How safe we all are now

Today's main thing is about my recent trip to visit family in the suburbs of Atlanta. Did I manage to somehow shut the fuck up the whole time? Did I have an existential crisis in the airport? Well let's find out down below.

I may have mentioned that my next book is available for pre-order! I spent so much time working on this thing that I feel a sort of emptiness inside of me now that it is no longer mine to worry about. The writing of it anyway. The selling of it is very much my new problem. I apologize in advance for how many times I'm going to mention it in here but that's show business baby.

My new book! ‘We Had It Coming’

A haunting yet darkly humorous exploration of a world teetering on the edge of collapse.

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

His stories make me feel less insane. – David Roth

If you’ve been looking for the great art that bad times are supposed to bring about, look no further. – Dave Holmes

People not named Dave also like it. It's not just Daves.

Thanks to Jesse Ackles – whose great newsletter Without a Gun I recommend – for the plug the other day.

Finding the sweet spot where art and social conscience intersect is a rare talent. One of the few people I know who does it well – and I include my own mother on that list – is Luke O’Neil. Luke is the publisher of the newsletter Welcome to Hell World, which features essayists and storytellers concerned about the human condition and this moment of perpetual crisis we all feel stuck in. He gave me a space a couple years ago when I was in desperate need of encouragement and I'll always be grateful.

Luke's own stories show up in Hell World but can be found all over the place. He rolls them out in a raw and casual prose that goes right to the middle of your brain.  At the risk of inducing writer comparison syndrome I'll say his work reminds me, sometimes, of Grace Paley. I’m sure he devoured Barthelme back in the day and I know for a fact that he and I are both devotees of the hilarious antipoet James Tate.

Anyway, Luke has a new book coming out, We Had it Coming. The announcement came as I was putting together this week’s posts on this very theme. His last book, A Creature Wanting Form was what I needed to read when I read it and I'm really looking forward to sitting down with this one. It's out in August and available for pre-order. I plan on getting a physical copy as soon as I have a table or shelf to set it on.

I shared some of Ackles' poetry in this Hell World and he wrote about his favorite David Berman songs in this one.

I thought this piece by John Saward for The Small Bow was just really really lovely. His stuff at Flaming Hydra has been consistently good of late as well.

There were months when I saw Jim and the guys in that bar more than I saw girls I was living with, more than I saw my parents when I was a child. We’d close up at 2 in the morning and they would be there again at 1 in the afternoon the next day, asking if I’d turned the fryer on yet. Sometimes they brought their half-eaten takeout with them from home, container still cold from the fridge.

The bar was a real shit hole, but in a way like it hadn’t accepted it yet; it wasn’t a place where the squalor is one of its charms, with the curated jukebox and the affected 28-year-olds and the irony. It was once a proud and crowded sports bar, but neglect had brought it here, broke it down and stranded it somewhere in 2005, and there was an owner who was once a rowdy drunk before sobriety had turned him cold and quiet, and who seemed to wish he was still living back before he had to make some hard decisions. There was a Bernie Williams jersey hanging behind the bar next to an autographed picture of Trish Stratus. There were mice that got trapped in the walls and died and stunk so bad it would seep out of the plug-holes in the electrical outlets. A satellite dish that would freeze in these pixelated 8-bit scenes every time it drizzled. A retired-model central air unit that chugged so hard to keep up with the thermostat it would freeze itself to a kind of death and you’d have to chip the ice off it to bring it back to life.

I'd also like to recommend this piece by friend of Hell World Derek Dexheimer about his experience of having a stroke and the long recovery process.

The stroke hit a year ago: June 3, 2024. I survived, worked hard to recover, and have, completely. A follow-up doctor summarized my recovery this way: “You’re not pissing or shitting yourself, so you came out ahead.”

This indelible observation is better than the implied alternative, but doesn’t solve the problem of how to write about something that happened on the other side of real.

I re-read notes, listened to voicemails, directed self-hypnotized attention to discharge orders, handouts, lab reports, hastily scribbled transcripts that didn’t keep up with what the doctors said. I made it up in volume, trusting all this evidence would add up to some kind of sense if I gave it enough time.

