Bela Lugosi started barking as I fumbled for my key. Yup, I still have a key, and as I walked in, swimming in the dog’s wet kisses, I was accidentally standing on one of his squeaky toys.
Up the stairs I went, hoping for a glass of water, but the dishes were stacked so high a cup couldn’t squeeze under the faucet, so my water came from the bathroom sink.
From Pathetic Life #23 Tuesday, April 16, 1996
Sidestepping a pile of clothes in the hall, I brushed slightly against a stack of books on a window sill, knocking a few to the floor. One landed near a cat, which yowled and ran between my legs, which nudged me into a tall bamboo something that’s been leaning disassembled in the corner for months. It toppled, and I jumped out of the way, nearly losing my footing and inadvertently kicking an empty can of dog food Lugosi had dragged from the trash. The can rolled and bounced down the stairs, kerplunking on every step to the bottom.
I was back at the old place in Berkeley, where Judith had hired me to scrub the stink out of Cy’s old bedroom.
When the five of us shared this huge second-story flat, Cy was the only one of us who smoked. He smoked only in his room, and he was in his room almost 24/7, even working from there. And always smoking.
The door’s seal must’ve been very good, because I never much noticed the stink of cigarettes unless he’d just come out or gone in from the bathroom or kitchen. Now he’s moved away like me and Joe, but the scent of Cy’s cigarettes lingers on.
My job for the day was to wash it away, so I mopped the ceiling and walls, a slow-motion revelation. I thought the paint was tan, but with ammonia and sweat and several hours of work, the walls were revealed to be an off-shade of white.
I got dripped in the eye only once, and after that I wore goggles. My t-shirt is now dotted with slightly Picasso stains I hope won’t wash out, because you can’t mop a ceiling without getting all wet, and it dried into art.
Before mopping the floor, there were buckets of liquefied tar and nicotine to flush down the toilet. If I say so myself and I do, though, the room looked substantially brighter when I left than when I got there.
Didn’t say hello to Judith or Jake, because they weren’t there. They left me fifty bucks, ten hours pay, and the work only took about seven hours, so I also washed some of the dishes before playing tennis-ball fetch with the dog, and then said farewell again to the empty house and cluttered mess where I’d lived until a few weeks ago.
♦ ♦ ♦
Back at the San Francisco rez hotel, my room is a catastrophe under construction, but it’s not yet the ghastly stinking cockroach haven it’ll become.
See, once I’m settled in a new place, I never tidy up. If I’m tidying, it’s someone else’s place and I’m being paid $5 an hour.
For now, I appreciate the general cleanliness of a new room, and a hallway that’s wide and uncluttered with trash or tennis balls. There’s nothing to stumble over on the stairs, which is nice. I kinda miss having Judith to talk to, but now I’m here instead of there. Nobody to talk to but the bums and derelicts.
♦ ♦ ♦
‘Home’ is a slippery concept to define. Is it anywhere you regularly sleep, or is it something more profound and personal than that?
If it’s the latter, then I never quite felt at home in Berkeley. The flat was a dump full of people I never got to know really, except for Judith. And the town, with the exception of a few bohemian blocks of Telegraph Ave, People’s Park and maybe Sproul Plaza, is just another slice of middle America. No insult intended, but it’s too quiet, too pleasant for me, and some of it feels as artificial as a trip to the mall.
Berkeley is white like the walls of Cy’s room after mopping. There are black people, sure, and Asians, Mexicans and every other ethnicity — lots of them actually — but the vibe of the town is always white. White with a splash of color, perhaps.
San Francisco is much more colorful and noticeably LOUDER, more vibrant, strange, multi- or sometimes anti-cultural, and never even an off shade of white. It’s always what-have-you, whether you want it or not.
The ruckus of this city hits your eardrums and eyeballs as soon as you step off the subway, and there’s never a truly quiet moment except behind locked doors.
And it’s beautiful, man. San Francisco is alive with life and lowlifes, and the people who love it, who revel in it, are my kind of people. For so many years, I thought my kind of people was no people at all, but this place has shown me something different, and it keeps showing me something different every day.
What’s home, after all? It’s hard to put it into words, but for me the zip code is 94110.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
Excerpt: These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.
