Aimless Thoughts: In The Summertime, When the Weather Is Fine

 Trying for the more conversational, casual approach of early Aimless Thoughts here. Also hoping it turns out shorter. However it turns out I hope it's good; after Florida I don't have the money for another trip or really anything else I can see myself writing about. I've already said this twice in 2026 but I'm pretty sure this actually is my last AT for a while.

Early August

“I guess I kinda wanted more of an adventure? Like, I went around a trailer park in a golf cart looking for alligators, that was pretty wild, but I never found any.”

Sean said, “to be fair, your rate of adventures is pretty high.” That's another all-timer Sean quote. 

“...yeah, good point. Actually, yeah, I'm happy to have had a break. Shit's been nonstop this year.”

Late July

Took a walk on the Loop the Lake trail in Menasha. Early this month I met a woman out walking who happened to be a professional dog trainer. She gave me some good tips for Artemis. For the most part they're working. Artemis started howling at a passing biker. When she calmed down, a monarch butterfly landed on her snout.

We descended the hill by the lock, stepping with caution between patches of little flowers and their droves of puny, delicate pastel-yellow butterflies. Cicadas and crickets are all-encompassing, their endless thrummmmm and chir-chirrup rattling my body like a gentle, massaging breeze. Through a thin part between bushes we reach marshy shore. A brick and a sun-faded soda can lie overgrown with algae. Small things skitter along the water’s surface. Rain's been sparse the past month. Where water has receded the stems of lilypads are visible, reaching to the sky as if in prayer. For rain or for sunlight, who can say? The plants along the shore are plentiful and colored every hue of green one can imagine, the kind of verdant arrangement only possible in places rich with water.

We continued onto the old trestle bridge, passing several anglers and a biker who got her all riled up. A middle-aged woman with marvelous salt-and-pepper hair stopped to ask, “is she a whippet?”

In my experience those who think Artemis is a whippet are the best people you meet on the trail. So I said, “no, she's a greyhound/Australian shepherd mix”.

“She reminds me of my dog Riley! He-” Artemis howled at a bike - “He used to do that! He always chased bikes, he was skittish like her. Is it okay if I say hi?”

“Yeah, of course! She's loud but she's really nice if you give her time.” I said. The woman squatted down to Artemis’ eye level and offered a hand. Her ears pulled back, she sniffed a little, her tail went to wagging. “Oh, she likes you!”

Artemis sniffed her way down the fishing platform, where the woman had left her water bottle. We followed her and spent a while talking about dogs. I told her about Artemis, she told me more about all the dogs she's had. Riley made it to 17 and she's been without him, or any dog, two years now. And she's happy to meet us on the trail, to play with Artemis a little, cause she just got some bad news last week. I said, “it's funny, I got her a little before my grandpa died of cancer.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry. What did he have?”

“Lung cancer. Well, it spread everywhere but it started in the lungs.”

“I'm sorry. Cancer is, it's the worst disease. It's terrible. And this is a very cancerous area.”

“Yeah, I've… unfortunately been noticing that lately.”

“Is it all the paper mills, the stuff in the water?”

“Now that you mention it… probably?”

“Is anyone cleaning that up? Do we have the technology to do that?”

“Yeah, I think, but it goes slowly. I dunno why.”

Artemis barked at a bike, our conversation fell by the wayside. We talked a little more about dogs, I brought up Lily and her history naming pets after Greek characters. She got a kick out of her rats Athena and Aphrodite, thought all three names were perfect.

She asked my name. I hate to say it but I still hesitate when I answer, “Max.”

“I'm Malika.” She offered a hand, I shook it. “Wow, you have a strong handshake!”

“Yeah, so I've heard. I, ah, try to tone it down.”

“No, it's okay, it just surprised me. I'll let you go now, I don't want you to be stuck here all day. Say hi to your fiancé today!”

“I will! Thank you so much for stopping to talk, this has been great.”

“You two are my new favorite people I've met, you remind me of me and my dog when I was your age! I love young people… thank you for giving me hope.”

That tiny little interaction meant a lot to both of us. That's what I'm always talking about! You gotta go out and talk to people. You wanna see a change in the world? Step number one is loving thy neighbor.

It started to rain on our way home. Artemis kept loping in and out of half-squats as if to say “if I pissed right here nobody would ever know.”

Monday

I've felt recently that my life is at a standstill. It's all in my head, I know that if I think about it long enough. But I get why my head is telling me what it is: a lotta little problems have been stacking up lately. Artemis had a seizure. Week later I woke up to a house thoroughly coated in vomit. Since then Lily and I took turns getting sick all summer. The smoke rolled in, my lungs gave up on me for a bit and our healthcare system is horseshit. Burnout is getting to me at work, I can hardly get through a five-day week anymore. The decent people keep quitting. I'm subbing in for like three guys (it's up to four in the week since I wrote that! Two of them lost fingers, the other two went to college. There's a metaphor in there somewhere). It's what I deserve for being the only competent person too stupid to walk away. I should've worked harder on the whole professional writer/YouTube gig before I had a wife and a dog and a company healthcare plan I can't live without.

Between our energy prices doubling (even though our usage is at an all-time low!) trying to pay for the trip to Florida and our roof starting to leak again, I've dipped into savings two months in a row. None of those things are soul-crushing on their own, sure, but taken together you can see how I might view my quality of life as stagnant at best.

Another thing, lesser in terms of material but vital in my mind, is how much of the same music I've had on rotation since April. Seeing Touche, OSC and Greet Death pounded my music taste full of new niches, all now starting to feel like ruts. Though actually I've been listening to more new shit than ever. That Danny Brown record I alluded to last time is as great as I hoped it would be. There's an eight-minute jungle song  where a girl raps in Polish and also a two-minute spoken-word outro (and the producer is… holy shit, I had no idea she was still around!). It's also remarkably uncensored; Issbrokie opens her verse by rhyming “faggot” with “bad dragon”. Feel like a lotta cis guy “allies” wouldn't let that line slide ya know? If you're not sold by those two pieces of information I don't know how you got here. (Oh, and I'd be remiss not to mention Brokie's Tyler Perry line. That shit had me howling).

I remember during his legendary feature streak people said he was turning into the “indie music Snoop Dogg”, ie he does rap verses on hyperpop songs instead of radio  pop songs. It's nice to see most of those artists return here, I want to imagine a future where this gaggle of weirdos become a stable of regular collaborators (yes, yes, I know how incestuous this scene already is but I hope you know what I'm getting at). They all pair as well as ever with him particularly 8485 whose ear for 2000s-rnb-throwback hooks is as sharp as ever. The only bummer is that this era came just too late for a Danny/Black Dresses collab. 

On the rock front: Idialedyournumber are also very good. My first exposure was their one big hit, Bunny Goes 2 Business School, a track I nearly overlooked. This was at a time when YouTube was showering me with these throwback alt-rock numbers with videos shot on old cameras to make up for a lack of interesting musical tricks. I mistook it for another of those until the skramz chorus pulled me in, showed me there was something more legit under the hood here. So naturally I got really into Limbs, a twee, gentle alt-rock song makes me nostalgic for the wistful yearning of a long-distance relationship. I've been all over it for weeks. They're very good at that kind of song, as it happens. On a similar note is Leannie Ryan's Lean In, sitting as I type this at a criminal 6k views on YouTube. She's got such a pleasant voice and the guitar in the chorus is perfectly needly (folks familiar with my taste in comics will recognize that my fixation on art about sad girls has now fully hit my music taste). 

Also big on that recent Mountain Goats number that tells, face fully straight, the story of the time Charlie Sheen called the FBI because a horror movie was too scary. It's the kind of story where you can't really draw attention to how ridiculous and funny the whole thing is or it all falls apart; Darnielle understood the assignment. Man… I used to feel self conscious about doing these little “media I like roundups” as part of an autobiographical bloggy thing. That ain't me anymore. I'm ecstatic to be that bitch who'll review a Danny Brown record in the middle of a crisis. Art exists to help ya cope, why shouldn't I embrace that!

I've also seen some great movies lately. Lily finally showed me the Cornetto Trilogy. Hot Fuzz is my favorite; I think it manages to age gracefully through being more anti-NIMBY than pro-cop. We also enjoyed Chan is Missing together. It rocks, the dialogue is so natural you swear sometimes you're watching real people talk and yet the jokes are still really fucking funny. Also, it ends with a monologue where the lead character says he's giving up on account of not being Chinese enough. The monologue is placed between two beautifully shot montages depicting scenes of 80s Chinatown. I think it might be the most successful non-ending I've ever seen? It works thematically, it looks great and it's so audacious you almost can't believe it's happening. 

In theaters Jason, Lily and I ran Backrooms and Obsession as a double feature. Looking back it woulda been neat to hit Digital Circus and complete the trilogy of indie-adjacent internetty horror films smashing box office records right now. Unfortunately Jason only just started showing me that show a couple weeks ago. It's funny that we dropped Dr. Who to watch it cause the whole premise of a mad god who's super excited to take people on adventures while they just wanna go home is like, my ideal tone for Doctor Who? I'm probably the only person who's ever gonna make that comparison but… Caine totally has Bill Hartnell energy. Bummer we couldn't catch it in theaters, I mean, obviously every modicum of my support is behind a trans indie animator who can outsell Star Wars at the box office but like, she outsold Star Wars. She don't need my ticket revenue.

