There was a huge fight at school this week. The last few weeks of the school year are often fraught with tension. Kids are tired; teachers are tired. Holes form in the social order. Classroom management feels like fixing leaks with chewing gum. “Just keep it together,” I plead with students, daily.

I’m not really sure what the fight was about, but students have told me it was Haitians vs. Somalis, two large populations at my school.

I didn’t see the fight, but I knew something serious was happening when the principal came on the intercom five minutes before lunch ended, warning kids to go to your third period class now!

A fight attracts kids like nothing else. They run toward it with phones out, thumbs on record, because that’s what social media has taught them to do. Hundreds of spectators, very few helpers.

When there’s a fight at school, the rest of the day is shot. It takes seconds for the videos to be shared, passed around, posted. By fourth period, every student had seen multiple angles, critically dissecting it in ways that I wish they could apply to their learning. Even if they weren’t in the fight, their adrenaline spikes, they’re out of breath.

One student showed me a video. It looked like a melee, a battle royale. Over fifty kids. The fight moved from one end of the building to another. Students, cranked up, swung their fists blindly, sometimes even hitting teachers and admin trying to intervene. I watched one of our school’s security guards take a hit, then proceeded to suplex the kid into submission. Many students will be suspended; many are seniors who will not walk for graduation.

****

But the day before, a student farted in my class. It was not on purpose. He is not the type to be disruptive. In fact, he and his two friends—all Vietnamese—might be the most engaged students in all my classes.

It was about five minutes before the bell rang when it happened. It sounded like it had been building up for days. So dry, deep, and toneless, like someone scraping the toe of their shoe against rough carpet. The Sahara Desert would be proud.

I looked over and the kid had his head down. His friends were falling out of their chairs laughing. The Haitian girls who sit nearby were shocked and looking at me—all of us unsure of what we had actually heard. Then they started laughing. Then the perpetrator lifted his head, his face flushed with embarrassment, but also laughing.

Soon we were all laughing together. Haitians, Vietnamese, Ugandans, Tanzanians, Mexicans—all unified in this amazing moment.

****

I finished Induction this week. Induction is a two-year graduate-level course that all California teachers have to take to “clear” their credential, which is essentially validating it. If you don’t clear your credential within five years of earning it, you lose it.

Nobody likes Induction. It’s not a ton of work, but it’s enough to be annoying. Weekly meetings with your mentor, lots of observations, so much reflection. Its goal is to make us better teachers, but it’s really just a shitty cherry on top of being a new teacher. Hey, we know you’re in survival mode most days, treading water, but here’s something else for you to do. I’ve lost many Sundays over the past two years because of Induction homework.

But I’m finished! I’m finally a real boy teacher. And, goddamnit, I hate to admit this, but I think Induction actually made me a better teacher. This year was the first that I felt competent at my job, and I did a lot of cool things in the classroom that I thought would not be possible with English learners, like reading actual texts (we read graphic novels of Macbeth and Frankenstein), getting students to read together in small groups, and speaking with each other. This is a huge shift from rote grammar, phonics, sentence structure practice that have been so prevalent in my past ELD classes.

Here’s my presentation if you’re interested.

****

I had two pieces of writing published this week. I go for months and years without publishing anything (apart from this amazing newsletter), and then I’ll have back-to-back publications. It’s either feast or famine. But I’m very proud of both pieces.

Farewell Transmissions posted the opening chapter from my unpublished mailman novel. “Novel “being a loose term because it’s very much based on my actual experiences delivering mail in San Diego from 2010-2011. The novel is 70% true, but the section published here is probably 98%.

Very stoked that some of it’s seeing the light of day. I finished it at exactly the same time my agent dumped me, which caused me to think “maybe I’m just not cut out for this writing thing.” It’s wild how easy it is for your writing career to be reset back to zero, or at least feel like that.

I’ve gotten some very good feedback on this piece, and that’s been very nice.

The other piece is a review I did of Mark Z. Danielewski’s epic 1,200-page novel Tom’s Crossing, which Zona Motel published. I loved this book. For the first time, it returned me to that childlike sense of getting lost in a narrative—I would look forward to work ending so I could go home and read it—but it also forced me to consider the whole purpose of books and art in general. It was a strangely earnest and life-affirming read, especially in our age of cynicism, irony, and edgelording.

I hope you check out those pieces, and especially hope you enjoy them.

Only a few days left of school. I’m tired.

THE DEFENDANTS: Sublime

Talk ill of Sublime in these parts — Southern California — and you might find yourself in deep trouble. Or worse. Drowned in bong water. Trampled by flip-flops. Garrotted with an acoustic guitar string that had been used to pluck a drunken rendition of “Three Little Birds” at a frat party the night before.

Alongside Social Distortion and Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sublime completes the holy trinity of Southern California bands that don’t merely make music, but personalities.

And what personalities are those, you might ask. Have you ever been high? Like, really high? It’s that.

Weed and Sublime go hand-in-hand. It’s difficult to imagine anyone enjoying them without at least some trace of THC coursing through the body, which is why assessing the preeminent white-boy reggae/ska/punk band is so difficult: is the music any good, or are we all just high? And does that even matter?

But bands that peddle chill vibes and weed highs are a dime a dozen in Southern California; what sets Sublime apart is their late singer, Bradley Nowell, who died of a heroin overdose a few months before the band’s multi-platinum self-titled album came out. The strength of Sublime turned Nowell into a martyr for white-dude reggae. Without that tragedy, it’s doubtful that Sublime, and maybe even the entire genre, would be as successful.

Or maybe I’m wrong? In this special edition of Is This Band Good?, I enlist the help of journalist and weed expert, , the foremost expert on everything cannabis. With her expertise and my unmatched skill at having opinions, we set out to determine if it’s possible to assess the band on its own merits, or do we need weed?

In other words…. [extremely long bong rip]....Is Sublime good?

PROSECUTORS

Jackie Bryant: I write Cannabitch, a newsletter about weed that is, despite all evidence to the contrary, also about everything else. I’ve covered cannabis culture, policy, and the industry for The New York Times, Wine Enthusiast, San Diego Union-Tribune, and a lot of other places. I also teach journalism at San Diego State, co-host podcasts, and sometimes I testify in federal court for defense teams as an expert on weed, which is the most useful and least useful thing about me depending on the situation. I live in San Diego, where having opinions about Sublime is less a choice than a civic obligation. Double that for the weed writer part.

Ryan Bradford: I’m the writer of this newsletter (not a blog). I like music. I sometimes play music. I’ve been accused of liking shitty music (not true, rude).

BACKGROUND

Ryan Bradford: Awkward as it is to say, Sublime’s self-titled album may be one of the most impactful albums of my life.

My first exposure to the band happened when I was a preteen with a burgeoning taste in alternative music. I was obsessed with a compilation, Saturday Morning Greatest Hits, which had legit bands covering Saturday morning cartoon themes. It was on this compilation where I first heard bands like Face to Face, Reverent Horton Heat, and Wax. Sublime was another unfamiliar name, but at the age of 11, their sillybilly cover of “Hong Kong Phooey” was the best thing I’d ever heard.

About a year later, I was browsing the listening stations at Blockbuster Music and noticed the now-iconic album cover: “Sublime” scrawled onto Bradley Nowell’s back, inked into permanence. Recognizing the band name from the Saturday Morning Cartoons compilation, I slid on the headphones.

The first two tracks got me. “Garden Grove” and “What I Got.” I’m sure I had been aware of reggae, or at least the concept of it, but this very well might have been the first time I heard something adjacent to it. These sounds were different from the post-grunge angst that I’d been exploring; here was something playful, upbeat. The music didn’t just sound good, but made me feel good.

And then “The Wrong Way” came on.

 Annie’s 12 years old and two more she’ll be a whore
Nobody ever told her it’s the wrong way.
 Don’t be afraid of the quickness you’ll get laid
For your family, get paid. It’s the wrong way.

I yanked headphones off. Jesus Christ. Can you even say that on a record? The ensuing feeling of shame meant that I had just let something bad into my head. Evil, in fact.

When you’re raised Mormon, you remember every transgression that leads you down a darker path. For me, Sublime was one of those transgressions.

But as is the tradition when restrictive ideology is concerned, the vulgar allure of Sublime did not leave my head, but rather grew until it became an obsession. How could a band produce something as zany as “Hong Kong Phooey” and also something so profane as “The Wrong Way”? (as we will learn later, Nowell contained multitudes). I needed to hear more, yearning now — yearning! — to hear whatever forbidden knowledge contained on that disc.

This would not be easy, however, since Sublime had a damning PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker on the cover. A death knell for Mormon curiosity, as damning as an R-rating or anything with caffeine in it. There was no way that my parents would let me own an album with that sticker. But necessity breeds innovation, and I needed Sublime. I came up with a plan. Ingenious and deceitful.

See, there was another church that my family belonged to: Columbia House.

After my brother and I convinced (wore down) our parents to sign up for that Faustian CD club, our mailbox became a rotating door for music. Columbia House would send promotional units they were trying to unload, and sometimes my parents would send them back, but more often they’d forget and disgruntledly pay the exorbitant bill that came after the 12-CDs-for-a-penny deal (a shady business practice, yes, but Columbia House sending random CDs to our house was how I discovered Ministry and Ween). It happened so often that there was really no accountability for what music came into our household. I ordered Sublime and 4-6 weeks later, it arrived.

There weren’t a lot of opportunities for me to listen without the risk of one of my parents barging in and hearing something nasty. The only times were 10-15-minute windows after both parents left for work and before I was supposed to leave for the bus. Fifteen minutes to enjoy the chill, sexually-unhealthy sounds of Sublime. When I was feeling brave, I’d sometimes listen to it when my dad was home, but I’m sure he suspected something whenever he would come into my room and I would dash to the stereo and skip to track six, “Santeria,” the only track that was inoffensive. To this day, I can’t hear the opening riff to that song without feeling like I’d nearly missed a bullet.

Sublime in middle school gave way to a love of ska in high school, and I moved toward bands like Reel Big Fish, Goldfinger and Leftover Crack. By the time I got to college and experienced firsthand the ubiquity of Sublime in California, my fascination soured into annoyance.

I moved to San Diego in 2009 and it was only then did I truly realize the full, supersaturation of Sublime in Southern California. I hated it. Or maybe I just pretended to hate it? Or maybe I just hated the culture that loves Sublime? Whatever the case, I resisted. I resisted for a good 11 years. But then Covid hit, and we were all forced to reckon with our past selves. Maybe it was watching the world go to the brink of collapse that made me realize that love, too, is what I got. Maybe it was because I smoked more weed and drank less alcohol. Whatever the case, I succumbed. I relented. I began listening to a lot of Sublime.

Jackie Bryant: I first heard Sublime in middle school, on a bus to violin camp on Long Island. A guy named Vinnie — who I had a deeply embarrassing crush on — was listening to them. I remember that being enough.

Sublime sat in the same rotation as everything the stoner boys were into: Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, a lot of grunge and nü metal (‘90s “alternative”), plus the classic rock canon they treated like actual scripture — Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Zeppelin, The Doors. (Nobody actually likes The Doors. This is a social contract and nothing more.)

More than wanting any guy to notice me, I think I just wanted to be those guys, the ones who held the aux cord and knew all the words. I was a violin kid on a bus to violin camp and a girl, to boot. The bar for cool was low and I was somehow beneath it.

None of this Sublime stuff was totally foreign to me — my parents listened to a lot of reggae, hip hop, and rock, so I was already primed for something bassline-forward and loose. But my actual Sublime education came later, in high school, when a few orchestra friends and I would sneak out during practice and recitals to smoke, listen to Sublime and The Beta Band in someone’s beat-up Toyota Camry, then return to perform on stage. I got my cultural PhD in Sublime when I got to college, through my best friend. I, uh, worked for him — he was my weed dealer, who, conveniently, also became my friend.

He played everything all the time — 40oz. to Freedom, Robbin’ the Hood, Second Hand Smoke, the self-titled, all the weird uneven stuff in between and random live clips snaked off Napster. He was actually quite religious about the whole thing and made sure everyone who came to buy buds knew that Bradley Nowell is a genius. You’d be asked to sit on the couch, smoke whatever he handed you, and start to actually hear it — partly because he made you, which anyone who bought weed the old way can probably relate to. But also because, let’s face it, Sublime is fucking scratchy and catchy in a way that gets inside you whether you’re paying attention or not. Why I think it still persists as SoCal’s background-beats-of-choice.

But Sublime is also kind of not good? Maybe it’s the violent lyrics Ryan mentions, or the fact that some of it is just plain sloppy, or both in combination. I remember noticing that when I first heard it, especially since I had grown up listening to classic reggae, dancehall, dub, et cetera. I think it set me up for an adulthood of denial regarding how much I actually enjoy the band. I kinda knew it may not be that good, but I liked it anyway. These days, I also know that I’ll never not feel something when the beginning foreboding trill of “Garden Grove” trickles on…to me, it’s the perfect prelude during which to spark up a joint.

