International Murder

272,525   deaths in the United States from Covid-19 and the Federal Government still refuses to do its job in countering the disaster. How long will this travesty continue? The world wonders.

Today appears to be (and I am relying on Wikipedia for this information, so be warned) Independence Day (Barbados), National Day (Benin), Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran (Israel), Regina Mundi Day (South Africa), Bonifacio Day (Philippines), Commemoration Day (United Arab Emirates), and Independence Day (South Yemen). The saint of the day is Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, a fisherman by trade, who was one of the first followers of Jesus, if you believe the late and discursive Gospel according to John. Saint Andrew’s Day appears to be a recognized state holiday in Scotland and Rumania. It is also Mark Twain’s birthday.

With the current occupant of the White House forgotten but not gone the news has been swamped with stories of the assassination of an Iranian physicist who may or may not have been the head of a program intended to supply the nation with energy from atomic reactors. The details of his murder are chilling, if rather confusing. Possibly twelve mysterious assassins popped up out of nowhere and blew him away before vanishing without a trace. Or maybe a robot machine-gunner took him out before self-destructing. The exact details are, shall we say, obscure. The purpose of this clandestine (and thoroughly illegal) action seems to be to make things difficult for the United States under Future President Biden to restore normal relations with Iran. Iranian officials are babbling wildly about murdering Israelis in response. Let’ s hope cooler heads prevail—though I don’t expect that. As always, I expect the worst.

The BottleDrop Scam

261,683   people in the United States have now died from Covid-19. It’s not what I want to talk about, but everything else is trivial compared to the ongoing disaster. Well, not the other ongoing disasters, I suppose—global warming, the great extinction event, the coming nuclear apocalypse, and so on and so forth—but, you know, the inanities of the economy, business, politics, entertainment, sports—even the sciences and the arts when you get right down to it. If you can’t bop to it, don’t buy the record, as the man said.

But the triviality I want to rant about today is the great BottleDrop scam right here in Oregon, something that is irritating me right now because of something that happened to me today. When I went down to the Burlingame Fred Meyer I walked past the bottle return center (as it is part of my regular route from the bus) and glanced over at it to see large signs posted there to the effect that it was closed. Permanently. It looked like they would still do hand counts for small amounts of cans or bottles, but otherwise, unless you were a BottleDrop customer, you were shit out of luck on getting your money back.

The store employee I talked to—who is a really nice guy who has been very helpful in the past—candidly admitted that the object was to get people to use the “green bags.” I admitted (with equal candor) that I hate the “green bags” program and have no intention of using it. Ever.

Let me explain. Under the old system when I paid a deposit on a returnable bottle I could get my money back by returning it to the place I bought it. It was a simple, straightforward transaction. Take the bottles in and leave with the money. Typically I would begin a shopping trip by returning my bottles, collecting the money (or taking the equivalent off my purchase), and buying whatever it was I’d come for. It was relatively easy to manage.

But no more. Under the “green bags” system I have to set up a special account, put my bottles in special “green bags”, and deposit them at a “convenient” BottleDrop return center. My bottles will be processed in three to five business days and the money added to my account. I can have the money in my account given to the charity of my choice, or if I absolutely insist on getting my money back, can obtain it from certain special locations.

Okay—let’s see how this works in practice. A 13-gallon garbage bag will hold ten, maybe twelve two-liter bottles. I can carry maybe two of these without too much inconvenience on the bus, so say, twenty to twenty-four bottles. Under the old system I’d take them in to the store, run them through a machine, receive a voucher for say $2.00 to $2.40, and present it as I buy my groceries on the way out. But under the new system I have to put the bottles in special “green bags”—each holding thirteen gallons. So let’s say I manage to cram twelve bottles apiece into two “green bags”, tie them and label them with the correct stickers, take the bus to a “convenient” location to leave them off—well, isn’t that essentially the same thing, except that I have to wait for my money those three to five business days?

