Æsthetics of Revolution

 In Mongolian, the word ‘nokier’ (no-key-er) refers to a prince sent away from their tribe to live as a dignitary in another tribe. This is where the word for that old-school, indestructible cell phone the ‘Nokia 2100’ came from. Nokia (fem. Nokier), the foreign princess. Generally, the utility of a nokier is manifold, maintain good relationships with neighboring tribes, prevent inbreeding, provide an outlet to the king for second or third-born sons and daughters, and because they are married into this iteration of aristocracy they contribute to maintaining that aristocracy in the following years. Often, the son-in-law would be called upon to fight on behalf of the khan and die in battle, playing into some kind of martyr narrative. From this I glean, that aristocracy and its systematic social maintenance is basically as old as society itself, as old as inbreeding, as old as the need to maintain good relations.  

The challenge for me here, is that I feel this so acutely. I feel sent away from my tribe to some unfamiliar place, sure they speak the same language and understand the culture to a point, but it is not a place of culture, it contains separate values unto itself. This is Denver, not Los Angeles. In spite of what the conservative voices in the back row think, it will never be Los Angeles. And I realize with increasing clarity, how, and why that is. And I think it is time to come clean, as I have not been completely honest with you; while I am a master horticulturalist, I am also something of a nokier. I was sent away from my tribe to here, I think, to figure out the shape of future maps.  

It did not look like that in person. They were disappointed in me. My tenants, my handlers, as if I were just quitting them. As if I were walking away from something I have built without reverence for its beauty or inertia. But deep inside I know that its beauty will proliferate without me. And I must flicker in and out, I live for the reprisal of empire, it is one of my favorite, favorite things. And my empire lives and breathes in these sweaty warehouses that ooze pulsating sound and I would be lying if I said I don’t live for it. Depending on how things are going this ‘ability’ is something of a dynamo. Once I can get it going it’s something of a power-wellspring. I can only imagine how sharpened a being could become, only to realize that I am very sensitive, for a human. It is this hyper-awareness that is so troubling and intoxicating in equal measure. As if incarnating the concept of “underground” is something I could ever resist in this life or any other.  

Truly, I had become complacent, complacent in a way that I had become aware of. As if treating people outside of my friends as if they were disposable. As if no matter what happened in the night I could always retreat to Boo, or Kore, or Spout, or Furby, or Déjà vu’s place. As if every now and again some windfall of drugs or music or both would just fall into our laps, and we would magically make it disappear into money. I had become comfortable with the ease for which things came to me. Like Jack Skellington wandering away from Halloweentown in search of something, anything new. I drove myself away from an empire of my own design, and for what? Something new.  

  

What attracted me to Denver at the time was this style of graceful dub-influenced, bass music. I fucking love bass music. The idea of this emergent genre struck me as utterly fascinating. My producer friends in LA are working out this Brazillian-bass, Californian-hood-rat-type-genre and it felt like everywhere in the world was developing their own culturally complex sound, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Miami, Chicago and so on, coming up with their own unique forms of electronic music. I liked where Denver was headed in this regard. In truth though, it was more of the æsthetics of this, most of the talent in this city is just passing through. Pretty much everything is. Denver’s design is that of an enormous airport terminal, you’re stuck here until you make your connection and for some reason, everything is overpriced.  

  

I guess, in that sense, I'm just fighting for my right to party. I wonder if things unfold as I imagine, if this will modify my understanding of ‘the party’. Even the counterculture shifts with the mainstream more and more these days. Like so much of everything, this too is hard to downregulate. Too much has been happening too quickly. It is becoming increasingly clear that it is time to brace for impact. I say this as this administration has made a concentration camp in Florida. These people are fascists, bro. You must see this. Bear witness to the crassness of it all. We must watch them with their shopping carts, up and down Washington Boulevard selling their wares for a little capital to buy drugs. All day, every day. It’s like a mechanical, drug-fueled, purgatory. But this is also something of a curse. I see it for what it is because of the creativity to do so. The imagination to behold the potential, and the debasement of its reality. In a sense, it feels as though there isn't anything else (or left) worth fighting for. I mean, the quality of life draped across the work to maintain it, is unobtainable. I don’t want to clean up after losers all day every day for the rest of my life so that I will never be able to afford a family, or a quality of life that I will ever get to experience that resembles peace. I do not have the inner silence to look beyond the profoundness of my existence to make so little of it. (I could be elbows deep in dancefloor pussy tonight.)  I think this is where our paths diverge most acutely. With the city willing to kick so many people to the curb to hide their mistakes is utterly bananas. But they’ve certainly shown their hand. And if they were to give you the boot it would be one of the most disrespectful things I can imagine at that level of ‘professionalism.’ Gave your whole life to them, and they could cut you down like a weed to save face that they fucked up so insanely. In this instance, I don’t have a family that relies on me, as if by design, I have nothing to lose, because I have nothing. I can lose myself on Saturday night in a warehouse. Some people my age have homes, stock options, zillions in bitcoin: I... I can move my hands in interesting ways.  

  

So then what? Nothing to be gained because nothing is to be ventured. Let’s cut to the chase: —what is to become of Denver in all of this? What are the tolerances? What are the parameters? What does any of this even look like? And perhaps most importantly, will any of it matter?  

We must ask ourselves, is this place worth saving? It is a hub, but for who? The intersection of conservative and liberal mindsets? The Democrats and the Republicans? Who is this for? The governor and all his various ties to the housing and real-estate markets? And for what?— an overpriced box that takes 3/4 of our income? This is not the dream of the founding fathers. This is a bastardization of what it means to be an American. And we’re all sick of it. We’re all fed up with the never-endingness of it. Never enough money, never enough work, never enough calories in a body, never enough hours in the day. We weren’t meant to live like this. Dying in-and-of carbon-dependent infrastructure while we profess their freedoms. God, what a time to be alive. Not for too much longer though, not with all this carbon-dependent infrastructure that has high-centered our society.   

But what can we do now? This child-rapist is the president, the country of Palestine has been wiped off the map, its people killed as rats in a burning building, a supreme court so corrupt and belligerent that it makes me want to fucking puke. Meanwhile, a war rages on the other side of the planet, where one side of the western world has a blank check to fight forever and the other with the economy of Texas, has fed 1 million men into a wood-chipper made of enemy drones and domestic kleptocracy. Perhaps China invades Taiwan to extend some exacerbated chip-war foreign-relations-trade fiasco that has gotten out of hand and the never-ending domestic atrocity train has no brakes.  

So, when will we recognize it? When will we realize that “Alligator Alcatraz” was in fact always intended to be Alligator Auschwitz all along. When will our failure to act be too belligerent to be ignored? When they start calling ICE the Schutzstaffel (the SS) because ‘Protection squadron’ in German seems to suit the president’s fancy randomly. Justified, of course, by some nonsensical reason. And I guess it falls into a kind of television generation; people so accustomed to turning their brains off and doing as they are told that unless the villain explicitly says the extent of their plan is “for evil reasons” our society cannot seem to muster the necessary nuance to understand that the fascism has already arrived.  

Now let’s refract this through the prism of our minds: we must, as a society, adjust our conception of money. As it sits, it has run away from any semblance of reality such that it is in the way of our society. I don’t think we have the time for philosophical musings between society and currency and their varying levels of interrelatedness, but said plainly, we are off the deep end. Money as a concept, is off the deep end. As if something is taking place that dissolves the meaning of it. There was this time when things were interrelated with money, but they are not here anymore. They’re selling us shit and telling us its gold and its concreteness is lost in the process. What does 100$ mean when it has the buying power of 20$? 5$? Isn’t money just a lie we all bought into. Is it like god? How is cryptocurrency different than the dollar at this point? To that end, what value are they based on at all? The ability to buy drugs and guns? We certainly can’t buy anything else!  

But this is where it comes to a head: our monetary system has become this runaway behemoth that cannot be stopped. It can’t even be touched, literally if it were a kaiju it would be at least physically easier to stop. But this intangible system has unraveled our everything and now we’re just broken robots pushing forward without meaning to our purpose. Meanwhile, money has too much import. It’s become everything. Like some kind of Akria-ass Lovecraftian horror, it has subsumed everything in its volatile path.   

   

Let’s explore this: Healthcare. It’s fucked— a guy with a worm in his brain from eating roadkill is the director of health and human services. We pay more to the institutions that withhold healthcare from us than we do for the actual care. And we’re out here using GoFundMe to try and save our friends and loved one’s lives. Crowdsourcing our existence like a bunch of pathetic cunts. Because, money. This is the same timeline where a healthcare executive was assassinated outside of a conference and the bullet casings we labeled, “delay,” “deny” and “depose.” Famously the three tactics that healthcare employees use to get out of having to do their jobs in the most profitable way. This is the same timeline where my friend Rick died from cancer because he was a successful artist and not a mediocre lawyer. He was a great guy that did memorial paintings and had a beautiful soul. With the capacity of our medical science, he could have been saved. But it doesn’t matter when we are bred to accept this style of extortion; and the only people that can afford this kind of treatment are the people that profit from this kind of system. And that is plain. At its end, imperfect and beautiful as his soul was nobody was there to paint Rick Rodriguez’s memorial.   

