kinda sucked. All I can even remember a month later is that Iron Man fights his dad in Hell. The eye thing is only in issue 3, too. Doesn't get any context. It just appears, does cool shit and then fucks off to, I hope, star in a better comic in some universe where people have better taste. Oh well. They were breezy reads. Hardly a waste of time.

With a couple hours on my plate I hit the town. Reckless Records first, not looking for anything in particular. Wound up with a copy of Violent Femmes’ self-titled, a big one to cross off the list. Man, talk about a one-album wonder. Those guys made one of the best albums of the 80s. Its sound is still pretty much unique, inspiring folk punk but still surpassing most of its disciples. Since then they've put out, what, like 3 good songs? I can't complain too much when the self-titled is so good. I mean, the bass in Please Don't Go is so good I'm willing to overlook the weird-ass Asian reggae voice he's doing. That's talent.

I found myself scrounging through a little bin of cassettes on the counter while waiting for the cashier. It was busy, she was alone, I think some equipment was down. It all looked too familiar… ah, retail is retail, no matter where you go. Specialty stores aren’t any more special, are they? It’s bullshit jobs the whole way down. 

Near the back of the bin I found the Bob's Burgers soundtrack, of all things. Lily and I started watching that show between trips. I'd only seen it once before. Back in high school there was a night I didn't feel safe coming home after a fight with my parents. I drove to Jason's and made all my bullshit his responsibility. His mom made some carrot soup I wish I had the recipe for, and he showed me the show while we ate. Turned into a pretty nice evening, all things considered.

Lily's favorite song from the show is that Styx parody from the planetarium laser show episode. Which, incidentally, is one of my favorite episodes. Not only because it's funny, but because going to a light show at the planetarium on the former UWO Menasha campus was one of our first dates. So reminiscing on watching that episode together is like, comfy warm girlfriend memories wrapped within comfy warm girlfriend memories. Except she's my fiance now, actually. A lot happened between March and April.

I found that song on the cassette’s mammoth tracklist and added it to my purchase. Which marked the end of the money I'd saved up for this trip, but what the hell, maybe I'll find something cheap at Chicago Comics. This is probably the best time to mention I actually found Is Ted Okay? on this trip, but included it with the first Chicago Comics segment for the sake of flow. Kelvin Mace, too. Aside from that I picked up Red Colored Elegy and the third issue of zombie apocalypse comedy-horror Bleeding Hearts. Which I have kind of a funny history with. 

I got the first issue at the House of Heroes in Oshkosh. Wasn't sure if I wanted to stick with it, but I liked it enough to grab issue 2 while visiting Power House Comics in Appleton. And now I got issue 3 in Chicago. Until I finally remembered to add it to my box like, a week ago, I was just buying these off the stands like an amateur and going on a damn odyssey to do so. It's a solid comic, feels like a tribute to those edgy but sincere 90s/00s books while still being firmly its own thing. Worth a read. Not quite worth a drive to Chicago (well, not yet… issue 4 is a real step up. It could get there).

With our vacation budget firmly blown, I woke Lily up. We dropped our stuff off in the parking garage and went out for a bite. She suggested the Mexican joint she and mom hit last time for lunch. She'd pay. No, I'd pay, she spent a fortune on the hotel alone. No, she'd pay, this is my birthday trip. No, I'd pay, I won't let an unemployed person pay for my meal. Let's just split the bill.

A few canvassers approached us, retreating when I mentioned our Wisconsin citizenship. Not one block down the road, an unrelated guy in a Planned Parenthood vest hit us up. He looked like my coworker John, so in my head his name was John. He asked us if we'd ever heard of Planned Parenthood. I had, of course. 

Now is the time to mention Lily is politically illiterate by choice. She's got a big, bleeding heart. Seeing anyone suffer any injustice can send her spiraling for like, months. So she tunes everything out. To me, it's one of her best qualities. I spend enough time among my friends chewing the world's most gristly fat. The only downside is, when politics inevitably rears its ugly head she asks questions like, “so is Planned Parenthood for or against abortion?”

“Oh, oh god! Yeah, we're pro-choice.”

“Okay, good, I was hoping I didn't have to turn you down. You're so nice.”

“Thank you. You are too! What brings you two to Chicago?”

“My fiance Max's birthday is next month and they wanted to see a band down here.”

I interjected, “Touche Amore. They're, uh, emo hardcore. They played at the Concord, down on Milwaukee I think?”

“That’s a nice venue. Have you guys seen a lot of concerts down here?”

“Not many. If we had the money, I'd love to catch more.”

“Yeah, there's a great scene down here. I used to be in a band-” and he gestured at one or two places he'd played. Bars, mostly, which is where a plurality of the really great shows are held these days.

“I love a lot of Chicago and Milwaukee area punk, yeah. I actually have the Violent Femmes self-titled in here.” I pulled it from my Reckless Records bag and briefly showed our Touche Amore and Greet Death vinyls as well.