What I realized along the way was that you didn’t need to be high to enjoy Sublime, but it definitely helped — being high made you notice it, the way the songs about getting drunk and getting laid and smoking weed and not having any money somehow felt like they were about your life specifically, like Nowell was narrating something true from inside the same haze you were sitting in. I now know with the benefit of age, life experience, and hindsight that my old dealer friend was definitely in pain and felt misunderstood by the world around him, same as me. Same as Bradley. Beyond existential pain, weed is also all over the lyrics, all over the vibe, baked into the whole thing in a way that displays a whole worldview. That’s a particular kind of songwriting, and weed is a particular kind of lens, and when you put them together in someone’s apartment at nineteen you start to understand why this band has the following it has.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

Ryan Bradford: “Date Rape”, “The Wrong Way”, “Caress Me Down.”

I mean.

You ever wonder if Sublime was too woke?

Sublime’s lyrical content and general vibe has never been suitable for empathetic ears, but now that we’re all (hopefully) better armed with the insight into more maligned experiences, it takes a lot of compartmentalization for a socially-conscious member of the human race to enjoy a lot of Sublime’s songs. For many haters, Nowell’s lyrical content is razon numero uno, which is more than fair.

For me, I’m not really interested in assessing Sublime through retrospective woke lenses. Maybe it’s because I teach high school and hear the most vile things daily, but know that the people saying them aren’t bad humans — just young people who need to grow up, who use insults as self-defense, who mask their insecurities with edgelord shit.

That’s the vibe I get from Bradley Nowell: A deeply sad bro who nonetheless desired to be the life of the party. An anti-social socialite who never could reconcile a cushy upbringing with his desire for dirtbagging. A rollercoaster of a person who perhaps could only feel solace in music and heroin. Not trying to excuse his misogyny; definitely not trying to be a “woke ruins everything” guy, but anyone who’s experienced anxiety, I think, can relate. This is why I give more leeway to Sublime than a lot of my musically discerning peers.

Still, there’s a basic meanness to Nowell that has existed long before terms like “woke” and “appropriation” became part of our digital lexicon, a unique kind that appeals to white bros with privilege. It’s like the people whose favorite Jackass star was Bam Margera or anyone who doesn’t know the difference between joking and cruelty. Of course in an era that spawned political correctness, a song like “Date Rape” — which then-kingmaker KROQ turned into a hit — would resonate. For this certain subsect of dudes, Nowell was a crusader against those who just needed to chill, lighten up, take a joke.

Take, for example, this 1995 interview where Nowell described the inspiration for “Date Rape”:

“I’ve never raped anyone as far as I can remember…We were at a party a long time ago and we were all talking about how bad date rape was. This guy was like, ‘Date rape isn’t so bad if it wasn’t for date rape I’d never get laid.’ Everyone at the party was bummed out about it, but I was cracking up and I wrote a funny song about it.”

Then there’s Lou Dog, Nowell’s Dalmatian who was the band’s mascot. There are many stories about Nowell’s abuse of Lou Dog, but probably the grossest is from Butthole Surfer’s lead guitarist, Paul Leary, who produced some of Sublime:

“Almost every night, he’d be sitting on the sofa and I’d be finishing up in the control room and he’d be sitting next to Lou Dog and his favorite thing to do was to grab Lou Dog by the tail and yell my name and when I’d look he’d stick his thumb right up the dog’s butt and look at me like, ‘Tada!’ The last time he did it was the best, he was talking to me and had one arm around Lou Dog and with other hand he was jacking Lou Dog off … while carrying on a conversation. Then he’d say, ‘Well he likes it.’”

There’s also this story from Gabe Meline who Warped Tour’d with Sublime. Drunk and looking for a fight, Nowell would sic Lou Dog on skaters, and then pick fights with those who tried to defend themselves. Lou Dog’s biting is what eventually got the band kicked off Warped Tour.

In addition to the animal abuse, there are also enough casual mentions of violence — especially toward women — in Sublime’s music that we have to wonder, wait, is he even joking? Was Bradley Nowell actually a psycho? In what way does this promote chill vibes or “love is what I got” ethos? It doesn’t.

Here again is another reason to hate Sublime: They’re phonies. Their fans are phonies. They claim peace and love, but malice is their bread and butter. They thrive in the notion of their superiority, and will strike out if anyone questions it.

When I was a writer and web editor at San Diego CityBeat (RIP), our music editor Jeff Terich once wrote an article against white-guy reggae bands like Sublime and Slightly Stoopid. Shortly after, Jeff disappeared and was never seen again.

For that article, we got more hate mail than any other story we published during the seven years I worked there. Vicious stuff. The No Bad Days crowd were having all the bad days. When CityBeat lost its archives, I’m sure Terich was secretly happy that the article disappeared. No more looking over his shoulder in head shops or at beachside bonfires.

REGARDLESS…

Put on Sublime or 40oz and you will be hard-pressed to find a crowd that doesn’t know the songs, enthusiastically or begrudgingly. It’s because Sublime could write bangers.

If you’re the type who can put blinders on, who can compartmentalize, who can ignore the culture of Sublime and just focus on the music, there’s a lot to like. These songs are eternal for a reason.

First off, Sublime were objectively great musicians. Founding members, bassist Eric Wilson and drummer Bud Gaugh, grew up in musical households, and began playing together at an early age. Their tightness has been there since the beginning, a rhythmic clockwork that makes the music on 40 Oz. To Freedom feel like a preprogrammed hip-hop track. As a drummer, it’s hard not to listen to Gaugh’s playing with awe. Not that he’s flashy or anything, but his precision and meter is well beyond most rock players. Same goes for Wilson’s bass playing.

And maybe Nowell could play the guitar like a motherfuckin’ riot? I don’t know, but his talents were in songwriting. The guy had an ear for hooks, melodies, vibes. Also his crass sense of humor stood out (pejorative) — especially amidst all the serious, self-flagellation that permeated mainstream rock at the time.

But what makes the band great, I think, is their creative atavism. “Waiting for My Ruca”, the first song off 40oz, begins with a brief clip of The Minutemen’s “History Lesson Pt. 2”, itself a dedication to the legendary punk band’s influences. For all intents and purposes, The Minutemen’s words — “Punk rock changed our life”— provided Sublime with a mission statement: to lift up your influences and share them with the world.

Through 40oz. To Freedom, I found Bad Religion, The Descendents, The Grateful Dead, Toots and the Maytels, The Toyes, among others. The band could cover the hell out of a song, and did so with an originality that people often misattribute these songs to Sublime (It was only last year that I learned “Smoke Two Joints” is not, in fact, a Sublime original). Bad Religion is one of my all-time favorite bands, but I think Sublime’s cover of “We’re Only Gonna Die” is better. Same goes for The Descendents’ “Hope”.

In essence, 40oz. to Freedom is masterfully constructed like an analog mixtape. The covers, sound clips, and sequencing feel genuinely personal. Apart from Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York, I can’t think of another record that so explicitly states this is who we are and this is where we came from. In the age of algorithms, listening to an album like 40oz front to back is pretty fucking invigorating. A smorgasbord of creativity.

Robbin’ the Hood, sounds cheap and is mostly trash, but I still have to give the band props for adhering to the mixtape aesthetic. Robbin’ is not good, but it’s interesting.

Sublime toned down the experimentalism, but it’s still there. More than 40oz., Sublime showed the band stretching all their musical abilities, proving that dub, ska, reggae, and hardcore punk not only work well together, but are intrinsic to each other. Certainly 40oz. showcased this genre mashup, but it was Sublime that proved the band could do it originally, without relying on covers.

Jackie Bryant: Here is something I think about professionally, more than I probably should: the cannabis industry and the legalization movement have spent the better part of a decade trying to shed exactly the kind of person who has Sublime in heavy rotation. Dispensaries look like Apple Stores now. The messaging is all wellness and microdosing and intentional consumption, which is a real phrase that real people say with straight faces (me included, being honest, but still). The stoner-bro image has been officially retired; thank you for your service.

And yet put on Sublime at any cannabis event — a trimming party, a harvest celebration, an industry mixer full of people pretending to be Serious Business Professionals Who Happen to Work in Weed — and watch what happens. Everyone smiles and starts singing. Everyone knows the words. The mask comes off embarrassingly fast, and what’s underneath it is exactly what the branding was trying to bury: the music of dirtbags, which is to say, the music of most of us who actually got to the industry honestly. Beyond that, I think anyone who just smokes weed, especially in private, can probably relate.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I came to deep Sublime understanding the way I did when I did: in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, on a couch, through a dealer, while high, being made to listen by someone who really cared about it. Reggae has always been tied to cannabis culture in its original context, and Sublime carries that DNA forward even when everything else about that context shifts. Plus, weed is featured throughout the lyrics. Every stoner loves that. Also, it’s worth noting that Bradley had recently died by the time I first heard Sublime. His legend, especially in weed culture, was quickly growing and spreading right as I came into their music. I’m realizing it’s a more formative band for me than I’ve ever given it credit for.

Ryan’s right that Nowell’s misogyny is real and worth naming. I’d add only that the peace-and-love ethos his fans claim has always been applied selectively, which is its own kind of tell. “Love is what I got” is a great line. Lou Dog was unavailable for comment.

THEORETICAL EVIDENCE

Jackie Bryant: Jamaican reggae and dub are built on a specific logic: the bassline carries the song, the guitar hits the offbeat, the drums sit back rather than drive forward. The whole thing is designed to feel loose while being held together by real precision underneath — and most American bands who tried it got the energy and completely missed the feel (except for Slightly Stoopid, which I am also happy to go on record about as a fan). Sublime nailed it, and then they pointed it directly at a generation of kids who, for various reasons, were still very interested in sitting still and listening to music for long stretches.

By the time reggae reached white American kids through skate and surf culture, it had already drifted pretty far from its origins — from Rastafari, from Jamaica, from the specific spiritual and political context that birthed it. What was left was the feeling of it, the looseness, the bassline, the vibe. Sublime is very much a product of that drift. They weren’t making music with any particular fidelity to the source but getting high in Long Beach, which is its own tradition at this point, with its own relationship to cannabis that owes something to reggae’s roots without being especially interested in acknowledging them.

Which is also why the weed isn’t incidental to how the music actually functions. Cannabis is baked into the DNA of reggae at a level that goes way deeper than lifestyle signaling, and Sublime inherited that whether they meant to or not — THC slows your time perception, makes you more sensitive to bass frequencies, turns repetition into something that feels intentional (see), though others may see it as lazy. You weren’t just listening to Sublime. You were participating in a ritual that started somewhere else entirely and ended up, through a long and not entirely uncomplicated chain of transmission, in someone’s apartment in California (or Connecticut) with a bowl being passed around.

Wilson’s bass is the center of gravity the whole thing orbits, Gaugh’s pocket is steadier than almost anyone gives him credit for, and Nowell understood — and applied this to most things in his life — that if the rhythm held, everything else could fall apart a little, and nobody would mind. They would actually dig it. I think the historical record proves the music’s staying power, however crude and imperfect it is. Here we are admitting its relevance and hegemony in the Year of our Lord, 2026. I think…dare I say it? I think Sublime might be good.

VERDICT

Sublime is good, okay? Bradley Nowell had a complicated life, and he sucked for the most part, but he (and the rest of the band) were a product of their environments. Long Beach was not the place it is now. It was a rough place that provided a fertile ground for gritty, working class creativity. Without a doubt, Sublime (alongside NWA and Dr. Dre) showed a lesser known (and in their own way, political) view of Southern California, realer than Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Hollywood, Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Sunset Strip or wherever the hell the Beach Boys were from. Or, as Jackie Bryant said in our text exchange Sublime were “the palm tree shrouded in decay.”

I can’t think of a better description of being a Californian.

SECOND OPINION

My dog Porter had this to say:

Woof woof woof bark bark woof whine bark guau bark bark guau grrrrrrrrrr….

Which, I believe translates to “Justice for Lou Dog.”

Thursday

I’m looking for joy. Something with weight. Something like a blanket. I’m sick of cynicism and irony. I hate that the state of the world has conditioned us to self-flagellate if we feel anything except despair or anger. Internet University has taught us that expressing happiness or personal fortune is a red flag. I want to lust for life again. Give me something that makes me feel alive. If ignorance is bliss, I’m ready to get willfully dumber. I think it’s working. Weed helps.

My 6:30 flight breaks through the rain clouds hanging over San Diego. The plane is washed in sunlight that shimmers over a sea of cumulus. Superchunk’s “What A Time to Be Alive” plays on my headphones and the moment is so beautiful that it makes me want to cry. It’s the kind of pseudo-profound epiphany that only a person on a 10 mg gummy would make. I snap pictures of the clouds from my window seat, certain I’m capturing a moment of transcendence, but really only taking pictures of clouds.

