Even God cannot hear us here

My mother called me which is a rare enough thing so I was already like uh oh who died and she said Luke in a tone of voice I hadn’t heard in a long time and my heart sank. She had just gotten a call from someone claiming to me be who sounded just like me she said. Apparently I had been arrested. I was crying and carrying on but there was something off about it she said. The phone connection was very crackly too she said so she told the guy let me call you right back. The fake Luke said no no hold on I’ll put the police officer on and she started to realize what was happening and I am very proud of her for that. My mother is at long last an old lady now. I don’t like that fact any better than anyone else in the world besides probably her. 

I suppose it’s better than the only other alternative. 

This other version of me said that I had been in a car accident and I had hit a woman who was "six months pregnant" she said and I thought come on man you don’t need that level of specificity for the lie. That’s a dead giveaway. 

He told her the cops were charging me with drunk driving but he swore to my mother our mother that he hadn’t been drinking in a long time and then my mother told the real me that that’s how she knew it was a con.

Got my ass there. 

I do not drunk drive to be clear but it was a good bit nevertheless. 

On the plus side now I’ve got the opening premise to a cheap Paul Auster rip off if I want to write it. 

These motherfuckers man. How do these people live with themselves? Not just these guys but all of them. 

I guess this is my recurring theme now. 

How do people live?

Being evil has got to be the most freeing feeling in the world. 

My new book is available for pre-order! Should be out in a couple months. I believe you will enjoy it.

A worker pulled his truck into my driveway and started unloading long 2x4s in a neat stack and I went out and waved hello and he said are you Mark and I said no I think you might have the wrong house. He was very apologetic about it in some kind of thick Eastern European accent and I was very understanding about it in my thick Eastern Massachusetts accent. I know how it is etcetera I said and then my new neighbor came out and told the guy he was in the wrong place. I went over to introduce myself because I had been meaning to anyway but I also wanted to reassure him that I am not the type of neighbor who becomes irate when someone you did not authorize is in your driveway or the vicinity of where you believe your car has the exclusive right to be. 

There are so many more people like that in the world than you might imagine. Volunteer parking attendants.

I lied and said I wasn’t sure for a minute if I had actually hired someone haha and he said haha I know how that is and then I wondered why I lied like that. Who did that benefit? 

So now that was settled. M. came home shortly after from wherever it is she goes and she had a tone of voice I hadn’t heard in a long time. Not since the incident with the maggots last summer and I said uh oh who died and she told me to go look and there was one of the larger rats I have ever seen in the very driveway I was just talking about. 

It was 93 degrees and humid as shit out and the rat was baking in the sun and covered in flies and I wondered why I hadn’t just noticed this mess like five minutes ago when I was out here being the neighbor of the year? 

I had this stupid unsettling thought that the worker had dropped it there after I chased him off. As a sort of fuck you. 

And then I felt racist about thinking that. The guy was white but you know what I mean. 

M. is one of those people who is not especially fond of vermin dead or otherwise in any kind of proximity to the home. My thinking on the other hand is that outside is outside and anything happening out there is none of my business when I’m not looking. Let nature take its course as far as I am concerned regarding this specific rat or every rat the proverbial rat. I knew that wasn’t going to go over wife-wise in this case – again after the thing with the maggots – so I put on a mask and gloves and got a little gardening spade and scooped the corpse up. It was so much stiffer than I was expecting it to be. I was bargaining on a softness to it. The newness of death. 

Then I wrapped it in a couple of trash bags and put it in a little tin trashcan and decided I’d call Animal Control to see if they had any advice on how to be a man. 

We don’t do pickups on private property the lady who answered said in an accent ten times thicker than my own. Like she was doing a bit. Option A is to leave it in the trash she said which didn’t seem prudent regarding the heat and wetness and option B was I could write a check to Jennifer Connolly for $60 and she would come get it. Which is what I did. 

When she appeared a little while later she opened the whole steaming slow cooker I had set up and said wow that’s stinky and I said yeah you would think and then she drove off to wherever it is they bring the dead animals. Maybe just some other guy’s yard. 

Apparently had I just booted the rat out onto the street they would have removed it for free so I guess that’s a lesson learned for the next time an Eastern European laborer curses me. 

Around 90,000 fewer tourists entered the country through Maine in May of this year compared to the last and I think we can probably make some safe assumptions about what’s going on there. That can’t be good for local businesses you would think. Let me just look up what the state motto is again real quick.  

We happen to have gone to Maine last weekend to visit some friends who took us out on their nice little boat. It was exceptionally foggy on the way out to Peaks Island but it broke by the time we arrived. I told my friend I wanted to go for a run along the water and he said oh man it is so pretty you are going to love it and he was right. I did love it. Then felt guilty about that. Later we had some crab cakes and oysters and fried clams at a touristy restaurant in the Old Port and I felt guilty about that too.