“Nowhere in the world pays more, to get less.” It’s not overutilization, it’s not some external prevalence to illness, it’s not some esoteric, unfathomable outlier; its greed. The pharmaceutical industry is the most well-funded lobby in history. Literally, measured in the dozens of billions of dollars. And that’s the point, isn't it? We have transmuted our health into their money, in the *fucking* single worst alchemic transmutation ever conceived. But eventually when I get cancer from living in Globeville I can rest assured, after a lifetime of paying for top-dollar healthcare, for the entirety of my career, they will surely do everything in their power, to deny my claim.   

It’s crazy that we have the technology to program DNA using CRISPR genes in the same timeline that we have people unable to afford insulin. And the problem in this, is the money. Insulin is not rare. It’s tedious to produce, but it’s not particularly hard at the industrial scale for which it is done. Because of its interrelatedness to government, there’s a million-and-three examples of this up and down the industry. And ‘we the people’ get none of it; not the tax breaks, not the price breaks, not even a good-faith case to be made for our very existence. And therein lies the point; we’re dying out here because we are not financially mobile enough to pay for the treatments necessary to sustain. The systems that claim equity, are in fact, using bureaucracy to run out the clock on our lives. It’s happening every day. Every American knows somebody that was killed by the system. Think about it for two seconds, someone will surely come to mind. Money may have helped the situation, but money did that. Like a health-dependent caste system we have become entrapped into. Our ‘mobility’ has become our chains.   

This could not be truer when referring to our labor and our relationship to our labor. Like you, I am bound to this job. Job hugging. Not even in the manner that anyone might think. It’s not worth it, but we have no choice. As if ‘the seizure of the means of production’ would even help at this point. Our money doesn’t mean anything beyond the hourly rate for which we sell our bodies. And therein lies the problem: fundamentally, money is based on self-importance. The tech-bro motherfuckers believe that an hour of their life is worth more than your paycheck, their day: your month, their month: your life—  

While that is in a sense, strictly speaking your financial lifespan worth of money, but we all know your lifetime earning doesn’t mean shit to these entities. Because you don’t either. Because nothing does. Not the death of nature, not the death of children, not the death of culture, but the survival of money: the survival of a number on a screen. The survival of a piece of paper that denotes conceptual value. Because there is no amount of chickens that can be traded for the removal of a brain tumor. There is no amount of money that is ever enough for anybody. Least of which these oligarchs of affluence that seem to have shanghaied our society, government, and future.  

So what does this have to do with our relationship to our labor?  

It’s meaningless.   

In a society where one person makes as much as an entire city in the same day. And that person is thumbing the scale, and that person is involved in government, regulations, civic processes, and that person is financing everything from both sides. We are but ants to them; nuisance to be wiped from the counter in revulsion. As if the systematic eradication of the Palestinian people looks like anything other than the jihad of cockroaches in one’s kitchen. How dispassionately violent it all is, and still just the eradication of infestation with militant, procedural impunity.  

 Of the same DNA as feeding your son-in-law to impossible odds on some foreign battlefield so that your daughter can rule as regent in (what is now) her village. Purely, Nokia diplomacy. And why? It doesn’t make any sense to me beyond its militant strategy. In the way that any individual ant must look at a human, beyond comprehension. And I suppose that is the point, isn’t it? We inhabit time in such a way that systems of finance beyond our comprehension rule everything around us with a severity of life and death and we are powerless to change or influence them because of their prepositioned self-important, self-substantiating nature that allows them to dissolve the only power into financial power and the only ones that get to have power are those that possess finance. And, like God, its power is imaginary.   

 

There is no amount of chickens that can be traded for brain surgery. But, there is a finite amount that they will pay per severed finger. Per grandson. How many museums launder a reputation? How many observatories wash the blood away from killing your wife and her lover in a motel room? The fact that we live in times like these and have for decades tells a revealing story to the lack of our values. Times like these have existed long before me, to that end we must recognize a simple truth: there is no morality. What is revolution in the face of this persistent violent peace? It is the lens of time that shapes how we perceive the present. These legacies of power and money that shape and have shaped everything. Devoid of grace or beauty, we have surrendered our humanity to these machinations. And for what? Line go up. Rich man rich. The deeply emotional experience of authoritarianism?   

Because if there is something we clearly don’t give a shit about here in America, is humanity and human rights. When conjoined with a critical level of class inequality, and a critical trend to autocracy we have a real problem; becoming enslaved. Systematically, the process of downgrading money and increasing the divide between our labor and our earning power, and trending into fascism, would imply that our society is trending toward human servitude. Slavery, the most valuable commodity ever conceived.  Which is curious, more than diamonds or gold, stock or options, human labor on the cheap is the most valuable thing throughout history. Not just our work, but our bodies, as if, beyond our hands, our genitals and minds are also subject to external possession. As if our tangible flesh is subject to the concept of value. This is a reality that I know well: and it makes me want to fucking puke. Because the truth is we use human bodies to mine diamonds, human bodies to produce the hydrocarbons, human bodies to fuck the unfuckable; and all of it is made possible through the bastardtisation of money.   

It’s not only the injustice. Is the derogatory bullshit of it. I don't even want to get into it because this kind of ‘derogatory’ is its own kind of gross. It cuts with a dirty blade, and it wounds on all fronts. The truth is clean though; we are tired of hurting. I am so tired of hurting that I would rather die than be a part of this shitshow. Make no mistake I’m not suicidal, that’s lazy, and I exist out of spite. But rather, to be destroyed in the process of something greater—  

The idea that somebody, in some far-off future will experience the violet skies of the desert, that they will know the Sierra Nevada as I have, the mountains will beckon them like a thick alseid on a sunny morning. And I would desperately like to retreat to these places, but the fight has come to us. It threatens the very biosphere. It threatens my home. It threatens us existentially. And while these companies (and they are all companies) have locations and addresses, nothing seems to pause the headlong dive into our own oblivion. The Mojave will exist with or without us. It doesn't know its name. Even if every inch of it becomes solar fields— eventually, it will be the desert again. But, I, selfishly, don't want to live in a polluted hellscape where all new ideas and systems and opportunities for existential advancement are smothered in the cradle because institutional hegemony has deemed it so.  

 

He said: while working for the city.   

 

Because realistically, it’s all rotten to the core.  And I wonder if this is a problem solved by bullets. I wonder if it is a problem solved through greater violence. I envision the fabric wrappings of AR-styled rifles covered in hardware, flapping slowly in a ferocious wind as cartridges tumble into the air with processed randomness, framed in drone explosions and burning vehicles, as the swell of the symphony playing the national anthem crescendos.    

Or, is it a problem solved by words?  

Are these doing anything? We’re living in what they call the “post-truth era” where everything is lies, to the point that people can believe whatever they want. Where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.  

 At time of writing the man is destroying part of the white house as another of his ridiculous distractions from the release of the Epstein files, which really is just a red herring to say that he rapes kids. As if we are living in this matryoshka doll of lies and politics to the point where we have no functional government. And what are we going to do about it other than suck and die? As the speaker withholds the confirmation of an already elected states woman who will be the deciding vote for the release of the Epstein files. Meanwhile, many of the victims are currently alive and have been releasing this information for years... And...  

This is what we’re doing instead of working towards a more perfect union. But we’re facing an interesting reality; with enough money, can fascism pantomime its way into a perfect future?   

Can fascism accomplish anything other than optics?          

  

Dog —  

                  These people do not understand violence. Literally, subset rule –1 in the international violence handbook: do not be showing your hand like this. They’re out here grabbing daycare ladies and roofers, like we couldn't figure out where their families live. That’s the thing: war is war. And these people seem to want the *optics* of war, but I assure you, they don’t want no smoke. And truly, I don’t want to have to deliver that smoke. Because all is fair in love and war; with the necessary imagination, both can grant absolution.  

But the truth is: all this ticky-tacky gestapo bullshit is going to go on until there is nowhere to go but down. And then it starts to look a whole lot more like our mind’s eye of a revolution... and I am curious if it truly will. Like, what is the point of all of this? Shipping some Honduran gardener to a black site in Africa, for what? To make one random guy’s life hell? Some protestors that can afford a lawyer? It’s just this perpetual shark-bump before the bite, and sometimes it peels off, and sometimes he follows through in the most corrupt way imaginable, and sometimes the Democrats show their feckless hand and cave to the fascists like a bunch of treasonous cowards. As if we’re treading water before some cataract like our little sleeve floaties have had any impact on the rapids beforehand, this too, is just words.   

 

Though, words are what precede all things in human experience. It appears, given our time and place, we must awaken some of their meanings. Because while this is just words. I mean this with full measure; the weapon of this revolution is language.  