Well … no. Those “green bags” aren’t free, for one thing—they cost $2.00 for ten bags. That’s twenty cents apiece. So I’m already out forty cents before I ever receive any credit towards that $2.40 I might have coming. But still—a two-dollar return on a forty-cent investment? That’s not too bad, right? Except that the money in question is my money already, a deposit that I put down and should be able to get back. And to cap things off, I’m not going to get $2.00 back—because there’s a forty-cent additional fee attached to processing each bag. In fact I am going to get $1.20 back on my $2.40 investment—not enough to even pay the bus fare to run the bottles to that “convenient” location. It’s a losing proposition all round.

Now obviously if you have a car, or happen to live right by one of these “convenient” locations, or habitually drink 8 oz. returnable cans and can stuff a couple hundred of them in a “green bag,” you may find the whole concept a more attractive proposition. For people like me, however, it’s purely inane. I’m probably better off just tossing the bottles and losing my deposit. It’s better than lending support to this pointless scam, at the very least.

The Return of Vile Kyle

259,231   people in the United States have now died from Covid-19, and the rate is rising. Is this what the whole city on the hill thing is about? Showing the rest of the world how we can rise above the disaster by just giving in to it? Live or die, we don’t care, as the old song has it.

And we can all breathe a little easier knowing that Vile Kyle has made his two million dollar bail, and is now free to (illegally) take up a weapon and go hunting for more victims. Oh, excuse me—people to kill in self-defense. That’s the story, right? Here’s hoping the next time we see this piece of human refuse in the news it will be a report of the discovery of his corpse dead of an overdose in a back alley somewhere. Save the state the expense of trying him, anyway.

We’ll see. The professional sob-brothers are now lined up behind this guy, telling us sad stories about how he was just out to protect property and all, never mind it being at the law’s expense, and the cost of the lives of a guy just out of the hospital and a would-be hero. Fuck that shit. Vile Kyle made his choices. He chose to kill others, and he should be prepared to pay in turn with his worthless life. He could even do some good that way—part him out for the benefit of others as an organ donor, for example.

Allah Have Mercy On Us All

256,164   is the number of people in the United States who have died (so far) from the Trump Pandemic. And things look bleak for the Dopey Don. President-elect Biden appears to have pulled it off, and is now scheduled to assume the mantle of US leadership next January. Allah preserve us all.

I suppose denying reality is always an option. There’s a lot of that going around. Our Fake President is still refusing to meet with his successor, claiming that the election still isn’t over. (It isn’t, but Trump no longer has a legal path to victory.) The contrast with his predecessor could not be more glaring. When Trump legally won an election characterized by massive Republican vote fraud (in the form of vote suppression, mainly) Obama met with the incoming president and started working on the transition. The classless idiot in the White House is still alternating between throwing tantrums and sulking in a corner. A nurse writes about how patients dying from Covid-19 are still denying that it exists as they take their last breaths. And now people are insisting that Al Gore was acclaimed president-elect for a month before the Supreme Court decided not to finish counting the votes in Florida (hint: he wasn’t). That’s as nutty as claiming that Richard Nixon would have been elected president in 1960 if it weren’t for chicanery with the Illinois vote. (Chicanery there may well have been, but switch all twenty Illinois electoral votes from Kennedy to Nixon and Nixon’s still a loser.)

Something has leached away all my enthusiasm and will to live, and I hate to see that morning sun come up. The library has closed again—not that it was ever really open, but at least you could return books and order things through the library system. My laptop is still not working, one of my aunts has just died and an uncle has been diagnosed with Covid-19, so I suppose external reality may be having an effect on me. I thought writing something might make me feel better, but it doesn’t, so I guess I’m going to give up. For the moment. We’ll see about the future.

Clarification

In case anybody is confused by this—yes, I’ve called the election, and so as the Cowardly Liar in the White House—but nobody put either of us in charge of making that determination. Who will be declared the winner will depend on the results of an actual vote count. That’s how it works in this country. People keep counting the votes until all of them have been counted. To do otherwise is vote fraud, plain and simple.