“You've got cool taste in music! Is that a cassette in there, too?”

I explained the Bob's Burgers thing. We talked a little while about how good the music is on that show before his face switched to an expression of “The System Is Down”. Instead of whatever he was going to say, he offered, “oh my god your eyes are gorgeous. That hazel with a little bit of amber in the middle… I could get lost in those.”

I pointed to Lily, “you and her both.”

He laughed. The two of them talked about my eyes a little longer. They’re one of my only decent features, I'm used to it. It's cute. Kind of awkward on the corner of a busy intersection but who would I be to turn down the woman of my dreams and a good-looking guy gushing about my eyes?

He and Lily talked a while, about her side of the trip. I think she also brought up the trip to see Christian. John had never been to the Annoyance. A couple minutes of conversation wiled on before he looked over his shoulder and said “I guess I should talk to you guys about what they're actually paying me to talk about.” Which is how we learned about their membership, $25 a month I think, and how vital it is. For abortions but also for STD testing, contraceptives, information and, I added, HRT. It's something we're looking into, as it happens, with how annoying it's becoming to get estradiol through a doctor.

He asked if we'd be able to sign up as members, with the organization in the dire straits it's in under the current regime. We don't have the money for all that, but we put down the last of the vacation fund when we were back home. All of two thousand five hundred cents. I hope it did somebody some good.

Rounding things out briefly, we ate at that Mexican joint, Mixteca. They did a queso I thought was actually pretty good, and I'm no fan of queso. As usual with Mexican food, I was mostly in it for the desserts. And horchata, which I'd never tried. Good as hell, and crazy simple to make at home. Seriously, go try it! All you need is a blender and like, a big bowl (you're technically supposed to use a pitcher but who the hell has pitcher money these days? A bowl and a ladle works fine).

Sitting down at the wheel I looked to Lily abruptly. “Shit, I shoulda asked that guy what his band was called!” I stewed for a bit, got on the road and said, “I just had the best weekend of my life, I mean, it was life-changing, and now I just gotta go back to work tomorrow? That's so fucked up.”

“One day you'll be a big writer, honey. You'll be able to quit your job and we can go wherever we want. I really think that, okay? You're talented. You'll be as big as Stephen King.”

“Except without the drug problems or the Epstein ties.”

“Exactly.”

(The closest thing I have to a lawyer friend, a left-wing political organizer who nearly passed the bar one time, has pressured me to assure readers that this statement was made in jest. Stephen King has no concrete ties to Jeffrey Epstein. He's simply a vocal Trump critic who has never publicly agreed with Trump on anything except the non-existence of the Epstein Files.)

Late April, early May. Home

The concert was actually one of two trips I took time off for in April. Looking at my bank after trip one, a second was gonna be regrettable. Not that another drive down to Nebraska would've broken the bank unless, say, the war with Iran drives gas prices up a dollar in the next week. But still.

Motherfucker. Eh, it's still doable. We'll just have to start living on ramen and TV dinners again. Only for a week or two. It won't be so bad. This is important. Lily needs to be there. Alex is getting married.

I got off work early so we could make the trip overnight. Except, two hours before my shift ended Alex texted Lily: “[Megan] has been crying for 4hrs cause doesn't want you guys at the wedding”. Lily, cordial as always, responded something like “well I want both of you to be happy, it's both of your special days”. Then she sent me, “looks like we won't need to spend that money”. I told Lily we should go anyway, crash the wedding if just to say hi. She said we had to be the bigger people.

Nah fuck Megan. She acted cool with us for months only to pull this, just to hurt Lily one more time. Lily’s still upset she missed their wedding. Between this and our D&D campaign going on hiatus she's feeling isolated from most of her childhood friends. Just lying on the couch begging me not to leave ‘cause she doesn't have anyone else. Fuck being the bigger person if it hurts the people I love. 

I had an extended rant about Megan here. In, let's call it “creative” prose, I recalled every bullshit move she's pulled in the two years we've known her. I drew it out, made it hurt. It was great. Easily the most cathartic writing I've ever done. Then I read it again the next day and thought, man, how dare I hold a grudge against somebody this plainly pathetic? 

She left her boyfriend for a guy with more money that she could manipulate easier. Now she's drained all their money and I've gotta see photos of their depressing-ass wedding at a fast food joint. She came onto my wife aggressively in front of her ex-boyfriend and when Lily stood up for herself she started telling people she fucked her own brother. She’s been spreading that lie to anyone who’d listen for two entire years. How can I stay mad at a fucking loser? How can you stay mad at somebody who derailed her entire life over a girl who lives two states away? She can keep on digging her own holes.

But one of the first things I ever did when I started this blog series, the last thing I wrote before Lily moved up here, was partially about the then-recent beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. In the interest of wrapping things up in a neat little bow: don't tell no lies about me, and I won't tell truths about you.