I think of the word ‘patriot’ mired in the mediocrity of a sports team as though we have appropriated ourselves. The patriots of this moment will not be in suit and tie, they will not be clad-up in modern combat gear, standing on the capitol steps with some nazi-coded flag like they are handing fascism out like lemonade. The patriots we need now will be people with the time and willingness to put that time into language. To act on that language, not just squirrel it around in autocracy, generating lots of pages but no meaning, utterly incumbent on the money that separates so completely that they become external to the people they once were from. A patriot will become someone with time to spend in the face of how desperately money subsumes their lives. It was easy for Sam Adams to get 100 guys to his barn for rifle training, but we collectively keep grinding away at that fryer with a drive through because housing represents 65% of our earning power and we’re too ‘busy’ to act up and put that (excellent use of our time) in jeopardy.  

Contrastingly, an uncommon expression that should be understood: ‘quisling’. Scandinavian for a bureaucratic traitor. Named for Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian nazi collaborator who created a puppet government to export Jews and comply to any and all nazi requests. Moral of the story; he was a traitor in a suit. He met his end by firing squad. These current motherfuckers will too. Does Stephen Miller think that his handling of ICE will let him off the hook in 5 years. The only justice for a traitor is death. Not isolation, as was the case for Karl Dönitz, who until 1980 spent his entire post-war life writing memoirs that glazed his inculpability in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Just because they wore a tie does not mean that they will be taken lightly. We must understand treachery in these terms. Not a debate, but a reality, and the understanding that the reality of this fallout has destroyed the caliber of this country for generations. And the brutal reality of it is that people (such as yourself) stood idly by while these rapist conmen subsumed in money have ravaged this country and butchered it for every fictional dime it was worth and we are left with the pieces while the quislings of America get to live out their days in the self-serving comfort that they have made. I assure you; they will not. We will butcher them in an equal and opposite way for which they have butchered this nation.    

Thus, we need to understand what revolutionary times will look like. And as cool as it sounds; 4th generation warfare is a battle of ideals. Not territory, not gunfire, not   

bombs— concepts. People that represent those concepts. Surely there will be here-or-there political killings, and in a sense (unfocused as it is) all these school shootings kind of are that. But the rampant gun related violence that we have apparently, nationally normalized is literally killing as many people as a warzone. But then again cars kill fifty-thousand people a year and nobody seems to give a shit about that either. So basically, nothing will change because nothing can change, and we’re just stuck here hoping that our kids don’t get gunned down at school, or (somehow more dangerously) we don’t get run over dropping them off.  

So what is a ‘revolutionary’ in all this? Tri-corner hat and all, what does it look like? And in truth its already happening, all these spaces on the internet, the airwaves, the podcasters the influencers, the propaganda, the continual molding of the narrative— and maybe because I'm a bit more sensitive to it, I notice it more? But, like, it’s staring right at you: these plain-as-day bad faith arguments. Generative AI, inflation, racism, tech-bro stock bullshit, church, lobbying, and the greatest offender of it all: money.  

This revolution will need to bring about the end of money as we understand it in a way that has a lasting impact on the quality of life for literally billions of people. We HAVE the technology; it's just not evenly distributed. That unto itself is ridiculous. This is also the same timeline that measles is on the rise because of belligerent stupidity, so it’s hard to gauge what kind of future these people really want. Almost like they want a pat on the head for eating paste. It makes no fucking sense. But then, money. If you think about the hold that money has on our culture, society, quality of life, everything, there is a fundamental flaw to our way of life. There is too much importance on this one, intangible thing. The same could be said for god; as we mourn another active shooter at a Hannukah celebration yesterday— like, what god? What wealth? What money? And in larger context, what authority?  

Because these are imaginary things, they do not have power over me. I’m quite aware that they do not have power over the masses either. While they are still in the process of waking from the American dream, they are awakening to the reality that this nonsense cannot continue. The literal planet cannot continue in this way. And while it would be easier to kill them, they must be converted, they must come to understand that we must be the shepherds of this earth and not its rapists. Knowing that no imaginary alternate reality is going to take place without action is the first step. Praying that things change in lieu of acting is the equivalent of saying words to no one. It is a selfish attempt to personally absolve responsibility to injustice. Jim doesn’t need you to pray for him; his wife needs help getting groceries while Jim is in recovery. And that takes work. We don't need to pray for Jim; we need to have a medical system that guarantees his speedy recovery and backs his family while he is in recovery, from any medical need so normalized that it presents no financial burden whatsoever on him and his kin. And, we are all his kin. He is a member of our society, ‘he’ and 'us’ are one and the same. As if the homogeneity of our kindred society has become subsumed in obsession with the concept of pronouns and not their utility. It’s so ignorant and pathetic that my mind lenses around its meaning to understand it as if this (right here) is why we can’t have nice things. The emotional  

lazines— the hegemonic emotional laziness of our culture and our time has brought us this reality, and it’s pathetic. In the future when people ask why this was necessary, we should say, in a nutshell, emotional laziness. They sat in front of their televisions (absorbing advertisements) for so long that they forgot how to be a culture. And in doing so they became advertisement cattle, pushed from one feed lot to the next, consuming whatever was put before them, uncritically. There is no end game either; they don’t get slaughtered as we do with actual cattle; the goal is to keep the cretins cloning and feeding. They are the self-replicating batteries to the machine. In that sense, I too; was born as one of these lower-class batteries. Insert thought-terminating cliché.  

The reality is that this will require a revolution to enact, and revolutions (in spite of what you may think) are a process. Not a bunch of gunfire, not a guillotine in the streets, not anything super exciting and violent. It’ll be a bunch of words and then policy, and then, in  its millions of steps, the construction of the future. But it does feel strange, like there is no finish line. When the money is meaningless, the game is uninteresting, the risks are not enjoyable, just the grind of a familiar monotony until we come to accept the fate that was set out for us. And that's not liberty. That’s not a fate I'm willing to accept. It’s not a future worth living in. So then, what is this process?  

  

I *envision* a process of words and refinement. Philosopher kings that create a better society for everyone involved in a unilateral and meaningful, value-based caliber of life dictated by the content of a man’s character: but ICE has already started killing people in Minneapolis. Gunning down people in Portland. A behind-the-scenes dissapearing of some random person, but they weren’t random. They were people. People in our neighborhoods have already gone missing, and we can’t mourn for them because we have to get to work. I envisioned something more than this, and instead the cold reality of sycophantic dog-whistle politics has proven that there is no ‘philosopher-kings’ solution; just violence. Just the shitty, primal familiarity of violence.  

I would like to go over that but I cannot know what violence the future brings. Only the predictable inevitability of violence to come. As our government traded our pathetic excuse for healthcare so that ICE could harass, and dominate, and brutalize us in the streets. People like your boss, Mike Keyser enabled it. Chanted its slogans at me. Embodied its values, whatever those might have been. And now I must embody something else. Something in contrast to the violence. Something in opposition to the beliefs that Mike has held, clutched to his chest, like a lie that he cannot be separated from, because he; and in equal but different measure, you, have become not even “accustomed to” but rather, dependent upon. It is simple enough to understand though: they put a box in front of these people that projects nonsense into their faces at all times. They grew up on it. And now it's a teat that they cannot be weaned of. And it tells them to sit on their ass and absorb whatever the box says, it tells them they are 'good' and 'right' and that they never need to be critical of what is projected at them. And so they never develop; just trumpeting lies as useful idiots. And all the while they are going to debate if that woman deserved a summary execution. Argue if native Americans have the right papers to be here. Disappearing people left, right, and center and the useful idiots will tout that it was deserved for some reason. Rambling off their lies like virtue. But to who? When everyone who was genuine has been destroyed and everyone left is a liar, you can trust nothing. There is no genuine compliment, no earnest request, no good-natured humor, just the treasonous betrayal of every interaction framed in ulterior motives.  

There is no endgame to what they are doing. They cannot win. The aggressor and the victim cannot be one in the same, and it has become abundantly clear that they are turning us into the victims of their cruelty; we cannot afford to stand by while they seek to enslave and ruin us and our way of life. It is about control and domination and nothing else. Like a plot so threadbare that there can be no happy ending, just the reprisal of violence until we are no longer the prey.  

  

At time of writing Renee Good and Andrew Pretti have been summarily executed on the streets of Minneapolis by ICE agents who remain utterly unaccounted for. The administration is just lying about everything, openly, obviously. Recently released Epstein documents implicate Trump and dozens of powerful individuals in a child sex trafficking ring that transcends decades and countries. Trump is in Georgia looking for election fraud for 2020. He shit his pants in a press conference at the oval office the other day. An Epstein victim has come forward claiming that they caused the trauma to trump’s posterior in a depraved act of sexual gratification. What a time to be alive.  

 

Meanwhile, I meditate on what it would look like. What does the end of Trump look like? Where will Maga go? What happens to these guards at detention centers that have been raping people? Will our economy ever be the same, or recover at all? All valid questions. Again, what a time to be alive. And it feels strange, in the way that the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro is in every sense interrelated to the oil infrastructure in Swansea. This is the world the children made. The incessant simulacra of a violent wilderness. A polluted criminal enterprise where empire is expressed over land and sea, domestic and abroad, and all the while the craven incarnation of self-fulfilling and self-serving.   