A friend who moved to Australia a few years back, Jackson, returned for a couple weeks. We got pizza with our mutual friend Brian (think I've mentioned he helped me flesh out some details of Cerberus from Wisconsin Hells) and saw Obsession again. Love the hell outta that flick, if it's not abundantly clear already. Backrooms is good too, mind. The bit where the monster picks up the camera is my favorite use of the found-footage gimmick in a minute (the way Gonjiam Haunted Asylum plays with reality is also commendable). It just had the misfortune of releasing alongside one of the best horror movies of the decade, and being directly compared to it cause they're both by YouTube guys. It also had to struggle through a bungled, immature script that had me thinking, for the first time in my life, “man that movie sure was made by somebody younger than me” (so I don't feel too old: the first time a piece of audiovisual media ever made me think “man that sure was made by somebody my age” was American Vandal less than ten years ago. It's still got the most realistic teenagers I've ever seen on TV and it remains hilarious. Maybe I should go back and expand this into a whole section about the show while editing. I should probably capitalize that so it stands out and I don't forget. Nah I'm tired.)

While getting pizza with the guys after Obsession I made some lame joke to Jackson that, since he's Australian now, he should say hi to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard for me. Hey, turns out he's been following them for years and we might've even been at the same Chicago ‘22 show before we knew each other? Small world! I mean, it makes sense; he's a music major. Music theory guys love that band. Speaking of, he's been up to some incredible stuff across the pond. An opera adapting Oscar Wilde's Canterville Ghost, a story I haven’t read. In general I'm woefully under-read on Wilde. He described it to me as about “a ghost who died a long time ago who isn't good at being a ghost anymore”. Sounds great. I am now in possession of an Oscar Wilde paperback. One more anecdote: at work that week, I encountered a weirdo customer. He approached me to tell me he “saw me gawkin at those women over there” but that it's okay cause he was lookin too. Recounting that story to Jackson he said, “finally, another slimeball I can talk some slime with”. That phrase has been anchored in my head the better part of two months now. Expect it to appear in Wisconsin Hells.

Also been getting into board games. Lily and I venture out to the Sweet Lair board game cafe regularly. The food is incredible, dessert even more so. This cherry almond scone I had back in like, March, might still be my favorite junk food I've had all year. I'm serious, it's that good, and damn cheap to boot. You can get a solid meal and a sizable dessert for ten or twenty bucks. Dad joined us one day for Pandemic, one of those map games where you're guaranteed to lose 90% of the time but the journey is fun anyway. Talking to my mom the next week she said, “dad's still talking about that game you played last week. He wants to win so bad”. Dead of Winter is similarly brutal but more fun, in my opinion; there's more to do and the theming and emergent narratives are more instantly engaging than an abstract map of the world. Haven't gotten dad on that one yet. We also inherited Mansions of Madness from Jason's dad and the entire Star Wars Villainous suite for ten bucks from somebody on Facebook Marketplace. 

Container I purchased new at full price, off the strength of its online buzz. I usually spend my entertainment budget on things I experience on my own - books, comics, singleplayer video games - I fucking love that I could pay thirty-five bucks to entertain a full table of people for hours. And we're all still excited to play more! I'm having so much fun playing with others but especially her, man, it's like… god, it just feels nice to have something we both completely fuck with. Like, I enjoy video games but I never wanna play them for five hours like she does. She likes walking but she never wants to walk a couple miles like I do. Board games are a sweet spot I didn't even realize our relationship was missing.

All this to say - ever since writing about how socially driven my musical discover was back in 2022 I've been trying to turn enjoying art back into a more social experience. I like to think I'm starting to do the same while creating it. Lily and Jason worked the camera on a YouTube video; Sean's designing me a snazzy website and I've been talking to some friends about doing art for Wisconsin Hells. I also consulted former gas station employee Colin for the gas station robbery scene in WH #2. Starting small but I'm trying to get more comfortable with collaboration; it's important as hell in this AI dystopia, it's fun, and it gives my talented and creatively burnt-out friends some motivation.

Also been gardening. My garlic died off immediately after I wrote that thing about how well it was doing. Taking that as an act of God. Tomatoes, basil and oregano are all enormous and some of my peppers are looking nice too. Homemade salsa is still on the table. 

Gardening has been a real learning experience. Figuring out where in my yard gets enough sunlight/water for this plant versus that one, learning how badly I underestimated the amount of space a tomato plant needs, buying a new hose-head Lily liked so much she sprayed our entire house clean and then did the same for the neighbor…

I've been keeping busy no matter what my brain tells me, and this has been one of the best and worst times of my life. Looking back at June-August ‘26 it's easily the most fulfilling summer since I started working full-time, my favorite since ‘22. I guess I just have this tendency to sequester my life out using big events as walls, and those events need to be Events to even qualify. Seeing Touche Amore in Chicago? One of the best days of my life, the most fun I've had all year plus it helped me to let go of my grief. That's an Event. Pride was a fun day out on the town. Seeing old friends is, too. Discovering a great new album is a neat little curio. I wish my brain could look at all those things and see the progression of my life as a slow-rolling snowball instead of waiting for the world to pack all the snow on at once.

The day we flew out to Florida a tornado touched down in my hometown. Or is it severe wind? A bad storm? A tornado out in the sticks that poked its head into the city for a couple minutes? Everyone is telling a different story.

The truth found me on the drive to Appleton International. A couple neighborhoods were leveled. Lily found people online saying this was a historically unprecedented storm. An e4, maybe. Some people say it only became an e4 when it spun out into the water. Most people are calling it an e3 that happened its way into all the worst debris it could've picked up. Does it matter, really? Nothing like this has ever happened here.

Manderfield's was the first business reported destroyed. We used to stop there on Tuesday after school. That's when they put out Charlie Browns, these soft cakey chocolate cookies topped with thick, hard chocolate frosting. My brother's first job was on their cleaning crew. 

The first actual footage was out when we got to the airport. Shit, everything around Manderfield's is gone. That whole neighborhood, god, there's so many stories there. Owen used to play poker at the Plank Road Pub. Completely leveled. I got pulled over in front of that house that's in pieces spread across the whole block. At 17 I spun out on a bad tire and got towed a little down the way, while driving to High Cliff State Park. My dad lectured me, told me I shouldn't be joyriding, I should only drive if I had somewhere to be. I told him I was going somewhere. He gave me the same spiel over again. 

I remember eating at Solea back when Sinnoh was the brand-new Pokémon region, learning about such obscure and cryptic monsters as Piplup for the first time from some dog-eared magazine I borrowed off a better-connected friend. A friend from Georgia had his first apartment in the state down in that sketchy complex by the BP that doesn't card. First time we hung out I took him to Mai's Deli and he got addicted to the chicken wings. While he cleared the table I went to grab plates. I asked him what cabinet they'd be in, “ya know, in case there's any cabinets you don't want me to look in”. That sentence trailed off into his weed stash. I buckled over laughing. Not far from there, at a secluded boat landing on a private road, Lily and I ate fried chicken and fucked under a full moon. Oh, over down that way by the House of Hoagies we had a weirdly long conversation about who had the best verse on 1Train. That was a great day. Except when she said Danny Brown had the worst verse. Like, I can forgive her rating Yelawolf as high as she does cause she's a country girl but really? I mean, she put Joey below Rocky. And did Kendrick really have the best verse or is he just likable?

It's funny, all the stupid trivial moments you remember when part of your world ends. All the tiny things your snowball rolled up between Events, the things my brain tried to tell me didn't matter. I only ever knew two people that lived down there, to me the whole neighborhood is a series of small happenings. As a billion people have said better than I could, those are the most important moments of your life, though they never announce themselves as such until after they're buried.

In the air we realized she'd forgotten the cord to her headphones. I offered her an earbud and we both listened to my mp3 player together. Mostly music, save the Jon Bois “History of Slipping on Banana Peels” video. Got her into Jane Remover through Psychoboost. It's cool whenever she has the aux and puts on any given Jane Remover song I didn't introduce her to. Like, that's the most satisfying feeling ever for a music nerd.

We sat next to one of the seats the flight attendants take for takeoff and landing. Whenever it got rocky during a long, turbulent landing we looked to her and a nonplussed expression told us everything we desperately needed to know.

Her parents paid this gay couple they're friends with to pick us up. Our driver was tan and fit; his husband looked and sounded like Dale Gribble. He smoked the whole ride. Offered me one, in case either of us smoked and needed a fix after our trip. Lily said she only smokes pot, I gave my usual “I'm boring and sober”. Our driver told me it's not boring to be healthy. Speaking of which, ain't nothin healthier than some good ol Indian gaming! Florida Seminole Tribe owns the Hard Rock Cafe/Casino franchise and their flagship complex was smack dab in the middle of Tampa. There it is now! God, what a delightful monument to all our sins.

Sins also manifest when one pictures your typical Floridian trailer park. Lily’s parents had always said they lived in a park… given their income level I'd taken that to mean, like, a cul-de-sac or something. Economy's different down here. And old age changes what you look for in a house. A smaller living space and a tight-knit community both look awful tempting once locomotion becomes a fairweather friend. I couldn’t get a good look at the park, coming in at night. All that caught my eyes were some tacky lights and a couple dodgy awnings. I scrambled to push a lifetime of “at least we're not THAT poor” classism to the back of my head: this is a retiree's park, the rich kind, and regardless trailer parks are a quintessential piece of Americana that I've never experienced. Ain't that kind of exciting?

As Lily exited the car she told the driver “I know Florida's supposed to be a bad state for trans people, but y'all have been so nice. Thank you so much for driving us”. I didn't hear his response, but I saw a smile replace trepidation on her face. That's enough.