I’m flying to Baltimore for the annual writing conference, AWP (Association of Writers and Poets), but not really. This year, I didn’t buy a pass. After 10 years of spending $400 to watch panels with mic-averse authors and Q&A sessions ripe with “not a question, more of a comment” people, I think I get the gist. I now go to AWP to hang out with friends, go to offsite readings, and explore new cities.

I also need this yearly excursion to remind myself that I’m a writer. At AWP, validation comes not from writerly prowess or where you’ve been published, but from the proximity to those who write because they want to create and share and impress their friends, and also because if they didn’t write, they would die.

And oh boy do I need that writerly validation. It’s been over a decade since I published a book, my agent dumped me last year, and the rejections in my Submittable are scrolls-long. Not that my situation is uniquely bad—this is just how it is in this cursed vocation. Always be pathetic. ABP.

The flight lands and the gummy has worn off. Baltimore looks like a zombie as we land: dead, severe, cold. Goth as hell. From the airport, I jump on the light rail. My timing is impeccable, the doors close right when I hop in. As if it was meant for me. I watch the gray landscape pass by, skeleton trees against a dull sky. At my stop, huge plumes of steam rise out the sewer, as if underneath the cold surface, a living breathing thing waits. That’s how I know I’m in a real city.

My hotel room has a kitchenette, in case I want to boil water. Not only do I decide this fact to be my entry point for all conversations over the weekend, it’s a nice, meditative visual that helps thaw the cold that seeped into my San Diegan skin. Southern California has turned me into a weak baby. I set my luggage down, climb into the covers, and turn on the TV just in time to see the “Dude Looks Like A Lady” montage of Mrs. Doubtfire. In a few minutes, friend and fellow blink-182 stan Emily Costa (whose book Girl on Girl was one of my faves of 2024) is about to read at a nearby cafe, but I’m curled up in blankets, watching fucking Mrs. Doubtfire in my dark hotel room.

Finally, I’m warm enough to walk to Emily’s reading. The place, Meander Cafe, is only a mile away, according to my phone. Around the corner from my hotel is a row of strip clubs. “Pussycat Club,” says one. Probably not a cat cafe. The doorman tries to usher me in.

“You look like you need a girl on your lap,” he says.

“Sure, sure,” I say, tipping an imaginary hat.

In the short walk, it feels like I pass through seven different cities. Abandoned buildings, blighted and boarded-up, loom over overgrown lots, but the next block will be a quaint neighborhood. What is this city?

When I make it to Meander Cafe, I spot a giant red-mulleted sage step out onto the sidewalk. Kevin Maloney. I’ve spent the past two conferences with Kevin (remember when our AirBnb in Kansas City turned out to be a morgue?), so this serendipitous appearance feels like the beginning of a sequel showing how the gang gets back together.

“I just ordered a ride to the next reading,” he says. “Wanna come with?” The event is called Lilith at AWP, a feminist flash-fiction reading with [checks notes] 15 readers. We ride back to where I just came from, a theater space that’s just around the corner from my hotel.

A woman in the lobby tells us to take the elevator to the fourth floor. We ride up and Kevin’s talking loudly about a recent bout with pneumonia when the elevator doors open, revealing a room filled with about 100 people staring at us. Just two bros man-yelling our way into a feminist reading. Front and center sits Aaron Burch, editor of HAD and another member of our AWP crew. He shakes his head. If we could freeze frame it there and play “The Boys are Back in Town,” that would be fine. Caleb Curtiss arrives shortly after, and now if we can play any cool bass line from Ocean’s 11 team-assembling scenes, that would also be fine.

After the reading, Kevin, Aaron, Caleb and I go to Peter’s Pour House. There’s a special on 32-ounce Natty Bohs, and I have no idea what a Natty Boh is but I like that number of ounces. But when I taste Natty Boh, it’s suddenly too many ounces.

We talk about books, movies, divorces, writers who we love and why we love them. “I think I mentioned this in my blurb,” Aaron says about someone’s work.

“Did you just reference your own blurb?” Kevin asks. “That might be the most Aaron Burch thing ever.”

Aaron takes a selfie of us, and later I make a joke about how I’m thrilled to be an honorary member of the Divorced Dads Club (DDC), and I don’t think the other guys like it.

Kevin texts with The Icebreakers (aka Icebreakers Lit editors and their crew: Aubri Kaufman, Emily Costa, Terri Lynn Davis, Kirsti MacKenzie), who are at a Cowboy Jamboree reading. We decide to head over their way. Our driver’s bags are on the front seat and we suggest a bunch of options of what she could do with them so we can all fit. None of them are good, especially after however many ounces of Natty Boh.

“I could hold them on my lap,” I offer.

“You, sir, are not going to hold my purse.” she says.

We make it to the end of Cowboy Jamboree and then go to a bar a few doors down, which has a digital jukebox. I see more people, meet more friends (Hi Julian, Aug, Scott, Daniel, Jennifer). There’s more book talk, more publishing talk, more divorce talk. The longing in this room is deep, but I just keep buying shit on the jukebox like “Dragula”, Collective Soul, Live. Don’t know why nobody takes me seriously as a writer.

Kevin and I decide to head back to our respective hotels. The Lyft driver who takes us downtown tells us she’s also a mortician, which seems just right for Baltimore.

Friday

Wake up, not quite hungover but kind of a ghost. Like 60% of a person. I’d told myself that I was going to use this trip as a mini writing retreat—perhaps even write some non-Mask-related fiction. But I also have actual homework for a graduate program called induction that all California teachers must go through to clear their credential. I spend all morning reflecting on lesson designs and focus students, and it’s taking all my focus just to put one word in front of another.

By the time noon comes around, I realize I haven’t eaten anything, which would explain my smoldering rage at the world.

I don my winter wear and sort of slime my way to a touristy Detroit-style pizza place near my hotel. Not really sure we should be rewarding Detroit with its own style of pizza just cuz they don’t know how to make it but oh well. We’ve given Chicago a pass for so long, so why not.

Walking back with my pizza box, some guy on the street says, “You should do pizza reviews! You look like Dave! You could make a fucking lot of money.”

Who’s Dave? I think, but thank the man anyway.

I crawl back in bed and sleep until the afternoon. I wake renewed, at least 90% human, which is about as good as it gets on any given day. I head out into the city. No real plan, just figure I can walk around, explore, creep around the convention center in case I run into anybody. I don’t.

My plan is to go to a reading put on by House of Vlad at an obscure location not printed on the flyer. I email editor Jillian Luft for the deets and she responds quickly. The address is at a house, a long way from downtown. A $40 Lyft ride. But I’ve got the time, so I look at my public transportation options. A bus will pretty much take me right to the reading. Only a 45 minute ride. Only!

I climb onto the steamiest, most crowded bus I’ve ever been on. It’s packed with tired workers and parents with kids, all just wanting to get home. I’m the asshole with the “Who’s excited about literature?!” energy, beaming off me like an Etsy handcrafted lamp.

The bus drops me off directly across from the address, a two-storey house that looks like a mansion to me because I come from a place where two storeys on your house means you’re a millionaire. There are a few people milling about outside. It looks like they all know each other, and that makes me nervous. What’s even my entry line? A retelling of my bus ride journey? Visions of Wayne’s World 2 flash through my mind.

Down the street from the house, there’s a little intersection with a few neighborhood bars, which is where I decide to kill an hour before the reading. There’s a place called Jerry’s Belvedere Tavern, which sounds fancy in a dirtbag kind of way, so I go there. It immediately feels like a mistake. The bar’s nearly empty except for three disheveled patrons who look like they’ve spent the last three days in Jerry’s Belvedere. The bar is big, with lights too bright and music too low. Everybody stops talking to look at me. Can’t back down now so I take a seat at the bar and order a Coors Light. The bartender gives me a Miller High Life.

There’s a man a few stools down wearing a reflective safety vest. He picks up the banter, cracking jokes to the older woman standing to the side of the bar. I assume she’s Belvedere’s owner given her severe and intimidating assessment of me, an interloper among her regulars.

“You need to get some hot women bartenders,” the man says. “A broad with sexy legs. That will get more people in here.” The woman rolls her eyes like she’s heard this a thousand times. The man introduces himself to me as George and asks me about my tattoos. We get to talking. I tell him that I’m in town from San Diego for a writers conference and I’m on my way to a literary reading up the street. This goes over about as well as you’d expect it to.

George asks how I got so far from downtown, and seems aghast when I tell him that I rode the bus. He talks about how easy it is to get a Lyft downtown and how many cool bars there are. In fact, he says tonight would be a good night to go barhopping. He invites me to go with him. He offers to drive. Perhaps if he wasn’t slurring like he had been in the Belvedere for days, I would consider it.

I chug another Miller, unsure whether I’m having a good time with or scared of George. But by the time I leave, he’s forgotten about his barhopping offer.

I let myself into the house where the reading’s held, and it feels straight out of a John Waters film. An artist’s house for sure. Kitsch covers the walls. A silver Christmas tree stands near the fireplace, but most definitely a year-round thing. A few people surround a kitchen island covered with charcuterie. I still get the interloper stare when I enter solo, but nothing compared to the reaction at Jerry’s Belvedere. I find Jillian Luft and introduce myself.

“I emailed you today.”

“Yes, I know,” she says.

For the next hour, I weasel my way into conversations, my confidence fortified by a sativa gummy that makes me weirdly articulate, especially while talking about AI to an experimental music bro. More people arrive. The crowd loosens up. Figure I’ve done a pretty good job with socializing, so I spend the rest of the time trying to court the cat that’s slinking around. Literary cat, I think.

Everyone huddles in the living room as the reading gets underway, cuddling on couches and staking claims on the floor. There’s something about the intimacy of a house reading that forces people to connect with each other.

After many years of attending AWP, I’ve found that it’s kind of impossible to convey the magic of a good reading. Similar to how we forget everything we learned in school but remember how we were treated, nobody remembers what a reader reads but how the reader makes them feel. And every writer tonight makes me feel good and glad to be alive. The lineup is mostly women whose stories are sad, horny, and funny. Truly the holy emotional triptych of modern living.

Luke Goebel is the only male reader in the lineup, and he makes his partner Ruby read from his forthcoming novel, Kill Dick, but proceeds to interrupt her every few minutes to say, “Isn’t Ruby such a good reader?” Not sure if the interruptions are intentional or if he’s just blissing out on the excitement of his new novel, but it’s very funny. Yet another example of why men shouldn’t be allowed at a feminist reading.

Pretty sure I met Luke once over 10 years ago at AWP Minneapolis. I have vague memories of hovering drunkenly over a pizza with him and Amelia Gray after a reading. At the time, I didn’t know him, but later found out that he’s kind of a big deal—not just a novelist but a screenwriter who wrote the screenplay to Eileen, the adaptation of his ex-wife Ottessa Moshfegh’s thriller that she publicly shat on after its publication.

After Ruby finishes, Luke gives everyone an address to a building downtown and says, “We’re having a party there tonight. I’m gonna be serving free booze until three. Come by and I’ll get you drunk.”

I Lyft back downtown, and then jump on a bus that’ll take me to Luke’s party, which is on the third floor of a non-descript mixed-use building. Enter a cavernous, open floor office space. There’s a TikTok logo hanging on the wall and I can’t tell if it’s a legitimate TikTok office or if it’s just a start up adorned with a decorative idol of their stupid god.

Except for a group of eight people sitting in a tight circle at the far end of the room, I am the first person here. I find Ruby and her little dog sitting at the side of the room, looking at her phone. I tell her that she did a good job at the reading, and she invites me to pour myself a drink from the many bottles of Tito‘s vodka lined up on a small table. Luke is in and out of the party, looking irritated that there aren’t more people there.

I throw some vodka and citrusy punch together in a plastic cup and slink away to a far corner of the massive office, which is garishly lit by fluorescent lights but also where the only couch is located. I post up and drink. I am completely fine being alone; the sativa gives the party a cinematic Lynchian vibe and I’m into it. I take a picture of the space and send it to both the DDC and The Icebreakers, hoping to entice them but probably doing the opposite.

It feels like hours later when they show up, but I’m unexplainably smug when they do. Like, you probably thought I was a loser all night because I was alone. Well, who’s the loser now? Not really sure who I’m addressing in this scenario.

“How long have you been here?” asks Emily Costa.

“Hours!” I yell, my eyes rolling in different directions.

I flit between conversations about shroom writing retreats and gooning (“I don’t really understand the whole gooning thing,” Kirsti MacKenzie says, and it makes me happy to know I’m not the only one). At one point, I tell someone that I think we should stop teaching the five-paragraph essay in school, and she looks at me as if I just said Hitler had some good ideas.