There is truly no going back, like a storm that has subsumed us into its chaos, pulling us into itself the maelstrom of circumstance; we must rise to meet our fate. To whatever context that means. 

Imperfect Hierarchies

Sitting here having to put in a fucking password to open my own (licensed) copy of Microsoft Word.  I can’t fucking imagine a world where I would need to put in a password in order to put pen to paper.  The future is a fucking, nightmarish, hellscape.  

How then, to explain that their (Berkley’s) performance today could be described a degrading. And this could be used to describe many aspects of this organization. Degrading. De-grade. 

To lower in status. And it’s this hierarchy. This hierarchy of grades, this bastardization of status and culture that holds Denver back. I think this alone is the greatest hole in this city.  It is saddled in this undeserved hierarchical belief system (that doesn't serve it in any way) that is just degrading to experience. And it’s like one of those B-movie horror narratives where you can only cure the curse by sharing it. So, in this sense the only way to escape the degradation is to pass it on. And it gives me pause. Am i afraid of this reality?   

Am I afraid of my work?                                          (the work?) 

But I (in a sense) I love the fight; and in a sense the approach that I have to things is a way of relieving that warlord aspect of myself.  

I believe (in a sense) that to live in bad faith* is to bastardize our character, and every trespass asks the question if I will let it erode me with its banality.  

 

No, I don’t want to go these dumb motherfucking Hort meetings where, they have icebreakers because their turnover is so insanely high 50% of the department can be new from one season to the next. Where it’s both an attempt to recruit talent AND “shut-the-fuck-up and do as we tell you.” Its degrading as fuck. Truth be told, the presence of character that is on display: its fucking weird.  

And I guess this is where these worlds intersect. At Hort meetings. Hort meetings that I, a literal master horticulturalist, find degrading to attend. Every time I go there is something, some nugget of insult that I cannot get past. Be it the urban forester that gives a literal 10 min segment about how she has no idea what her job is. As if to rub the salty nepotism in our stupid little faces. I fucking applied for that job! Why does this person have it? Why does she get an opportunity to speak? Why does she get an opportunity to speak— about nothing! (What the fuck am I doing here? These people are fucking idiots.) Literally; “Here’s the birds I watched.” “Here’s the uncountable reels I post about gardening 200 square feet.” “Guys, Plants need water.” and who can forget the classics: “Shut-the-fuck-up and sit down you’re not getting any more money.” have all been memorable keynote speeches.  

The most priceless of these moments being the special accountant adjustment guy they rolled out to bullshit a study that was internally conducted (after exhaustive months) that found horts were being paid equitably, so (conveniently) there was no need to get a pay adjustment. What an incredible fucking dick-wag in the face. Then this mayor lost some unbelievable number of millions of dollars magically to the Venezuelan immigrants. What an absolute cum-on-your-face no-money-on-the-dresser, insult. Fucking de-grade-ing. Like were just the guest of honor at the bukkake. At least there’s free bagels.    

But if we raise a wrist, it’s a torrent of emails from people that believe that hierarchy can be obtained from a chair, clutching their pearls if I even make a sound at the symposium. If we raise a wrist its discipline through social isolation. And I have come to know this discipline through segregation well. As if through the separation of hierarchy, the powers that be will make their authority more pronounced. As if power worked like that at all —They’ll never have it. And they don't deserve to.  

I learned this a long time ago, and it is something kind of cool about myself, I only have power by never holding it. I hate to exert, or pull rank, or flex on anyone. Sure it feels good to knock a dude to the floor, but only you feel that way, and the rest of your peers are mortified. Like watching Scott Gillmore talk over someone. Its cringey degrading, but they don’t realize it. Often in this example, I imagine, they’re kind of into it. Our mutual tolerance of this behavior creates a kind of permission.    

I think for everybody, there is this psychosocial aspect that must remain known but beneath the surface and I am no exception; to actualize this is that stark moment when the record skips and everyone sees you for what you are. I may also be more sensitive to this, in such a way that I believe that the true nature of the universe is somewhere between ‘poetically apparent’ and ‘belligerently obvious.’ Alas, I digress. 

We were talking about the degrading nature of weaponized incompetence: 

also called strategic incompetence, is when someone knowingly or unknowingly demonstrates an inability to perform or master certain tasks, thereby leading others to take on more work. This generally occurs in two domains—in the household, between partners, and at work, between colleagues. And therein lies our experience with the Berkley horts that is the catalyst of all of this.   

The devil of this is that my mind refuses to tolerate control dramas such as this. A control drama is the concept that we steal energy from one another through archetypes that are formulated through our previous experiences. And in this sense, after the life that I’ve had, they seem utterly transparent. Kind of like a character that somebody is playing in lieu of being their authentic self. * And this is essentially living in “bad faith.” Living inauthentically to oneself.  

Which is to say, when these people are being actively lazy they aren’t lying to me; they’re lying to themselves. And if you can’t be true to yourself, why should I, or anyone else have any respect for you? I mean, be polite, but if you’re lying to yourself you already can’t be trusted. 

 

But that’s just some ghetto shit, some San Bernadino-ass wisdom.  

 

I’ve always been relatively smart. I definitely lost some IQ points along the way to some fights, those hot desert nights where nobody is sleeping and the meth grips the landscape like some kind of weather pattern. Serious San Bernadino-ass shit, where everyone present is made equal. In exactly the same way that Denver resists gentrification. In the way that honesty cannot repair our damaged edges, only glorify our scars. To this end I think about my high school valedictorian: got a full ride to Stanford, then had to dropout sophomore year because he got someone pregnant. All the brains in the world and not a lick of sense. I remember their family photos, professionally taken in a studio, looked adorable as I unfriended Nolan Wu on face book. Let’s be real, I’m never gonna see that motherfucker ever again. And I’ve known this cat since kindergarten.  

I am caught up in the propensity of it. I have a certain personality that cares little for anything beyond the result. This, I think, makes me a good horticulturalist. And beyond that, it’s all really the same note. I believe it outlasts other positions, I believe it proliferates through them, like some unstoppable liana, that subsumes everything. 

This sounds good, but it's a bit more compulsive than I'd like to admit. I seek knowledge in a way that aims to become it. To be deeply knowledgeable on all things that interest me and I have so many interests that I don’t think one lifetime is enough to grapple with them all, consequentially I draw an odd solace in understanding how the sausage gets made. I like to see the finished product; in my mind’s eye it is the most important part.  

And it is these two interlocking parts, the will to see how things work and the realized efficacy of production that are something of a dynamo to my identity. I am obsessed: with the perfect garden design, how to fix the planet, the most sublime experience. My mind is unrelenting, as if learning by doing is the only way to know anything truly. And I have become practiced over these years, and still, everything remains painfully imperfect, as if there is always a greater technique or some more articulated expression. It is, a kind of beautiful madness. But I know of nothing else, so it is normal to me, and we have already gone over the importance of being true to ourselves. So, the time has come to get down to the brass tax— 

 

 

Just like the Daoist parable of the 12 blind men and the elephant, depending on what part we examine there will always be a vastly different interpretation of what the essence of a thing is. Any fraction can be its own entity but I mean to make it quite clear, the “elephant” in question is way more complex than even a real elephant.  

The way I see it the Northside is broken upon several fault lines, they are at times lines on maps, though they don’t necessarily have to be, they are numbers in bank accounts. Go-like territorial accumulations, something of a land grab to a unique ecosystem of people, corporations, and institutions. All of which hold and divide it in unique ways. But this is the essence of the Northside, this is the reality of what we’re looking at.  

The players are : 

the trains 

the refineries 

the housing magnates (investors of domiciles, real estate capitalists, and the institutions based on these ‘industries’) 

the regulated and unregulated auto operations (from reputable diesel mechanics with storefronts to tweaker-fueled chop shops, from car dealerships to car-jacking rings) 

the recycling institutions  

the city  

the homeless 

 

Small business in this context is non-existent. The migrants are just pollen floating on the surface of this cesspool. There are other aspects of this that I don’t understand quite as well but their influence should be noted. Like the airport, or the judicial system, or the military industrial complex. That may have far-reaching effects on these things but that’s beyond the scope of this now. Let’s get to the pieces.     

 

The Trains: In short, the trains are the root of this whole problem. They are the trunk for which this city seems to be built on. They are the bullet from which the sepsis spreads. They are an institution that seems so immovable that this famous Slavoj Žižek quote comes to mind: “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”  

The trains are where this starts and where it ends and the sooner the city can realize that the better off they’ll be.  