It’s the commonest form of vote fraud, actually—not counting votes. It’s one way Black voters were disenfranchised for years, along with fake literacy tests, grandfather laws, and poll taxes. Boss Tweed and Mayor Daley knew how to lose votes, whether by throwing them in the river or by intimidating voters into not voting in the first place. When Trump says he wants to stop counting the votes now—with Biden ahead in both the popular vote and the electoral college, by the way—he is advocating vote fraud, plain and simple. I never thought I’d see an American President engage in such lowlife thuggery—but I never thought I’d see the American Supreme Court order a vote count stopped lest it result in the wrong man being elected to the job, as it did in the 2000 election.

In point of fact Biden still has multiple paths to victory. (A combination such as Nevada, Wisconsin, and Georgia—none of them out of reach—would do it, for just one example.) It doesn’t mean that any of them are going to pay off—as I think I’ve made clear, I don’t think they will—but they do exist, and will exist until the vote is counted—or Trump stages a successful fascist coup.

Personally, I wish there was some way they could both go down to a crashing defeat. Say, Trump manages to eke out an electoral college victory via massive vote fraud while the Democrats take both the House and Senate—and then bang! the first thing the Democrats do on taking power is impeach both Trump and Pence and kick them out of office. Or Biden wins but Trump shoots him when he attempts to take office, leading to Trump being taken out by the Secret Service. Or—well, you get the idea. Some improbable sequence of events that would eliminate both scumbags and maybe allow the country to finally get on the path to healing again.

Good Job, America

237,245   people dead from covid 19 in the United States, and the nation has just reelected the man most responsible for the carnage. Good job, America! There’s nothing we like more than a fumbling stumblebum with a solid gold racist heart. I just saw somebody saying that nobody would know Trump was a racist if the media didn’t keep reporting on it—which I suppose is true if you never listened to the guy or read his tweets.

And good job, Democrats. That electability thing really paid off for you, didn’t it? Put up an uninspiring stuffed nabob because people will vote for anything to be rid of Trump. Brilliant! How much of the country do you think is going to be left after another damn year of this crazed criminal at the helm?

But if present trends hold, at least you’ve got another moral victory out of it. Biden may have lost the presidency, but at least he won the popular vote. Who are you going to throw under the bus this time? Old people? The ill? The homeless? Not the rich, obviously. You need them.

Well, at least the election is over, Allah be praised.

Signs of Life

222,988  American deaths from covid-19 as the slaughter continues. It’s also seventeen days till the Election, fourteen days till Halloween, and 1366 days since the Genius of the Stables took office. And it’s Wear Something Gaudy Day.

And I see that after six years of silence the Afarensis weblog has abruptly come back to life. I’m looking forward to new posts. And Ed Darrell has rescued an old comment of his from oblivion (well, the archives of P. Z. Myers’ blog)—this one about Charles Darwin’s alleged racism. And the Quote Investigator features an Arthur C. Clarke observation to the effect that “There is a hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags will not wave in a vacuum; our present tribal conflicts cannot be sustained in the hostile environment of space.” Also the History weblog is noting a project that is digitizing some 30,000 Hittite cuneiform texts. It’s encouraging to see signs of life in the rubble.

I Really Don’t Care

212,768  American deaths from covid 19 and counting. I read online that President Trump is having trouble breathing and that White House officials are “concerned”. In the words of one of the Trumps, let me just say “I really don’t care. Do U?” Maybe they could ask Eric Garner or George Floyd about it; I’m sure they’d have something to say on the subject were it not for their untimely deaths.

Ah, but I should be concerned, say the pundits, since the election could be thrown into chaos should one of the candidates (God forbid) die or become incapacitated. And that would be different how? One party—mine—is already doing everything it can to throw the election into chaos by practicing massive vote (not voter) fraud, while the other is hoping that a grotesquely feeble candidate will inspire a turnout so massive that all the fraud in the world won’t be enough to stop the juggernaut. It’s a sad end for the American experiment, but not undeserved—from where I sit, anyway.

I can’t help but hope that posterity will take our intentions into account as well as our achievements; our reach always exceeded our grasp. It’s like that epitaph for Wernher von Braun—“He shot for the moon—and hit London.” Rest in peace, American hopes and aspirations for a better tomorrow. It’s over. Time to pack up our things and go home.