I don't have much to say about the family's reunion in the dining room. You could hardly feel eight years of lost time. We were all tired. They finished playing cards, showed us around and found their way to the bedroom. The place looked like a modern home in miniature, smooth wood floors and featureless white shelving. A big flat-screen TV broadcast AI-generated screensaver art above a multi-colored electric fireplace. Two gargantuan Holy Bibles lay on a mantle between them; a third was on an end table with a bookmark halfway through. A digital camera photograph of a Google search for a battle of the Vietnam War is framed on the wall. This is how the other half live, eh? Not sure what to make of it.

Tuesday

I woke up at 8 in the morning, cause regardless of a vacation my body is used to the midshift now. Fuck, I'm glad to be off nights  Getting home past midnight was killing me. Went to the bathroom and shaved my legs for the first time since I worked in the YMCA pool. Gonna be wearing shorts this week and what's the point if I don't look good, right? I spent a couple minutes just running my fingers up and down my legs, reveling in the alienness of their smooth texture. I forgot how much I loved that feeling. Realized while walking into the bedroom that I missed a couple spots. Lily beckoned me back to sleep. I curled up in her arms and slept till 2.

We played cards through the afternoon. It stormed on and off, it's interesting how casually thunderstorms happen down here. All day they roll in and out, in and out. I went to toss a can, Lily's dad directed me to a bag hanging on the doorknob. “We don't recycle but there's this ahhtistic fella who collects ‘em. Everyone saves ‘em for ‘im, he makes a couple hundred bucks a month!” That's something I can't easily picture happening in my neighborhood. I'm wondering how to export that, and nothing else about the trailer park lifestyle, to the rest of America.

Nah golf carts can come too. Rain cleared up and Lily's dad showed us how to operate the rickety little machine parked on their lawn. It ain't street legal - some are, but not this one - but you can get a long way driving it down the sidewalks. But let's not leave the park with it today, he forgets how charged it was. Only question I had was, where's that alligator hang out?

Lily took the wheel and we spent our day driving tastefully through the park, watching ducks.

It's great down in Florida, but I feel the distance starting to eat at me. The first night I had dreams of Menasha, Milwaukee and then Chicago. Homesick not just for my house or my family but for the Midwest. Chicago, Oshkosh, the Menasha I can never return to. There's some assholes who'll tell you I hate America cause I have complicated feelings about my dick and balls but the only way you're getting me out of the Midwest is in a fucking bodybag. This is the best place on the planet.

Oh, and while we're on Chicago - Chi-town traffic's got nothin on driving her mom's lifted truck in a trailer park. Doesn't help I forgot my glasses, but packing them wouldn't have made the roads any wider, or gotten the park's resident dipshit children to listen to my horn. In a place where vehicles were sized reasonably, parks would be more likable, I think; easier to see for their efficient use of a small space. Shit maybe we should just make all golf carts street legal? 

Anyway we got in the truck to buy Lily some weed for the week.

“That’s a whole weeks’ supply?”

“Yeah. I’m gonna take one now.”

“Y’wanna get a bite to eat?”

“There’s a Sonic down here. I haven’t been to Sonic in sooo long. I used to go there all the time when I was in Nebraska, when I was a student I’d go after classes every day.”

“Yeah, looks like it’s in Brandon? Like, thirty minutes?”

“My weed’ll start to kick in by then, perfect.”

“Y’ever notice how every fuckin’ burger place has like, a house sauce or a sauce with some special name, like, this is some amazing bomb-ass sauce that you can only get here… then you get it and it’s just regular burger sauce that everyone has?”

“Yeah!”

“I mean, I don’t care, it tastes great. It’s just funny. Can’t be hard to make. Like, ketchup and mayo and… somethin’ acidic? Lemme look up a recipe. Yeah, pickle juice, I guess.”
“We gotta make that next time you make burgers.”

“I’ve seen signs for a candidate named Gay and a candidate named Batman. Y’think they ever thought about running together?”

“That’s how you get less than one percent of the votes.”

“You don’t think people would go for a Gay Batman ticket?”

Lily’s dad’s a big music guy, just not the kind I can jive with. Like, there’s this dude I used to work with. He’s into a bunch of cool shit. King Gizzard, sea shanties, a half-unironic encyclopedic knowledge of internet-age novelty rock songs from Trogdor to I Can Only Count To Four. Got me into some stuff. But he’s also a mega-conservative Republican and that’s just too many eggshells to walk on when so much of the music I’ve loved this decade is coming from trans women and black men. People who can’t so much as talk about the honest truth of their everyday life without that kind of guy accusing them of being radically political. And then you start to notice the dude doesn’t ever play music by women, and you notice the only new music he plays is throwback shit, and you notice he added a great new song to his playlist that seems a little out of his wheelhouse, and you Google the artist and learn people are mad at him right now cause he said something anti-trans. It’s the same thing with Lily’s dad. You can have good taste and still be completely tasteless, ya know?

We were playing cards and he goes, “ya like Jelly Roll?”

“I think so? I think Lily likes one of his songs, she mighta played it for me.”

“I like him a lot. He's a good guy… ya like that Tom Mack Donald?”

“Not familiar.”

“He's a rapper. Only rap I listen to.”

“I'm not much of a rap fan.”

“Oh, me either, but he's diffren’. No killin’ whores or anythin, he raps about good stuff. Politics, n Trump, n… good stuff.” He played Tom MacDonald's music for some fifteen minutes as he explained the rules to the card game “hand and foot”.

“Y'shuffle up six decks, that's why we have that card shuffler, it works real well. An’ everyone gets thirteen cards, two piles of thirteen cards. You take one of'm, look at it, that's your hand. Other one stays face down till ya empty your hand. Goal is to make books of the same number. Twos'n Jokers are wild. Wild books're black, ya put a black card on top, they're worth three hundred. Books without wild cards're worth five hundred, you put a red  card up top. One of our neighbors here taught us this one, it's real simple once y'start playin. We play this till sunrise, four, five in the mornin’ sometimes. Ya like Reeeba McIntyre?”

Abiding by tradition, we played til four in the morning. He forgot about the radio after that, just let Reba run a couple hours. You won't hear me complainin. 

Around three he goes, “ya like Jelly Roll?”

I turned to Lily. She shrugged. I said, “I think Lily plays some of his stuff sometimes?”

“Oh, I like him a lot. Have you ever heard Tom MacDonald? He's the only rapper I lissen to. None of that ‘I'm killin' whores’, jus’ good stuff.” He looked over at Lily's pot. “That's legal? Or is it from a guy?”

“It's from a store. I don't know anyone down here.” She said.

“ That store sell hash? What ever happened to hash? I used to get hash back'n the sixties n’ seventies, then my guy moved away an’ I never saw hash anywhere again.”

“I think it used to be a lot more popular?” I offered.

Lily said, “you can take some of mine if you want.” She gestured to the untouched meal shake on the table. “Might help your appetite.”

Wednesday

Didn't do much today. Went to Outback Steak House. Lily and I were talking about going to the Outback in Milwaukee when we got home, actually. Been meaning to do a Glorioso's run and pick up some of those cherry beef Jerry sticks from the Public Market. Aaaand maybe find time for the ol bookstore.

Speaking of books, I mostly sat in and read today, on account of the rain and Lily being sleepy. Curled up in bed with her and started Nigel Robinson's Doctor Who novel Birthright. Back in high school I used to travel with a stack of some ten Doctor Who paperbacks, had a suitcase just for ‘90s tie-in material. Could be a once-in-a-lifetime week-long trip or Easter with the cousins, it didn't matter. My Doctor Who fixation has subsided somewhat since then on account of the show sucking ass, but ever since my rewatch group gave up on rewatching it I've found myself reinvigorated. Now, instead of dredging through the Matt Smith years as part of my weekly routine I'm free to explore the parts of the series that appeal to me at my own pace. So, paying tribute to the exploration that defined my high school self's engagement with Doctor Who, I packed a couple Virgin books I hadn't read - the duo Birthright and Iceberg. The former stars the companions sans Doctor, the latter the Doctor sans companions (though, rather hilariously, Iceberg is also Doctor-free until page 148 and, with the companions off in the prior book, no established characters take his place. It's, er, a slow burn. Thankfully the author's cast of original characters are interesting).

Birthright, then, belongs to my favorite school of Doctor Who storytelling: defining the Doctor through their absence. The recent Redacted podcast handled that admirably, too, and it remains the strongest piece of Thirteenth Doctor media. But nobody's ever really done it to the extreme that Birthright did: stranded on Earth in the past and future after an apparent shipwreck, the Doctor's two closest friends get involved in local affairs only to discover that they've already got pre-established housing, clothes, identities, gigantic piles of money and so on all thanks to a mysterious benefactor. There's even an implication that he orchestrates a murder all to frame his companion so she's safe in prison while a massacre goes down. The Doctor becomes a looming, ever-present force. It’s one of those stories that redefines every other story he appears in: now you'll always be wondering how spontaneous his adventures truly are whenever some plot contrivance reveals itself. It takes the Doctor's background noise of sinister alienness to the forefront. I wish more Doctor Who felt like this.

The concept is so strong that it makes up for what might be some of the worst prose I've ever seen in a professionally edited novel. I'm saying that as a dodgy writer myself, mind you, but this is a novel about secret conspiracies where every line of dialogue from one of the secret conspirators is tagged, he said secretly and conspiratorially (this is a slight exaggeration). It's a novel about a serial killer murdering prostitutes where the writer will flip-flop between a gruesome description of a sex worker's bladder falling from a gash in her abdomen to “and that made her john very sad :(”.

“Lily, why do I keep gettin’ these messages? Is somethin’ wrong with my phone?” Oh wow, she actually called her Lily! (I commented on it later and her dad said, “you can chalk it up to stupidity. Maybe if you'd come down here more we'd remember”).

“Those are spam texts, mom. They're not real people.”