Luke has now taken over bartending duties and, with a mouth coated in citrus, I ask for one more. I slip him a mixtape that I’ve been carrying around all day in the event I meet someone cool. I make him promise that he’ll listen to it. And if he’s put out by any of this, it’s his fault for inviting me.

Around 1 a.m., Kevin announces he’s hotel-bound. My brain’s been thoroughly smoothed out by free booze, and has been demanding me to put it to sleep for hours, but my body somehow is like nah, dawg.

As we’re leaving, we see people heading to the open rooftop. We follow, and it’s like we’ve just unlocked another level to the party. Most of the guests have migrated out here, and dark clusters of people are silhouetted against the city. Writers in leather jackets get close and smoke cigarettes. Mouths steam. People do photoshoots near the edge of the wet and slippery edge. Distant smoke stacks spew smoke colored by the lights of industry. Baltimore looks beautiful from a rooftop. Just kind of misty and twinkling.

Saturday

I feel great this morning. Great! Definitely don’t emit an involuntary groan when Aaron texts the group at 9:30, wanting to know if anyone wants breakfast. But carpe diem, yolo, whatever. Plus I’m helpless to the promise of breakfast burritos.

I’m the first to arrive at David and Dad’s Cafe, which has a confusing ordering system where you order at one computer and move down five feet to pay at another computer. It’s really not that complicated, but I fuck up anyway

“Oh, chicken and waffles!” Aaron says, and orders them.

“Why did I order chicken and waffles?” Aaron says the moment we sit down.

The burritos come out, Caleb ordered one too. They’re fine, but would be an affront in most San Diego restaurants. It’s like, good try, lil Baltimore. Cute.

After breakfast, we go our separate ways. I have a reservation at the Poe House museum in about an hour. I check my phone for directions and it’s a two-mile walk but right in the middle is Poe’s grave. Why not take a little tour of Baltimore’s rich literary history, I think. A nice little jaunt through Baltimore, I think. I put the new Converge on in my headphones. A harsh record, perfect for the gloomy walk.

A few people shuffle around the churchyard where Poe is buried, not as many as I’d expect, but the ones that are here fit the mold. Pale men and women in various states of Victorian-lite attire wander between the headstones of the other bodies unfortunately buried alongside Poe. Nobody cares about the other (probably) important historic figures, and neither do I. Everyone just wants a photo with our sad, goth king.

I find Poe’s grave and fulfil my obligation. There’s a sign next to it directing people to Poe’s second gravesite. Of course that little goth bitch would have two graves.

I continue on to Poe’s House, and my surroundings become bleaker. I walk through blocks of abandoned, boarded-up government housing and weed-filled empty lots. No one is out on the street, yet I can’t shake the feeling that there are eyes on me. I pass a child’s bike discarded in the gutter. I check my phone to make sure I’m in the right place. When I was a letter carrier, I delivered in some pretty torn-up parts of San Diego. But walking to Poe’s House Museum is the first time in a while where I’ve thought I’m in the wrong place. I finally find Poe House Museum, bookending the blighted housing projects.

(Before coming to AWP, I had refrained from rewatching The Wire, because I didn’t want to be a white-guy stereotype whose only point of reference to Baltimore was that show, but upon returning home, I succumbed to a rewatch. I had to see if the Baltimore I knew from The Wire resembled the one I had just visited, and even in the first few episodes, the characters make numerous references to the Poe houses).

As I wait for my tour, I loiter across the street in the courtyard of a new apartment complex. There’s a walkway where donors have engraved stones with their names and famous Poe quotes. “And I fell violently on my face” reads one. Never has being a writer been so succinctly summed up.

Poe’s house is so small that it makes me feel a little claustrophobic, even with a 16-person limit for each tour. Our guide, an older woman who’s lived in Baltimore for 30 years, has the resigned optimism that comes from a lifetime of keeping it real. She often undermines the tour with her own opinions on Poe’s life and living situation. “You’ll see that they tried to make it look like Poe’s room,” she says, referring to a small attic bedroom, adorned with a stuffed raven. “But that was most likely someone else’s room.” Someone in our group asks about the stuffed raven. Is it real? It’s pretty much the only question anyone asks.

I don’t really learn anything about Poe, except for the fact that he was a physically fit man who once walked to DC and back in a day. It seems like a fact that I’ll bust out next time I’m at a spooky party.

I leave The Wire and head over to the Central Library for ’s Literary Salon, a hangout in the library’s ornate and beautiful “Poe Room.” In the midnight hour, she cries Poe Poe Poe, I think, cuz, well, lots of Poe today.

When Twitter died, it took with it the centralized literary community, but thankfully, Zona Motel has stepped in to fill that void. If you’re at all interested in literary scenes in general, please read it. Zona Motel’s doing the lord’s work. It’s also founded and run by and —two amazing writers based in West Virginia. Well, Escoria is actually from San Diego, and always will be, no matter how hard she tries to shake the shakas off. We talk about how hard it is to remove “stoked” from our vocabularies. Always be stoked. ABS. I find another San Diego expat, Sunny Katz, and she tells me that I have to check out the bathroom in this library, something about a “huge toilet.” We gossip and reminisce about the hometown writing scene, and how the lit organization that brought us together fell apart because of an abusive man, and isn’t it funny how that usually never happens ha ha ha ha ha?

I hear someone else mention the big toilet.

To encourage interaction, Zona Motel has given everyone a card with conversation starters. I join a circle with Mesha and Lucy Shaw and other Zona Motelers as they’re tackle the first starter—Fuck, marry, kill: Jonathan Franzen, Ben Lerner, or David Foster Wallace. It dawns on me that I haven’t read any of these authors, but since he’s already dead, I say kill David Foster Wallace. I also say I’d marry Jonathan Franzen because he wears glasses and that seems domestic to me. I’m definitely the least smart person in the circle.

Zona Motel’s Literary Salon is a highlight of the trip. Somehow, the social stakes feel lower in this beautiful, brightly-lit room; the pressure to impress dissipates. There’s no hiding behind a drink or in the shadows of a dark bar. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder for more famous people to talk to. Having taught high school for a few years and constantly surrounded by teens, I often feel nostalgic (envious?) of the period in our lives when hanging out was the thing. There were none of the second things that adults need in order to hang out—no dinner parties, no going out for drinks, no double dates, no movie plans.

I meet one of my favorite writers, Brian Allen Carr for the first time, despite “knowing” him for over a decade. I still often think about Carr’s book Motherfucking Sharks 12 years after reading it, and in fact reviewed it for a popular lit blog that has since crumbled due to a Bad Man of some sort (which usually never happens ha ha ha ha). We talk about Evan Dando. I mention that after the Zona Motel event, I’m going to the 7-Eleven where the Ouija board was invented. It’s only a few blocks away. Brian says he would but he must go steal a pint glass from the supposedly last bar where Poe drank. Seems like we’re both history-heads.

I leave without looking at the big toilet. My one regret of AWP.

I find the Ouija 7-Eleven and take a selfie in front of the plaque. I love how a city can be so goth that not even the 7-Elevens deviate. I buy a spooky Dr. Pepper.

Then I bus it to Beyond Video. Before coming to Baltimore, I’d half-heartedly tried to set up an offsite reading to promote Later Fees, the zine I made last year with essays from people who’d worked in video rental stores. I googled video stores, and Beyond came up. It’s a volunteer-run, not-for-profit neighborhood rental store that, even in the relatively brief period of its existence, has become such a community pillar that they can paint their building iconically. Although they didn’t have the space to facilitate a reading, the owner Kevin had been extremely generous with trying to help me find another venue, which didn’t work out, but I told him was going to stop by anyway to check out his store and drop off a few copies of the zine.

Beyond Video is my mecca. The tight space houses over 44,000 DVDs, many of them donated. There are sections devoted to any and every genre. Their horror section is something out of my dreams/nightmares. It’s hard to imagine something like this existing in San Diego, a city where the only venue to see independent films is the 50-seater Digital Gym. To see Beyond’s devotion to art, film, and community makes me jealous of Baltimore.

But then I step outside and the sun has gone down and the frigid goth air seeps into my skin. Not jealous anymore.

I walk a few blocks to Club Charles, where a JAKE Magazine reading is going on. Saturday night at AWP is always kind of a culminating mix of exhaustion and a contact-high from too much socializing. Everybody has dropped the pretext of trying to impress or convince anybody else that they are a fancy writer. Tonight is for the real ones. There are about five competing readings on this final nigh, all of which have at least two or three killer readers, but a good rule for AWP is to spend it with your fam. My fam is the DDC and the Icebreakers. Aaron and two of the Icebreakers—Terri and Aubri—are reading at JAKE.

To enter Club Charles, you need to ring a doorbell and the bartender buzzes you in, similar to a pawnshop. It’s that kind place, therefore the right kind of place. The inside is all vinyl booths and genuine vintage shit. There’s even a private room that immediately becomes deemed the handjob room. It’s hard to ignore the slightly sinister vibes.

Terri reads first, followed by Aubri. They both read something red-tinged, funny, and full of want. I said earlier that we don’t remember what a reader says but how they make us feel, and both of them make me feel like we should all turn into vampires at the closing line. Don’t ask me to explain it.

Aaron reads one of my favorite sections of his new book Tacoma, which is about him visiting Spencer‘s Gifts at his childhood mall. When I finished Tacoma, I texted him specifically about the Spencer‘s Gifts scene, so I think his reading is secretly dedicated to me. I love making everything about Aaron really about me.

The reading ends and suddenly Matt Bell is there and we’re buying each other PBRs and then maybe I have some whiskey? Everything is flushed and my insides feel like the bar’s red lighting. Not sure if the body is meant to absorb so much artistic beauty in such a short time span.

If I have one other regret—apart from missing the big toilet—it’s that I leave Club Charles early to try and catch the end of the Zona Motel reading. I knew it was a long shot since it had the same start time, but maybe they had started fashionably late?

When I get there, everything is just shutting down. Writers are hanging out, but it’s definitely more of a scene here. People are dressed nice. Nobody’s chugging PBR’s. I find myself at the bar next to renowned author, critic, all-around good guy Tobias Carroll and ask what he’s been reading lately. He says some titles I don’t recognize and then asks the same question to me. I sheepishly respond with Mark Z. Danielewski’s Tom’s Crossing—sheepish because it’s a major book by a famous author, and with AWP people, sometimes it feels like admitting to reading major books is like saying you’re really into Clive Cussler or Sue Grafton. But Tobias reacts like I’d just offered him the best piece of tiramisu (assuming tiramisu is his favorite dessert). So we geek out about Tom’s Crossing for the next few minutes and I savor every moment because we don’t get many opportunities in life to talk about epic 1200-page novels with strangers. And this is why AWP is special.

As we’re talking, a man comes up to Tobias to thank him for something, and then introduces himself to me. But I know who he is. It’s Brad Listi, host of Otherppl Podcast. Pretty much the Marc Marron of literary podcasting.

For just a second, I have the shitty impulse to pretend to not know who he is, but I’ve listened to hundreds of Otherppl episodes. I tell Brad how much Otherppl has meant to me, and how some of the interviews have influenced and drastically changed my own reading habits. He’s helped me discover some of my favorite writers. And, I don’t know, I think the candor kind of takes him aback, because writers aren’t usually so open with their praise. I could be wrong; maybe he gets this kind of fan interaction all the time, but he tells me how proud of the show he is, and how he’s never missed a week, and how it still fulfills him. I absolutely love that. This is the type of joy I’m looking for.

Sunday

Kevin, Aaron, Caleb and I meet for one last meal at an expensive, touristy seafood place. Caleb gives us all a ride to the airport and I make them listen to “The Air That I Breathe” by The Hollies because of its blatant similarities to Radiohead’s “Creep”—a fact that’s covered in Hugh Grant’s horror film Heretic, which nobody has seen except me. But I know Aaron loves “Creep,” and I’m pretty sure he’s used it as an opening quote in one of his books.

We sing along, attempting Radiohead’s lyrics over The Hollies’ music, searching for moments where the heavy chug-chug guitar part should go. Writers are very good at making things heavier.

Last Wednesday, I had a teaching day that made me want to hang it all up.

The kids in fourth period would not shut up. I was in front of the room, trying to introduce persuasive language, and there were like three different conversations , one of which was happening across the room. After my who-knows-how-many attempt to bring attention back, I gave up. “I’m done,” I said, and sat down. It was one of those moments that you probably remember from school, when the teacher freaks out and the whole vibe of the class becomes a coiled snake, tense and quiet. “You can get your phones, you can talk,” I said. “I’m just done teaching.” Nobody moved, nobody got their phones. They just watched as I configured a new seating chart for them.

My fourth period is not a hard class. There are fewer than 20 students, a theoretical cakewalk in terms of classroom management. This makes my inability to manage it even more confounding and embarrassing.

That night, I did what I do best: spiral!

They don’t respect me. I’m too easy. I’m too nice. I can’t teach. I can’t lead. What am I even doing?