Gullible's Travails

211,109   American deaths from covid 19 so far. And the federal government, whose job is to deal with threats of this sort, is doing nothing under the alleged leadership of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Why Americans chose to put such low-level intellects in charge is a mystery, but the consequences have been bad for the nation.

Some joker apparently hoaxed our gullible and not-too-bright President into thinking that the “Portland Sheriff” gave him his support. There is no such person. Portland sprawls over three counties, and they have sheriffs, but Portland doesn’t. (Sheriff is normally a county function.) If he means the sheriff of Multnomah county—the county that is almost (but not quite) synonymous with Portland—he has specifically denied it. But with the Dopey Don all things are possible—and my guess is that somebody told the President he was the Portland sheriff in hopes that Trump would make an ass of himself by repeating it. As happened.

I’ve got to go; I hear the bell ringing for the daily corpse pickup. It’s time to bring out our dead.

And Now a Word from Our Sponsors

209,417. That’s the number of deaths from covid 19 in the United States so far. And we can all give heartfelt thanks to Donald Trump, Our Glorious Leader, that the number was not much lower. If OGL hadn’t sprung into prompt inaction, tens of thousands of people might still be alive, consuming resources desperately needed by the Gilded Scum at the top of the Pond of State to keep them in the comfort they feel entitled to.

Expendable people—the elderly, the diseased, the poor—ought to be glad to make way for the Gilded Scum. If they can’t be used to make the lives of the One Tenth of One Percent better, then they should at least have the grace to terminate their existences in some socially approved manner. It’s the American Way™ after all.

[Paid for by the Fake American Greatness Foundation, a subsidiary of Koke Bros UnLtd.]

If You Think That's Boring [2017]

[Journal entry, 28 September 2017]

11:50  pm PDT—[My roommate] woke me up when he came home, which was probably a good thing because I needed to be up in time for my nine o’clock appointment with somebody at the Social Security Administration over my Medicare situation. I caught the 94 and got there just before nine, joining a line of people waiting to get in. The woman ahead of me slightly puzzled me in that she was wearing shorts and her legs seemed to have some sort of strange skin condition, but I concluded that she was wearing stockings in addition to her socks. When the door opened the line moved slowly, and the guy directly ahead of the woman ahead of me turned out to have rather a lot of things that needed to be opened and looked at, so things moved slowly. Abruptly I heard my name being called to go to window F, and I told them that was me, and they dropped everything and ran me through. The interview took very little time and the questions all seemed relatively simple and straightforward, so I was out of there in very little time.

I caught the 94 back and went as far as Fred Meyer, where I bought a few groceries with what’s left of the money, and at the end remembered I needed to refill some prescriptions. That went reasonably quickly, though it would have been better if I’d remembered it in the first place, and I came home on the 12.

I spent the rest of the day doing laundry and screwing around listing files on the computer, eventually seeing [my roommate] off to work as usual. And in the near future I expect to sack out. If there’s more, I can’t think of it.

Stolen Bicycle

Honestly, this could have happened any time in the early sixties, but based on what I can recall I believe it must have been right in here in 1961—nearly sixty years ago—that it happened. It was beginning to get dark early (as I remember it), possibly not long after Daylight Saving Time had ended. My brother had been out riding, and he’d left his bicycle at the edge of our property, alongside a little access road by the gravel pit that served some residences behind us. My father told him to bring it back to the house before the sun set.

My brother headed out, a little annoyed—and then came back without the bicycle, looking worried. It wasn’t where he’d left it. My brother was forgetful at the best of times, so we took a quick look around the yard to see if it was anywhere to be found, and my father went out with a flashlight (the sun had set by then) to look along the bank by the access road and where the property fronted Fourth Plain. The bicycle was gone. Apparently.

We had nearly an acre of yard planted with a variety of shrubs and trees that might obscure a bicycle, especially in the dusk, so I, at least, was not convinced. But it didn’t turn up in the daylight either, so my mother called the police to report it stolen. We had followed the instructions given in a police handout on protecting bicycles, which included placing our name and address on the bicycle in a hidden place, and we informed the police of this, as instructed. The officer said that there was not much chance of our ever seeing the bicycle again, but we could check in from time to time to see if a matching bicycle had turned up in their collection of the lost and stolen. No, they had no matching bicycle at this time.