May. My parents’ house

Except I’m not ending it there. Megan ain't worth it, and anyway my life is still moving. Dad finally brought all the comics out of grandpa's basement, invited me over to sort em. I leaned against grandpa's truck while waiting for him. Without a roof over its head it'd gained a crown of pollen, fuzzballs and helicopter seeds. And a ghost at the wheel. Every time I see that truck in the driveway a part of me thinks, ‘oh, grandpa's here! Maybe we can talk a little while’. And it hits me, and I hate myself for still saying ‘maybe’.”

So it goes. Turns out grandpa had almost every issue of Howard the Duck I was missing. Giant-Sized Man-Thing #5 and a Moore Swamp Thing commiserated together in damp, moldy oblivion at the bottom of one box. Appropriate to the characters, at least. The Man-Thing turned out to be totally legible once I tore the fuzzy cover off. It's a good one!. Any comic that retells Romeo and Juliet with a man made of algae as a major character is a literary masterwork in my books. God, I love Man-Thing. At the risk of sounding certifiable, I'd rate Gerber's run above what I've read of Moore's Swamp Thing. The uneven combination of mythology, action,  tragedy and corny satire is more compelling to me than basically anything else in mainstream comics. If you go read my own short story series Wisconsin Hells you'll catch some of the same energy. I think grandpa would've liked Steve Gerber too 

On that note these aren't actually grandpa's comics. Grandpa, not himself much of a comic fan, inherited them from a cousin who was a devout Marvel and DC reader through the eighties. Not devout enough, however, to have moved past the idea of comic books as disposable entertainment; upon finishing an issue he would simply toss it down his basement stairs where it languished for decades. Grandpa, a more meticulous man, scraped off years of mold, removed unsalvageable covers and moved the books to his own, dry, basement. Even made (and xeroxed, several times over) an index of his collection! Despite, once again, not caring about comics. The world may never again witness a man so befuddlingly organized.

Some comics which I assume belonged to him were hidden amongst these boxes. It’s easy to tell which they were; they're hippie/counterculture comix in pristine condition. A random issue of Groo from the Epic run also features. Unfortunately Epic's Groo run (and their ElfQuest, which grandpa's cousin kept up with for some two dozen issues) were printed on notoriously shoddy paper. It's a shame cause Groo is a lot more fun as individual issues with the backmatter present. The letters page and lame single-page strips about Groo's dog give the thing an unbeatable energy. It's like its own fanzine.

Issue 3 of Vaughn Bode's Junkwaffel, an underrated hippie classic, was in there too. Bode is mostly remembered for the way he drew women; it isn’t uncommon to hear other cartoonists’ women described as Bode-esque. They're too cartoony to be sexy and too sexy to be cartoony. Don’t see the appeal. I love his alien lizardmen. They’re stretchy, greasy, absurd and pathetic as they come. This issue is dominated by an illustrated short story about Bode being contacted psychically by such creatures. It's a hoot. I gotta seek more of these out.

Some of the best runs we found: over 50 issues of 70s-80s Captain America, JLA, Daredevil, Spider-Man, GI Joe (unfortunately not including the famous “silent” issue), Transformers, Iron Man (including all of Demon in a Bottle and most of the underrated Denny O'Neil sequel storyline), Wonder Woman and some rare 60s Conan the Barbarian. The latter two we couldn't save. WW is basically unreadable as at some point somebody vandalized every issue. It's disturbing stuff. Whoever did it fucking hated Wonder Woman in particular. Her breasts are exaggerated but all of her skin, in every panel across fifty-plus issues, is drawn over in red, her eyes hollow from Sharpie ink. It's not as simple as mere blood, either, they've gone through the effort of accentuating musculature, giving the impression she's been skinned. Villains’ dialogue has been altered - whenever, for instance, somebody is threatening to kill her, our vandalous teenage dirtbag adds “it's what the bitch deserves”. Dad has no idea who could've done it. I hope he's gotten his shit together since the 80s. The Conans were unsalvageable for more normal reasons; they were the moldiest of the bunch. But far from the most rotten.

Organizing grandpa's comics helped to put a lid on my grief almost as much as the show, somehow. Sitting in a warm, dusty garage with my dad, our fingertips caked in gray-green spores, doing something we promised we'd take care of before he passed. Talking comics with a man I struggled to hold a conversation with until I left his house. There's no guilt anymore. Just three generations bonding through the pulp detritus of another time. It almost sounds like a comic book story, right? A stoic man and his emotionally maladjusted kid setting something right for their dead ancestor. You replace the comics with some more exciting object and substitute my family for a lineage of stoic barbarian-kings and you've got yourself a hundred sales to Weird Tales. Some cover art of your story, probably.

No, I'm not even sure you need to swap out the comics for something “more exciting”. Just turn them to regular books. So you've got these two guys who had an abnormally smart and organized ancestor that made a bad deal or lost a bet or something. And they're fighting to reclaim and secure that ancestor's library even though they're not capable of reading the books themselves. It could be a commentary on the way Conan the Barbarian (and heroes like him, and masculinity as a whole if we're being real) have been dumbed down since the original Robert E. Howard stories. I think that would kick ass.