“Why do they think I want to see that… 42 horny sluts?”

I learned very quickly today how insane life in a park can be, even a park full of retirees. It ain't exactly Trailer Park Boys but it gets crazy. There's this young Puerto Rican guy, here whenever he's not visiting family. Handyman, builds stuff for the retirees. Built a bunch for Lily's parents’ neighbors. They took advantage of his kindness, never treated him well or paid him what he asked for.

And then her parents asked him to build for them. He put in the fireplace, all-new ceiling fans, a wheelchair ramp, redid the bathroom. Got close with the two of them, says he sees them as family - and thus he's willing to cut them a deal on construction. So now the neighbors won't talk to them, because they're jealous their guy got poached. 

“Lily, did I tell you the whole story about the TSA thing?”

“Yeah, he groped you.”

“Nah, it’s crazier than that. He pulled me aside and said there was an ‘unusual amount of mass’ in my groin region. And then he groped me.” I couldn't help let out a chuckle.

“What? That's so funny, I was so worried!”

“I mean like, he did grope me and I should be taking it seriously but mostly I'm over the moon that my dick is considered unusually large under federal law.”

Her parents went to bed early tonight, dad underestimated Lily's weed gummies. Took one and smoked a joint with her, greened out hard. We stayed up watching Bob's Burgers on the TV above the fireplace. It's kinda fun, watching somebody else's TV when they're not around. Almost voyeuristic. There's a comfort, too, in reminding oneself that the way the other half lives ultimately boils down to watching TV on the couch just like we do.

Thursday

I hate being away from home right now, helpless and watching the news roll in. Lily keeps me updated on the destruction daily, or whenever something new crawls out from the wreckage. I don't think she realized it upset me as bad as it did until today. It's the sinking feeling that the world I grew up in doesn't exist anymore, of course, but also a sense of guilt. I should be out there, struggling with my city. Today she told me Chef Fresh is gone, and it might not come back on account of the owners wanting to retire anyhow. Me and Owen's Moto Mart, too, and Studio 6D6 next door. An old friend's house, though she and her family moved out years ago. 

She quoted some article or Facebook post, “other businesses reported damaged include Third Street Diner, Chicago's House of Hoagies-”

“Not the fuckin’ house of hoagies!”

She was confounded. Assumed I waa fucking around; it's the kind of name I find funny. She shrugged, “we've never been there.”

“That was grandpa's favorite place. You remember his hospice nurse always used to buy him hoagies, every day til he couldn't handle hard food? Remember they used to call him hoagie boy?”

“I wish I hadn't told you now… they're planning to rebuild, at least.”

“That's good. I never got to try it. I always think about going there with him now. When he got sick I was barely an adult, y'know, I was like 21… I wasn't comfortable around old people enough to ask normal shit like what's your favorite restaurant. I wanted to check it out. Make up for that mistake.”

“It's not a mistake, you were just young and shy.”

“Doesn't stop the guilt.”

I was planning to rewrite my old Little Detroit essay some time this year. The tornado's made that a weird prospect... what was once an embarrassingly self-effacing, self-victimizing, juvenile attempt at journalism now reads as a nostalgic eulogy for a world I didn't know belonged to the past. You look back at how I drew parallels between Menasha and my cancer-stricken grandfather and you wonder how fucking hard Apollo was laughing. The only mistake I made was measuring Menasha's lifespan in decades.

But then every day the news reports on how my hometown is weathering this disaster with strength and aplomb. You see the entire state coming together to help us pick up the pieces, and right at the center is Bluejay pride. You get the feeling I didn't give Menasha enough credit. Every day this month I've been watching my punchline of a city rise from the muck like the fuckin Man-Thing.

That tornado tore away all my reservations: I've seen what this town is made of, I'm proud to have it in me. This is the strongest little mill town in Wisconsin, a model for how we're going to survive every unprecedented storm this century has on deck. God, I never thought I'd get to say something so forward-thinking about Metrasha. But here we are… say nice things about Little Detroit.

“So you for sure wanna go to Disney today?”

“Yeah, I'd love to. How are we gonna get there? You forgot your glasses, I don't want you to drive in Orlando traffic.”

“We could Uber.”

“That's expensive.”

“What about your parents’ friends?”

“They’re busy today.”

“So let's just bite the bullet and get an Uber.”

“I don't want you to spend that much money, the tickets are already so expensive.”

“Lily, I'm getting you to Disney. You've been showing me clips of that Star Wars ride for months. It's a bucket list item for you and who knows when our next opportunity is gonna be? I've done enough overtime, we can afford it. Let's just get an Uber.”

“We can skip it… I hate watching you tear yourself apart like this.”

“I'm not tearing myself apart, I'm trying to make you happy.”

“You're not making me happy! I've been watching you destroy yourself all day stressing about the money and getting us there and - and I think you need to accept that we can't afford Disney right now. We'll come back when you're managing that whole stupid building.”

“We can afford it, do you know how much overtime I put in?”

“If we could afford it you wouldn't have had to put in any overtime. You took half a day off for a concussion. You've been destroying yourself trying to make this happen, seeing you like this, I - I don't even wanna go anymore.”

“...so what are we gonna do?”

“There’s that comic store you wanted to check out. Buy me some Red Sonja and we'll call it even.”

“This trip was supposed to be about you. I'm not gonna spend all day forcing you to do something for me.” 

“Seeing my parents is enough. That's what this trip was actually about for me, don't forget that. Disneyland isn't going anywhere, who knows how long my parents have? There's a card store next door to the comic shop, it looks nice.”

“Shit, I'll take you there.”

Urban Legend Comics in Brandon, Florida, resides within an unassuming strip mall storefront. There's a palpable, sticky mundanity to the place not even halfway offset by bright tropical flowers and full-figured palms. There's some stickers on the windows and a plain black-and-white URBAN LEGEND COMICS sign but next to my home bases in Appleton and Oshkosh it's as functional as they come. Save one small detail: an army-green box truck adorned with a Deadpool logo sticker and an enormous ALWAYS BUYING COMICS sign. I’ve never thought too hard about what kind of car I’d buy if I won the lottery. Always assumed I’d buy something practical and move on with my life. That was before I knew this thing was an option.

An odd feature of this strip mall: all the windows are heavily tinted, so you can't actually see into a store from outside. It's not like this is a particularly dangerous area where you need to keep The Product secure, otherwise there'd be more barred windows and fewer hobby stores. Maybe it's about keeping out the killer Florida sun? 

In any case the result of this peculiar design was that I had no idea until the door'd shut behind me that I was visiting the closest I'd ever come to a comic-book Library of Babel (one day I’ll make the pilgrimage to Mile-High Comics…) 

So the store was fantastic. As in it rocked, but also as in it felt unreal, like some dragon's treasure hoard. It had two doors so I wanna say it was two of the tiny strip mall units wide. Not a lot of space, all of it used to its best effect. It had been sequestered into some ten or so rooms, all as themed and decorated as could be, every inch of wall space occupied either a comic-character decal*, a curiosity such as the pamphlet “How To Teach Your Cat About Gun Safety” or a comic book on a system of strings and clips (don’t worry, they’re clipped to the bags and boards). The proprietor told me, “I don't decide what's on the wall based on what's valuable. I just put stuff up there that I think looks cool”. He said he liked to try and theme the walls. Like, if he had a complete run on a series he'd put it in a pack. If he had a large but incomplete set he'd make a wall of it. My favorite detail: a mirror surrounded by vampire comics.

The indie comics section proved most fruitful, predictably: I'm suffering from good ol Superhero Fatigue and Lily's not a superhero girl to begin with. It helps that one of the indie rooms had a substantial Kabuki wall. I'm now the proud owner of most of The Alchemy, that series I bitched last time about never being able to find! I love that it was sorted by publisher, made it easier to find books from small companies. Over in the Eclipse section I found two Dreamery back-issues for a buck or two apiece. Being vaguely aware of the series and curious, I couldn't turn ‘em down. Turns out it rocks, I've immediately become a diehard fan! It's a world apart from your standard 80s fantasy comic, no sub-Frazetta machismo. Nothing macho at all, really - it's whimsical, firmly PG and mostly authored by women. Nice change of pace for the genre.

The Dreamery was overlooked at the time because it's a black-and-white fantasy anthology without enormous tits on the cover; these days it's overlooked because most of the good bits have been collected. Specifically Lela Dowling's incredible Lewis Carrol adaptations and Donna Barr's Stinz. Highly recommend Stinz as a whole, by the way, if you enjoy that whole late-20th-century YA fantasy vibe. It's set in a version of historical Austria where centaurs exist alongside humans. What does it do with that high-concept premise? Mostly light, lush slice-of-life nonsense. It’s fun. Not long after I started reading Stinz, Lily got high and stayed up til 6 in the morning watching My Little Pony. We're both getting into horseshit.

But the real star of Dreamery is the best letters page ever. Lettercols are universally worth reading IMO - what makes this one so different? One great editorial mandate. Every issue of the comic came with a question or riddle wherein the winner (either the first person to answer the riddle or the best response to the question) would receive a prize. Issue 8's letter-writers, prompted by an inquiry about local cryptids, all won a prize on the strength of every single submission. The issue contains three whole double-columned pages of ghost stories from readers! You just don't see that in modern books (Royals #3's letters section has a nearly page-long breakdown of inaccuracies in the poker gameplay in #1. That's about as close as you get in 2026, and it's the exception, not the rule). My favorite is the guy who talked about how his friend and him used to make scary props and go around trying to start local legends. These include an enormous spider costume and a paper-mache severed head they hung on the sign for Indian Head Road. You could argue the latter hasn't aged well, but I think the fault lies with whoever named the road.