It was a considerable blow to my brother, who used the bicycle constantly to get around, and it shook me up too. I mean, despite our parents’ constant reminders of theft and accident, nothing of the sort had ever happened to us here. I suppose our parents had in mind the extensive vandalizing of the house before we had moved in, but I always took that as a consequence of its being vacant at the time, not as an augur of the future. The thought that somebody had simply come onto our property and walked off with (or maybe ridden away on) my brother’s bike was disquieting. Maybe even shocking. Powerlessness, outrage, violation—all that was stirred together in my emotional cauldron. But there didn’t seem to be anything to be done about it. My parents dutifully called in to the police over a period of weeks, but each time were informed that nothing matching the description had turned up. They did send us another copy of their brochure on protecting bicycles from theft, but that wasn’t much help. And my brother had a birthday coming up, and he had almost outgrown the bicycle anyway, so through some combination of present and labor he ended up with a new and improved replacement. And life went on.

I might not remember the event at all, traumatic as it was, were it not for the sequel. My parents though eccentric were always active in school events, and a year or two later my father was the parent designated to assist on a school field trip involving my youngest brother—not the one with the missing bicycle. His class was touring our emergency facilities in Vancouver. The fire department put on a demonstration for them, and my brother recalled watching them with considerable interest as they set a house on fire, but was disappointed that they had to leave before the firemen could put it out. As the class toured the police station they passed a rack of recovered bicycles, and one of them looked oddly familiar to my father. He didn’t do anything at that moment, being involved in keeping an eye on a couple dozen small children, but after the field trip was over he went back to the station.

The bicycle he had seen was in fact my brother’s. It still had his name clearly printed on it, as well as the address located in a concealed place. The police were quite happy to return it to us, and we were fairly happy to get it back, though by this time it was superfluous. How had the police recovered it? we wanted to know. It had been found, abandoned, presumably after somebody had stolen it. Since nobody had reported its loss or claimed it, they’d kept it for use in a program that loaned out bicycles to kids who might otherwise be tempted to steal one. Where had it been found? Just off Fourth Plain, on an access road by a gravel pit.

Yes, that’s right. The police had stolen my brother’s bicycle. They had taken it from our yard, they had repeatedly denied having it in their possession, and they put us through all the trauma of violation and loss.

My father, predictably, found the whole thing amusing. It fit with his notions of how people in authority were wont to behave. I drew a somewhat different conclusion from the affair.

Police steal for no reason, and then lie about it.

I don’t now remember what we did with the bicycle; we didn’t really have a use for it any longer. Possibly we passed it on to somebody else who could use it. Maybe we should have let the police keep it for use in their anti-theft program. At least it was probably doing somebody some good there.

Everything Except Work (1999)

[Passage from my journal, 23 September 1999]

7:27  m PDT—Well, today worked out fairly well for everything except getting any actual work done. I bathed, bought stuff at the store, ran a load of dishes, cleaned out the refrigerator some, cleaned up the kitchen a bit, and so on. The closest I got to work however was writing a few notes on the San Francisco Post material I worked on earlier this week.

I finished The Indian Frontier, which is a hell of a good book; I don’t know why I haven’t run into it before. And I took the tube checker apart to see whether I couldn’t loosen up that tube list a bit, so that it’s easier to turn and read. Food has been dismal recently, but I hit on the idea of doing au jus sandwiches, which I haven’t had since before [my father] died, and that got me looking forward to a meal again. I checked out my copy of Introducing the Beatles from my Beatles record guide, and found out that it is (I guess) a counterfeit of one of the rarest versions of the damn record, rather than a late re-issue as I’d thought; I bought it at Fred Meyer or some such place maybe in the early eighties. And that’s about it, I guess. Well, it rained some time today before I woke up, which kind of serves notice that summer is really over. Not that summer has been that hot or dry this year. Days recently have been fairly hot, which is why my air conditioner is running even as I write this, but I imagine that will pass soon.