Lily Cutaway

While I'm talking about telling stories, hey, Lily’s gotten back into writing! She used to write years ago, while working at a pizza place she hated in West Virginia. Back when she could work. All short-form vent writing that I think she only ever shared with me. I encouraged her to share it more broadly, that her prose was great and a lot of people could relate to the subject matter. She never did, though she says she's warming up to the thought now that she knows vent writing is something people actually enjoy reading.

What she has done is start a short story. It's semi-autobiographical, centering a couple of sad lesbians in a West Virginian former coal town. I took some cues from them while writing the bits about Sarah and Harry in Wisconsin Hells #2 - not sure if that'll be out by the time this one hits the blog. While reading the opening to that story she commented, “it's funny how different your writing style is to mine”. Which is true. She writes soft, easygoing prose. Melancholy and gentle as opposed to my long-winded, expletive-ridden literary sledgehammers.

I have no idea when or if she'll finish it, not historically being a creatively driven person. She did two or three pages one day in April and she's returned for about two paragraphs since. I'm pushing her to keep it going, it's fantastic stuff. Like Sean, her writing blows mine out of the water and yet neither of them have the drive to put pen to paper.

Talked to her a bit after writing this. She said, “my writing is very emotive. I have to be in that space to write it. You and them [her friends] keep telling me to publish but it's all passion. I write a few lines every few weeks just to vent those feelings. I picked it up a while ago, I wrote a sentence, then you took me somewhere and I lost the feeling.”

In the garden

I said I would garden more this year. Sticking to that. Was too lazy to dig up my yard and do a big patch of something (probably potatoes?) like I wanted, committing to doing that next year. But like, I actually mean I'm committing. It's not just one of those things I push infinitely into the future. Especially if April is as rainy as it was this year… something approaching three straight weeks of rain. My dad says he's never seen flooding that bad in fifty years of living here. Most roads near the water were impossible to drain cause they were feet below the river level. It’s cool that we get a monsoon season in Wisconsin now.

Dad bought me a planter that goes over the rail on my deck. I have a few pots but those are full of moss and lichens, the pretty kinds you see people on YouTube stick into jars with bugs. I water them as I water all my actual crops.

Peppers in the rail planter. A habanero, a ghost and something my dad assured me isn't spicy. Built a raised bed in which I planted cilantro, basil and roma tomatoes. Hoping to save some money making my own salsa, which I've been addicted to lately. Saw birds picking at all of them, but they're all sprouting now. That’s nice. The cilantro is coming in thick, I really don’t remember planting that much. Oh well, I’ll use it. Down in the plot of dirt my house came with, I'm happy to say last year's oregano re-emerged. Got two whole plants coming up, one is huge. Glad to see them come up, as I didn't harvest my oregano on time last year. I have a huge jar of basil left but I'm way past done with the oregano I was able to bring in. 

I planted an entire bulb of garlic cloves in that plot, too, assuming some would die. Every goddamn one of them is thriving right now. I have so much fucking garlic. A cursory googling suggests it’ll be ready to harvest around July-August… if any friends of mine reading this want fresh garlic in a month or two I can hook you up. Oh, and my mint plants came back albeit between the bricks in my walkway. Fucking annoying place for it but hey! free mint!

In the garden, two hours later

Back out here, barefoot at dusk. Always get a little worried taking Artemis out, like, what if tonight's the night she gets jumped by that fat fucking possum? The only sounds on the air as she pops a squat are our footsteps and the distant industrial din that’ll outlive us all. My feet brush against grass, picking up droplets of retired humidity. We're just suburban enough that ticks aren't a problem, just rural enough that Jason Voorhees is. Media has trained me to understand that the Calm exists in servitude to the Storm, after all.

I left the eye of the storm and went to bed. Eight hours in the storm tomorrow. Lunch break in there somewhere, I guess. Got that to look forward to.

Lunch break

I got bored and made a chronological playlist of every song I've talked about on this blog. In cases where I only mention an album, I've included a track I feel is representative. No song will be included in cases where I've just namechecked an artist. Mostly I'm happy with it, every track's inclusion makes sense. It looks exactly like I'd imagine a list of songs I felt were important enough to write about.

Mostly. It's, by design, dated, because more than half of the time I've spent writing about music was in that blog post about my life in 2022. Which was, as I mentioned then, more foundational than any other year in establishing my music taste. But a lot has changed since then! Four years is a long time, especially when your frontal lobe is still in the oven. While I've got a sec I wanted to chat in bulk about some songs and albums I'm listening to right now, because I've never done that and it sounds fun.

I'll start with one by an artist I spent a little bit of time on in my last outing. For the most part I'd consider Ada Rook a one-album artist for me, albeit in a more complimentary sense than the Violent Femmes. Those guys used all their good ideas up on their first album. Rook just has one album good enough that it distracts me from the others. And then there were two. Cum Songs has a bizarre title and the album cover is a trolley problem meme. It's an hour of very abrasive music by an artist whose chosen forms of abrasion sometimes test my patience. There's a twelve-minute song. Yeah maybe I should skip this one? Nah I got an hour to kill let's see what's up.