How does a person live?

I just read a story about an Irish man who was held in federal detention for three months for overstaying his visa by three days after injuring himself and being advised it was unsafe to fly home. He attempted to get the proper exemptions in order but they said fuck you and shuffled him around the country from prison to prison without any explanation for what was happening. He had asked to be deported and sent home immediately when they snatched him up but they said fuck you and kept him here to rot anyway. 

For our safety. 

The Guardian reported:

He and other detainees were placed in an area with dirty mattresses, cockroaches and mice, where some bunkbeds lacked ladders, forcing people to climb to the top bed, he said.

The Bureau of Prisons didn’t seem to have enough clothes, said Thomas, who got a jumpsuit but no shirt. The facility also gave him a pair of used, ripped underwear with brown stains. Some jumpsuits appeared to have bloodstains and holes, he added.

Each detainee was given one toilet paper roll a week. He shared a cell with another detainee, and he said they were only able to flush the toilet three times an hour. He was often freezing and was given only a thin blanket. The food was “disgusting slop”, including some kind of mysterious meat that at times appeared to have chunks of bones and other inedible items mixed in, he said. He was frequently hungry.

“The staff didn’t know why we were there and they were treating us exactly as they would treat BoP prisoners, and they told us that,” Thomas said. “We were treated less than human.”

Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk has written about her own ordeal of being imprisoned for 45 days for nothing in Vanity Fair. 

Sorry I shouldn’t have said for nothing. She committed the crime of co-authoring an op-ed asking for less massacring of Palestinians. 

Eid al-Fitr passed, and I struggled to celebrate. A Catholic friend told me: “Even God cannot hear us here.” She prayed night and day just the same. I asked her if it was God who could not hear us, or if it was people like me before this experience, who either know nothing about the immigration detention system or prefer to ignore or forget about it.

She seems like a much more decent and resilient person than I because she managed to find moments of hope and light in what otherwise sounds to me like Hell. 

She went on:

After many requests, I finally accessed what turned out to be the saddest and smallest library I have ever seen. I was surprised to find that the books were not categorized by author or Dewey number but size. I tried to find a book before my allotted time ended and picked a cooking book; the second time I got a novel. I began flipping through the pages in search of solace, as books have always been my safe haven. To my surprise, I discovered handwritten notes scattered throughout the book, dated and written by various detainees over time. These messages were filled with reminders of hope, strength, and the assurance that this, too, shall pass. Tears welled up in my eyes as I read their heartfelt expressions. It’s incredible how human beings can find ways to uplift each other, transcending time, space, and borders if they want to and if they choose to. I continued to turn the pages, holding on to the hope of finding brighter moments in this terrifying situation—all thanks to the kindness of people I had never met.

I guess you would have to do that. To be able to carry on. I certainly do not think I could. I can barely carry on in my nice comfortable home with everything a person could ever want. I can barely go on a guy's boat and enjoy it without having an existential crisis.

A life was snuffed out in the pursuit of a quota

He was forced to make an impossible choice by the federal government

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

The other day Mel Buer reported for Hell World on immigration raids at cannabis farms in California. Please read it if you missed it it is very good.

One of the people arrested was a security guard and U.S. citizen. He released a statement about the ordeal. 

My name is George Retes. I’m a 25-year-old U.S. Army veteran, a U.S. citizen, and I work as a security guard at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, California. On July 10th, I was wrongfully detained by ICE agents while simply trying to report to work. I was pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, had my car window smashed, and was dragged out of my vehicle at gunpoint — all while I was nonviolent, and doing nothing wrong.

I clearly identified myself as a U.S. citizen and an employee of the farm, yet federal agents ignored me, yelled conflicting orders, and then violently detained me. I was held in custody for three days without any charges, without a phone call, and without access to legal help. I was never told why I was arrested. I never received care to clean myself despite being covered in tear gas and OC spray for days.

This is not how any person should be treated — especially not a veteran who served this country with honor. I didn’t break any law. I was just trying to go to work. What happened to me wasn’t just a mistake — it was a violation of my civil rights. It was excessive force. And it was a failure of justice. I’m speaking out not just for myself, but for every citizen who could’ve ended up in my place that day.

I’m calling for a full investigation into the actions of ICE and other agencies involved in this operation.I want the agents who ignored protocol and used force against me to be held accountable. And I want the public to know the truth: this raid didn’t just target immigrants. It hurt Americans too.

I will not stay silent. I served this country, and now I’m demanding it do right by me.

What are we gonna do here man?  I mean that rhetorically sure but also literally. What are we going to do? 

We’re being torn in half. 

Here’s one of our elected Democrats hard at work on something anyway: 

Thank you as always for reading. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read the rest of today's piece. Will I manage to tie it all together? Will I land the plane? Does the rat mean anything? What are the songs of the week?