This city is built on trains, in its formation I imagine Denver was little more than an outpost for them to get soigné before crossing the Rockies. To this day I wouldn't be surprised if that is how the train companies still view this city. Literally, if you were to get an honest response from BNSF we are a gas station to them. Or that’s just how they treat this city and its people. One could not (in good faith) assume that the way that they treat the land and the air has any concept of reverence. They don’t give a shit. They treat the environment as a thing to be used and as such deserve neither the permit of use nor the presence within it. And I mean this as someone that has lived in a ‘weather pollution alert’ zone for the entirety of the year.  

 

And don’t get me wrong I get it: like, the trains make this city possible. The trains are the reason this city probably exists in the extent that it does, in the manner that it does, and even (in the case of that fuckhole train track design of 39th & greenway) with the aesthetic that it does. [we will come back to this.]  

 

But the truth is saddled on a knife: we will have no kind of quality of life as long as these industrial complexes continually hold the city in the manner that they do.  We can force them into our parks in some play at normalizing their aesthetics. But they are the immovable object for which this city has been built upon. And that presents us with a conundrum that I ruminate on tirelessly. Is there a Denver without trains? Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?  

 

The trains make the powerplants possible and this is where Swansea makes its entrance.  

The powerplants: Nearly as influential as the trains, the powerplants hold this city by the nuts. What are we going to do? Bite the hand that feeds us? In winter? We'd be fucked. But the truth is: they have some sort of sweetheart deal with the trains, shipping coal daily to fuel the city at the expense of the planet. And I’m sure there’s some regulations in place or whatever. But we have been living under a pollution dome for years and it’s starting to feel like an episode of The (fucking) Oblongs.  

All the while, the dog-food smell permeates everything at Dunham Park and intermingles with the various petroleum-based smells as one rides down the freeway. As if to implore the casual visitor: welcome to the northside, see the sights, smell, the smells. (And they are all some variation of the glamourous concept: l'odeur de Carcinogen.)  

Put plainly, the pollution that the industrial institutions create (in spite of the lip service laws and regulations) is fucking killing us. And I’m deeply concerned that this is just like the “cost of doing business.” We just sacrifice like a fifth of the city to die of airborne particulate matter in the industry fields to the north so that the rest can live in inflated housing market. It’s the makings of a dystopian cyberpunk novel. But I definitely don’t want to die like this. As if the convenience of ‘business as usual’ can operate without regard for the people of the city. Which is to say, the living, breathing part of the city. And we have to understand that these enterprises are not parts of the city but rather the framework for which it is situated upon. To remove them from the city would be like surgically extracting our own backbone. And I don’t think it can truly be done. I don’t think that the immediate need will ever outweigh the long-term damage. And by the time it does it won’t matter; which is telling, in a way. (...the way that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.)  

I cannot stress enough how objectively ridiculous it is to wake up every-single-day to an “air quality alert” on my phone and computer. We know that this shit is killing us and literally just do nothing. Why doesn’t the city act? Why is there no government or local action? These companies are fucking poisoning the air, daily, every damn day, and we do nothing! It makes me feel like we are all rats on a sinking ship. As if we are all dogs, in god’s hot car. Because the writing is on the wall. We cannot continue to sustain ourselves in this manner, the climate of planet is changing because of the actions of industrial complex's behavior. We see on full display every day: the profits of the few at the expense of the many. We are that prestigious many. So fortunate are we, to be slaughtered on the altar of capitalism. But you must see it, these institutions are the agents of pollution; they contaminate everything. Even the literal silence they manage to cut into. As if they are gigantic mechanical worms that devour and colonize everything. They take the earth as if cheating at a game of Go. They pollute the air in factories where I can only imagine reviling things take place. And perhaps that’s a commentary too— maybe we should just stop living like this. As horses and leftover livestock get processed into kibble on the side of town where the, poors live. It’s so fucking degrading.  

 

And, the thing about the truth is; it’s the truth. And the truth is, I fucking hate shit that isn’t about it. Anyone can complain, we can just bitch about the state of things until we’re blue in the face but it solves nothing. Words are just words. And I think that we need to envision a future that we would like to live in and not just complain. And my short-term solution is this: move them. Move them the fuck out of the city, the whole-ass operation. The concrete plant, the fucking dog food factory, every-single-drop of infrastructure. They can have a little wally-world operation somewhere way up in Adam’s county away from human contact. If one wants to construct a nightmarish industrial hellscape with money and infrastructure, they can do it the fuck out of my way. Instead of leaving us all these divisions just looming all over the god-damned city with weird bridges, and rail shit that's constantly blocking everything. Like we’re just an entangled municipality caught in this industrial silkworm’s web, bound every-which-way but loose. 

No matter what, it will cost a fucking ton of money. Just in general, take no action, ton of money. Make a difference for the better; ton of money. We'd be paying some form of blood money to whatever northern county we’d be relocating all this kipple to. We'd need to pay to construct said facilities, pay to remove or modify their former infrastructure, in all likelihood we’d end up paying them to remove their own shit. But is the arduousness of the task greater than sacrificing our people’s health forever? Not forever, just until they die. Which is to say that every case of respiratory cancer in Swansea, every unenforced traffic fatality in Elyria, every tweaker scratching up recycled metal in Globeville is a win for this machine. We’re feeding it: and what we’re feeding it is the intangible parts of ourselves. Until we all erode into shells of humanity.    

 

Bringing us to, The Homeless: The interrelated reality of trains and homeless are like fleas on a stray cat. Or the rats that inhabit the mechanized fallout of industrial desecration. It’s the slag of capitalism. Like a fungi that prefers to exist under and within these cheap bridges that never have enough lighting. It’s for a reason. They are here because something enables them to be here. To cling to an existence where they would rather have drugs than stable housing or regular meals. The reality of this is hard to comprehend in words. It must be experienced to truly understand its magnitude. It is there behind the McDonalds on Washington. It is there in splintered plastic at the bottom of a slide surrounded by alcohol bottles, as if fragments of human soul, scattered all over the playground. And the destitution of these various enabled theaters begs serious questions. Namely, what cash-related resource is available to be exchanged for drugs in this area? Alternatively, how exactly does the city fit-into/enable this? And finally, (what the fucking fuck!?) why can’t we just give them what they want? I’ve often held the belief that ‘the universe wants to do itself.’ And the viability of the path that we are currently on seems to persist but it does not flow in the way that it needs to flow to function into the future.  

The homeless are like, whatever the opposite of grease to a machine is. They are in the fucking way, their behavior is in the fucking way, they break and steal, and abuse drugs and the song and dance. But the truth is simple; homelessness causes trauma, and trauma causes homelessness. They are the manifestation of our failings as a society. Failure to protect those in need, failure to properly administer medical attention, failure to address a myriad of things that could have been addressed at some previous other place and time. If a dog weighed a ton: it’d be a big dog.  

 

And the why is belligerently simple: housing in this city is fucking fucked.  

 

The housing sitch is in short, insurmountable. It is impossible to get to in this city and there are a ton of implications of this that should be examined. Cardinal amongst these is the nature of society, of civilization and its future. And to think it is anything less is to be subsumed into the false narrative that capitalism is greater than society which (on its face) cannot stand.  

As of today, the median age of a first-time homebuyer is now 54. This is an unachievable number. This place is a shithole. This timeline sucks. At the time of writing the average age of a homebuyer has changed to 56. Literally in the two weeks since I last wrote the previous sentence the age has increased. By the time I finish this part it could be up to 60. Basically, not gonna happen— considering a 30-year loan would mean we need to live to be 86 to pay it off. Considering most men in my family die from cancer in their 40s its not looking great.  

 

I need to take a break here and address the very reality of this: the FUBAR-ness of it. Like, this is where we lose the narrative. Where people give up on the whole thing. Who gives a shit if Suncor poisons the air. Who cares if Elyria is nothing but unregulated auto industries slowly being converted into high-rise housing. Who cares about the poor, ignorant masses that will never amount to anything that spawn from the cracks of these places. They will never know greatness, and maybe that’s the point; they cannot know greatness because we cannot achieve it in this environment. It takes everything I have to sit up and keep working on this, not that its good, or meaningful because it isn’t. But because I don't think anyone has ever given it an honest look. It just becomes overlooked, forgettable and in that ignobility it remains the same unchanging cesspool, without imagination or the dramatic attention that it requires to even become something more. But I guess this is the promise; this will come full circle. This setup will have a punchline. So bear with me. I imagine a thousand other things we could be doing than reading this essay about north Denver, and a thousand more that I could be doing than writing it. And it will never change unless we lean in and give it the attention it deserves and up until now I feel as though nobody, save for those that wish to ruthlessly profit from it, have ever paid attention to it in any context more than what they can siphon from it. And this won’t make any real difference in the scheme of things, but it’s cheaper than a movie and wont damage your liver.  

This then, brings us to the wild west auto industries and the metal scrapping operations: a truly Northern Denver experience! If the triangle communities wanted a mascot I can think of none better than a crackhead stealing a catalytic converter and then selling it to the scrapyards. Like some based-out rap name, Lil’ tweek n’ scrap. Dropping his new mixtape ‘get that copper’. Available only on Washington Blvd. While supplies last. 