This album would've killed me in 2023. Jesus Christ. That's the quickest an hour of music has ever gone by for me I think. So much more sonic diversity than I'm used to from her, I mean you can really tell she put some time into this one. A lot of left-field decisions I found captivating. And somehow the weirdest part is a piano ballad produced by Lauren Bousfeld? Has she ever done that? I can count on like maybe two hands the number of times either of them have been this subdued before, and after a whole hour of screams it sticks out in a good way. Not entirely sure Rook's voice is suited to sparse piano, mind, but it's just 3 minutes and the chorus for Shadow Zone Kids kinda eases you into it anyway. Also, the lyrics are among her best work. Making them more comprehensible than her lyrics sometimes are does them a lot of favors. 

I Am Not Alive is the best individual track, the chorus’ sparse club beat with those backing guitars is transcendent. And given my background I'm obligated to praise the sentence-mixed intro. The use of “negative space” on this album, ie everything that's below a million decibels, is perfect. The songs never wear out their abrasion and aside from the generically sleepy beat on Tired Sicko neither do the quiet moments. I think it could've used a Purgatory Modulation Engine, a song that's weird even within a weird sonic landscape, but the sound as it stands is so cohesive in its diversity I'd hate to interrupt it. I guess the record scratching on Unreal Tournament gets close, it caught me off guard, but then Ada Rook doing Limp Bizkit isn't as surprising a move as a full fucking brass section. Her vocals have come a long way, too. Screams are less one-note and her odd nasal singing is a lot more full, multi-dimensional and just plain fun to listen to. Though I guess I'm biased; squeaky vocalists have always appealed to me.

The guy who first introduced me to Lauren Bousfeld was my high-school friend Gavin. He told me I should listen to Nero’s Day at Disneyland; I asked him what genre they were. He shrugged and said, “weirdo music?” Which is still what I call all this abrasive electronic stuff, regardless of its actual genre. Experimental Rap, for instance, is Weirdo Music. And speaking of Experimental Rap, Jpegmafia's new record fucking sucks right? 

Scaring The Hoes and I Lay Down My Life For You are both serious contenders for the most sonically transgressive mainstream albums of the decade. I mean, lyrically you get exactly what you'd expect from an album called Scaring The Hoes but musically? Garbage Pale Kids alone is almost overwhelming. There's so much going on. The chant sampled from a Japanese TV commercial, the hilariously blown-out bass, Danny Brown's incredible one-liners (everyone talks about the Canibus line but let's take a moment to appreciate the bathrobe joke) the stuttering “oh my god” prechorus, the “chorus” that's just a fuzz riff smothered in reverb? When's the last time you heard anything like this that multiple of your coworkers knew about?

Peggy's misogynistic Twitter rant lyrics still worked because this album is meant to be obnoxious, you can still pretend it's ironic. Especially paired with Danny Brown, a guy who uploaded a thirty-minute “podcast” where he talks to himself about how dinosaurs aren't real and nobody questioned it. Danny's entire personality is built around being a lovable weirdo, it's hard not to be okay with anyone in his orbit.

Putting it like that, of course the album Peggy dropped after falling out with Danny is his worst shit ever. He went from collaborating with the supremely likable Danny Brown to the loathsome Kanye West and corporate homunculi BTS. At this point he's either trying to cancel his way out of fame, testing his fans’ loyalty or genuinely losing his fucking mind Kanye-style. I'm hoping it's either of the former but let's be real, he's always been an asshole. His persona is built on unlikability, making people uncomfortable. He sampled actual audio of a guy being murderd one time. Challenging the listener has always been his shtick. It's just usually backed with better music. Single number one, Babygirl, is great. Aggressive guitars, weird rapping, a weird music video… more of the same but the returns have yet to diminish. Then it was followed by a sub two-minute single that sounded more like an ambient interlude than a song, and a track I hardly remember. 

The album is similarly unremarkable. He sure does like triplet flows and loud guitars. I did too, one hour ago. It's the kind of record that makes an artist's past work look worse in retrospect. Now that you've seen what Jpegmafia looks like once he's succumbed fully to his social media addiction and run through all his good musical concepts, it's impossible to see anything else. I was already running out of patience with him after the shit with Danny Brown (where he spun an offhanded comment Brown made into an angry tweet thread, somehow), but this solidifies it: the Jpegmafia experiment has run its course. Say what you will about Death Grips, at least they knew when to stop.

Fuck I should check out the new Danny Brown record from last year. Loved the singles and his pre-album feature run, which saw him collaborating with a mostly transfem lineup of hyperpop and electronic acts. Love him with Jane Remover, and that G.I.R.L. track was a hoot. Oh, so was single number one with its weird beat and the girl doing poetry for like an entire minute at the end. That was all coming out while I was wearing out the Durango and driving grandpa's truck, which was funny to me. He would've hated that racket. 