Excerpt: The ICE agent drove A.G. to the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office on Delegates Drive in south Orlando, where they replaced his handcuffs with shackles.
He was interviewed and quizzed on his own history, as well as his family’s and his girlfriend’s. They asked him about the worst crime he’d seen committed since he’d been in the U.S., and how the notorious Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua operated, which puzzled him since he’s never had any connection. They had him remove his clothes to check for tattoos that they could trace to gang lineage.
He said he was in shock as he sat in a room with other detainees for most of the day.
“I have my work permit, I have my social security number, I pay my taxes, I go to college, I work, I don’t have a criminal record. I’ve never been pulled over, because I drive like an old man,” he said. “I was doing everything right.”
But after several hours, a Department of Homeland Security investigator told him he was being detained and sent to the Krome North Service Processing Center immigration facility in Miami-Dade County. He arrived around midnight.
Excerpt: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initially accused Hernandez of being a gang member wanted in connection to a murder, but his attorney has strongly denied those claims, and the justice department did not repeat those allegations in its complaint and press release on Tuesday.
… Patrick Kolasinski, Hernandez’s attorney, said Tuesday it was notable that after a weeklong investigation, the FBI did not speak with the key witnesses, including the agent who is the alleged victim.
Excerpt: After the shooting, federal immigration agents cut all of Hernández’s clothes off, took pictures of him, then left him handcuffed sitting naked on the side of the road without providing medical care, according to Kolasinski.
At least one eyewitness has come forward to support Hernández’s claim about how the incident first unfolded.
Excerpt: On Easter Sunday, Department of Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins sent an agency-wide email with the subject line “He has risen!” It described the life of Jesus as “greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.”
Speaking to Wired, a department employee labeled the email “grotesque,” adding that such conduct would be unacceptable even for military chaplains.
Excerpt: “No, we have released everything,” Blanche replied. “So listen, we reviewed six million pieces of paper. What we released with anything that’s associated with the Epstein file. So we are not sitting on a single piece of paper.”
On principle, of course, the government should not be funding any aspect of anything any religion does, even charities. But this is merely more Trump retaliation.
Graham Platner sounds like a genuine leftist we should root for, but has a history that’s complicated, including a Nazi-curious tattoo. I’m about as far from Maine as you can get without leaving the continental U S of A, so my take on Platner is: I’ll trust Mainers who see him up close and personal.
In our UpsideDown America, it’s collusion and censorship when ad companies warn their customers about sites publishing misinformation, where perhaps advertisers wouldn’t want their ads to run.
Excerpt: “I don’t think there’s any line right now between policy decisions and political calculations and the interest of the Trump family,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University.
Excerpt: The United States is waging a pressure campaign against the leading inter-American human rights watchdog to squash a potential investigation into illegal U.S. attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
After a recent meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the State Department pushed the organization to shift its focus to other issues instead of the monthslong campaign of extrajudicial killings by the U.S. military.
Though the president of the IACHR disputes that the U.S. is pressuring his organization, the State Department responded to questions about the meeting with a statement urging the commission to move onto other matters. A past IACHR president said the organization may fear the “wrath” of the United States, which is the largest financial contributor to the commission’s parent organization, if it launches an investigation.
U.S. lawmakers and experts say an investigation by the IACHR could be an important mechanism to hold the Trump administration accountable for the lethal strikes. Scores of civilians have been killed in the campaign, which has seen families of victims petition the IACHR and sue the U.S. government, accusing it of wrongful death and extrajudicial killings.
Excerpt: Despite Houston City Council voting to limit police officers’ cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this week, the department’s prior rules remain in force, according to a late Thursday email from police leadership.
Officers for now should follow a directive Chief Noe Diaz sent out following a press conference last month that requires police to give ICE agents 30 minutes to reach the scene for a noncriminal administrative warrant, according to a department-wide email obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
Excerpt: Other tech titans like Microsoft and Meta have also ramped up their spending projections recently. Microsoft spent more than $88 billion in its 2025 fiscal year, which ended in June, and is on track to spend far more in 2026. Through the first half of its 2026 fiscal year, Microsoft’s capital expenditures totaled $72.4 billion as it increased spending on high-tech computer chips. Meta is expected to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion this year on its AI-related efforts.
Me again: Give me a happy ending just once, Lord. Give me the weakening and collapse of all these shitty corporations.