The Winds Have Died Down

Everything is strange here; a neon-yellow light pervades our immediate environment, and the sun is a dull copper disk in an otherwise nondescript gray sky. At least the winds have died down; there are, however, still items strewn about the landscape, ranging from tree limbs to old clothes.

As far as I can tell there is no immediate danger, but familiar places—Oregon City and Canby—are being evacuated, and more distant locales I have visited—Phoenix, for example—have been reduced to ash.

It is difficult to write on this defective machine (which is the reason I replaced it) but it’s either that or give up, and I’m not ready yet. I’ve been forced to fall back on reading actual books—the fragments of my library—and so have reread Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives and Frederick Lewis Allen’s Since Yesterday.

In the Meantime...

Nothing is working right at the moment. My shiny new computer exploded and I am reduced to trying to write on my old workhorse where certain keys don’t work well and others don’t work at all. It’s really annoying. I was able to recover my work (I think), but getting anything further done may have to wait on coming up with some new arrangement. It looks as though I will at least get my money back and be able to buy some sort of replacement, but the way things are going I’m not betting on it. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.

We’re having some kind of strange storm here in Portland, with smoke and haze swirling strangely and ominously about. I hope things clear up soon, in terms of my personal landscape as well as this murky weather. It’s hard to write, hard to move about, and hard to cope. Problems and difficulties loom in every direction I look. Possibly things will clear up soon, but I am losing confidence.

Visitations (1975)

[Passage from my journal, Sunday 7 September 1975]

8:22pm PDT (livingroom)—(cloudy, 2) For some unknown reason I’m nervous, apprehensive, jumpy. I feel imminent expectation of flying saucers, unknown Things, Huge Face or Eye in the Sky, strange creatures from the forest.

The wind is up slightly outside. It was cloudy today; it’s been hot the last couple of days.

Lights seem to shift in brightness—I’m also suffering from abrupt sensations of falling. Otherwise (unless you count flashes of depression) normal, whatever that may be.

Events are getting too fucking improbable. All right: on thursday the telephone man comes and the man to repossess the car. On friday Tekla has puppies, and we get a strange communication from the employment people. Saturday R’s check doesn’t come. Sunday the stair light which has been here since we moved in (I believe) burns out. Monday I’m visited by Saucer People who tell my fortune, tuesday Thaddeus has puppies, wednesday the house sale is declared fraudulent by angry owner, thursday Ruby [the cat] has puppies, and so it goes.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

Diamonds and Rust (Joan Baez).

I’m rererereading The Scholar Adventurers. I sometimes picture some industrious scholar of (say) 2043 running down this journal in search of valuable information. His comments read: sbh’s Diary (or “journal” as he called it) consists of twenty-seven looseleaf binders, most bearing names of well known electrical companies of the time, containing notes covering the period from March 1966 to April 1984, with large gaps. Most of this is unintelligible, due to the author’s habits of obscure abbreviations, and omissions of everything of interest. Even in a family noted for self-centeredness sbh stands out in that he succeeds in telling us nothing of importance about his famous brothers. Nowhere is this failing clearer than in the ...

KZEL is off the air. Why?

I Didn't See Anybody (2003)

[Passage from my journal, 6 September 2003]

1:19m PDT—I didn’t really see anybody today, though I think Darryl dropped by at some point. My main accomplishment was scurrying off to the store—the Plaid Pantry—to buy bread, which I was out of. I need to make a real store trip, but the money situation is awful, and I have many bills coming up. I worked some on separating the J, E, and P sources of Exodus, mainly because I’m trying to figure out how the Moses story grew over time. He’s not at the center of the cult for J, as he is for E and P, or at any rate that’s now it looks to me. So how did the story grow over time? I think I watched some TV today—mainly coverage of the ongoing Middle East disaster. The Korean situation, which as far as I can see is entirely the result of the current president’s bungling, looks really ominous, but for some reason nobody seems to be covering it. And Ashcroft, that goddamn witch, is going around the country explaining that we really didn’t need those pesky civil liberties we used to enjoy anyway, and look how useful they are in prosecuting people who just a few years ago wouldn’t have been guilty of anything. Are these people for real? God help us all.