Also in the Eclipse boxes: almost every issue I didn’t have of Aztec Ace, at a buck each! I don't have as much to say about Aztec Ace, though I love it just as much. The pitch is simple: imagine if Doctor Who regenerated into a Mexican warrior. Bigger-on-the-inside time machine, young female companion and all. The first issue goes fairly immediately from setup to a nude Ben Franklin trying to gun our hero down in an Aztec bathhouse. Almost every issue is overflowing with insane panel layouts, too. They take full advantage of the medium.

Some other pulls from the indie rooms: Eclipse's Real War Stories 1 (the comic famously challenged by the US Navy! The story they took issue with is famous for the single panel about “greasing” but if you bother to read the rest of it, it's a very effective and moving anti-military story. Certainly the best in the book… in a comic full of Vietnam War blood and gore, this story focuses on trauma inflicted on a man who never even saw combat. It leaves you with the message that, even deprived of a war, a war machine is still a horrible thing to be trapped in. I think that's more vital than giving Alan Moore another excuse to write a violent rape scene.), Naughty Bits 16 (one of those 90s Politically Incorrect Anthology comics but controversial for being written by a woman who made it sexual in a way you couldn't easily wack off to. It, erm, hasn't aged well. A problematic fave for me), the whole Eclipse run of Reid Fleming the World's Toughest Milkman (it's truly idiosyncratic, like a 30s slapstick film directed by an 80s punk. The art is obsessively hatched and pretty enough to hang on your wall without ever being too stiff and formal for some great visual gags. I love the whole sequence in issue #1 where Reid fishes his truck out of a pool by swinging it from a tree), a complete pack of Mirka Andolfo's Red Sonja for Lily (we read her Sweet Paprika together; hoping she's as good on Sonja) and the first few issues of Melody: The True Story of A Nude Dancer (autobio comic that's not as sexy as it sounds… the first issue concerns her neighbors outing Melody’s habit of hosting orgies to her parents. It does however have the honor of being the only comic book with a strip club named after it). This last item I found in a room dedicated to adult comics, behind a door and a VHS rental store-styled beaded curtain. Years back my short friend Colin and I discussed a plan for a bookstore with a “banned book room” placed behind a beaded curtain, themed for the adult video section. It brings me so much joy that somebody else is keeping ye olde beaded curtain room alive.

I found complete packs of a few series I've been meaning to read: Sisterhood of Steel and Starstruck. The latter of which has a more definitive collected edition out now, but why not start with a cheap pack to see if I like it, right? I put a couple packs back last minute on the basis I'd never heard of them before, and kinda regret it. The series in question are apocalyptic teen drama It's Only Teenage Wasteland (if you can't tell from Cerberus in Wisconsin Hells I am very much a fan of near-feral teens in fiction) and Loose Ends (an Image miniseries that's supposedly terrible narratively with great art. Which is like, kinda what Image is good at, right? The founders’ comics all fit the bill of course but see also Zero. The art is captivating even as the story completely vanishes in favor of a half-assed metanarrative about Kerouac and Ginsberg. It might be my favorite Image comic, warts and all).

One last curiosity in the indies room: old manga! Since this is first and foremost a comics pamphlet store I'm talking manga from that first, larval manga boom where they tried to adapt manga in floppy format. Akira worked (to say the least), a comics blog I read made a compelling case that gag anthology What's Michael works well at twentysomething pages monthly. Everything else… it's a mixed bag, ain't it? The selection of titles was confusing, a clusterfuck of misjudging the burgeoning weeb audience - we want things that feel Japanese, not generic action serious that happen to be Japanese!**. The few who understood the assignment brought over the wrong kinds of Japanese manga, crappy versions of better manga the localizers didn't know about or things that were just too Japanese without the context of media that hadn't been localized yet.

Another fun little curiosity I passed by: a book called Into the Storm from Curtis Comics. The art looked like any other sports manga of the day but inconspicuous and small amidst a sea of big flashy colors and shapes was the word MANHWA. I looked it up and holy crap, Curtis Lee was trying to bring manhwa to America in 2002! There's an interview with him online, courtesy of the deliciously Web1 Animefringe. His curt manner of speech is refreshing, I love his comments on Tokyopop. Unfortunately this is like, one of the only sources online I could find about Mr. Lee. He had big plans to import figures and do graphic novel volumes. He was all self-funded and mentions in the interview he “would make more money” if he caved and sold Japanese manga which I take to mean he wasn’t turning a profit. You gotta wonder what he's doing in 2026, now that Koreaboos are set to outpace us weaboos.

A chunky feline purred at us on the way out. I'm very accustomed to a bookstore cat, this is my first-ever comic shop cat. This place just keeps on getting cooler! The owner was great while checking us out, too. He haggled on our behalf, saving us $50. We wound up paying $150 for close to an entire shortbox of comics! Had a nice conversation too, he told us his motivation was far from profit, he just wanted to establish the kind of shop he'd enjoy as a reader. He shared anecdotes about talking a guy out of $300 of comics so he wouldn't get scolded by his wife, and a customer telling him he had a $500 book in one box for a buck. His reaction to that information: he charged him a buck! Without a doubt the most honest person I've dealt with in my years as a comics fan. Also a midwesterner, it happens. Though I hate to generalize, that might explain the integrity.

Next door was that card shop we talked about. I don't know what I expected when we opened that jet-black door. My experience with card/board game shops is casual fare, like the relaxed family-friendly Adventure Games in Oshkosh. This place was more like, uh, going to a friend of a friend's single father's house to play Magic in high school? They had music going, snacks for sale, a vintage Pokémon ball machine to your left as you come in. The merchandise was all relegated to a couple frames on the wall: the floor space dedicated itself to tables flush with dudes playing cards. The owner, an amiable bro-ish younger guy, told us it was a brand new store. He was an influencer trying to establish a place for people to play a couple games that didn't get as much attention as he wanted. I wish I remembered which ones… Lorcana, the One Piece game, Union Arena, I think there was a 4th one? In any case, Lily's into the One Piece game and bought a couple Corazon cards off of him. She told me a little about Corazon and we wound up watching like, basically his entire story arc through bootleg YouTube clips in the parking lot. Gentle rain fell, the palms and pink-flowered bushes rustled in a light breeze.

We played more cards tonight. I noticed Lily’s mom put her real name on the scoresheet.  They talked about Lily's late grandmother. She's been holding in that grief forever, it's nice to see her gain some kind of outlet through other people who knew her. Finally got to hear her dad's favorite yarn about her straight from the horse’s mouth. When he was in Vietnam she wrote letters cussing him out for not sending enough money back home for his family, until one day he finally wrote something equally vicious in return. She held onto that letter and presented it, sans the context of what she'd done to provoke him, to anyone who ever asked why she hated him. She never treated anyone else so poorly.

Lily's mom then told her favorite grandma story. Way back in the day, she was a new mother grieving her own mom. She and the kids slept on the second floor of a house in the dim, quiet West Virginia woods. One especially dark night she heard movement downstairs - someone had entered the house. She lay stock-still in bed until the door began to open slowly. From the thin crack in the threshold came her mother's voice: “I didn't mean to scare you. I just wanted to see the babies. I won't bug ya anymore.”

Friday

Today we headed to St Pete. Little further than I want to drive without glasses but there's stuff we both wanted to do and the traffic ain’t Orlando bad. For one I had this big plan to propose on the beach. Naturally I chose the worst fit ever devised for the occasion. Gray shorts, my The Shining poster tee under a cream-colored button-up with a palm tree pattern. It's a size too small so I keep it open. Lily said it was at least shitty in a cute way.

First stop was Tombolo Books. It's right down the road from Haslam's, formerly the largest bookstore in the state. Some 300,000 books inside, a veritable warehouse something like half the size of the block it's on. Kerouac used to hang out at Haslam's. Covid hit and the elderly owners sensibly locked the doors. Less sensibly, they've since left the store and all their merchandise to rot - maybe literally, what with the humidity. There's no talk of them selling their inventory, their location… it's the saddest excess of the “it's not hoarding if it's books” mindset, a depressing window into either senility or sentimentality. The place is still kind of beautiful to look at: all the windows have wood boards behind them, and posters for some famous book (or their movie version) are hung on every one. All peeling and sun-yellowed now, of course. But there's some beauty in that, ain't there?

We parked down the road from the husk of Haslam’s. Right next to this store with a sign reading French Pastries and a couple of pastries painted on the brickwork. Cute. I said we should go for pastries when I got back. Just went to kiss her goodbye, one thing led to another. She made sure there were no kids on the sidewalk and stuck her hand down my pants. I was halfway up when she said, “what's that in your pocket? That little box?”

Ah, shit.

“It's nothing.”

“Okay?”

“I mean, you can look if you want, I dunno. I don't wanna keep anything from you.”

“No, if you don't want me to see it I'll stop asking.”

“...”

“...”

“I was gonna propose to you at Disney. Uh, not at Disney, I don't wanna be one of those assholes. But like, somewhere near there, when you were really happy... I guess I might as well do it now since you just found the ring.” In my defense there wasn't any blood in my brain.

“It's beautiful, I hope you didn't spend too much on that.”

“No, mom gave it to me. It's one of grandma's old rings. I'm gonna get you a nicer one, like a nicer version of your promise ring, when we have money.”

She slipped her old promise ring on my finger. “You don't ever take that off now. I've wanted to see you with a ring for years.”

“Hey, mom. Something big just happened, you're gonna wanna hear about it. No, no, it's nothing bad.”

“We're gonna go get French pastries. And I just proposed.”

“So you're gonna get French pastries?”