Months pass. I keep promising I really will write this piece, and keep not writing it.

I don’t know how to write about something so hostile to my animal that some cells still cower in the dark.

If you can please consider sending a few bucks to Marshall Woodruff a young man in Los Angeles who had his eye shot out by the cops while protesting in Los Angeles recently. Be warned the photos on the GoFundMe are really hard to look at. What the pigs did to him is hard to look at. What they have done to so many.

Tim Johnson is a friend of Marshall's and a Hell World reader and I asked him if I could share this post he wrote about him.

Yesterday, at the Quaker meeting I've been attending since last year, I sat next to a young man I know named Marshall.

Last week, while he photographed the largely peaceful demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles, Marshall was shot in the face with rubber bullets by LA riot police.

The bullet(s) shattered his cheekbone and ricocheted into his right eye. Though he spent hours in surgery, last week he learned that he will not see out of the eye again.

Quaker meetings typically involve sitting in silence, unless someone is moved to speak, for an hour. Spending the hour next to Marshall--who was still wearing his hospital bracelet--sitting a foot from the heavily discolored, still swollen side of his face, and the right eye out of which he will never see again--out of which he could look at me, and all of us, a week or two before, and through which he was looking last Saturday, while photographing a demonstration that reflected his (and my) values--was an experience I will not attempt to describe.

As the meeting ended, someone asked Marshall to stand and talk about what had happened. In his very particular way, Marshall recounted the events, as well as the grim prognosis he'd received for the recovery of his vision. It was a very difficult few minutes. As he finished, he said, "Now...just to lighten the mood..." and reached into the pockets of his jacket, which had been on the bench between us. He produced three tennis balls. I hope that the 10 seconds that he spent juggling them, for the 100 or so of us that where there, are 10 seconds that I never forget.

"I promise I could do that for longer before," he said.

More on Los Angeles from Hell World recently:

It is happening here

Three days of escalation by the feds in Los Angeles

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Please enjoy these videos I also enjoyed.

"We're going to stand up for Haiti because you taught the world about freedom. It's time for us to return the favor."

Sorry if I'm falling for it again but this shit got me crying bro. Like seriously has any mainstream Democrat ever shouted out the Haitian Revolution? Never mind selling it sincerely like this? No wonder they want to kill his ass.

This was an interesting video too. Much to consider.

Alright here's my thing. You'll have to be a paid subscriber to read it in full. Been losing a lot of subscribers lately due to expired credit cards so please re-up or chip in for the first time if you can.

The house is as big as the world

I was worried I was going to shit my pants before too long. Both meanings. It had been about thirty minutes of trudging through an improvised security line antechamber at the Atlanta airport on Sunday morning before we finally made it to the area where the security line as one commonly understands such a concept actually began in earnest. 

You can never tell how long these lines are going to be until you are in one and then you can tell even less. 

It all becomes an abstraction anyway. The disorientation is part of the deal. There are so many exit signs everywhere but no actual exit. 

Someone should write a play about that. 

Monde de l'enfer c'est d'autres personnes you might say. 

No matter though isn’t the line where I’ve always lived come to think of it? 

Do I not belong at long last to the labyrinth? 

Quizá yo he creado las estrellas y el Sol y la enorme casa, pero ya no me acuerdo.

They’re remaking the entire country into the security line as it happens. The putrid umbrella hungover atmosphere of simultaneous infantilization and militarized threat that the air travel experience has pummeled us with for I guess almost twenty five years now wouldn’t you know it. 

I should say it’s a hungover atmosphere even if you aren’t actually hungover. Which I nevertheless obviously was literally speaking. 

Those fellas well and truly got our ass with setting all this into motion didn’t they? And did our worst politicians a favor in the effort.

Retribution almost never gets the main guys’ asses it’s just the regular assholes who suffer. You know that. I don’t know why I’m telling you that.  