I was still having these thoughts the next day when Alex came into my room during lunch.

Alex (not his real name) was a student I had last year. That was an especially hard semester for me, since it was the first time I taught 11th grade English and AVID—two topics I had no experience in. Additionally, this was my first time teaching English-speaking students as opposed to immigrants and refugees, which was a hard lesson in American student apathy and entitlement.

Alex was not a good student. He barely turned work in, and often cut class. He slept in class, which—paired with his gaunt appearance—pointed to a drug problem that seems obvious in retrospect, but I was too naive and clueless to recognize at the time.

But Alex was a sweet kid. He always smiled when I asked how he was doing, as if the sheer acknowledgement was a pleasant surprise. “Can’t complain, Mr. Bradford. How you doin?”

The only academic success I had with Alex was getting him to write in a journal. When I teach ELA I use a system of journaling taken from Rain, Steam, and Speed: Building Fluency in Adolescent Writers, which does a good job of presenting journaling not as bell-work or quick writes, but something profound and to be executed with decorum. For twenty minutes twice a week, students wrote on a robust, multi-layered prompt (some of which the book provided; some of which I made up). The students took it seriously, and I always gave the option to mark their paper with “Private” in case they wrote something they didn’t want me to read. Very few students marked “Private”—they wanted me to see what they were writing.

This is how I knew so much about Alex.

At the end of the year, I had students combine all their journals into a binder to submit as an end-of-year project, wherein I would take them home and spend the weekend reading them.

Alex’s journal was like a roadmap of heartbreak: loneliness, incarcerated family members, gang shit, substances. Hardship writ large.

I gave him an A for the assignment and wrote something like “Thank you for sharing your writing. This is very good. It seems like you have a lot on your plate right now, but I hope you know that things get better.” Kinda cliche. Maybe even a little dismissive. Platitudes are good avoidance mechanisms.

“Oh, thank you Mr. Bradford,” he said when I handed the journal back to him. But he didn’t open it to see his grade, just left it on the desk like many students do when you hand back a graded assignment. Then he walked out of my room and it was the end of the semester and he was no longer my student.

I picked up the journal and put it in a box next to my desk. Since then, more things have ended up in that box, a trove of abandoned student artifacts: water bottles, broken phones, a discarded sweatshirt. Alex’s journal sat at the bottom.

Alex didn’t graduate. He dropped out halfway through the next semester. But that’s not rare. Sometimes you just realize that you haven’t seen a certain student in a long time and you figure that they either moved schools or dropped out.

When Alex walked into my class last Thursday, I immediately knew he was a different person. Not only was the gauntness filled out, but he—and here I have to resort to another cliche—glowed.

“I see you got new ink,” he said, commenting on my new tattoo. In return, he showed off the new gold across his knuckles and in his ears. “So check this out,” and flipped his phone around to display a screen that read: “295 days.”

“That’s how long I’ve been sober.”

“Holy shit,” I said, involuntarily.

“I’ve been going to a program,” he said, and then told me about his new lease on life. He’d been going to adult school and had since won a handful of academic rewards. He had a construction job, and showed me videos of the project, an event space, his team was currently building. He’s also getting his driver’s permit.

“Let me know when you have it so I can stay off the road,” I said.

“For sure, Mr. Bradford. For sure,” he said, laughing. We then sat quiet for a beat before Alex stood up. “I still need to see some other teachers, but it’s real good to be here,” he said. “I miss this place.”

“It’s so good to see you, too—” I said, the last thought cut off by an epiphany. “Alex! Wait, I think I have something for you.” I rummaged through the box beneath my desk and pulled out—even to my surprise—Alex’s bright yellow journal from the previous year. I held it out to him, nearly speechless by the uncut and complete serendipity of this moment.

“This is yours. It’s going to be wild to see where you were when you wrote this and comparing it to how you’re doing now.”

Alex flipped through before stopping at my note at the end. “Things will get better,” he whispered.

He took a breath and looked out at the other students eating their lunch in my classroom. “You know, Mr. Bradford. If there weren’t so many people here, I’d drop a tear.”

Only later, when I was texting with another teacher who’d had Alex and knew him better, that I learned that he’d nearly died in Tijuana from an overdose after dropping out of high school. “He was literally dead.”

We both stood up. Alex went for the fist-bump but I gave him a hug.

People hate cliches because they lack original thought, but if something’s so widely accepted that it shuns originality, isn’t that a component of truth?

Here’s another: It’ll all work out in the end, and if it doesn’t, it’s not the end.

Things will get better.

ICE-OUT LOVE IN

Author/musician/poet recently asked if I wanted to contribute to his anti-ICE literary mixtape, I.C.E. OUT, LOVE IN - an audio literary mixtape of stories, poems, and essays on the topic of I.C.E. Resistance. And of course I did.

It came out this weekend and it’s full of beautiful, heart-wrenching writing. And then there’s mine.

I wrote a short radio play called “Ice Store” about an ICE agent shopping for a facemask. It’s performed by me and Ryen Schlegel.

I knew it would probably be an outlier in the compilation, but now having listened to everyone else’s, it feels a little jarring. But I’m still proud of it, so thank you Adam for keeping it on the comp, and just know that beneath the jokes and fart sounds, there’s a deep-seated rage.

Support it if you have the means. One hundred percent of proceeds will go to the Immigrant Defense Project.

People are posting pictures from 2016. While it’s refreshing to see people posting actual photos instead reposts, it’s also depressing to see just how much better things seemed back then. Even the mere fact that we felt more comfortable posting in earnest back then is an indicator of how much things have changed.

I look at those 2016 posts and the first thing I think is: there’s no going back to that. We are a vastly different country than we were 10 years ago. We are a fundamentally different population. And for the worse.

What makes me most sad is seeing how cynical I’ve become since then. It’s hard for me to see the light at the end of this fascist tunnel. Even after the current president leaves office or dies, we now know that democracy only works if those in charge agree to the rules. The lack of consequences this presidency has faced will only embolden whoever’s next.

Really, the only thing that gives me hope in America now is seeing it through the eyes of immigrant students

At the beginning of this school year, when I was told I was going back to teaching ELD (English Language Development—the new term for ESL), I was stoked. For those who’ve been reading this newsletter for some time, you may remember when I documented a whole semester of teaching ELD.

I spent last year teaching standard English, which was fine. I survived. I learned a lot. I became a better teacher. So when I was assigned back to ELD this year, I had a new confidence. Not that I knew what I was doing (till don’t), but the objectives had become clearer.

One objective that I wanted to try was getting newcomer students to talk about their life experiences. It’s hard to get these kids to talk about their stories. Most literally don’t have the language to talk about their circumstances. Even if they did, there’s so much trauma embedded in their journeys that it’s often an horrific experience for them. Why would I want to talk about that?

Let’s also not forget that a project like this has high potential for exploitation. The last thing I wanted was for this to have an agenda, something well-meaning white people would listen to while nodding along, tightlipped and mmhmm-ing.

But kids are good at spotting ulterior motives and phoniness, and most students were eager to talk about their journeys if it meant helping others.

To hear these kids’ stories, and then see state-sponsored violence against immigrants is a disconnect that a fundamentally broken society could produce. As I learned, nearly all these kids came here for better opportunities and more security. They miss their home countries, but they also love the freedom that the United States (purportedly) represents. The vast majority are thankful to be here.

I swear, if one of the job requirements for being in ICE was to spend a significant amount of time in an ELD classroom, there would be no ICE.

The actual project

If you’re not a teacher or care about the logistics of how I did the project, feel free to skip this part.

I titled the project “The Immigrant’s Guide to Living in the United States.” I started with the essential question: How can our stories and experiences as immigrants inspire others and make change in the community?

I also showed the students where we were headed.

We talked about America as a concept. Students thought of both negative and positive aspects and I had them brainstorm key terms. We then charted their responses.

Next, I had them watch this short Storybooth video about a teen girl named Corrie, who talks about her own experience. It was way more difficult to find models of this kind of storytelling than I thought (i.e. short audio/video stories of teens telling immigration stories), which made this Storybooth example all the more valuable.

I made a graphic organizer from the video, asking students to compare their story with Corrie’s. The idea was that after they were finished, this would act as the outline of their essay.

We spent a day talking about what makes a good story. The students brainstormed in groups before sharing out, yelling story elements as I charted them on a poster. Conflict! Drama! Plot! Sex! (true). I believe this helped because it put their stories in a narrative framework and gave students a sort of creative agency.

Then came the actual writing. I broke the essay up into four parts:

• Paragraph 1: Describe life in home country

• Paragraph 2: First impressions of United States

• Paragraph 3: Challenges and cultural differences

• Paragraph 4: Advice for other students in similar situations

I hate assigning essays, especially the five-paragraph essay. This is not a unique or even rare stance, but I think back to the essays I did in high school and wonder how I even became a writer. It does nothing to instill a love of writing in young people, so I have nothing but spite for the formulaic format.

However, students—especially English Learners—crave structure, and the essay format provides that. It turns writing into a sort of mathematical process, and it’s something non-English students can do and feel successful about. So I’ve implemented a modified way of assigning essays that isn’t complete hell for me.

I create graphic organizers for each paragraph, which gives students the option to free write their paragraphs (highly proficient), or use sentence frames (proficient). They write using paper and pencil, and show it to me for review. I can edit it at that point, suggest clarification, flesh out ideas. After my approval they can go onto the next paragraph. It’s a long cumbersome process, but by the time the students are finished with all four parts, their essay is pretty much graded. I still make them combine all four parts into one typed document, and it’s pretty cool for students to see their finished, printed-out essay, knowing they produced something meaningful in a new language.

(These are the graphic organizers I used, printed double-sided: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

With the writing finished, the students had their scripts. Next was recording. Before that, though, I organized with our school’s art department to let 5-6 students read their stories at the school’s winter VAPA showcase in presentations similar to mini TED Talks. I approached a number of students whose essays were strong and asked if they wanted to tell their story in front of a live audience of admin, parents and other students. Most did not, even with the bribe of a guaranteed A-grade for the quarter. But I eventually found six students who agreed, and watching them read their stories in front of a live audience is the highlight of my teaching career so far.

At this point, we were about two weeks away from the end of the semester. Students were tired; I was tired. The idea of getting 70+ students to record podcasts during that time felt insurmountable. But what kind of teacher would I be if I didn’t just dive into that abyss?

I had a set of new 11 lavalier mics that I got through DonorsChoose, a crowdfunding site for teachers. (Side note: I don’t know if I’d do another DonorsChoose again. In many cases, the donors can request handwritten thank-you notes from the students, and while I get the sentiment behind that, it feels weird to make students write letters for things they did not ask for).

I had students play around with the Podcast app on Adobe Express (which our district has access to via Clever). I showed them how to use the mics, how to access Adobe Express, and then let them go. Kids would check out the mics and find somewhere quiet to record their story. A co-teacher, who was doing assessments in the library and could supervise the students there, later told me how impressed she was with how seriously they took it, how important it was for them to get their words right.

What the students said

They shared beautiful moments of their home countries:

I am from Mexico, Guerrero. My life [there] was so so, it was good because every day I went to play with my friends and It was also bad because there was a lot of deaths every time in my town. I have many fond memories, but there is one in particular that I will never forget and that is when I was 8 years old, I went to the basketball court, but on that court we played more soccer than basketball,making the goals with two stones. And you know, It was weird because when we started playing, my friends and I noticed that suddenly a lot of people started arriving and they started applauding. Me and my family we decide to moved to U.S because it was a lot of deaths in my town and also because we hope more opportunities.

They talked about the differences between their home country and the U.S.

When I heard that I was coming to the U.S., my first thought about the U.S. was a country where it’s easy to find a job and make money. Almost everything was free here. However, when I come to the US, I discovered that things are expensive here, students can disrespect teachers without being beaten, you can go to school with basically anything you want, you can go to school with your phone, you can get a job at sixteen. The strangest things I noticed when I started attending school here are that students can go to school with bed sheets, students can wear pajamas to school, and they don’t get beaten when late. I felt confused because in my country it was the contrary.

They talked about the United States’ notable diversity.

What brings happiness to me in the United States is the diversity of cultures and opportunities. And I think it’s something that makes the country more interesting. To help others feel happy, I would suggest exploring local communities, trying new foods and attending cultural events. As for who has helped me adapt to life here, they are people who already migrated here and friendships. Newcomers should know that it is okay to ask for help and it is normal to feel overwhelmed.

Challenges that I face when I first move to the U.S we’re had to go to a shelter in Texas it was very uncomfortable I didn’t sleep well, I didn’t eat well either- there was a time to go to sleep and a time to wake up, some different laws is the apps use without being 18+ in my country you can use the apps without that problem, in my country some of us are very racist with black people, and here In the U.S I had never seen someone racist yet, and I feel happy about it.