Jokes aside, that’s what it is. A whole system of industries based upon the slaughter of cars and their parts. Allowing for all the criminality and side hustle that comes with it. While slaughter and dismemberment of animals and the slaughter and dismemberment of plants also take place in our district, it only seems to be the automotive version that enables crime. And how could it not? Rhodium is $165 a gram, platinum $35, palladium $30, all are found in catalytic converters. Not to mention the regulations that can be skirted by recycling these materials illegally, there is a river of dirty money flowing down Washington blvd. Why in the hell would the literal hundreds of homeless with their shopping carts be there if not for a quick off-the-books buck that can be converted into a down-and-dirty sack? Its not fucking rocket science, (it’s DiGiorno) is a social network that has failed and a healthcare system that is high-centered on its own criminally weaponized ignorance. And it begs the question, are we just weaponized ignorance? Ignoring the hordes as they shuffle to the metal recyclers, carts in tow all up and down the boulevard, for another sweet, sweet hit of... whatever dirt drugs they can get their hands on. It’s a subhuman lifestyle that we contribute to with our permissiveness; somebody should have helped these people a long time ago, but here we are: allowing the main artery of our district to be a third-world, drug-fueled, shithole. 

 

And what the fuck are we going to do? Send a strongly worded email? They couldn’t even vote the slaughterhouses out of the area, the same ones that exploit migrant workers; laden in controversy. Meanwhile all of Elyria (save for the park) is automotive wrecking and storage yards, funneling whatever comes off those machines right into Globeville and onto the trains to be shipped off to the exotic places of... wherever has looser refinery laws. 

It’s hard not to lose heart. How could anyone care about this? (in any meaningful way) eventually they will sell the land for mass overpriced housing. Slowly absorbing these processing endeavors into another form of processing: human financial batteries, cogs in the gentrification machine. And why even resist? There truly is nothing to lose. And, for the right people, there’s money to be made. The truth is; we are not those people. We are just caught in the undertow of the players. Fish adrift in the riptide of industry.                 

For its part, the city need not raise a finger. The homeless will eventually OD. The Land that these business run will eventually be absorbed into housing conglomerates.  Law enforcement doesn’t need to do a thing. Eventually the citizens will die from their polluted air and then they’ll all be quiet.  The trains will roll through, unincumbered as all the players at the top collect their coins and the blood will wash off. New families will emerge and raise the next generation of blue-collar nothings that live in the shadows of unapproachable industry consumed into the maelstrom of capitalist fallout. 

I think that it's the pseudo-hierarchy that fills the place of actual brass-tax problem solving. This is where the degradation of this comes to a head; in lieu of committing our energy into working toward goals we have this game of looking the part but not being the part. In essence, where weaponized incompetence rises into visibility is when it is a crutch to prop up those that don’t deserve the authority they have and are masking their lack of problem solving with pseudo-regality. 

And I am aware that some things are well beyond the realm of possibility. Some things will never come to pass no matter their intentions nor their feasibility. But I didn’t come this far to just complain and shrug. So, I think it’s time consider different solutions— thinking with thoughts unbridled is the tenement of change. Assuming I had billions to frame the change I seek; this is what I would do—  

 

1. Move those fucking trains. Move the overblown industry out of the city.  Move them out of the city into some place where they aren’t this sprawling shitshow that pollutes and enables every-criminal-ass-thing in this city. Surely it will cost money, but everything costs money and we have crossed the Rubicon with quality of life in the northside and outlying areas, so cost is really just a by-product of what’s already happening.    

 

2. Build them some place with intention and design and planning that isn’t this undercity, ghetto-hell that they’ve enabled and created. This includes a smaller line that can bring resources into the city but not staging nor switching tracks, just the train that enters the city and drops stuff off and picks things up and then goes to some moderately far-away place to do their normal logistical activities. I am aware that this city was built on train infrastructure but I deeply, earnestly suggest that it does not have to be dependent on the whims of these companies for the rest of this city’s existence.  

3. Hold these refineries accountable. There it’s probably millions if not billions in regulations that they are skirting. The roads are fucking destroyed, the air is contaminated, the land is just littered with a never-ending cesspool of equipment and machinery and you can see it all from the river. Make them pay for every infraction, there is so much vileness coming out of Suncor alone that it is mind-boggling how we are powerless to regulate one company’s bastardization of our natural spaces and environment for decades. It cannot go on. It must change. And when massive swaths of our quality of life are at stake there is an involuntary imperative to act. Is this vile, toxic, shithole the legacy we are trying to leave future generations. 

They will listen to money, money caused this and the sequestration of that same money will be speaking to them in a language that they understand. Up until now it seems like we just let them get away with it, and that's why it’s so fucking profitable. Honestly, what are the consequences if we just forced them to leave. More money? As if it costs too much to have an environment worth living in. Hold them to the fire and make them finance their misdeeds for the trespass. 

This would also require tremendous community involvement. But you put a couple of their executives where the sun doesn’t shine and they’ll listen. Make their only options compliance I assure you they will comply. Because they’ve been killing us since day one. It needs to get there first, but once it does, they will understand the precariousness of their position. 

 

4. Housing should be directly correlated to income. Nothing fuels inflation like our housing market. It needs to be either subsidized by Universal Basic Income and/or taken as a portion of one's earnings if they are beneath a certain income level. Just whatever 1/3 of your income is, that pays for housing, it might limit your possibilities for finer, more extravagant things but being both full-time and homeless should not exist. Being both full-time and having half of my monthly income go to my landlord is a situation so bullshit it should be illegal.  Every bee has a job and every bee has a place to live as long as they’re working for the greater good of the hive. There’s no reasonable justification for housing to cost what it does in this city and it hinders our capacity as a society to sustain itself. This must be resolved or the collapse of our culture is imminent. I believe that this is resolved by aligning our housing (and earning) costs more directly to inflation. We must remember in this scenario that society is made of people and if those people cannot exist the society will not exist either.  

 

5.  The homeless can be divided into clear and separate categories. A hierarchy, if you will. I often make the analogy that ‘homelessness’ is like tide pools. There is a region by certain shorelines where all sorts of animals live, we call them the tidepools, but that minimizes their overall impact and underestimates their varied and complex lives. “The tidepools” does not distinguish between the urchins and the mussels. There are starfish, you might even see an octopus. We need to grasp homelessness as a complicated system of interactions spawned from myriad levels of circumstance and disadvantage. The irony here being a system of hierarchy: 4-5 categories, broken into other smaller categories that I believe will help us understand the concept of ‘the homeless’ more completely.  

(1) Those that are homeless because of circumstance, these are like your LGTBQ teenagers and people with abusive (in all contexts) homes, people thrown out or situationally separated because of their formerly at-home circumstances that leave them nowhere to go. These are where homelessness starts and leads to the greater traumas that tend to skew towards younger individuals and women are still reachable provided, we act with intention and don’t lose our nerve in the bureaucracy of situational action. When we turn these individuals into numbers, they become lost in the mælstrom of the rest of these categories and then, as if by design, they become these other categories of homelessness. These are the people that I imagine the shelters and public outreach programs were initially intended for, a meal and a place to lay your head and you’ll “be back on your feet in no time.”  

(2) Then, there are those that are homeless because of circumstance; lost their job, injury, go-fund-me didn’t work out —bullshit late-stage capitalism realities. These are the homeless most affected by the flaws of our timeline, people that lost everything from circumstances largely out of their control. Their tragedy is their lack of understanding of unfairness in our modern world, they tend to skew older, unable to understand that the world has bypassed them and their situation. This is your amputees, your anti-establishment guys, veterans that were DOD’d and can’t navigate the department of veteran’s affairs, etc... This group is still helpable but they are the beginning of the of the other sections, that is to say the downward spiral that leads to social, economic, and societal fallout. It begins here: These people unlike any other branch of homeless are living on the streets because the failure of our society. The same society that seems to rebuke responsibility for its failings. This second category could be cured with systemic changes to our operational system these are the people that need medical care, housing, therapy, and money. These are the people that would succeed with Universal basic income, which at this point would really just be offsetting runaway inflation.  

(3) Thirdly, there are the homeless that do not want help. Career homeless, those that live under the freeway, mark their spot and will not leave. The guy at Metizio-Curtis that has been there for like 17 years (he’s back btw). These individuals are the creatures of routine, institutionalized in poverty, largely hopeless. Theres a certain pouting, self-deprecating, stick-it-to-the-man by acting-out-in-no-confidence nature to their suffering. These are usually the hyper-independent but also not too proud for a handout types. In particular they are an interesting case because ludonarratively they make no sense; generally framed in their own confusion to a world that has seemingly passed them by “a dime bag used to cost a dime!” and “back in my day, the men were men, and the women were men, and the children were men! And there was no time for all these fru-fru genders! Or any of this D-E-I whatcha’ call it!” Jokes aside, the irony of these people is that they are utterly unemployable and are dependent on handouts and the generosity of others. You could not have a racist, misogynist, homophobic, street person, in their 60’s, that smells like piss at all times washing dishes for minimum wage and treat it like they were an asset to your operation. This alone makes helping them quite difficult. They too, would benefit from UBI, and are often on Medicaid or have some moderate source of income that helps sustain them but their social skills and behavior is such that they are like stray animals that can bite. Making it domestically hard to justify extensive resource allocation when the risks of their upkeep is vastly disproportionate to their social contribution; which is a net negative.  