I passed a restaurant on the way to Tombolo Books with an enormous octopus over the front entrance. A quick glance at the sign told me it was called Kraken Pizza or something. I'd have to remember that for later. Next door was a slightly scuzzy-looking yard, like a beer garden stripped of furniture and left to its own devices, and next to that was a supremely scuzzy fenced-off lot. Empty save puddles in the cracked asphalt. Also a massive RV in the middle. An RV in a shitty old asphalt lot, right next to some kind of outdoor seating that looked like it hadn't finished rendering in properly… it made me laugh. That’s about what I expected Florida to be like. Hedonistic, chaotic, everyone's brain is a little fried from the sun so we can't really be fucked to make every inch of the place look nice now can we? The asphalt is decaying but it's alright as long as we have an RV and like half of a beer garden.

The road became more forested, rows of dense bushes and palms sprung up on either side. Squirrels and lizards came darting from them as I charged into their paradise. Amidst all the greenery the technicolor storefront somehow sneaks up on you. It's beautiful, framed perfectly between palms, thick-leafed bushes and shoots of bamboo(?). Whoever painted the structure standing amidst these plants deserves all the money in the world. The stark black framing the doors, windows and signs breaks up the massive pillars of color perfectly. I don't want to undersell how colorful it was, so here's a specific detail to drive it home: the concrete stoop in front of the door was painted in two separate colors, green on the right, lavender on the left. They painted the stoop, man! The words BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS came flying out from either window, sharp green motion lines behind them. I already like this place.

A colorful facade's only worth so much, of course. Well, first impressions of the store are positive: it smells pleasant in the way a purveyor of unused books should. I might prefer yellowed paperback smell but really, who am I to deny the scent of a million pages? The knowledge that so many stories inhabit these walls that it's actually affected the way your body senses the air you're breathing? That's never a bad thing. Oh, and it's cold. So many places around here look like they keep their doors open to let the beautiful warm weather in. Books being fragile things, their stores don't have the luxury to ignore the modern luxury of climate control. Any means of controlling temperature and humidity is a must. After a walk in a tropical sun I was hardly accustomed to, I appreciated it.

Right of the entrance is genre fiction, about a shelf apiece of horror, sci-fi, fantasy and romance - the latter two cozying up to one another more than they might’ve a couple years ago. Unusually for me I breezed through this section - I dunno, man, I'm kinda falling out of love with SF and fantasy for opposite reasons right now. Modern sci-fi is too character-focused and modern fantasy is too worldbuildy. Brandon Sanderson's “hard/soft magic” dichotomy did a level of damage to the genre I'm not sure it can ever recover from. 

Much more to my present taste is the tiny “small press” shelf in the corner past mystery fiction. A sign, featuring a manatee, reads: “These books exist because their publishers are supported in whole or in part by federal grants from the National Endowment of the Arts. On May 2 2025, the NEA terminated these grants, stating that the organization's projects “fall outside [the NEA's] new priorities.” Among the projects they will fund instead: those that “foster AI competency” and “make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful”. SUPPORT SMALL PRESSES!” Fuckin amen. Wish I'd picked up more from that shelf.

Only, right behind it was music writing and travel writing so of course my hands were already full. I've been getting into travel writing lately. Cause like, this is the first real traveling I've done in my adult life and most of what I've done has been hang out at somebody else's house. As a kid I was a homebody, as an adult I'm broke and live with a disabled woman.  Even ignoring economics, I think my chance to have an honest-to-God adventure has already passed me by. I spent that time doing donuts in cul-de-sacs, playing poker in gas stations and pretending I was a novelist. I have no regrets - if it was worth regretting it would’ve killed me  - but it's fun to imagine. Paul Theroux's old dusty tomes about catching trains in ‘70s Eurasia remind me of grandpa. “Riding the Iron Rooster” is a title he'd have found hilarious.

In this store I found a book called Walking Europe's Last Wilderness, about a trek through the Carapathian Mountains. Flipped to a random page, read a couple pages about illegal logging and government bureaucracy. It might surprise you to learn I avoid environmentalist writing… it depresses me in a way no other subject manages. It makes me feel inadequate and helpless, there's no righteous anger or drive to go out and do things. What motivates me on the environment is a drive to keep my old neighbor's plants alive during a drought, or dreaming of a white Christmas like the ones I used to know. Small things I can do, or nostalgia I can whinge about. The raw “here's the numbers” approach you see a lot is just too much. The story in those pages drew me in, though. A well-wrought, well-told conversation about political bullshit. It made me angry! It made me wanna go to the mountains and take down an illegal logging operation with my bare hands! Either I'm starting to process shit differently or that passage was just that good. Maybe both?

Oh shit and right next door they've got like 3 33⅓ books. Those are little pocket-sized paperbacks with a roughly hundred-page essay about a beloved album. I own just one, Trout Mask Replica, because there aren't many classic albums I feel an emotional attachment to. Like, yeah, I think the Beatles are cool and all but who doesn't? That’s not my opinion. At the time I was born it might as well be the opinion of God Himself. If I want to hear about the Beatles, any baby boomer or gen-xer I know has a story with more soul than any essay. The albums I'd like to read a book about are a little left-of-center, music I discovered for myself or with friends. 

Like, oh shit, they only have three of them and one of them is on my favorite punk album of the ‘80s? The simultaneously over- and underrated debut of Milwaukee folk-punk legends the Violent Femmes? Fuck, of course I'm getting that. I flipped to the review of Please Do Not Go in the store - it goes into the pseudo-reggae sound and the half-hearted Jamaican accent but doesn't mention that he sounds like Kahn Soupanousinpone on the bridge. Am I seriously the only one who noticed? Am I crazy? And hey, looking online they're actually doing more books like that lately. I remember this series mostly being classic rock records. Now they've got books on Weird Al, Moss Icon, a couple on modern hip-hop, one for the (IIRC) hilariously awful rock alter-ego of country star Garth Brooks, and one about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop? Shit maybe I should get into 33⅓.

I turned to face the wall, across which ran a wide-ranging general fiction section. Small publishers seemed well-represented here too. As I meandered down the way and around a corner (filling some open space sat a table dedicated to women working in translation - I love how curated and personal some of the sections of this store are!) it turned to nonfiction. General nonfiction, American history, gender/minority studies, local history. The LGBT section had another book-length music essay, hot-pink and discussing trans rave culture and, if I'm remembering it right, what art means when the future doesn't exist. It's a little outside my wheelhouse, like, I'm queer and I enjoy the music you'd hear at a queer rave but I'm not a part of that scene at all. I'm too low-key and crippled for anything like that. I'll stick to banging my head while cooking dinner. So like, I'd feel like a poser if I bought it, and thus I didn't, but looking back isn't curiosity about a group I'm not part of my main motivation for reading nonfiction? I wish I remembered the title now.

I did however purchase Gender Trash From Hell, an oversized paperback collecting every issue of an old trans zine. Good shit from what I've read. Published by the small, trans-run press Littlepuss. They also have a shirt that says “TALLER GIRLS SHORTER BOOKS”. Hell yeah.

So this place was really cool! Was I skeptical about an indie bookstore without used books? Of course. Would I have gone to Wilson's Book World instead if I'd known it was on the way? Yeah sure. It's on the list for next time. Still, I'm satisfied. The selection was personable and intriguing, I found some great stuff. Like every good bookstore I came in with a list and left without a single item crossed off. If this is the only bookstore I have time for on this trip I'll be more than satisfied.

“I saw a cool-looking card store down the street.” Lily said when I returned. She gave me directions and off we went. Card shopping is a recent thing for her. Something she used to do in Nebraska, and something she talked about picking back up here except we could never find a card store she liked. Getting into board games got us into Adventure Games, who also do cards. First time we stopped she pulled a stupid expensive card from an Assassin's Creed deck and she's been on a roll ever since. Hey man I don't mind that the thing she's into right now costs like five bucks a pack. It's cheap and makes her happy. That's great!

The card store was inside of a convention center? Like, you enter into this big glass-walled vestibule with doors leading into an even larger hall. And then right between the doors is this tiny little like ten-foot-tall box that sells cards! They have card tables set up outside that house something like a third of their inventory in binders. The first thing I told the guy at the counter is, “you don't really see… uh, architecture like this in small-town Wisconsin.”

Lily ended up finding almost every Corazon card she was after. Unfortunately the hundred-some-dollar one she's been hunting was still a hundred some dollars here and they didn't have any more of the pack he used to come in. They had a bunch of these little blind box figurines of Pokémon imported from China, with these nicely flat paint jobs that bring to mind some of those old cel-shaded video games from before graphics snobbery disappeared up its own ass. I got a Machoke.

A guy who either worked there or was just a friend helping out - it's hard to draw the line in small businesses - said, when Lily inquired about One Piece cards, “One Piece is crazy, all I know is if it's got big ol bitties it's worth a lot.” Fuckin quote for the ages right there.

Lily and I decided to order from that Kraken Pizza restaurant. Googling led us to Kraken Joe's and a guy on the phone who tiredly explained, probably for the hundredth time today, that you can only order online or in-store. So we ordered online - a pepperoni, some hipstery pesto-and-veggie creation and a side of meatballs. About thirty minutes; it'd be like a ten minute walk. We shot the shit for twenty minutes, then I hit the dirt.

On the way I saw a poster on a lightpost - “new band looking for singer/screamer who can play piano and guitar”. I like that they're not picky how harsh the vocals are but you GOTTA know piano and guitar. My only problem is that they didn't name the band in the poster, piano/guitar/screamer is always rad.

