Here is a short list of occupations unsuited for raccoons: spy, burglar, librarian, watchmaker, pilot, jeweler, and funeral director. Tonight, I walked out onto my porch, looked

each of them right in their drunken toddler faces, and said, "If you guys would just shut the fuck up we don't have to keep meeting like this."

General #Custer was killed here in 1876. His decisive defeat was dubbed as his ‘last stand,’ though all accounts point to him being discovered in a state of permanent recline. The titling of his death strikes me as the nineteenth century’s equivalent of a late night all-caps tweet, a recasting of defeat as something that it wasn’t. Custer’s demise was not operatic. Captain Frederick Benteen, a man who surveyed the bodies left on the battlefield just two days after the last shots were fired, reported as much. It was running chaos, he concluded. “It was a rout, a panic, until the last man was killed.” In any telling of the story, it’s worth noting that the Indian Wars didn’t end until 1924 —twelve years after my own grandmother was born to a family homesteaded on the very land for which the wars were being waged. By that time, estimates place the war’s toll as tantamount to a genocide having eliminated

80-98% of the targeted populations from the American interior.By the measure of history, it’s safe to say that the connective tissue that stretches between generations is not atrophied by millennia; its memory is recent and its consequences are neither static nor trapped in a vacuum. The inertia that launched Manifest Destiny didn’t just roll off and slowly come to a rest at the bottom of the Pacific. It ricocheted about, fueling new people with its surplus of old gas. This is how broken ideas stretch forward through history, touching us from time to time as a cudgel that implores us to turn backwards. We can feel it when our collective whole seeks itself in memes that discard any countervailing truths that would otherwise introduce ripples into our Narcissus reflection. In the pinball trajectory that began long before we were all born, there comes a point where the emptiness that was once transversed intersects with the course of things present and,…

The sprawl comes to a punctuated end. Except it’s not. It’s just the pause in the middle of a long and rambling run-on sentence that seems like it will go on and on and on forever without the benefit of a comma or

ellipsis or hyphen or; every night the chewing beast sucks in a solitary asthmatic breath as the dust settles back underfoot. In the morning its bite will double. And double again. And again until its gradual incline has been bent vertical. And then what?

We were headed to Phoenix, but had some half-cocked idea that that trip would be better if we made a detour to find the exact spot where Travis Walton was abducted by aliens in Fire in the Sky. From Holbrook, it’s about an hour and a half southwest, running out the last of the Painted Desert until the flats give way to the savannah of piñon junipers and ponderosa pines that grow along the narrow edge of the Colorado Plateau. I met @rocknrollranch in the parking lot of the Wigwam Motel. He had come in from Wyoming and I drove from a forgettable assignment somewhere nearby. It was there that we first saw Barbra Streisand’s RV. BJS, her initials, were monogrammed on the doors of a late 80s camper that was parked outside of the motel’s registration office underneath a streetlamp. I don’t recall how the conversation began but its driver told us that he had just purchased the vehicle

in California from among Streisand’s depreciated holdings and was en route to an intermediary state where lowered emissions standards would allow him to get tags for it. According to the driver, Streisand was no fan of public toilets. She had purchased the RV to serve as a highway-ready shitter, a loo that could be kept to her standards at all times during her tours. Everything was as she left it --except for the toilet, he explained. She had it removed prior to the sale to prevent it from becoming an eBayable artifact (or something like that). Chris filmed and I chuckled along as the man pulled open the door to the RV to show us what he meant: the interior was pristine except for the void over the gaping abyss of a toilet flange above which there was no toilet. ⁣⁣We thanked the man for his story and Chris asked if he could take a souvenir. The man opened a…

Obvious tragedies aside, the last few months have been nothing short of an introvert’s ideal state of existence. You can talk to who you want, when you want, one person at a time. The days start and end without pressure. Things are quiet. Cocktail hours and networking events are all but dead and buried. It took a little more than a couple weeks for a few bad extroverts among us to start Gadsdening out, give them Buffalo Wild Wings or give them death. Pro tip: you can have both in short succession if you really put your mind to it. That old axiom at least holds up under the relentless

stress of ordinary inconvenience. Boo-fucking-hoo. I imagine the ghost of Nietzsche’s mustache dusting along through empty Abercrombies and peering out from behind the glass of shuttered hair salons as the weird crossbreed of faux one-percenter motorcyclists and husky-blue-liners pound on the doors, internally conflicted over their presentation as outlaw rebels while also genuflecting to authority. “Free for what?” his mustache would say before slinking back into the ether of infernal oblivion. Maybe there is a Taco Bell in purgatory. Maybe our lesser angels are, at least, nourished on Chalupa Supremes. Maybe there are no hungry ghosts, only hungry mortals shaken by the silence that lingers when the ride suddenly stops.