The album is, from what I understand, pretty similar to those singles: Danny does hyperpop. The guest list, about a dozen trans women and some Polish guy, looks like the kinda shit I'd listen to day one. His statements in interviews that he wanted to do a song with SOPHIE but felt like he'd be ripping Vince Staples’ then-recent Yeah Right off struck a chord with me. She passed shortly after he was probably thinking about working with her, leaving Danny and SOPHIE as one of those projects we can only imagine. He said he wanted to make an album she would've been proud of, and from what I understand he succeeded. And, just like the Rook album,it has a deeply intimidating-looking 12-minute track. Apparently that's the fucking secret to an 11/10 record for me lately so that's a good omen. I gotta listen to that shit.

At the same time as Peggy lost me, the aforementioned Vince Staples is gaining my attention. I've been a casual fan for years, never done a full album but loved some of his singles. Yeah Right is a perfect distillation of the year it released, it couldn't have come out any sooner or later than it did. The SOPHIE beat would be difficult to acquire these days, and Kendrick isn't putting out features as frequently anymore. But see also the random like, ten second hyperpop intermission by two completely different artists? Who aren’t anywhere else on the song or album I’m pretty sure? What a weird choice. Only in 2018! Norf Norf is cool too, the beat reminds me of the background sounds in Half-Life 2.

In short for a while he was “that guy with the cool deadpan flow and the impeccable taste in beats”. Which was enough to get me subscribed to his YouTube music page at least. I forgot I’d done that until he put out the single Blackberry Marmalade. Sonically and lyrically it's been called punk or punk-adjacent. To which he said: “The dummies hear a guitar and immediately start calling shit punk rock. Rock, Punk, Post-Punk, Grunge, New Wave, Indie Rock, and so on and so forth are all different, but they all come from the Cracka tryna be James Brown.” 

Real ones don't need me to explain that that's the most punk response possible. Real ones also wouldn't call it punk. It's rap with guitars and political lyrics. Weird rap is still rap! That aside it doesn't sound like punk. If anything it sounds like those hip-hop-inflected alt-rock songs from the 2010s. Which isn't my favorite sound, I'll admit. Lyrically I love it and Vince definitely has an ear for a good vocal melody, the hook is great. And I like the actual righteous anger on this track, which isn’t a constant through the rest of the album. “Just know that behind every smile, they thinkin ‘bout killin you” is the best bar on the record.

A short aside: my dad was a punk in the 80s. I mean, he dressed like a regular guy and had a normal warehouse job after a couple years in the Navy. But he listened to the music, went to punk clubs, hung out with punks and believed in fighting the power. He qualifies in my books. And he also listened to rap, because back then there wasn't much stratification. Punks recognized rap as the black form of anti-authoritarian music and rap guys saw the same in punk. There was an unspoken kinship until record labels got sketched out about it and started marketing shit differently, watering the genres down et al. The fact that these days a rapper using guitar and talking about the current administration being evil is considered alien in any capacity annoys me.

But yeah the tone of the following single, White Flag, was less punk and more “Somebody That I Used To Know But The Ex Is The Government”. It’s defeatist and sad. I find defeatism cathartic in short bursts, it's like the philosophical version of sobbing on the couch with a tub of ice cream. Which is to say, it's good to expel your worst excesses but please don't let the bastards trick you. The government and corporations want you to believe it's hopeless, doomerism is literal propaganda. So is paranoia. They want you to believe your neighbors are all child rapists who wanna steal that rusty old bike from your garage. Otherwise nobody would buy Ring cameras, which I'll remind you mankind made it millennia without. They want you to believe the situation is hopeless and you shouldn't even try to engage with your community. Fuck ‘em. 

Uh, third single Cotton is really excellent, I’m happy to call it my song of the summer. It’s bold, continuing the shift into rock sounds but without any rapping to lean on. Vince is a good enough singer to make that work. His softer, less deadpan vocals on the verses blew me away paired with the piano, the way he brings up the energy in the prechorus is phenomenal. That bass, too! God, what a nice bass line. To say nothing of the lyrics. Some of the specifics miss me, I’m whiter than paper after all, but the theme of music and art as a refuge against a history of oppression hits close. 

The album’s great, too. Aside from the one weirdly dated song about how TV is bad (am I missing a layer of irony? Probably) it’s a perfect record. Closer 7 in the Morning is devastating. Second amazing album to come out in June; god what a good month for music. Happy pride month to those of us with my exact taste in music I guess. I hope its positive reception (it’s no commercial darling but the response from every hip-hop critic who isn’t on some label’s payroll has been overwhelming) inspires more rap-rock. Nu-metal gave it a bad rep but it’s a fucking incredible genre when done right. And this is the second record I’ve mentioned so far with record scratching on a track so we’re obviously cooling down on that genre. Wonder what the future holds?