Kraken Joe's had a bunch of nautical-themed wood work outside, cephalopods for the most part. It's weird, after years visiting the shores of Lake Michigan, to see an ocean-themed tourist spot that's actually next to the ocean. It’s kinda cool. It’s what I’ve been wanting all week. The whole week I've been complaining that Lily's parents only ever get fast food, that I haven't had an opportunity to sample any of the no doubt fantastic food culture down here. I asked if there were any good Hispanic places and they told me there's a Taco Bell down the road. I asked about anything Southern and they gave me the address to KFC. I asked if there was anything at all they like that I don’t have in the Oshkosh metropolitan area and they took us to Outback Steak House. Which was great, mind you. I'm grateful they paid for all our food, it left me spending a lot less money than I'd saved up (coming as I do from a family of prodigious bill-splitters). But what's the point of going somewhere if you're not gonna eat things you can't eat at home? Food is half the reason travel is worth the overtime. Man, I'm still thinking about that sandwich I had at Hot Chi back in April.

I guess I should probably make it explicit here that I know I only have one foot outside my comfort zone. Tourist trap restaurants near the water are like half of my childhood memories, bougie pizza joints aren't unfamiliar to me as an adult. But this is still a Floridan business and you can feel the state's ethos as you walk in. It's familiar to me as a veteran of touristy restaurants, just flashier and more maximalist. They had a kraken painting hung above three pinball machines. Next to them was a couch/coffee table situation and a shelf with board games on it I think? Across from that is a pretty standard bar, but in the corner of the bar they had an old Coke machine and a couple filing cabinets. It's a good vibe. I told the bartender I was picking up an online order and he said, “it's outside”.

That whole outdoor area I passed earlier was part of this place; they had a stage for a live band and served food out of a truck. Dozens of tables and chairs now filled the space, most occupied. A couple hung out by the counter where a teen girl tried to keep up with our orders. She's one of those kids you see sometimes that reminds me of who I was at the YMCA, too young for all this bullshit. Behind her, tickets were scattered haphazardly, half-prepared meals sat next to them. My food service experience told me somebody knew what the plan was, but it wasn’t her and they weren’t communicating that plan with anyone else.

A stocky bald man stormed from the kitchen, picking up styrofoam containers and shouting “where does this go? Where the hell is this going? Why's it sittin’ here?”. Then he huffed his way out to our poor waitress: “those two guys need to get their heads outta their asses. You can tell the customers that!” I've been him as often as her. I hope they got a couple good days off after this.

Oh, and the pizza was excellent. Probably not worth the price but rent is high in Saint Pete. They got bills to pay.

Saturday

We spent a couple hours last night snuggling on the couch. Lily lay on my lap, we vegged with pizza. This morning her dad got up to piss, took a detour to the guest room and said, “I liked you a lot better fore ya crashed on my couch. Don't lay on my couch.” He grumbled about how much it cost as he shuffled to the bedroom.

Hours later Lily and I were talking to her mom in the bedroom when he cried out from the kitchen. I heard something hit the floor and booked it. Just in time to grab him under the arms. His iPad was shorted out in a puddle of Coke. A walker he always left in the corner looked awful conspicuous. He told me to keep him upright a moment before going dead-weight. Pain shot up my back, I could feel something give, I could feel every individual vertebrae. I began to lower him, knowing I'd miss this pain when he was safe on the ground.

It gave me a sense of control I never had with grandpa. Cancer is a choice taken away from you. It's your number coming up for the draft. It's growing up in a mill town while all the jobs move overseas. A tornado touching down. Fighting cancer is like actually writing Bernard V. O'Hare's “anti-iceberg novel”. But I've got two arms, I got one under each of his. Gravity isn't cancer, it's a mortal foe. 

I wished he could keep falling forever.

Sunday

Today we tried to do everything we were supposed to do yesterday. Except the drag queen bingo those gay guys were gonna take us to… they do that every Saturday. Hoping it's still on next time we're in town, from what I hear it sounds great. Gay Dale Gribble's appraisal: “she… what's that line? I forget, but she says this funny like about balls, bingo balls. She's hilarious.”

There's one more bookstore I considered a can't-miss, but it was out on the outskirts of Tampa. Not nearly as bad a drive as Saint Pete; still kinda shit. Turns out there were a couple places Lily wanted to hit on the same route! There was also a kinda sketchy-looking but well-reviewed book and manga store in Brandon that was closed Sundays. Another one for next time, dammit! In any case a cat cafe Lily wanted to visit was fully booked up, but neither of the game/collectibles stores were. One in Brandon was fantastic, a dusty, scuzzy old-fashioned catch-all Retro Hobby store called Vintage and Current Collectibles. You walk in and you're slapped in the face with the smell of yellowing cardboard from a bazillion action figures’ boxes, trading cards, unbagged comics, the whole nine yards. By the register he had a display of (local?) metal fanzines priced at a reasonable $6.66. 

Also, sealed vintage National Lampoon and Mork & Mindy trading cards at three bucks a pop! Mork makes for a good stand-in birthday gift for my dad while I decide on something bigger and cooler; National Lampoon is just a cool novelty that happens to feature a ton of artists I really like - Frazetta, Bode, Wrightson, Trina Robbins… it's a great lineup! I'm starting to “get” cards. I'm not one for card games (I prefer a game where you pay 20-50 bucks once and host it regularly for the next decade of your life) or collecting the things but having a little piece of art that doesn't take up any significant amount of space is something I can get behind. Kinda the same appeal as collecting the original pamphlet comics so you have all the cover art. Note to anyone with a surplus of cardboard looking to make some money: I would totally buy a trading card-scale comic longbox.

While Lily searched a diminutive video game rack for some of her white whales I made my way through the action figures. There was a time when toys like these were a big part of my life. In the seventh grade I kept a whole running list of all the action figures I wished I could produce based on the Portal/Half-Life/X-Files/Doctor Who fanfic series I was running at the time (in one of the most sensible and logical storylines, Gordon Freeman is revealed as an evil robot created by GlaDOS who's in league with a superintelligent hive mind version of the Black Oil substance that created Dawn of the Dead-style zombies who were also headcrab zombies). I considered a figure from Metropolis, really a pretty strange movie to base an action figure on, until those damned longboxes called to me. Completely unsorted, unbagged, a buck apiece… that’s where you find the good shit.

I found more Aztec Ace - in all my time in Wisconsin and Illinois I've stumbled into one issue, down in Florida I've gotten the whole run. My dad suggested an Aztec character might be more appealing in a place with more Hispanic people. Makes sense. Also scrounged up issue 2 of Feud. That's an obscure 4-issue series by Marvel's creator-owned Epic line. Epic was floundering by the time Feud came out. They'd tried to do Original Adult Comics and fallen flat because unlike, say, Eclipse, Marvel had a clean-ish reputation to uphold. And I don't mean the skimped on the sex and blood - I mean they would have never published Neil the Horse or Tales From Beanworld. They tried to do Vertigo for a bit, then they tried to be Image, then they gave up entirely and just did Iron Man But With Blood And Sex. All the while the only evergreen title in their roster was cartoonish comedy Groo The Wanderer, so like why the hell didn't they do more of that? 

Feud checks precisely none of the boxes Epic tried to check, except violence and a well-liked creator. But like, it’s completely unlike anything else Marvel has published… it’s a political/war thriller about sapient technologically advanced reptiles. There are four species of them and they all hate each other on account of their places in the food chain. They all still need each other, though, so tensions are high. Plentiful are the, well, feuds. Really it's a story about ecology disguised as a political thriller. It's a good time in a way completely alien to the Marvel standard (especially at the time… check out the fuckawful Swimsuit Special ad in the back if you wanna know how desperate Marvel were getting before the Disney buyout).

We stopped at another game store. Lily finally got herself a cheap copy of Breath of the Wild, a game Artemis ate many years ago. Buying a full-price copy for such a literally dogshit reason always felt stupid to her, so she's been patiently waiting for one under thirty bucks. Lo and behold, it only took a flight to the other side of the country! I picked myself up a couple old Halo Prima guides.

And then we were at Mojos. It occupies the inner-elbow corner lot of an unassuming strip mall. The door, and a couple outdoor book carts, stood behind a pillar. Those carts are so cute, I see em all the time in big cities. For places that peddle books and clothes, more often than anything else. And usually it's not for free merchandise, which makes me wonder how they prevent theft? Like, there's nobody out there watching the goods, places like this can't always afford cameras… margins are already slim at bookstores, how does this work? I assume that's why the books on those carts tend to suck, but still. Sucky books have fans - James Patterson is a multimillionaire.

If I had to compare the cut of Mojos’ jib I'd say it’s sorta like a locally owned Half Price Books. Clean concrete floors, records and CDs in front of the actual book part of the bookstore, that vague Coffee-Addled-Hipster vibe those stores always have taken even further by the addition of an actual cafe at the checkout counter. Everything over there smelled great, I would've ordered had we not arrived thirty minutes before close. I bought a funnel cake flavored chocolate bar on the way out, at least - it was excellent.

So was Mojos! This is the kind of local bookstore I wish we had more of in my neck of the woods. I mean, obviously I'm gonna fuck with any store that has a Vince Staples Crybaby poster right when you walk in, but aside from that… it's clean, well-organized, the staff are friendly, and I crossed a bunch of books off my list. Volume 9-10 of Don't Call It Mystery, the one I've been stuck on because the Grand Chute Barnes and Noble only ever stocks the ones before and after it. Also the Library of America all-in-one of Octavia Butler's Lillith's Brood was a cool find, too, even if I still think the LoA dustjackets are dreadfully plain. It’s worth it to get the entirety of a series I want to read under one roof, I think.

