You’ve had enough

I love getting a massage and the guy keeps going oh wow your back is really tight right here do you feel that? Yeah man that’s why I’m at the massage store in the first place. Probably be a lot more notable if someone wasn’t in rough shape when they walked in here wouldn’t it? 

Be pretty funny if they could refuse service if you came in looking too loose and relaxed though. Like a bartender cutting off a drunk. You’ve had enough pal.

I've lost a dog in just about every way you can lose one my new massage therapist told me the other day.

I've been seeing her for my fucked up elbow situation. She’s pretty much a Boston townie Paula Pell character if that helps you better imagine it. I don’t especially have anywhere to go with this anecdote I just thought it was an interesting sentence I’d never heard before. 

I told her I am not a dog guy but my parents are and that they had recently lost the last of their golden retrievers that keep dying on them over the decades and that my dad has finally decided that that is enough. He cannot take another loss like that. He's getting old and his heart might not be able to take it.

Then she told me about losing all her dead dogs and it was basically only four of the ways total which felt like an oversell on her part. Pressing deeply into the flesh and muscle and tendons of my forearms. This one’s gonna be a little rough but it will over soon she said. 

Ok now I just got 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover caught in my head. 

This was my second visit with her and she's been doing a great job. She has also asked me what every single one of my tattoos mean. You might think a person with tattoos would enjoy that but they really do not.

What's that one? 
It's a bunny. 
What's it got there? 
Well it's uh eating a human heart. As a uh metaphor. 
Oh come on.

I suppose she’s right there. 

Gonna tell you right up top that this is going to be one of the meandering ones with no real through-line or direction or sense of purpose. They can't all be winners.

On Friday Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer after a report showed that hiring for the past couple of months had slowed significantly. He of course accused her of being a Democrat plant who was deliberately trying to sabotage him personally. He will undoubtedly jam some dipshit toady in to replace her now and then everything that is ever said about Trump’s economy forever will be positive and all of us will share in the prosperity. 

Say what you will about International Capital but are you not at least still a little surprised at how cowardly they’ve turned out to be? And all because there is one weird old drooling pervert dementia patient doing whatever he wants every single day? And fucking with their actual money too! I had been under the impression this entire time that that was one thing that you couldn’t do. I thought that they had Jasons Bourne available for scenarios much like this.

Just one of the many ways in which International Capital has let me down.

I don't really want to get into it but you all do know they don't have to do secret dog whistle fascism stuff in advertisements for jeans or whatever anymore right? Stuff that only savvy posters can decode. We're on to the next part of it. They just do the actual violent shit now.

There's a bit in the new book about the last time we turned this gal's giant honkers into discourse that goes something like this:

People were talking about a famous actress’ famous breasts for the third straight week and I wish they would shut the fuck up because a guy can’t be going around thinking about that kind of thing all day when he’s just trying to mind his own business. With his mother-in-law around.

I think what they were trying to do was to start a fight over the concept of beauty itself. Which group of us it should belong to. Which of us gets to perceive it and which of us do not.

None of us were arguing about the substance of the thing though it’s all abstracted out to arguments about how we argue.

There's also a story about losing your dog come to think of it.

The eventual truth 

We were going to have to put Jodie Foster down. I told my son we were sending her to the very same farm upstate my parents had conjured for me the last time this scenario played out when I was a child. 

Massachusetts doesn’t even have an upstate. That should have been my first sign something was amiss back then. But a child’s brain cannot accept the concept of death. That differs from how an adult might think about it constantly and still not accept it. 

She hadn’t been hungry much of late but I kept smuggling pieces of my dinner into her bowl when no one else was looking anyhow. Hoping that a switch would flip in her tiny brain. 

She knew something was weird about it and I knew that she knew that. 

I got the idea that she instinctively sensed that I was bullshitting her somehow. Dogs are so dumb but an old dying dog is wise enough. Knows things we do not.