(4) Then there are the criminally homeless: the wire-stripping tweakers that are observably filthy. Coupled with any number of mental illnesses, any number of years on the drug, any number of prior criminal activities, any amount of self-destructive behaviors coupled compellingly with no respect to self or others. Some of them so perpetually strung-out and societally challenged they are difficult for my mind to see as something other than a stray human. As some feral dog, covered in ticks, the pits on their face from decades of drug abuse, missing teeth and damaged frames through thousands of nights of violent, substance-fueled chaos. These people live perpetually in a hell of their own making. It is the Tartarus of the human experience; the slag of capitalism, an event horizon of human capacity. And, somehow that horizon has pulled these unfortunate souls into the gravity of its influence, and it will hold them in orbit of its influence to death. These people are unable to see that this is not the real world, (smoking fentanyl underneath an unlit train bridge) somehow, they can resist the possibility of a better world indefinitely. And there’s always just enough of them to perpetuate the cycle. Their world doesn’t even need to be that way, but the psychosocial environment that they inhabit cannot conceive (whatsoever) of otherwise. They, are stuck this way. This carries into other thought processes, and the absurd, confusing, and outright surreal strangeness of it. Is a topic for another time, suffice to say these are the poorest among us, beyond money and power, beyond normalcy or conduct, beyond circumstance and luck; there is a place in our society where the shadows never recede. The longer a person dwells in those places the more likely it becomes that they can never leave. And then we’re out there cleaning their garbage from bashing apart an air conditioner on our playground equipment until they die from something substance-related. So, there are three parts to this solution: Give them what they want. Give them what they need. And be deeply considerate of what and how those two things are interrelated and how those two things interact. 

       The fact then becomes; money. Money wants to make money. There is no money to be gained in any of this. In the same way that money creates class (or class disparity) it is that same money that holds these things in place, intransient. This reality is not lost on me, I see how there is no feasible way to make the train companies move or the housing oligarchs come to heel, there is no realized way to remove the refineries from the landscape or hold them accountable for their actions, as if we are just waiting to die from the pollution they generate and the fallout from their contamination. Like district 12 in The Hunger Games, we bear the burden of the city's profits, we are the heel for which the capital stands, and I see this.  

However, I also see a different horizon. A different system. An upheaval of thought. In the same way that these pathetic hierarchies exist; I see their end manifested in revolution. 

It is time that we stopped imagining the apocalypse and started imagining the revolution. Even now, thoughts of shoeless militia covered in rags vaulting over burnt-out cars, musket superimposed with the black furniture of a contemporary AR-style rifle. It sounds cool, but that’s also not what I'm talking about. However, it is the import of this imagery when speaking about the type of revolution that needs to take place. We must see this within the theaters of violence and act in a way that is discordant with those actions. 

 

Revolution. Because it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. I assure you, Denver will be a player in that coming revolution. (As they try to quarter and divide our sanctuary status as literally write this) I have wrestled with the nature of this: I do not think it will be in the way that I had in mind. Though I have no problem adapting that strategy. I do however see revolution as an avenue towards solving some of these woes. Upheaval seems more viable to the resolution of these challenges than the current path.  

In the sense that I am writing some sort of wish list for what happens after, we must think unbridled thoughts. We must view the end as a more-perfect solution, like a gardener’s work; it is never done. There is no end to the kind of refinement that is required of us. It is now that we must begin the cultivation of our future, one without the degradation of hierarchy. Like a noxious weed hasa subsumed everything into the hierarchy of itself it deserved to be degraded into nonexistence so that a future of greater design may grow. 

 

Eye of the Storm

 I write this having just been terminated from my little ‘watering the brunch spot’ job. It’s the longest job that I have ever held. (I think of the identity of my employment as 1 year contracts. Renewed or reinvested. I think of relationships differently.) I was their longest continuously employed person. This job, interestingly, wasn’t about the money. This was a relationship. And I definitely just fucked that up.  

There was this moment today where I was speaking with Jimmy. (Which really galvanizes that Jimmy is my absolute favorite person to work with.) Where we both talking into some mutual understanding that there is this inherent adrenaline to the fight; there is a thing that takes place in the heat of the moment, where everything becomes silent. This, is not won cheaply. It is through violence that we are made hard, strong, or enduring. It is through the heat of contest that we are made complete. 

There is this African proverb that has been ringing through my mind all week, it comes to me in traffic, it comes to me in meetings, it comes to me right now: “The child, scorned by the village, will burn it down to feel its warmth.” And I think about this often. Almost involuntarily. Like some reminder broadcasting across my mind, as the Hort meeting drags on with the same empty displays that they always seem to have.  

I worked that brunch place for 50$ a month. Unchanging for inflation, unaffected by covid, or taxes. One Grant a month. Sometimes they gave me baked goods. Sometimes they gave me a 10% discount on food when I made a reservation for breakfast. Sometimes I'd have a beer with the owner after they had closed. And still, every time, the experience was that of a sitcom. The micro interactions of the employees always soft with a certain tranquility. Always in-character like the bit parts that make a budding actor’s career. Often it felt like some modernized Steeve Urkel making his appearance to fawning applause at the 4th min of an episode of Family Matters. The scene was full of teasing jokes, then a complete overhaul of the ambient music to something either extremely gay or extremely ghetto, peel off the apron and eat a quick egg as the day reached the final stretch. ...and here comes fkn chess to water the plants... roll the intro— 

 

There is this part of myself that disassociates, caught in the propensity of the moment— a certain strength emerges. Sometimes it feels unnatural, like I am the conduit of something else. Sometimes it feels uncannily familiar like exhaling a deep breath. I can cite several examples where this has proven itself true and still, there is always an odd underlying theme: I cannot be sure if I am doing it deliberately. [This will come up again.] But like, I’ve done strange things with my mind, with my body. I’ve created and destroyed so many parts of myself over the timeline of my existence. As if I am some dynamo, churning pieces of itself into some sort of deer-god nightmare. And the results are like those crocodile-tongues in James and the Giant Peach; whatever they touch, whatever vulgar object suddenly becomes enchanted at random (save for the family-friendly songs about kindness and caring) and I am utterly unsure of how to contain it. The level of supernatural weird shit that I have done in this space is hard to quantify.   

There is a part of my soul that is a monster. There is a part of my soul that is like Archimedes reincarnate, and there is a part of my soul graced by the forest spirit. The interaction of these things is in some sense, is me in my entirety. And yet, the intersection of those powers simultaneously is somehow both profound and devastating. I learned it, sometimes I wonder if I was bred for it. But it makes no difference. It comes out of my hands and mind like some expression perfectly timed for the occasion. Some gesture so flawless and moving to the aesthetic, that the recipient suddenly understands ballet for some brief and terrifying instant. Because the truth is so blatant, and often external to ourselves, the sting does not come from the injection of some great poison, but rather from the absence. The ability to create void is more powerful. This is something I am darkly obsessed with. And still. As if by natural law; the galaxy is nothing more than the material spurred into motion around the profound pull of a singularity. Electricity itself is negatively charged. Loss is what stays with us longest. We seem to be incapable of truly understanding something until it is gone.   

The problem with Denver is that it has no sense of quality. Not to say that none of its people have any sense of this, but as a whole it suffers from this systemic lack of quality. I know this, because I have seen quality before, and some of the horseshit that this city in large (and many of its people) seem to tolerate as normal is absolutely, un-fucking-forgivably, ridiculous. It, awakens in me something that is familiar and, not great. And I aim to give it due attention here but it comes clearest to mind as this one apocryphal example: 

 I think of some buster in the hood that everyone rips off because they are weak, or slow, or whatever. (Maybe trying too hard to fit in, maybe they have more money than sense, maybe they’re just plain fucking retarted) The outcome is always the same though; you rip them off too. I don’t want to be seen as sympathetic to the whatever-ness of the situation. Sure, I’m down for people with special needs, LGTBQ, weird kid in the back of the room, the chill sheik guys at the gas station, whatever. What's intolerable is the way that there comes a moment in (seemingly) every relationship that you’re either about it or you're not.   

Sometimes the city’s leadership strikes me more and more like buster-ass-Trey at the end of the block and it’s hard, at an almost primal level, for me to take it seriously. As if I am pantomiming my way through the day and then people begin to take that at face value. And I think the reason for this is a conflict of credibility. A sort of quality of personhood. Something Denver, it seems, knows nothing about.  

and I've said this often, painted it even more often;  

Don’t talk about it, be about it–    

 

And this, in a large sense, is part of the loss that I feel daily. Not with our crew, definitely not with present company. But there is this moment when I wonder if the city wants to hemorrhage money into immigrants or have an organization with any credibility. I wonder where this buster-ass authority comes from. And this weighs on my mind gently and often, as if Trey claiming to the barrio urchins that I have his back for some recent bullshit-thing he’s up to; you gotta go down the block and set that boy straight. (In whatever context that means.) In a similar but different way: to tolerate fascism is to condone it. Which seems to loom in the background like a cosmic pink elephant occupying every instant out of work; but this is for another time.  