And most seemed to believe life here was better than life in their home countries.

I want to share a message for anyone coming to the United States. I want to tell you that even if you don’t speak English yet, don’t worry too much, don’t be afraid. At first, you might feel shy or uncomfortable, but people here try to understand us. And if you don’t understand something, you can ask questions or use an interpreter. There are many programs and schools that help both adults and children learn English. In this country, there are many opportunities, and we feel safe. If you respect the rules and work hard, you will find your place here. You are welcome in this country.

To those planning to come to the United States. Make sure you speak English. Bring a thick jacket, and be cautious so that they don’t deport you. Don’t sign any paper without reading it first. If you don’t understand something, use Google Translate. One thing that brings me happiness in the United States is the beautiful sky. The sky can make you feel happy when you see how much things god is capable of and how beautiful his creations are on their own way.

Trouble was/is, I’ve never read a movie novelization before. Not really sure what one entails. So I just started writing about what I saw on the screen, second-by-second, throwing in commentary when I can. I don’t think that’s what a novelization is.

Spending three years with THE MASK… I don’t recommend it. These entries are my least popular. My friends have referred to them as tedious, and I don’t disagree. But just like any experiment in tedium, one can attain a Zen-like calmness and clarity while doing it.

So even though there’s about 20 minutes left of movie to recap, this will probably be the final AWKSD entry. You’ll just have to wait for the printed book to read the end. Details forthcoming.

(Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5)

While THE MASK is getting searched by Edge City’s Finest, we cut to intrepid reporter, Peggy Brandt, burning the midnight oil at her work desk. Another reporter, Murray, who wears a bowtie which—having been a staff writer in a newsroom for seven years, so I can attest—is exactly what a reporter would wear. Murray storms through the press room, complaining that it’s going to be a long night. Peggy, her interest piqued, asks where he’s going.

“Cops got your pal Ipkiss staked out at Landfill Park.”

“Let me cover it, Murray,” Peggy says. “I really need this story. And you can go home to Claire!”

Murray is skeptical, senses the desperation in Peggy’s voice. “I don’t know,” he says. “Ramsey said—”

Peggy cuts him off. “I will take care of Ramsey.” We must assume that Ramsey is their editor, and probably a hardass at that. Probably has a whole closet of bowties. “Thanks a million,” Peggy says to the speechless Murray. “I owe you one.” She kisses him on the cheek, tenderly, affectionately, but not romantically.

Back at the park, police search THE MASK’s pockets. The stuff they’re pulling out: absurd. Just fucking insane. There’s a bike horn, rubber chicken. A bowling pin? A SMALL MOUTH BASS?? What the heck. Doyle gets his finger caught in a mousetrap. “A little to the left,” THE MASK says, vying for a little touchy. “Oh, that’s it,” he says, aroused.

The cop pulls an enormous bazooka out. “I have a permit for that,” says THE MASK. The limits of this movie are none.

Doyle holds up a framed photo of a woman posing in lingerie. “A picture of Kellaway’s wife.” There’s a handwritten message and a phone number: Call me, lover! The exclamation point is A+.

“Margaret!” Kellaway says. “You son of a bitch!”

“Geez, I thought you’d have a sense of humor,” says THE MASK. “After all—” THE MASK cranks his neck “YOU MARRIED HER!”

Kellaway, in a fit of rage-induced insanity, just screams. Screams and screams. This anguish would perhaps be eternal, neverending, except—Oh!—THE MASK has escaped his cuffs and begins slapping the two policemen. Rapidly, fronthand-backhand style. THE MASK then leans through the two stunned cops, breaking the fourth wall, and whispers what we’re all thinking: That’s gotta hurt. Whether he’s talking about the physical pain, or the deep emotional pain of Kellaway’s wife’s infidelity, we do not know. Then THE MASK does the broken-toy sped-up jaw-thing and zips away.

“GET HIM!” Kellaway yells, right before realizing that THE MASK has cuffed him and Doyle together.

THE MASK, now free of his shackles, zooms to the entrance of Landfield Park, his legs blurred and wheeling. He shuts the big wooden doors beneath the archway (which are unsecured and I guess anyone could do this). THE MASK pulls wooden planks from thin air, uses them to barricade his pursuers within the park’s fortress walls, hammering them into the wood with a carpenter’s speed and precision. He crisscrosses a metal chain against the doors to further secure his escape. Satisfied with his work, THE MASK turns around, only to see Edge City’s entire police force outside waiting for him, guns drawn.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” screams THE MASK, his eyes, skull, and tongue bursting forth from the confines of his skin.

“It’s all over Ipkiss,” says an officer over the bullhorn. “Put your hands over your head or we’ll open fire!”

The camera zooms in on THE MASK as he contemplates his options: surrender? Or continue his orgy of madhat violence and destruction? The decision is simple, given his sinister look of resolve.

THE MASK jumps forward, snaps his fingers. “Hit it!” he snarls. All police cruisers light up, spotlighting THE MASK, who—oh my word—has suddenly changed into a Rumba outfit. Obscenely white pants, a shiny blue shirt with billowy sleeves (think Seinfeld’s puffy shirt but on steroids), orange scarf and black fedora. Tucked into his waist band are two maracas. The song “Cuban Pete” plays from an unknown source.

Yep, we’re getting another dance sequence.

For many years, I believed that “Cuban Pete” was written for The Mask, but a quick google search reveals that it was first performed by Mantovani & His Tipica Orchestra in 1936. A further foray into the ether shows that the song was used in an episode of I Love Lucy in a scene where Ricky and Lucy are performing it with a band backing them. I’ve never really seen an episode of I Love Lucy, but was this normal for the show? Occasional song and dance numbers? Whatever the case, it seems like the kind of thing that would leave an impression on someone—an obscure-yet-indeliable clip that implanted itself into some kid’s brain, who carried it with them into their adulthood, where they became a screenwriter and incorporated it into The Mask. What else besides a needling childhood memory would account for two dance sequences in this movie?

I’m not against the dance sequences, but when you’re 9 years old and have been pissing your pants in anticipation for then-novel CGI and cartoonish violence, it feels like a rip-off. Not to say that The Mask is bad, no no no no I’d never. And the dance sequences have since become the most iconic scenes in the movie, but when I was 9 and this scene came on, I was like aw man.

(I also remember that theater experience because I chugged a large Sprite at the very start and had to pee so many times during that I wondered if I had a health problem.)

So “Cuban Pete” is playing and THE MASK is dancing. He’s a-kicking, he’s a-shimmying. The police seem flummoxed, wondering how to address this situation. Is he a threat, or just someone experiencing a mental health crisis?

What the police don’t know is: this is how THE MASK gets you. The minute you let your guard down, that’s when he slides in. A spectacle turned to spell turned to terror. The police begin to succumb to THE MASK’s power. An officer with his gun drawn wonders why his shoulders dip to the rhythm. Dear god, his face seems to be saying. What is happening to me?

THE MASK sings: “My name is Cuban Pete. I’m the king of the Rumba beat. When I play my maracas I go chick chicky boom chick chicky boom chick chicky boom”. We get a close up on his butt wiggling back and forth. A lil sumthin for the ass people.

More officers shake their shoulders, possessed by THE MASK’s hellish rhythm. By now, he has the entire squad in the palms of his hands. THE MASK sashays through the wide berth he’s given, turning the scene of a stand-off into a stage. In fact, he’s not even really paying the cops attention, just mugging for the camera, which only THE MASK seems to be aware of, which raises the question: are we, the audience, implicit in THE MASK’s chaos? Do we enable it? What does THE MASK and The Mask say about our human need for entertainment at any cost?

THE MASK jumps to a parking meter near two women who just happened to be walking through the police standoff (no big deal). He uses the meter as a makeshift stripper pole, using it as support to pirouette, can-can dance, and even give the two women a view of lush, white-clad ass. Chick chicky boom, indeed. H-O-R-N-Whyyyy? Because he’s gotta! THE MASK jumps away from the women right as they reach out for a touch of that delicious tush.

THE MASK flies an indeterminate distance onto a construction-site sawhorse, where he slides to and fro, teeter-tottering on the precarious surface. The police follow him with their guns. THE MASK slides to the end of the piece of wood and launches himself out of frame. He hits a lamppost and twirls down it. At the bottom, there’s a lone woman police officer, her gun trained on this dancing lunatic. THE MASK creeps forward, using mystical hand motions, bewitching her. The police officer opens her mouth and a beautiful singing voice emerges. Based on her frightened reaction, we know this isn’t her real voice. “He’s a really modest guy,” she sings, horrified at THE MASK’s uncanny puppeteering of her body. “Even though he’s the hottest guy—” The fright quickly leaves her face, replaced with a smile as she too becomes Stockholm Syndromed. “In Havanaaaa!” she wails. “Let’s get ready to RUMBA!” I’d say if we were watching together.

THE MASK now fully has the officer under his spell. With her legs wrapped around his waist, he swings her around. She slaps his face dramatically. The fact that they’re performing this tryst on top of a police cruiser only highlights the anarchy of the scene. A spit-in-the-face of law and order if we’ve ever seen one. THE MASK twirls the officer off the cruiser and into the loving arms of her colleagues.

We then get a shot of Doyle and Kellaway scaling the wall of Landfill Park. “Not bad,” says Doyle, affected by THE MASK’s residual magic spunk. Kellaway, who—on the other hand—does not have the mind of a child, remains impervious. “Shut up and help me down,” he demands.

THE MASK jumps off the police cruiser and coerces the entire police force into conga line, which then becomes a synchronized swing dance number. If you’ve never been to a Señor Frogs, this is exactly what it’s like, and if you think you would not fall into the conga-line-to-group-swing-dance pipeline, just wait until you’re two $30 drinks in and then somebody’s offering free shots.

Kellaway and Doyle have successfully scaled the wall; Kellaway watches this pandemonium in disbelief. Doyle, on the other hand, begins to stupidly dance toward the action until Kellaway pulls him back. “Start dancing, and I’ll blow your brains out,” he threatens threateningly.

Kellaway runs to the nearest SWAT member, takes the officer’s shotgun and fires it into the air. “There he is,” he yells, “Let’s get him! Snap out of it! C’mon. This dance is over.”

THE MASK peers out from behind a dark corner, does the broken toy sound with his jaw before making his escape. He runs straight into a woman who screams at the sight of him. THE MASK silences her by smooching her bigly on the lips. No idea why this scene is in the movie.

Kellaway has successfully broken the police force out of their spell, and leads them in pursuit. A whole squadron with guns are on THE MASK’s tail. He skids to a stop where the alley T-bones, ducks down a side alley and hides in a doorway to pull THE MASK off.

It’s the first time in the movie that we’ve seen the horrible reverse transformation. With both hands, THE MASK reaches behind his skull and pries it off him like the skin of an orange, or—if you will—spreading the cheeks of a butt. Lightning flashes and THE MASK groans in agony. The tight green skin wrinkles and the eyes hollow out. It desperately clings to Ipkiss’s skin, pulling at it like taffy. It’s in this moment that we see just how parasitic THE MASK is.

Just then, Peggy Brandt pulls up in her car, honking the horn and yelling for Stanley to get in. Behind Ipkiss, Kellaway and his squad round the corner, bloodlust a-raging.

“There he is,” Kellaway says, pointing his weapon. “Halt or I’ll shoot!” Stanley jumps on Peggy’s hood, slides across it as Kellaway begins to fire. In typical cop fashion, Kellaway orders his men to fire. No regard to Peggy’s safety—they just want Ipkiss dead dead dead. They unload a hail of bullets into Peggy’s poor car. “Seatbelts” she says calmly as the car speeds away. Obvious ADR.

The criminals are gone, escaped. Yet another embarrassment for Edge City PD. “I missed him,” says Doyle, with the remorse of a bullied child.

“C’mon, we all missed him,” Kellaway says angrily.

Cut to the Edge City Tribune newspaper production plant. The camera pans over bundles of papers with the headline “THE MASK ROBS BANK - Police scour the city” and a picture of THE MASK gleefully hoisting a big sack of money over his shoulder. He smiles for the camera as if he knew that this was his star-making photo. I believe these papers are from the previous day—essentially undelivered trash, and which I can only assume will end up in Edge City’s river.

Peggy and Stanley sit on a stack of old newspapers, drinking coffee. “I saw it,” Peggy says. “I saw everything. What’s happening to you, Stanley?” Peggy hands him a cup of coffee, which he takes and immediately puts behind him. Like, no thanks. (Having worked in a newsroom and knowing the quality of coffee they drink, I can attest this is the right move).

“It’s crazy,” Stanley says. His foot shakes; he plays with his hands. Jittery as a junkie. “I’m losing control. When I put that mask on—” he pauses, leans absurdly close to Peggy. We’re getting flashes of the desperation that we saw from Stanley when he visited Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money’s office. “I can do anything. Be anything.” The intensity fades. “But it’s wrecking my life. My life is wrecked. Wrecked.” He stabs the air with his finger. “Wrecked!”