Part of me wants to get into some individual songs I'm into, non-album singles and songs I like from albums I haven't heard. But this tangent has run its course. It's obvious by now why I never went into music journalism, I don't think I have a particularly good ear nor an exciting way of discussing songs I like. It sucks cause music is my favorite medium, I wanna be good at talking about it. Some day.

Briefly: Otis/Carl by Spanish Love Songs and In Heaven by Japanese Breakfast both got a lot of play after grandpa passed. The latter song is the standout from another album about grief that I would recommend in full. Both of them are incredibly written. From the former, incidentally the only song I’ve been listening to that’s actually about the death of a grandfather: “I got the call in June but couldn’t bring myself to see you/or even get you on the phone/I wanted you to remember me in perfection/but really I'm just a fucking coward, I couldn't bear to see you die/I was dealing with my own shit if I'm being honest/mom said you'd understand, I don't blame you if you didn't”. From the latter: “The dog's confused/she just paces around all day/she's sniffing at your empty room”. Both resonate with small details of grief and guilt that I didn't realize until I heard them that I needed to see in somebody else.

Home

I just had a nice weekend. Lily, Jason, my dad and I all went to the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay. Jason bought himself an Amtrak hat, with money from his new job. He’s making decent cash now. Wants to take us out to a movie some time. Still not sure I’m comfortable with all that… maybe I’ll start with just splitting the bill? He pointed out a train or two that once belonged to the disastrous Penn Central, the single biggest corporate bankruptcy in American history prior to Enron. Then he recommended a nearly ten-hour podcast about it. It’s prime morning commute listening.

Next day Lily and I went to Xiangkhouang market in Oshkosh, got some eggrolls and pork belly from the hot deli. Picked up a few bags of lychee, my favorite fruit and a rare commodity around here. Guy at the counter said more tropical fruits are coming since it’s summer. I said I’d be back for more, especially lychee. He said, “lychee is so-so. Sometimes you get it in and it’s okay. Sometimes it’s-” he waved his hand. Seemed annoyed about the lychee situation, but maybe that’s just me. Presumably they take a hit when fruit comes in spoiled. The bags I got were mostly good quality.

For once life is okay. Just stop thinking about the piece of shit government for a second and I’m actually pretty happy with everything. Lily and I are engaged, we’re not being evicted, we’ve had a laundry list of fun experiences together lately. Some months I’m still close to paycheck-to-paycheck but others we can afford fun shit like trips to the big city. I’m nearing done with a couple comic book collections and I’m only some twenty books removed from calling my Doctor Who novel lineup complete. Been working on both since high school. Dad built me a bookshelf for my birthday, constructed with grandpa’s old homemade shelves in mind. For once in my life I have almost enough shelving.

Been focusing this June on drilling into my head that it’s alright to be who I am, whoever that may be. I’ve come to accept that there’s no danger in self-expression. I’m already living with a trans woman. If the worst comes to pass I’d be a casualty regardless. So why hide? Even if I don’t know how to describe myself, and probably never will, why hide? Despite protests from friends and family, my name is Max, my hair goes down past my shoulders, I wear funky shit, I think too hard about what's between my legs and I'm working on altering the sound of my voice. And if that's more important to you than the ecological, economic and political atrocities unfolding in this country your opinion doesn't matter anyway.

There's this John Prine song, Illegal Smile, that he always insisted wasn't about pot. I mean, he was cool with potheads claiming it but in his own mind it was almost a private joke. It was about making yourself smile in a way society didn't approve of, whether that be some stupid inside joke or drugs or being a queer. I never got it until just recently. Now I, too, have that illegal smile, that hidden euphoria that gets me through the days even as it threatens to land me on an FBI watchlist or oust me from a hard-earned position in a conservative-leaning work culture. Cause regardless of what happens here on Earth, well, that blue line decal won't get you into Heaven anymore.

Postscript: Pride

We went to Pride, the event held in Appleton’s Jones Park. I forgot how fucking rad Jones Park is. It’s in a big-ass ravine, down a flight of stairs and partly under an overpass. What a vibe, what a place to come together as one people. My whole life I’ve had this bias against out-and-proud queer people, this voice in the back of my head screaming at me to tell them to get down! Stop being so loud about it! Get back in the closet, it’s dangerous out here! I didn’t feel that shit once today. Talking to people I’ve known for years, a couple people I worked with, with a face full of glitter, I felt nothing but actual uncritical happiness. Briefly I felt pride.

There was fear, of course there was. Fear that this kind of event might be illegal before next June, that this could be my first and last pride (not that I wouldn’t attend an illegal protest, but it ain’t the same as freedom of expression, is it?). Going to work the next day I - well, I got a migraine and went home, but even before then I felt depressed. There I’d been in that amazing crater, that scar in the land where my people, a scar in the government’s agenda, congregated. Even if it never happens again, even if worse comes to worse and we all wind up in camps, I’ll never regret that it happened to me once. You know that movie Sinners? That last scene, where they’re reminiscing on the plot of the movie years down the line and Stack says, “and just for a few hours, we was free.”

