The Song Choices Were Limited So the Grooves Were Dug Deep

:hospital animal emergency 365/7/24 a in morning Day Christmas Written

Olive attacked Louie,* scratched his eye. In the ten minutes I’ve been here a standard poodle who swallowed a large stuffed toy, an elderly dog w face ripped up after two dogs attacked, an elderly man with an elderly dog wheezing for breath turning slowly in circles on it's leash, and in walks a distraught but dignified elderly woman carrying a box with her cat who died Christmas Eve, I don't want to put her in the trash, she said, I don't know what to do, and the hospital took the box

I’m crying. I’m a hot mess sideways. Hundreds of humans will die today via the genocide my tax dollars pay for to be laundered into profits for shitlords and I get furious and enjoy and indulge my fury but an old lady in tears walks into an emergency vets and hands over her only companion for cremation and I melt into hopelessness and *this* feels like a greater sinful indulgence, the fuck wrong with me

 

This possibly the longest between posts here ever, nine days. I thought my apostasies complete but I'm shocked anew and obsessing, you who follow me on twaater can vouch, this extermination of a people and a place with the full support and in many cases gusto from who are my purported battalion against trumpian hordes. My senators are useless, my congressman, in Democratic leadership ladder his job is to be the progressive congressperson mocking crackers, I knew he corporate was but still, I'm disappointed, not even *this* fuck? the fuck wrong with me

Nothing that is happening anywhere in the world, whether protest already quashed or current protests being quashed and all future protests to be quashed can be stopped by you and me together, and I seem constitutionally unwilling to keep explaining how and why when you already know though I think I think it worse than some of you do, no excuse for barking at the moon daily no matter how fast we eat the latest and shit out the old, so yes, same shit tomorrow

Olive instantly understood my disappointment and her doghousing and she self-isolated upstairs for two days after (C, every bit if not more abnormally nice as her mother (I can't imagine who I'd be if they weren't L & C), suggested Olive was lovingly defending me (though I was never under attack though Olive's first view of Louie was him licking my ears so maybe she *was* says this mark, I'm happy Louie likes me)). I'm working on it

*Olive = our cat, Louie = my daughter's sweet puppy, Olive Louie's first cat encounter (which he's recovered from and he's friends with Fleabus, yinz know Fleabus)
Gas, Gaza, and Western imperialism
"Yes, and that’s why, until a few months ago, financially supporting Hamas was Israeli government policy."
A history of Israeli attempts at ethnic cleansing
The forces behind the assault on opposition to Gaza genocide
The Bomb In The Backyard: A 2023 Coda
The Mongol Hordes: They’re Just Like Us
(if you're paywalled - you shouldn't be but if - and want a pdf just email me, it's a fascinating article)
Oligarchy and Democracy					The Year in Corruption!
The idea of a ‘precolonial’ Africa is theoretically vacuous, racist and plain wrong about the continent’s actual history
The Year We Stopped Being Able to Pretend About Trump?
Last weekend's Maggie's weekly links
The big hole re-opened					Some thoughts on the substack controversy
Avedon Carol's occasional links
Sasha unquits!			Notes from Overground
The Pathos of Obsolete Reference Books
⇧	The Guardian asked him to write about blogging
Last weekend's { feuilleton }'s weekly links
Review of two new translations of Swann's Way
The 500 Best Guided by Voices songs
(the above GbV song this shitty blog's Theme Song #3 (I'll spare *me* another riff on BLCKDGRD's theme song crisis of being in chaos and *not* being a crisis), the one below the grid my favorite GbV song period)

JUKE

Diane Seuss

What kind of juke do you prefer?

For me, it’s the kind with three

songs and thirty-seven blank

title strips. Three songs, and two

are “Luckenbach, Texas.”

The third is beautiful and arcane,

but the patrons hate it,

and the record skips.

I prefer the three-song juke

and the three-toothed human

smile. I found the juke of my dreams

in a bar called “Chums,” no clue

the origin or meaning

of the quotation marks. It was a prime

number of a bar, and now it’s dead.

One night, drinking half-and-

halfs, half beer, half tomato juice,

with schnapps chasers, a cheap

source of hallucination.

A soon-to-be-defrocked Catholic

priest, Vic Jr., my mother, and me,

our faces streaked blue with pool

chalk, juke red as a beating heart,

and just a strip of hollyhocks

and a tree line between us

and the northern lights.

I was young. I looked like a Rubens

painting of a woman half-eaten

by moths. What lucky

debauchery, the ride back

on a washboard dirt road,

taking everything for granted,

flipping off the aurora borealis

like it was some three-toothed human

in flashy clothes dancing

to get my attention.

I wasn’t a mean drunk then,

just honest.

Next morning, mom walked in

on the naked priest

in the shack’s garage,

washing himself with a rag

and cold water from the well

in a metal dishpan. I’d later do dishes

in that pan and wash my hair

in that pan. We popped popcorn

on the one-burner wood-burning

stove and ate it out of that pan.

I’m talking about a time and a place.

All I can say of it is that it was real.

The song choices were limited,

so the grooves were dug deep.