The city has so many abundant weaknesses, whole businesses are probably saving tens of thousands of dollars monthly with their bad practices that are borne largely on the city’s resources. (Lorraine Granado died of cancer from living in Swansea after a lifetime of fighting the local coal industry and many others in community-equity activism, and met her end from the effects that those things cause. You can't even make this shit up.) The fact remains the same: at some level we need to be about it or we’re not. And I know that the people around me are, I have shaped them into what I need; but some of the people within our organization are so detached that it seems right to watch them be ripped off. And I have no interest in taking drastic action to help them. And the detachment is deep, so observably avoidant of being in the field, that it’s obvious that they have no idea what’s going on.  

To this end, I think about that scenario you mentioned with your daughter returning the wrong change, or how you handled Justin’s boot voucher experience; deep down we all recognize the opportunistic nature of a come-up, but just as quickly know what the right thing to do is. We do things (as best we can) the right way, even if it’s harder, even if it is more emotionally taxing, the right thing is the right thing. The truth is the truth. And I; for all of my cunning and guile, do live by this. I am proud that we live by this. Justin is a good dude, and I like to imagine his buttery personality simply distracted the clerk from filling out her paperwork correctly. I like to imagine that the universe wants to do itself. That things happen in a way greater than just causation. The universe wanted him to get a break. Though the deepest way to experience this, I find, is to do things the right way. Build the fence as best you can. Do good business.  

 

But this also makes bad business more recognizable. It makes me recognize the inept leadership. The flawed efforts, the pointless, uniformed ego-tripping in the same measure. And it’s pathetic. Some of the most pathetic and embarrassing, performative leadership I have ever seen. Your fence sucks. Dilapidated, bare chain-link is for poor cowish people to be herded from one rental trough to another. Transposed by a plank fence built backwards for aesthetics but then also uselessly easy to climb. (I honestly can’t even think of a better representation of gentrification in this city) and at it’s end, it all sems to miss the mark, neither is of quality.  

Quality leadership feels like something else. A forestry department that isn’t wholesaling me bullshit smells like something else. Machine shops that are properly staffed aren't so painfully disorganized. It's embarrassing. Its embarrassing to have to go through channels that are unable to (literally,) literally do their job. And it starts to look like an experience I could name. Because I don’t want people thinking we’ve gone soft because other aspects of the organization seem to have forgotten the code. And I think they forgot it by not doing the right thing —by not being about it.  

The challenge is for people that haven’t stayed true to themselves, they get detached. Thinking they are leaders when they’re not. Thinking that they are about it because they read an article on the topic for some mediocre understanding, talking about shit like they got something to say. It’s infuriating. I think it is there in the push-and-pull between some lack of quality and some lack of credibility that I am annealed with the daily experience of the Northside. I feel the absence of desert in my bones. I feel the absence of the rawness that made me like this. Where every trespass feels like gullible ignorance dancing stupidly in front of me. Like a barking chihuahua that deserves to be punted into a (remarkably shorter than you’d think) justifiable oblivion. And the only solace seems to be the off-the-cuff sarcasm for which these cheap, dubious motherfuckers can be dealt with. Who gives a fuck what kind of power they have; they’re idiots.         

 Where the circuits cross for me is when these people have a will to power. (The marjarie taylor greenes of the world) It puzzles me deeply, how stupid people vie for power. To the point where I am almost incoherent to the opposition. (this is said lightly, but speaks dark volumes) And for better or worse there is a quote of my own design that lives within me like the collapsed rafters of some ancient cathedral: 

 ‘you will come to see it my way.’  

 

I’ll remember it like this: I was trying to get into the restaurant, knocking on the door because we have to lock it otherwise the homeless will come in and bother the lead of the waitstaff or the owner for something irritating. I’ve seen it firsthand several times. I'm knocking on the door and there are these three women standing in the entrance. They glance over their shoulder to my knocks and look away from me as if I am a homeless person. And in this moment i think about the amount of homeless bullshit I put up with all day; these entitled white bitches have no idea what it was like to watch some unfortunate disassemble an, obviously, stolen air conditioner with a rock (literally bashing it apart) for 3 straight hours in the Argo parking lot. 

And I won’t let it go, the dismissive, beneath me look they tossed in my direction. As if to justify why they weren't going to open the door for me.  

And I thought about those little classes; “...Homelessness causes trauma, ...trauma causes homelessness...” But what they don’t say is the ‘contamination factor’ that dealing with the homeless can make you numb to it. They don’t know anything to the nature of meth, manipulating reality around it; destroying or altering everything it touches. Until they’re trying to kill every tree in the park. And in this moment I looked homeless to these people, literally baring my way to work, like I was the vulgar unwashed masses to be ignored. And I'm filthy today because I was doing the labor for these same vulgar citizens. Picking up their trash, handling their inconsiderate bullshit, and it set my ass on fire.  

 

As I pounded on the widows to be let in, eventually the team must have pointed out that I work there and the same blonde woman that turned a cold shoulder to me moments earlier let me in. 

 

“Sor— she begins.  

“You can get fuckin’ rekt for that.” I snap. Heading back into the kitchen to get the same pitcher I use every week to water the plants. I make some pithy comment to the line cooks, and then the chef, and when I come back out the woman is bawling— 

 

“You... just need to know ... that today... today ...was my birthday... and you’ve absolutely ruined it!” She cries.  Tears streaming down her splotchy red face; ulgy crying. She storms out of the restaurant. 

 

I stand there in awe. Confused by the whole scene. Her friend meets me at the counter a bit more reasoned and in control of her emotions. “You know you really did ruin her birthday.” She states at me flatly. And I stand there dumb-faced for a moment. 

She makes this face that is both mocking and disdainful, not unlike the one her friend made before not letting me in.  

I pause absorbing this, and then ultimately beckon her with a subtle gesture leaning across the counter, slightly I whisper: “When I was a child, after my mother picked me up from daycare, after screaming in my face for hours, if I cried she would get an implement, like a broom handle or like, a bat, and beat the living shit out of me. While screaming that I was a fucking faggit.”  

 

She reels back in disgust. Dismissively announcing: “Oh, you’re just a fuckin’ asshole.” She turns to leave. And I whisper in the same tone after her; “I’m aware. I was made this way.”  

 

40 minutes later I'm receiving a stream of texts about conduct, and how the owner isn't satisfied. And I don’t give a shit. Today should have been payday, and wouldn't-you-know-it, they didn’t have my 50 bucks on hand. It was only later that they get wind of what took place. It feels almost clairvoyant, or at least worth not having to chase after $50. The waitstaff agreeing with me, that they closed over an hour ago and the response seemed over-the-top for people that were just lingering around keeping them from cleaning.  

 

The entire experience sends me reeling. Filling me with this cacophony of emotions that it's hard to calibrate or quantify. But there is a part of my soul that could be described as a manticore;* and there is a part that could be described like the forest spirit. Apocryphally, The forest spirit is a god of life and death. I have often written on this, the nature of such psychological values. And on this day, for the trespass upon my sovereignty, I removed from them, their birthday. And this is a weapon so infinitely sharp it feels like I have practiced it forever. And in that, many times I have cut too deeply into myself and others, when learning. And i will always be learning it seems. As if it can devastate whole rooms of people or lift some from wretchedness to redemption. Its really just how I choose to use it.   

 

And These entitled white women will never know the scene of my mother, destroying my things, flipping over my mattress. Smashing my legos against the walls and destroying my artwork in uncountable fits of belligerent rage when I was small; I remember this behavior sometimes on, or days before mother’s day. Sometimes lasting for weeks on end.   

Once on my own birthday, where she beat me until couldn't stand— or the time she threw me out on Christmas Day to sleep in the streets. This shit goes on and on. But it doesn’t amount to anything, because void, inherently, by definition, cannot amount to anything.  

 

I think about 50$ and what that doesn’t mean to me, to give three self-aggrandizing white women a lesson in humility. They have been made weak in their own self-importance. But I learned it well and I learned it hard. Be it the city, or my family, or diminutizing white people: 

 

You deserve what you allow— and I don’t tolerate this shit for an instant.  

 

What so many are unprepared for, is the manner in which they will be brought to heel— 

So when Jill wants to mansplain her personal head cannon about the city, or some tweaker wants to grift some commodity metal, or the Venezuelans walking into oncoming traffic with their children in tow; like the belligerent, ignorant, slobs that they all are. I know they aren’t paying attention.  

but I am.  

 

And the moral of the story is this:  

 

These people can put their money where their mouth is; or they can shut the fuck up.