I found one of the Missing 411 books for Lily. I guess they’re about unsolved and spooky missing persons’ cases from around America. Lily tells me they're all like a hundred bucks online. That isn't quite true, but the twenty bucks Mojos was asking is well below average aftermarket prices. I only bought one, there are like five left. If you're in the area and in the market, check ‘em out!

The only disappointment among the shelves here was that no given sci-fi anthology or magazine stood out to me. A crumbling 50s issue of some digest or other for two bucks tempted me, but I'd destroy it trying to get it home. What I wound up with was an increasingly common trend in my book purchasing habits: just one genre book. I mean, more if you include a couple of manga with fantastical elements, but still. Octavia Butler is the only genre writer who made the cut. The rest was nonfiction and gap-filling in a burgeoning collection of literary fiction - a copy of Confessions of a Mask by Mishima, for instance.

I briefly considered The Priory of the Orange Tree, a book I see a lot of people gassing up online in vague terms. I know it's good and I don't know shit else about it. I passed on it for the hilariously esoteric reason that reading the title in this location brought to mind a medieval fantasy world set within the climate and ecology of a place where orange trees grow. God, fuck, imagine how sick a Floridan medieval society with some kinda hybrid Seminole/European mythology would be. Am I crazy? Writing that reminded me of Sarah Gailey's althist book about a world where they let hippos loose in the Everglades. That’s the only Everglades-core fantasy I can think of... Gonna go put that book on my Christmas list real quick.

Waiting for my turn to check out, I glanced toward the little sitting area and noticed a kinda out-of-the-way employee recommendation shelf. I already had my hands full, no purchases here. But I must make particular note of the lower-most shelf, recommendations from someone named Caroline. Her recommendations include: two books and a DVD about Elvis; Babel by RF Kuang; a book titled THE KOREAN WAR right next to two volumes of hit yuri manga The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy At All!; DVD copies of King of the Hill season 1, The Great Dictator, Moulin Rouge, American Graffiti and Gilligan's Island. It's nearly impossible to discern a goddamn thing about Caroline based on her interests. Take, for instance, her age - the Korean War, the collection of movies and the Elvis memorabilia all suggest someone older. But then there's the yuri… as I said to Lily, advertising algorithms hate this woman!

The guy at the checkout counter asked me if I found everything okay. I said I was impressed with this place, that we don't have many stores like it in small-town Wisconsin (a bookstore just opened in Oshkosh, been meaning to check it out). He said, “we're trying to improve Florida's reputation. It’s an uphill battle”. Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar caught his eye. “That looks cool!”

“Yeah, I've been reading a lot of old travel writing lately. From like, the 60s and 70s. My grandpa used to travel a lot back then. Now I'm too broke to do that, I gotta live vicariously ya know?”

“And there was more to see back then too.” There are a lot of ways to interpret that single sentence. Each of them depresses me. I felt like kind of an asshole telling a guy I was too broke to travel while purchasing a hundred bucks worth of books. Had we more time I might've burdened him with the story about how much overtime I worked to get us here and how much my fiance's parents were paying for. Instead I just let myself come off as some unselfaware middle class jackoff. I'm sure it's not the only time. Sometimes it's easy to convince myself that's who I am, when the Tylenol is working and I haven't paid my bills.

It finally happened tonight: we got dinner from a local restaurant! It’s called Jesse’s, they're over in Brandon and they do steak and seafood. I got chicken strips and coconut shrimp. The chicken was solid; the shrimp was a revelation. Cause coconut shrimp is usually served with Thai chili sauce, right? Even the frozen shit has a couple packets in the bag. This place did something I'd never seen before, coconut shrimp served alongside a lemon and cocktail sauce like any standard American shrimp. Maybe that sounds basic to you, but to me it's a new flavor combination and exactly what I wanted from this part of the world. Deeply American but a little bit exotic, seafoody and fun.

The parents-in-law wanted to look at some photos after dinner, send some home with Lily. As we looked through them I learned a little more about who they'd been. At a picture of the old schoolhouse dad said, “my English teacher told ‘er not to marry me, that I'd never be more'n a ditch digger. I metter at the store years later, I said, I served in Vietnam an'm a certified 'lectrician. Y'said I'd be nothin’ but a ditch digger! She looked at me like she didn't know what to say... 'sides, I'm too lazy to be a ditch digger."

Later on he told us about a boy famous in their small town for being “a gigolo”. He grew up to be a barber, cause “his whole family was barbers.”

I asked, “all gigolos too?”

“Nah, just barbers.”

Monday

I was hyperventilating pretty bad on the way down to Appleton International. The landing is worse when you know how long it takes; it fucks me up just picturing us falling so fast. I had recurring nightmares about plane crashes the first week I was home. This isn’t anything to do with falling, really. It's trusting somebody I don't know with my life. I'm a control freak. At least if you die in a car crash it's your fault, ya know?

What snapped me out of it was thinking about me and Lily. How far we've come. When we first met I was barely willing to drive in the city - hell, aside from the drives between my house and hers I avoided the highway. We went to Milwaukee twice with my dad, we fought a lot when we traveled. 

Look at us now! We went to Chicago twice in two months, we drive to Milwaukee all the time. Every time we hop in the car we share new music and new conversations, we go somewhere where we share a brand new experience. Sure, our definition of ‘travel’ is driving a couple hours away and doing mostly cheap shit. But we've had so many adventures in the past year! We've seen parts of the world neither of us have seen before, and I've introduced her to some places she never thought she'd go.

This year was a fucking trainwreck. It’s also a year we went into as scared, bickery young idiots who never left home without accompaniment and left as people who can claim to have traveled the country together. I dunno, I'm proud of us. And I'm proud of myself for getting through a whole passage about falling in love and going to Chicago without quoting that Sufjan Stevens song Jason showed me.

Tuesday

Picked up the last issue of Is Ted OK?, one of two monthly comic books I bought in Chicago that I ended up subscribing to. The other was Royals, which I didn't even mention in my Chicago blog post. I picked it up because it's a poker-related crime caper, in spite of art that looked a little too “modern Disney cartoon” for me (in fact the guy who drew it is a professional animator). In the time since Chicago Royals has won me over with a good plot, cool-ass panel layouts and cartoony character design that works wonders by serving to harshly contrast the ultraviolent mafia storyline. At the same time Ted has devolved from a paranoid near-future thriller to a Trojan Horse for a superhero comic with a sub-Homelander villain. Art still slaps though. I like both of them, but the one I expected to like less ended up being one of my favorite things Image has published recently.

Anyhow, I picked up the last issue of Ted the Tuesday after we came home and felt oddly morose about it… it's a comic I made a big deal about in Chicago, the first issue is still my favorite single issue of the year. And now Royals is done as I'm writing this… my final links to that incredible weekend in Chicago are gone. Little bummed about that.

September 1

Coming home from my parents we drove past a yard full of tents. I happened to have three cases of water in the back seat, and a couple bags of clothes for the thrift store. I rolled down the window and, while a bleak-looking older woman shuffled away, I shouted, “you guys need water? Or clothes?”

The woman running the operation said, “we need water! For a while the police had free water, and Piggly Wiggly had free water, and they all said stop giving us water, we have too much. So now we don't have any.”

“Yeah lemme get it.” I said and opened the trunk. Like an idiot, I carried all three of the bulk-sized water cases to her at once. Lily was gonna give me shit for that later.

In the moment she asked the woman, “do you need clothes? We were gonna run these to Saint Vincent's.” That's St. Vincent De Paul - locals call it Vinnie's - the closest affordable thrift store to ground zero.

“They’re still accepting clothes. I don't think anyone else is. You could try the church down the road, they have some tents set up. You should ask them!” I knocked on their door later; nobody answered.

“Thank you,” Lily smiled.

“Thank you guys.”

“Would you want more water?” I asked.

“Definitely. Gatorade, anything with electrolytes, even those packs-”

“Can do! I'll try and swing back in some time soon.”

“Thank you. I appreciate anything… our neighbors hate us, our neighbor over there. She says we're bringing down property values.”

Lily scoffed. “What you're doing is so much more important!”

“I'm gonna keep the tents up as long as I can, but after that I'm still gonna be doing order forms for people… I'll still need water.”

“Yeah, I'll try and swing back in soon. Thank you so much for doing this. I've been trying to get out and do more but my health's been funky and I work so much…”

She told us she's only open til 7 today due to her own chronic illness, and then I kinda awkwardly got in the car and started to skedaddle as somebody swerved around me - shit, I parked like an asshole!

I hope history remembers my parking job as less of a dick move than what her neighbor is up to. But I fear that if they're still pulling this shit after a fucking tornado, the NIMBYs are destined to win. Nobody on my side of the fence is that persistent.

*A large Power Girl sticker caught a friend's eye whilst I was sharing pictures - maybe it's because I hang out with so many horny dykes but the idea that the Angry Feminist demographic overwhelmingly disapproves of fantasy heroines in revealing outfits is so foreign to me? Women love that shit! In my experience it's usually puritanical straight men who actually want to censor slutty clothes in fantasy. Like, recently DC have made some efforts to “fix” Power Girl through shrinking her chest and giving her visible muscle. This also appeals to my lesbian friends but if you keep your ear to the ground, you'll see that what the Woke Left actually want is for the mainstream media to acknowledge that women can have muscles and huge tits at the same time.

**Or, we did… nowadays stuff like My Hero Academia has me convinced weebs are mutating into superhero nerds with a fetish for Asian girls. For the record I dig a lot of modern normie shonen - Chainsaw Man is one of my favorite manga! But is it really that Japanese? All the cultural touchstones are American, sans a depiction of guns as bloodcurdling, devilish artifacts of power. Is it really that hard to imagine some fuckin dude from like, New Jersey making Chainsaw Man?