The Vera Project is Seattle’s all-age punk venue, which I’m tangentially aware of because they occasionally host left-leaning literary events. Mostly, though, it’s a rock’n’roll place, punk and loud, so I’ve never attended a concert there, and probably never will.
The Black Lodge, with a name obviously inspired by the TV show Twin Peaks, was a way-underground punk venue — unlicensed, and at an address you had to ‘know someone’ to know. It closed during the COVID shutdowns, but the Vera Project brought the Black Lodge back, slightly more above board with permits and stuff, in 2022.
So far, so cool, but how in the holy heck did they get Twin Peaks star Kyle MacLachlan on board?
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Eating a super-sized chef’s salad at Little Pat’s, there came a tickly sensation in my mouth. I’d been chewing lettuce and dressing and ham and tomatoes and such, but now I was chewing hair. I reached inside my mouth and fingered around, grabbed and pulled it out of my face, and oh, this was a long one.
It certainly wasn’t my hair. Mine’s short and white, this was long and black. Seriously, yuck, but just as seriously, who gives a hoot? I am not a guy who’s going to complain to the waitress about a hair in my salad, unless there are three.
It’s food, made by humans. Humans have hair. Sometimes there’s gonna be a hair in your food. If you can’t handle that, then stay home, shave yourself bald, and make your own damned salad.
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Here’s something I say once or twice a year, to give people something to ignore.
If I cared enough to wear a label it would be ‘socialist’, but socialists are the biggest impediment to socialism. Their pitch is usually littered with words like bourgeoisie and proletariat and tedious references to Trostsky and Lenin and Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, so they’ll never get through to enough people to matter.
Translate socialism into the language of people who aren’t yet true-believers, and you’ll get a lot more true believers. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, for example, are socialists who never get caught publicly using socialist insider-lingo or referencing the boring writers’ boring books. They speak plain English, with easy-to-understand principles that make sense to voters, who re-elect them every time.
Other pinkos need to shut up about Lenin and Marx. Speak English.
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I haven’t written much recently. Mostly I’ve been tossing reprints at you, sorry. Just haven’t felt like writing.
Never been big on pledging allegiance, but this place is home to me, and I love the lofty ideals it’s never lived up to. And now, it never will. I’m in mourning for America.
Trump and Musk are obliterating every arguably good thing about this damned country, and it’s the kind of damage that can’t be repaired, even if Trump (improbably) allows elections or leaves office before dying.
Close down entire departments of the government — USAID, NOAA, the CDC, and there goes the Department of Education, etc — and you’ve lost the expertise, the knowledge, the plausibility. These agencies could be rebuilt, I suppose, but it would take decades, and America and the world and Life As We’ve Known It don’t have decades.
America will never again be what it was, and the dark clouds are still gathering. Everything will be worse in a month than it is today, worse still the month after that, and with Trump “in charge” the trajectory will never bottom out. The USA is gonna get shittier, and uglier, and uglier and shittier, and it’s all a wee bit depressing.
It doesn’t leave me in the proper mindset to try wringing a few jokes out of my first taste of pho, or an argument with a bum on the sidewalk downtown. But the sadness will pass, probably. It’s a sorry-ass situation, but reliable sources say life goes on.
My plan is to try writing something. Tomorrow, maybe.
2/14/2025
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