What if the rest of the movie was just him saying “wrecked”?

Somebody would have to stop him, right?

Sorry.

“Look, I don’t know what’s happening to you, Stanley,” Peggy says. “But I do know this.” She sets her coffee to the side and scoots closer. “That letter that you sent to my column. That was from a guy with more guts and more heart than any of the creeps I’ve met in this city.” She can’t possibly be talking about Charlie, right? The patron saint of predatory invitations to the Coco Bongo?

“Whatever that mask is,” she continues. “You don’t need it.” The camera cuts to a close-up of Peggy, ready to deliver the final stroke to Stanley’s ego. “You, Stanley Ipkiss, are already all you need to be.”

O here, as the music swells to accommodate Peggy’s unbridled sincerity; as we think about our own lives—the ephemeral moments that nonetheless defined us and reinforced our true sense of self—we realize that, yes, beauty can still exist in the world.

Stanley Ipkiss, with his hangdog face, is on the verge of tears. “Gosh, Peg,” he croaks. “Do you really mean that?”

“Actually...” she leans in, on the verge of seduction. “No.”

Stanley, like us, does not comprehend. “What?” he says, emotionally cucked.

Just then, the factory’s large metal door slides open and in walks Dorian and his goons, their guns drawn. “What took you guys so long? I’ve been vamping here for like 20 minutes,” Peggy says. While we’re all kind of heartbroken at Peggy’s betrayal, we must also wonder at what point in the 20 minute vamping did she decide to start leading Stanley on, reeling him in via validation, only to shut him down the moment Dorian walked through the door. Say what you will about Peggy’s treachery, but her backward planning skills are top notch.

“Is that him?” Dorian asks.

“You got the fifty thou?” Peggy says. Dorian tells his longhaired associate to hand over the money. Bewitched by greed, Peggy looks upon her blood money, hypnotized. “Right,” she says, almost distantly, before handing THE MASK over. “When he puts on the mask he turns into that green thingamajig,” she says, and briefly, we’re like excuse me?? Thingamajig?? Hate to break it to you, Peggabeth (what is Peggy short short for?), but that thingamajig has brought both Edge City’s police force and crime world to its knees in the past two days. (We’re jumping on furniture now) Your paper, a supposed paper of repute, even put him on the front page, perhaps even gracing him with his name, THE MASK. (We’re punching holes in the drywall now) Show a little respect, Peggaret!!

Stanley pleads with Peggy, his face a mixture of terror and childlike confusion. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry, Stanley. You really are a great guy,” she says matter-of-factly. “But I just can’t lose my condo. You know how hard it is to find an apartment in this city.” Uh okay, Carrie Bradshaw.

Too stunned by Peggy’s craven greed, Stanley doesn’t fight when Dorian’s two goons grab him by the arms. They drag him toward the giant printing press, which looks more like an industrial age torture device. As large as the building, the machine seems built to intimidate. as if its sole purpose is to frighten and its secondary is to print newspapers.

Peggy chases the men as they pull Stanley up the printing press’s stairs to the machine’s uh observation catwalk? (that’s how big this fucking thing is). “You said you wouldn’t hurt him!” she cries. Jesus Christ, Peggerly! What the fuck is wrong with you? You made a deal with Edge City’s most ruthless, dangerous crime lord and you expected mercy? Are you an idiot?? (We’re back to jumping on furniture and screaming),

Dorian pulls a lever, activating the monstrosity. A red siren casts his face in an evil glow. “I lied,” he says, perfectly. Are those hairs sticking up on our necks? Yes, they are.

We must take a moment right here to acknowledge the actor who plays Dorian, Peter Greene, who, sadly, passed away on December 12, 2025 while I was in the middle of writing this inane and tedious project. I’m not sure if Greene is better remembered as the sadistic cop in Pulp Fiction or Dorian in The Mask, but even if he didn’t make another film (he probably did, but too lazy to check IMDB), these two would cement his status as one scary-ass actor. Mad respect for anyone who can remain terrifying while sanctioning Jim Carrey’s baffoonery.

The printing press lurches to life. Gears swirl, metallic arms undulate, the giant rollers roll menacingly, ready to flatten anything fed into it...which is exactly what Dorian and his thugs intend to do!

They hoist Stanley over the railing of the catwalk and dangle him upside down above the machine’s infinitely rolling mouth. Stanley, on the brink of hysterics, yelp-screams like a feral animal, holding his tie against his chest to avoid the press’s slick, rolling maw.

About a year after I saw The Mask in the theaters, I was sleeping over at my friend Collin Stevenson’s house and we were watching a movie called The Mangler, a movie based on a Stephen King short story about a haunted laundromat. The movie begins with an elderly woman who gets sucked into the steam rollers, and the scene was so frightening to me that I couldn’t watch. I turned my head inadvertently toward a window, where I could still see the image in the reflection, albeit distorted and vague. What that impression had on me, coupled with the sound of the old lady screaming, was infinitely worse than if I had just watched the scene. I still credit that as the most traumatizing film-watching moment of my life.

Oof. Steam roller deaths. Scary shit.

“Tell me,” Dorian says to Stanley, whose life is literally in the hands of the goons dangling him over the flattening rollers. “How does this mask work?”

“You just... put it on!” Stanley yells, almost incredulously. Like, Dorian should’ve known that was a dumb question, right? Maybe it’s just me, but masks seem pretty self-explanatory. But what if it cut back to Dorian, confused, and then cut again to Stanley, who would clarify: “On your face!”

Dorian absorbs Stanley’s answer like it’s profound. He looks down into THE MASK, which shines iridescently, seductively, ready to take on a new host. As he slowly lifts it to his face, a dark cloud forms over his head, quickly blossoming into a wretched phantasmagoric tempest. Peggy and Dorian’s goons watch with increasing terror. “Boss, you better be careful, right?” says the longhair.

Dorian puts THE MASK on. It latches. A wisp of smoke circles downward from the dark cloud, enveloping Dorian like a Lovecraftian tentacle. Even Stanley, still dangling, seems more concerned about this sinister transformation. The storm fully cocoons Dorian. A flash of lightning projects his skeleton against the skin of smoke. A perverse x-ray. The message is clear: Dorian’s atomic makeup is now fundamentally changed. THE MASK has latched onto his core, his id, perhaps his soul. It’s turning Dorian inside out.

DORIAN MASK inhales, breathing in the remaining darkness like a kid sucking up the dregs of a Slurpee. His new, green face is haggard, the hollows exaggerated and witchy. His neck has widened to WWE wrestler size, all veiny and thick. However, why DORIAN MASK gets to keep his hair is beyond me. If we thought Stanley as THE MASK was ghoulish...whoa boy. Who let the dogs out.

“What a rush,” says DORIAN MASK, his eyes flaring red scarily.

“Whoa, boss,” stammers the longhair goon. “You okay?”

“Better than ever, you idiot,” says DORIAN MASK. Damn. Idiot? This dude’s really evil now.

“What do we do with Ipkiss?” the longhair goon asks,

“The police are looking for THE MASK,” DORIAN MASK says. “So we’ll give them THE MASK.” He looks at his crew and begins laughing, like, really hard. Considering that they were just about to flatten Stanley in a printing press, this course of action seems way less evil, but I don’t run a ruthless organized crime ring, so what do I know?

This is also the last time we see Peggy in the movie, and the reason is that she’s dead. We don’t see this, but there’s a deleted scene where DORIAN MASK throws her into the printing press, which then spits out newspapers printed with Peggy’s blood. “REPORTER DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT” reads the headline, complete with a close-up photo of Peggy’s face in her agonizing final moments. As far as deleted scenes go, it’s pretty sweet. Youtube it.

We cut to the exterior of Stanley’s apartment. The longhaired goon’s car is parked in front. In the backseat, Stanley, bound and gagged, writhes in the backseat. Longhair twirls around and sticks a gun in Stanley’s face. “The money better be here, or you can Ipkiss your ass goodbye.” It sort of feels like the entire character of Stanley Ipkiss was created just for this line delivery, and the world is a better place for it.

Inside, two henchmen kick open Stanley’s door, disturbing sweet Milo. It’s been a minute since we’ve seen Milo, and his presence is like a balm for the eyes and soul. If we’re looking for a moral center to this film, there’s no question that it’s Milo. This little dog is simultaneously essential to the film and too good for it (which is saying a lot, because the movie is perfect).

It takes about one second for the henchmen to find the money. It’s all there, right in the closet by the door. The two begin shovelling the cash into garbage bags—both unaware that they’re being spied upon by sweet, sweet Milo, who growls softly from his hiding place behind the window curtains. He then looks down at the car parked in front of the building and sees Stanley inside with tape over his mouth. The two briefly lock eyes, and Milo—perhaps the smartest character in this movie—immediately knows that his owner is in danger. As he pivots between the intruders in his home and Stanley in the car, we know a plan is forming in his dog head. The longhair goon pulls Stanley away from the window, out of Milo’s sight, and the dog whimpers.

Acting fast, Milo sneaks out of the apartment, but not before glancing at the intruders to make sure it’s a clean escape. Very impressive bit of dog acting.

The henchmen exit the building, each carrying a trashbag full of cash. Milo watches from a nearby stairwell. He gets one last look at Stanley as the goons get in the car, and then chases the car as it drives away.

Milo runs his heart out. His little silhouette bounds heroically through the nightmarish streets of Edge City.

Lest we allow the tears of joy to remain in our eyes, let us move on from this heroic scene.

Now we’re with Kellaway and Doyle, exiting the police station. They walk with the determined anger of men who’ve been humiliated.

“I still can’t believe it,” Kellaway says. “Hardened cops dancing in the street, and broadcast all over the 11 o’ clock news!”

“The SWAT team got an offer to open in Vegas,” Doyle adds, morosely. Is he jealous?

“I’m history,” Kellaway says, not even acknowledging Doyle’s Vegas comment. “The captain’s gonna have my badge for breakfast with a little pension on top.” LI’m sure the writer of this script loved that line, praised the gods of the written word when he was blessed with it... and he’s right! Perfect line. No notes.

“C’mon Lieutenant, it’s not all your fault,” Doyle says, consolingly. “Something will turn up.”

“Sure, Stanley Ipkiss is going to fall right into my lap!”

Because we know this comedy trope, we know exactly what will happen next.

Tires screech. Kellaway turns toward the sound. We get a zoom-in on his face as it takes on the exaggerated look of someone acting surprised. In the reverse shot, Stanley Ipkiss—still hogtied and gagged—is being forced out of the moving car speeding at the beleaguered detective.. As the car passes, the gangsters push Stanley out. He falls right on top of Kellaway.

“Get him off! Get him off!” Kellaway yells as Doyle rushes to rescue his master colleague.

Kellaway swiftly rips the tape covering Stanley’s mouth, and Stanley lets out a brief, shrill scream.

“Ipkiss!” Kellaway yells.

“Wait! I can explain everything!” Stanley pleads, yet as he says this, the detective is already rifling through his jacket. Inside, there’s a cheap, green rubber mask which barely shares any resemblance to THE MASK’s perfectly stylized symbiotic appearance. If these cops just did the minimum—i.e. asking Stanley to try on this cheap decoy—then maybe they wouldn’t be the laughing stock of the city. Also, let’s not forget there’s absolutely no curiosity about whose car Stanley just fell out of. And at what point did these gangsters buy this cheap mask? Are these types of products readily available in Edge City? Or did they make it? Alls I’m saying is that if I was tasked to create a decoy mask, that would be a one-day job, at least.

Nonetheless, Kellaway asks: “How do you explain this?”

Stanley hesitates when he easily could’ve said anything I said above. “Umm.”

“Get him up!” Kellaway yells. “I got a cell for you, pal.”

We cut to two guards locking Stanley in jail. What a sad, sad turn of events for him, but it’s kind of a reap-what-you-sow situation. He puts his face against the filthy bars and pouts.

But, hark! A dog barks from the alley outside. Stanley climbs on the bed to look outside his cell window and beholds an angel (if angels were dogs named Milo [and they are])

“Milo,” Stanley says, sulkily. Upon seeing Stanley’s face, Milo barks with joy, does a little spin. “You better forget about me, buddy. Find a new place to live.” At this point, we’re like, fuck you Stanley. You have a phone call. Call literally anyone to rehome this beautiful dog. Fuck you forever. Rot in that cell you fucking monster.

Milo cocks his head. He doesn’t understand. I mean, he probably literally understands, but like us, can’t fathom why his friend would be such a real piece of shit.

“Looks like I’m going to be in here for a long, long time,” Stanley says.

Milo lies down. Stanley moves away from the window. The screen fades to black. We let out a collective sigh and think about loss and friendship. We reach a tissue to take care of what’s happening to our eyes.