The first thing I did when the cops pulled into the parking lot was run. They were shouting at me over their squad car's PA but I didn't stop nor did I drop the rifle that was in my hand. I made it halfway around the side of the building with the police driving behind me when I ran headlong into my dad. He was who I was looking for. I hid behind him, still clutching my gun, as he confronted them with the selflessness of a parent protecting their child. The cops cowered in their car as he yelled with a purpose and severity that remains inked across the strata of my memory, clear as desert sunlight.⠀⠀I was nine years-old, big for my age, tall enough to be a teenager. My dad had been working in a small, vacant building across from the Butterball Turkey Plant in Longmont, Colorado. He spent the day tearing out a commercial tile floor

and I spent the day in an empty dirt lot behind the building playing with my bb gun, shooting a paper target taped to a soda box. It was harmless, but it looked as real as the gun that Tamir Rice was holding when he was killed.⠀ ⠀In the taxonomy of my memories, the outcome of this event has always been concrete: my dad intervened and I remained safe. The lesson of the institution's valuation of my body under those circumstances is what I internalized as a child. In other words, I learned my place and how far I could push. When the cops finally pulled away, my dad put me and my bb gun in the car and we drove two blocks to the police station where we met the chief of police. I remember staring at an office plant, resisting the urge to fiddle with the blinds that covered the window behind it while my imposing father lectured…

The nazi who lives behind me died a few weeks ago. I didn't bother asking how. He was an asshole born of the kind of infectious bacteria that festers in the subcutaneous tissue of our thin American skin. He was proud of his idiocy, a wanna-be David Allan Coe who had papered the walls of his small garage with David Duke campaign posters. He was a coward who shouted at kids from his kitchen window and huffed around like a small dog on a leash when those kids eventually broke the lock off his garage and made off with a case of his precious beer. I will not miss him and neither will you.⁣⁣When I was nineteen, I watched the New Orleans Police march a handcuffed man up a deserted street towards a waiting squad car. The man was black and the four cops were white, a detail that almost seems not worth the sentence. It was just hours before

dawn. The man in handcuffs sassed one of the police. I couldn't hear what he said, but I could see what he meant by the expression that he wore. I looked on from the dark as they used his body like a pinball, slamming him into cars and off of walls until he cried like a child. I watched in detached horror because, like my dead neighbor, like the cops beating a handcuffed man, like everyone fetishizing raw power from the safe glow of their touchscreen, I found no courage in the moment and so I remained concealed in the dark.⁣⁣Last night I dreamed that I was shackled under the floorboards of an old, crooked house. I could hear people walking above and, as they moved about, dust fell through the cracks and filled in the space around me. I swept it away, but the crowd grew larger, louder, and the stream of settling dust flowed down faster than I…

The fog sets in. A friend of mine has been long fascinated with electrical infrastructure. He’s explained that, by counting the number of ceramic insulators on a line, you can determine its load. It’s as you would expect: more insulators, greater voltage. The roads are quiet and empty. Before the fog, the whole valley of Denver is as clear as I have ever seen it. The thin sliver of earth that recedes eastward into Kansas is tack sharp in the dry, clear air. Another friend sends a text. Midday. It is short. “My first COVID patient is dead. 71. Healthy.” I’m delivering groceries to

my parents when my phone buzzes with the news. I’m reminded of the videos taken in the minutes preceding the Indian Ocean Tsunami where the water drains far away from the beach revealing something marvelously unusual. In some of the videos you can see people looking at the sands as they spread out against the disappearing surf. It’s hard not to feel terror precisely because nobody in the videos seems to. The viewer knows that somewhere out there, past the line that marks the horizon, is a 108 foot-tall wall of incompressible water moving at a predictable and constant speed to backfill the void.

Two weeks ago some asshole piloted a homemade steam-powered rocket into the compacted talc of the Mojave desert on some half-baked publicity stunt to prove that the Earth is flat. It killed him. Ends being what they are, I suppose it’s beyond the pale of meaningless for his journey to note that NASA has been mapping the Earth’s gravity from outer space for almost two decades. Their findings? Gravitational forces are greater in places where there is more mass underfoot. In other words, an asshole over the Mojave weighs a little less than an asshole over the Himalayas.⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣Today, satellites passing through the outer dark of earth’s atmosphere photographed trenches being dug to dispose of Iran’s coronavirus casualties. The global economy has ground to a halt, spare whatever profit can be wrung from toilet paper sales. There hasn’t been a second of this crisis where I haven’t been haunted a vision of miles and miles of suburban apartments stuffed to

the hilt with cases of Charmin. Inside, puffy corpses are sprawled about in matching track suits and Nike sneakers, applesauce all over their pale faces. I imagine their gradual liquefaction into the beige medium pile carpet like some sped-up claymation video set to the tune of Hank Williams Jr’s ‘A County Boy Can Survive.’ ⁣⁣⁣⁣The capital D Dildo that occupies the Oval Office has tried every last piece of my patience in recent weeks, decorating his own dumbass Mojave steam rockets with just the right amount of flags to inspire a chorus of unexamined idiocy. Yesterday, I called my septuagenarian parents to tell them that I felt that circumstances made it incumbent upon me to let them know that I wanted them to live long enough to die from cancer, heart failure, shingles, or gangrene —anything but this completely preventable steaming pile that has been gifted to us by the inaction and apathy of the moron piloting our collective steam-powered…