She looked at me like I was the one with the problem. Maybe I smelled different. Maybe a person smells just off in a way that we cannot perceive ourselves when we’re devising a betrayal. 

Or is it that what I was steeling myself to do now was the inverse of that? 

Does loyalty smell like anything? 

Grief affects all of us differently. I just accidentally wrote ad copy for a sneaker campaign there for example. 

She limped the sideways way she walks now over to me after having not eaten any of the slop of meat sauce I’d purloined for her earlier and put her dog head on my human knee and I looked into her dog eyes and asked her what if it turned out that the farm is actually real somewhere honey? Why not? Why wouldn’t any single thing we wanted to be real be real for just this one time? 

An occasional gesture of benefaction that I believe that we are owed. 

An extra hour of rec time for the prisoners. 

She didn’t react to that.  

But then in that case which of my dead friends would I play with first when I visited the farm some day I worried. Which of them was the actual best girl in the whole wide world?

I told the boy about a time before he was born when I caught Jodie Foster lumbering home from the neighbor’s yard with a rat half in her mouth and her snout caught in a trap the rat had also been caught in. Proud and ashamed at once like a bronze medalist. She would have eaten anything back then I swear to you. 

He asked if we would ever get to see her again and I told him the only thing I know to be true. 

Use the code WEHADITCOMING when you pre-order the book for 20% off.

Hell here's another short one from the book. I love giving this thing away before it's even out.

Speaking of famous ladies who suck this one continues to suck.

On the other hand...

Turns out Nemik from Andor (roughly Space Trotsky or Marx I guess?) is a good one too.

I know this is a little out of character for me to be such a Star Wars Nerd about Andor but man if you haven't seen it yet please do. Yes I am aware that as a product of the Disney corporation it is an example of how capitalism devours everything even anti-capitalism but it's still good as hell baby! Don't care.

Nemik's manifesto is worth re-reading if you only heard it the first time.

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.

"The real truth about it is we're all supposed to try..." as another fella once said.

Don't be like this dope though.

You really didn't have to write that sentence though big man! Not volunteering that you agree with a literal Nazi is an extremely easy thing to do.

Libs fucking love it so much when they can agree with a right winger. Look how broad minded I am haha! Agreeing with a Nazi!

No my broadmindedness doesn't extend to the far left though no. Not that obviously.

I imagine a bunch of you have thought at one point or another "this fucking guy won't shut the fuck up about how evil the New York Times is give it a rest pal" and I will not.

Maybe you are like me and have been wondering what happened in the past couple of weeks that the tide seems to have turned for a lot of elected Democrats in how they talk about Gaza. Not all the way but somewhat which is big enough a thing on its own. Part of that I think were the stories – and particularly the images – published by the Times and the Washington Post among others – of horrific starvation among the children there.

Images like this one:

The baby in question born in the midst of a genocide was already starving due to a pre-existing condition the Times wants to inform us. No one could have stopped this. It's basically no big deal. It would have died anyway. They regret the error in reporting on the humanity of a Palestinian.

You see shit like this from the most vile people alive all the time:

They're not actually starving, etc. It's fake. They’re stealing food from their own babies in fact and therefore they have their massacre coming.

As always it's fuck A.I. till I die. And even after I die for that matter.

Imagine giving so little a shit about a loved one you've just lost that you ask the lying slop machine to shit out some bullshit about them? I swear to god if anyone does this for me I'm coming back to haunt their ass. Gonna be real perverted about it too.

On the matter of ghosts we stayed at a thoroughly haunted hotel in Kennebunkport for a few days this week.

The views outside were gorgeous though. Then again the wifi was bad and I couldn't really post much the whole time so... ⭐️1/2

Ok here's something very funny for the road. It's from the continuing adventures of the long running series Everyone Fucking Hates Alan Dershowitz.

The very very rare you gotta hand it to the cops moment.

I'd say this guy is living in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm but even Larry hates his ass too.

Here's your song of the week from Boston's let's say interestingly named band Fleshwater.

"They sound like Deftones."
- Luke