No Appointment Needed

Last night—well, this morning literally—I dreamed I was hanging out in a large room somewhere—it might have been some kind of restaurant, or a lobby, or a waiting area at an airport. The place was packed with people, all of them animated and engaged in lively activities. There were children digging in the sandy floor, there was a woman breast-feeding her baby, there were groups engaged in discussions and games as far as the eye could see. At one distant point there was a door by a kind of desk with a register, and periodically somebody would come through it and call out a name. Somebody—I assume the person who was being called, would go over to the desk, sign something, and disappear through the door.

I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, since I wasn’t waiting for an appointment or anything I knew of. Everything seemed bright and peaceful and kind of mellow. And then a young woman came through and called my name. I thought it had to be a mistake, but she was looking my way, so I went over cautiously, with an increasing sense of dread.

“Sign here,” she said, pointing to a space in the open book. My name was printed there, right by a blank line for me to sign. I hesitated for a long moment. “Oh, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” she assured me. “It’s nothing new to you. And it happens to everybody sooner or later.”

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s on the other side?”

“Nonexistence,” she said.

I bent down to sign—and woke up.

Suspect in Portland Killing Dead

In the news I see that the only suspect in the shooting death of Aaron Danielson was killed in the course of the investigation. Michael Reinoehl, who lived with a beautiful husky dog but otherwise had no obvious redeeming qualities, died while being arrested in Lacey Washington. The circumstances are otherwise murky.

The press is making a big deal out of Reinoehl’s opposition to systemic racism and to fascism, but here in the Pacific Northwest that’s like the flag, babies, motherhood, and apple pie. Not exactly a defining characteristic. I mean we may be racist as fuck up here—so my Black friend tells me anyway—but we’re all against it, just so long as we don’t have to make any personal sacrifices to end it. And nobody really likes fascism, not even the anti-anti-fascists.

There are still no details—just contradictory stories—about the events leading up to Danielson’s death, and with Reinoehl dead nothing much may ever come out. The guy had been involved in several scuffles in the area recently, once getting shot when he tried to wrest a gun away from another armed guy, and seemed to have a propensity for violence. He doesn’t sound like much of a loss, though I hope the husky is okay.

An Extraordinary Incident in Tallahassee

What should have been an ordinary incident in Tallahassee (Florida) went off the rails on 27 August thanks to the fuzzy thinking of Wallace and Beverly Fountain, an elderly couple with more guns than brains, seemingly. Beverly Fountain, apparently the owner of the Fountain Plaza strip mall, had allegedly received complaints from one of the businesses located there—a U-Haul drop-off facility—about people siphoning gas from the trucks parked there. For some reason not explained she decided that the thing to do was to hide out in the lot with her husband and fire off guns to scare people off. Apparently she hadn’t taken into account the possibility that people might show up there to return rented vehicles, because when somebody came to drop off a rented truck, she and her husband opened fire.

A police officer parked nearby happened to observe the fiasco. He noticed a U-Haul van pull into the lot followed by a GMC truck. “The driver then parked the GMC by the U-Haul and based on their interactions, I assumed both parties knew each other and the gentleman driving the GMC was picking up the driver of the U-Haul.” This is what any normal person would assume, but not the Fountains. They assumed that the two drivers were up to no good and started shooting. Hearing the shots the police officer drove back to the lot to see the GMC speeding off and the Fountains waving pistols about.

When the crazed couple declined to immediately lay down their arms the officer did not shoot them for some unstated reason, but called for backup. The Fountains eventually did drop their guns and lie down as ordered, and under questioning admitted that they had no reason to assume that the customers returning the rented vehicle were stealing gas, and that they had not observed any suspicious activities. The police found no evidence of gas siphoning, and they arrested the couple for aggravated assault. Beverly and Wallace Fountain both insisted that they did not fire at the U-Haul customers, but up in the air, but this is contradicted by the victims, who say they were fired at.

Well, the thing is, some people cannot be trusted with guns, second amendment rights or no. Based on this incident, the Fountains are clearly among them.