Excerpt: The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Joey Jo Jo & John the Basketemeritus, Jeff Meyer, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn’t always shitty.
News always and only from reliable sources, and I decide what’s reliable — no right-wing bullshit, no Substack because fuck Nazis, and no RawStory, Newsweek, or other clickbait sites. Written news is preferred; video links will be rare, and damned near never to videos where a reporter or podcaster simply reads a script or does improv — that’s show biz, not news.
If a paywall, forced registration for spam, or a website’s anti-reading layout blocks any article linked here, please let me know. I’ll reply with the article’s complete text.
I don’t like that title, “Lesser people.” Don’t like what’s under the title, either.
It’s what I’m thinking, though, and the rule is, I write what I’m thinking, and try real hard not to hide from myself, so let’s pop this pimple, not cover it up.
My intelligence is, I think, a smidgen less than average. Sure as shit I ain’t Descartes. I’m a high school dropout, haven’t read most of the classics, and I’m vividly unfamiliar with anything any intellectual might call ‘intellectual’.
Sometimes, though, I ponder things larger in scope than merely me and my situation. I look at the stars, and wonder whether anyone’s out there, maybe seeing the speck of light that is our sun from their distance, and wondering if anyone’s out here, too.
Some mornings it seriously surprises me that there’s so much something all around us, when there could just as easily have been nothing but nothingness.
I ask myself and enjoy asking others semi-tough questions, like: What do you truly believe, and why? What do other people believe, that you reject? What questions have you found no answers for? I’m aware of the profound injustice inherent in damned near everything humanity does, and wonder how much more injustice I’m unaware of.
And lately, a big thought I can’t shake is that there are people — some, many, maybe most people — who simply don’t ask such questions. They can recite what they’ve seen on TikTok or TV news as if it’s their own opinions, but they can’t go deeper without scurrying to change the subject. If the subject can’t be changed, they’ll turn it into a joke, and/or look at you like you’re nuts.
It feels dangerous to say it, but these are lesser people, who simply don’t have greater thoughts. They frustrate the hell out of me, because they can only talk about the football team, their religion, their new car, the sit-com they’re enjoying, the job they hate, the people they’re angry at, and their new shoes.
Perhaps they alsoponder the mysteries and marvels of the universe, but don’t want to talk about it? Or they don’t want to talk about it with a fat, mildly odoriferous old man?
If so, that’s cool. That’s a choice, and I too have days when muscle aches and petty arguments and celebrity gossip are all I can think about… but it’s not every day. It’s not an entire life of me me me, and Maria said this, and Mike said that, and listening to sports talk radio to be “well-informed.”
And when someone says something to me, I run it through a rudimentary logic-check in my head. It’s not even on purpose — that’s just the way my head works. These lesser people seem to lack that ability, and reject anything that clashes with whatever shallow idioms they’ve heard recently, which are all too often along the lines of, “The immigrants are eating the dogs, eating the cats.”
Which brings us to the psychological and political pimple I’m trying to pop: A lot of these lesser people admire Elon Musk, don’t believe in climate change, voted for Donald Trump, and hate hippies and cross-dressers and Muslims, and whoever they’ve been told to hate. Lesser people are not merely dimwits; they are the target audience for our current crop of PT Barnum billionaires pushing the end of everything that’s decent about life on Earth. And you know, life on Earth has never been too terribly decent.
Lesser people are a kinda huge problem, but I’m absolutely not proposing that they deserve lesser rights. I’m not endorsing eugenics, not suggesting any restrictions on stupid people’s freedom to be stupid, or speak their empty minds, and vote for the worst candidates in every election. I will always believe freedom is a good idea, even if it kills me, which it might.
But we’ll never solve the Lesser People problem without this level-headed, three-pronged solution. Details available on request (which nobody will request), but the very short version of what humanity and America need is:
① Improved public education. Require all kids to participate, either by attending or by passing the same tests as if they’d attended. And remove idiots from control over school curriculum.
② Media that’s not controlled by the same PT Barnum billionaires advocating hate and fear and normalizing stupidity. Make it illegal for billionaires to push their agendas with slanted news coverage.
And ③ perhaps most importantly: We must greatly increase public impatience and mockery of out-and-out ignorance.
