The day the country was dismantled was so perfect
Everything else about it
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The day the country was dismantled was so perfect. Not the dismantling part obviously but everything else about it. High seventies and dry and breezy on the north shore of Massachusetts. The brine of the sea air.
We probably wouldn’t have scheduled a night away on our favorite beach Plum Island had we known it was going to coincide with the erasure of what little was left of our healthcare safety net for vulnerable people and the further funding of the world’s richest and most racist police state apparatus but it has been very difficult to find a day when cruelty wasn't being enacted for the past few years and I suppose my entire life. The calendar gets full so quickly.
What is a person supposed to do? Not go swimming in the bracing Atlantic ocean when it’s beckoning right there before you?
We did the thing we do where I swam out into the water just far enough that I scared myself a little and I looked back and waved while M. took pictures of me like I was a little boy showing off for his mommy. The thing from this story.
Luke O’Neil
The beach was chilly and the water was brackish and cold but not Massachusetts cold although he would have gone in either way because when you trek to the beach you go in the water that’s just how things are done.
She always asked him not to swim out too far from where she could see even though it’s what he was compelled to do. He felt unsettled this time and so he stayed close and bobbed near the shore waving back every now and again.
One has to be careful to not to do the I’m drowning wave. It’s a different motion than the I’m still here wave.
She laughed at how his little head looked poking out of the water from a distance. A little fucking clown.
No it wasn’t harsh like that.
What do you think about when you’re floating out there she asked him later and he said I don’t know mostly dumb stuff about our connection to the earth and things like that. The type of things you think when you are trying to not think about anything. Corny naturalistic transcendentalist Thoreau and Emerson type of shit. Man’s powerlessness when confronted with the sheer awesome force of the tides and that sort of shit.
Instead of thinking about abandoning people abroad and dooming them to death this time I thought about abandoning people here at home and dooming them to death.
I thought of this sort of thing.
I couldn't wash the stink of it all off of me. Neither my own nor our collective filth.
Not even the entire ocean is sufficiently cleansing.
They’re selling merch for that new concentration camp in Florida and everyone is rightfully aghast at the prospect.
A couple years ago Jonathan Katz wrote about the gift shops at Gitmo for Hell World.
Luke O’Neil
Lest you think the prison camp itself would be a bridge too far to sell souvenirs, don’t worry, they’ve got you covered. At the main gift shop, you can get a whole line of mugs, shot glasses, hoodies, fanny packs, and T-shirts from the “Joint Task Force GTMO Detainee Operations” line, all festooned with guard towers and barbed wire. There are more “comedic” versions too. One shirt featured a sunglasses-wearing iguana in front of a scene meant to invoke the prison camp.
… If there’s one thing the United States has always been good at it’s extracting every last cent from the places we occupy, and all who pass through them.
Now I’m not saying there’s nothing new under the fascist American sun but…
I’ve written this in here before and I guess it’s the entire premise of the new book and of everything I’ve ever written but I thought once again floating out there in the waves about how a person can go on living. Just how it is a person is supposed to live.
I’m back home now and it’s humid already this morning. What fucking day is it? Seriously. I can’t remember the last time I was confident in knowing what day it even is. Gonna be in the 90s later I know that. The kind of air that feels likes bugs are crawling all over you. The bugs are also literally crawling all over me but it would feel like that even if they were not. You understand me.
I of course do not like it when you smack a bug that is on you and it flies or scurries off unscathed but I do respect it. The resilience of it.
At least fifty people are dead and dozens of children are still missing after devastating flash floods struck Texas. (Here are some places you might donate for aid and relief.)
I just read a story that said the Navy will no longer share crucial satellite data about approaching storms with scientists and forecasters. They declined to provide an explanation for why they would stop doing that but I think we can safely assume it’s for the same reason this administration ever does anything.
What must it feel like to not be burdened by asking yourself The Question every single day?
Is self interest above all a kind of serenity or does it more closely resemble the torment of the damned? Not only dwelling in isolation from God and other humans but doing so by choice in a self-imposed exile.
All day yesterday on my version of online deranged cultist liberals were busy delighting in the pain of the people in Texas.