Leaving the place (was it really the place we left? Jones Park was hardly there, all things considered, and it’s still there… it was more of an event, a feeling, that we were walking out of), Lily had to sit down halfway up the steep, metal-grate stairs. Her panting in the afternoon stage light sun, me in my hundred-hued Hawaiian shirt adorned with Richard Nixon “I DIG DICK” buttons - anywhere else in town we woulda been a hell of a sight! A woman in smart, businesslike attire and monochromatic hair said “happy pride!”. Then she said, “I'm actually running for Congress in this district, and I'm trans. My name is Katrina DeVille.”

“Oh, yeah, I saw your booth.”

“My girls are probably down there wondering where I am!”

“They looked like they were holding their own. You got a minute, uh, what's your platform?”

“I'm kind of the trans version of Bernie Sanders. All the same stuff, healthcare, human rights. I was a musician for thirty-five years but I just can't abide by it and do nothing anymore. At this point anyone who wants to do something would've done it, and nobody has.”

“Got that right. Well, so far ya got my vote.”

“I think we have a good shot at winning - the guys I'm running against are both really nice guys, but-”

“Getting kinda fuckin’ sick of nice guys at this point.”

“Yeah. We need an aggressive progressive.” She handed us each a flyer from her bag. Buttons on the bag endorsed some of Wisconsin's other promising long-shots, like Francesca Hong. I wished her good luck, Lily stood up. And just like that she and I were gone from that crater, that pocket-dimension of queer joy, and Katrina was descending into it a woman on a mission.

God fucking speed.

*I have since purchased They Were 11! from Milwaukee's Lost World of Wonders, which Lily and I visited when her family treated us to an Outback Steakhouse gift card. Love that place, I should write about it some time. The whole manga/anime figurines/imported snacks and trinkets bit reminds me of those innocent, unironic early years of weebdom. The period where it hasn't quite sunk in yet that Japan and Korea are the token Exotic Countries because they're both basically the 51st state and thus “safer” than other options. Those halcyon years when manga and anime are new enough that you haven't realized most of it is just action hero slop with just enough violence and T&A to feel transgressive next to the Avengers. Those were good times. And I should mention, I guess, that I have nothing against being a weeb. I'm a weeb. I just don’t think your curiosity for other cultures should end in America's geopolitical backyard. Lately I've been into animated films from ex-Soviet states. Check out Krabi. It gave Jason weird dreams. Expand your horizons! Every kind of human makes cool shit!

**In the time since a few things have changed my mind on what really happened with the Ultimate comics line. A lot of people point to Hickman not writing Ultimate Endgame, the five-issue finale book, as proof that he lost interest. I personally think it makes sense to get Deniz Camp to do it since he was an unexpected breakout star (even though all his good books are for DC), but I want to present that evidence because I do find it a little compelling.

As for my own evidence: I had no idea there was another book, Ultimate Finale, scheduled to follow Endgame. Credits include basically everyone who had an Ultimate Universe book. To me that reeks of Marvel coming in and telling everyone “the sales have dropped below the Shareholder Viagra threshold, we're gonna shitcan all your books at nice round numbers and then let you tie up loose ends in one final cash-grab anthology thing”. That book's announcement has me feeling a lot more cynical toward the Ultimate Universe, even if just looking at the covers for Ultimate X-Men or early Spider-Man still gives me the warm and fuzzies. These were good fucking books, they both deserved another year or two. If Peach Momoko is gonna be banished to X-Men books for her entire career at least let her continue her best one, damnit.

To damn the Ultimate Universe with one point of faint praise, it was a much easier commitment than the Absolute Universe. I never felt any financial burden from adding “all ultimates” to my pull box. I think at the height of its powers they were doing, what, five books a month? They all fit comfortably into a single shortbox and it felt cohesive. Small enough that every comic mattered to the story, large enough to permit mostly standalone side stories like Ultimate X-Men. Meanwhile the Absolute Universe started with four or five books and it's only spiraled from there. Which is a positive signifier of its greater place in the hearts and wallets of consumers, obviously, and much has been written about its positive impact on the industry. The Absolute Universe is a full-on capital-U Universe, no cohesive vision or ongoing plot, just a bunch of similar What If scenarios with occasional, natural and unintrusive crossovers. It's a petri dish for stories to grow on, as opposed to the Ultimate Universe's restrained, singular focus. 

I respect the latter a lot, and Absolute DC being so disconnected and full of series I don't care about makes it harder to justify committing to any given new title. But that lack of restriction, the fact it's just “yo do your own shit with these characters” with no Big Bad or Doomsday Timer looming overhead gave books like Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman space to grow into the best Big Two titles of the decade. It's a healthier environment for creators and consumers, I won't deny that. I just can't find it in me to fall in love with the Absolute brand itself the way I fell for the Ultimate Universe, ya know?