As I was saying though you cannot and probably will not ever again go on vacation or a work trip without having to receive permission both tacit and explicit from roughly fifty feds every step you take along the way. The includes many of them that you can see and many that you cannot and some who may or may not even exist. 

You cannot for example go to visit your beloved in laws and celebrate your nephews’ graduation in Cobb County –  the famous place from the news on election nights I kept thinking of every time I saw a sign – without being made to understand how powerless you are at every turn. 

Everything here and everywhere else now is:

The Implication.  

Anything out of line – no pun intended – you might do can be hit here with the punishment multiplier. Never mind on the actual plane itself. 

It’s been good practice for all of us I suppose. All of this. To inhabit a place where the law isn’t real except for the potential for punishment. 

Have you ever been held hostage on a plane that you desperately did not want to be on anymore? Not for one single fucking second longer?

They can do that to all of us so easily. It’s not even considered that big of a rights violation. It wouldn’t even make the news. 

You can be sitting there at the gate on the way in or on the way out for hours and hours and say you would like to get off and they will say to you:

No.

For safety reasons. 

I guess the country isn’t just the security line now it’s more accurately the entire airport itself because they still need to gouge us for everything. They still want our money. 

Is the airport the country or is the country the airport?

I have bought so many packs of gum in airports without even knowing how much they cost. The little push out sleeve joints that make you feel like you’re taking meds. What do those cost?

I’m not being rhetorical here I’m literally asking. 

Nine dollars?

By the way I will never as long as I live buy a bad bottle of water or a thing of gum as per above from one of those newly proliferating self-service things. I don’t care if it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I do not care if anything I do doesn’t matter I am still not going to volunteer to debase myself a single degree more than necessary. 

Not until later in this piece. 

As I walked Charlie Brown head down round yet another corner of the line there emerged before me a bright blue rotating hologram of a gun. Some kind of spinning LED fan type of fucking thing that can display different images according to what I just briefly read up on. They must have paid some firm so much money to design these. 

So much money.  

I thought of the cramped little bullshit mazes they make the livestock walk through before they blow their fucking brains out.  

My brother-in-law grilled so much steak on Saturday. I think he has it shipped in from New Hampshire he said. It was very good. I ate more of it than I’d like to admit. We sat out in the steaming Georgia heat day drinking and gorging ourselves and not talking about politics while the kids played grab-ass on a big inflatable water slide.

The flies were merciless. They had set up torches and zappers all around the yard to kill the mosquitos which they did a very good job of but no one had accounted for the flies.

When you first see the LED contraption you might not be sure if it’s an advertisement for the concept of guns themselves or not. I also saw a lot of those on my trip of course. I went for a walk along a brutal tree-less stroad in Marietta to the cigarette store and saw more than a few.

A pawn shop too whose sign read “We will accept anything of value." 

They had junkies playing slots in the Quick Stop or whatever it’s called. I didn't know they had slot machines in stores here. Everywhere isn't just the airport now everywhere is also the casino.

I can call them that.  

The LED wasn’t an ad for guns but the opposite in fact. It just makes you wait a few moments for the reveal. For the strike-through to appear over the platonic depiction of:

Gun. 

I couldn't get a good picture of it because its spinning wheels move too quickly.

The airport is one of the few remaining places where they still don’t want us to have guns. The literal airports. That’s weird right? They do not care if we are massacred by guns almost anywhere else in the country but the airplane violence thing really stuck with them. I guess killing people on an airplane is supposed to be Muslim-coded and we can’t have that becoming too popular. 

We can’t even have apparently kind and decent Muslim politicians becoming too popular. Not even if all they seem to want to do is give people a better life.

Especially if that’s what they want.  

I just saw that neither Trump nor Vance went to the funeral of Minnesota’s Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark over the weekend and that’s because both of them and all of their supporters think it is a good thing when Democrats are assassinated. 

Not by a Muslim mind you. But by a right wing Christian. Then it’s just like whatever. 

These LEDs displays are a few years old I just learned although I have never seen them before. Nothing about any of this is new besides the vantage we’re looking at it all from. 

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