I like January. October through December always feels like a heightened reality, where Halloween feeds into elections that feed into the holidays—all culminating in the hysterics of NYE. But January feels like a breather, a return to form. The Christmas decorations go back in the boxes, the families go home, the desperate need to quantify your accomplishments from the previous year dissipates. This is why I don’t usually do resolutions (except the one time 15 years ago to never eat a Hot Pocket again, and I’m proud to say I haven’t), or Dry January. We’ve been working—consciously or not—to project or perform (Halloween spirit, electoral hope/outrage, Holiday cheer, etc.) for the past three months. Why not give yourself a break? Step back from being the main character. Become less of a person, less of a presence, at least for a month. Dissolve into the background.

(Feel free to share or recommend ways of dissolving comments)

Anyway, I was trying to think of a funny post to start the year, but in this era of diminished attention spans and tracking follower counts and ubiquitous information feeds, I’m just thankful that people stick around and read what I have to say. Thank you all very much. I hope you continue to read.

And in keeping up with this spirit of thankfulness, I also wanted to share my favorite social media post from 2025, posted by a girl I went to high school with. Hoping we can all find some inspiration from it.

Despite what the subhead says, 2025 is the first year where I consciously thought: hmm, maybe I’m not as in-tune with pop culture as I thought. Perhaps that’s been the case for a long while and everyone has been too polite to tell me. Whatever the case, I’m getting older and I’m losing my edge. At one point, I felt like an authority on these kinds of things, but now I feel like I don’t watch or listen or read widely enough to be knowledgeable on the State of Art in 2025.

But if you write in some capacity and don’t put out a retrospective, you lose your writing license. Substack even has a secret police they send to your home and force you to opine at gunpoint.

So let’s get it out of the way, shall we?

Favorite books that came out this year

Old Soul - Susan Barker

This is exactly what I’m looking for in horror literature. Susan Barker’s story of a strange, ageless woman who’s been stealing souls throughout history sounds pretty heady (and nerdy) on paper, but Barker’s story is the most elegant, literary and unsettling book I’ve read since Our Share of Night. I wanted to reread this one the moment it ended.

Hey You Assholes - Kyle Seibel

Not only is Seibel’s story collection the funniest book I read this year, it’s also one of the most subversively touching. Siebel’s writing reminds me a little of Tim Robinson’s humor (especially in this year’s incredible The Chair Company): absurd set-ups that nonetheless reveal (and then elevate) the deep humanity underneath, which is sometimes not apparent until the last gut-punch of a sentence.

The Death of Us - Abigail Dean

A story of a husband and wife who were victims of a horrible Golden State Killer-esque home invasion. Years later, their tormenter has been captured and they’re asked to testify at his trial. Dean forgoes a lot of true crime plotbeats to create a lovely, harrowing vision of the ways a single act of violence can fester throughout our lives, as well as the resilience of not becoming defined by it.

Better to Beg - Kirsti MacKenzie

The voice and energy of this book is incredible. Better to Beg follows two musicians—Viv and Hux—in the early 2000s who set off on tour from New York to Los Angeles. As their fame and notoriety grow (thanks to the then-new blog buzz), Viv and Hux are forced to deal with both internal and external pressures of artistic integrity, romance, drugs, bachelorette parties, and shady record promoters. I love a good friends-making-art-together story, and MacKenzie’s feels more authentic than most.

Freelance - Kevin Kearney
It might be reductive to describe Freelance as a story about a possessed/haunted rideshare app, but it’s also such a cool idea for a novel that I’m jealous I didn’t think of it. But rather than Black Mirror’s obnoxious finger-wagging, Kearney treats his techsptopian horror story with intelligence and grace, capturing how something so malevolent not only feels alluring in our current capitalistic timeline, but frighteningly normal.

Favorite book that didn’t come out this year

I bookended (heh, get it) my year of reading with Westerns: Larry McMurtry’s epic Lonesome Dove and Charles Portis’ True Grit. While I enjoyed Lonesome Dove, there were many times I almost lost interest. I get why it’s a favorite, but I think the whole “hooker with a heart of gold” aspect of Lorena—really the only constant woman character in the novel—kinda wore on my nerves.

True Grit, on the other hand, is a goddamned delight through and through. I remember watching the Coen’s adaptation and thinking about the dialogue: ah! how very Coen-esque. But it was all right there in the source material! True Grit’s an incredible adventure—as close as “timeless” as they come—and Donna Tartt’s reading of the audio book is probably the best I’ve ever heard.

I’m keeping the Western theme going in 2026 with Danielewski’s new 1200-page epic Tom’s Crossing. Anybody down for a decade-long book club?

My year in reading

I had a damn good reading year. Honestly, if I had more stamina, I’d write about a lot more books on this list. Feel free to hit me up if you want some recommendations.

Movies

Eddington - Eddington is a sneaky epic. While pop culture is still kinda dancing around the Covid-19 pandemic, Ari Aster tackled it head-on with a Western (I guess I like Westerns now, okay??!) set in mid 2020, where phones and social media take the place of guns and shoot-outs (at least until the actual, breathtaking shootout at the end). An ambitious, fearless, messy, imperfect encapsulation of that year. I wish all movies swung this hard.

The Naked Gun - I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard in the theater.

Weapons - Not as scary as I wanted it to be, but amazingly original. Definitely earned its place on the shelf of modern horror classics.

Bring Her Back - This is a tough movie, but for those who are into extreme horror, there’s so much to admire. The imagery, tension, and subject matter are relentless, but there’s also a strange watchability and dark-dark-dark sense of humor that set it apart from, say, When Evil Lurks or Speak No Evil (the original) or any of those types of movies that make you lose faith in humanity.

One Battle After Another - The patient, instantly-iconic, almost-Hitchockian car chase through the Mojave desert is worth the admission price of this movie alone. But you also have Sean Penn (his mouth movements deserve an Oscar of their own) and Leo DiCaprio playing respective idiots who believe they’re the main characters in a story that’s not written about or for them.

Albums

Mclusky - The World is Still Here and So Are We

Mclusky’s first album in 21 years is their best. The unhinged rage, the sardonic humor, and the abrasiveness is the perfect antidote to a year when we saw so many people and entities bowing to authoritarianism.

Rosalía - LUX

Operatic and beautiful. Also unapologetically weird and ambitious. Of course Bjork appears on one of these songs—it’s the perfect fit.

Home Front - Watch It Die

Home Front is like Cock Sparer mixed with Devo. I’ve never been a huge fan of oi punk, but goddamn it, I can’t stop pumping my fist to these songs. Might even get some steel-toed boots now.

Viagra Boys - viagr aboys

I’ve loved Viagra Boys for a long time, but they’ve always been a singles band for me; their albums never feel quite complete. viagr aboys, on the other hand, feels like a huge evolution, where the band had a cohesive vision and stuck to it. And what a banger of a vision it is.

Lorde - Virgin

Sorry, Lorde is the best pop star right now. I don’t make the rules.

What would your role in the post-apocalypse be?

I’m sure many of us have been on the receiving end of that question, or some variation of it. A nice little conversation starter, an ice-breaker.

When I was writing full-time, I hated this question.

When we imagine post-apocalypse scenarios—whether they be of the environmental, robot, zombie, or Biblical variety—we imagine ourselves stripped down to our barest essentials. Gone are our interests, opinions, and philosophies. We simply become a thing that does a thing. At our most raw, we’re forced to imagine what it is, exactly, that we do. What can we offer in a world that no longer needs us?

Unsurprisingly, this is a popular conversation starter for those in, or have been in, the military. In fact, I’d wager that being prepared for the apocalypse is not an insignificant reason that many people join the military. There are few things more heroic than maintaining order, offering protection, keeping people alive when the oceans rise and robots turn against their creators and zombies run amok.

Since a number of my family have served in the military, I’ve endured this role play a handful of times. When it came to my turn, people—who are well-meaning—were always quick to assign roles to me. Someone needs to document the history, they’d say. Someone needs to write the story of the post-apocalypse.

Being a writer—or any creative, for that matter—is a constant battle, both internal and external, to prove your worth. But let me tell you: nobody’s going to need a fucking bard in the post-apocalypse. When humanity is stripped to its essentials, we offer... what? Our skills are ornamental, decorative.

Which, I think, explains The Artist’s underlying fear of AI.

It’s not just replacing us. It’s exposing us.

****

I’m a teacher now, which I guess adds a little more worth to my post-apocalyptic prospects. If I find myself in charge of leading 30 or so teens through a decimated wasteland, for example, I could do that (I mean, in theory. In reality, I’d rather put my neck in the snapping jaws of a zombie).

As a teacher, it should be no surprise that I encounter AI a lot. And in high school, it’s very easy to spot. A kid who is unable to summarize basic plot elements of a story will suddenly turn in something with words like diegesis and fluctuation and encapsulation. At this stage in their apathy, they’ve just learned of ChatGPT’s awful power, but not yet honed it. I feel for every professor in higher education who has to navigate these robot-generated essays whose prompts are so locked-in and precisely deceptive that we can only lament mental effort used to draft them instead of actual thinking.

Recently, I asked a well-respected writer friend—who’s also a college writing professor—how he uses AI in the classroom.

“I don’t. And I actually think less of people who do,” he said.

Which, fair enough. It’s the duty of The Artist to stake a claim, and being anti-AI is one of the least dumb hills to die on.

I think my response, though, was: oof. Because I use AI a lot.

****

Here are some of the ways that I use AI:

· ChatGPT is very good at translation. I have over four languages spoken in each of my classes, with a large population that speaks Haitian Creole. Haitian Creole is a tough language to translate because it’s not really a written language. The people who get education in Haiti learn to write and speak in French. For this reason, there are fewer sources of Haitian Creole on the internet (at least compared to other languages) that translating bots can pull from. Before, I’d Google Translate materials, and often get strange looks from confused kids. ChatGPT, for whatever reason, is really good at translating Haitian Creole.

· I write my own vocabulary tests, but I will always use ChatGPT to make at least four variations of them—similarly worded questions, scrambled choices, different fill-in-the-blanks. It’s a really easy way to cut down on students copying each other (although, some still find a way to cheat, which actually instills a bit of awe in me. The resourcefulness of teens.)

· I often create scripts for kids to read aloud in order to practice speaking. I ask ChatGPT to give me three levels of difficulty, based on word complexity, vocabulary, length.

(How much water am I using to do this? How deep am I sending the Earth into environmental collapse to meet the needs of immigrant youth? Who knows. Probably less than an influencer. Probably less than a person who’s daily Instagram stories look like - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. )

- I will create a project, put the description into ChatGPT, and ask it to tell me how I can scaffold it for low, medium and high-level learners.

- I will use Gamma to create a slidedeck for specific instructional necessities. For example, when I was having issues with students using phones during class, I had Gamma create an image-heavy slideshow illustrating the drastically negative effects on mental health from phone use over the past 15 years. Not that it really resonated with kids, but at least I had something I could fall back on when I took their phones away.

The list goes on, but I hope it’s clear that AI has been a boon for accessibility and equity in education. There are days when I have to do all the above in a single 90-minute prep period, and to do so without AI would take days, weeks. AI allows me to eke out time and mental stamina to do so. Although I love teaching, I still love to write. In fact, I need to write. For The Artist, it’s not a choice.

Otherwise, just bring on the tidal waves.

****

Defenders of generative AI “art” will tout its accessibility. Okay. But does being a breathing person entitle me to all the skills that humans have developed and honed for thousands of years?

Accessibility, I believe, does not apply to art. Art without exclusivity is not art. When everyone can art, then there is no art; there are only products.

What’s distressing is how well AI is at masking itself as art. This is what The Artist fears. This is the underlying impetus that fuels The Artist’s overarching hatred. We see the number of Spotify streams garnered by AI artists, the popularity of AI actress Tilly Norwood, the best-selling AI-written book “Tech-Splaining for Dummies”, and we panic.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that AI “art” has been so widely accepted and consumed by the populace. People have been writing and consuming shitty books since the beginning of art. Listen to any alt-rock hit from the mid-to-late ‘90s and wonder: how is this not AI? Although I haven’t seen any clips of Tilly Norwood, I can’t imagine that Tom Cruise has any more personality than her.

Which is to say that the banality and predictability of popular culture is the culture we’ve rewarded with our money and attention. The human mind, generally, craves familiarity, so it’s not very difficult for a robot to emulate it. And now, with the ubiquity of handheld distractions, even the most simplified and saccharine formulas pass without much interrogation. The people who can’t tell the difference between art created by humans and machines, I imagine, are the same people who listen to algorithm-created playlists and watch movies with a phone in one hand. They are passive consumers of art, or what they believe to be art, which makes it pretty easy for a robot to slip one past ‘em.

Before AI, though, The Artist could at least take secret, smug satisfaction in knowing their hard work, perseverance, and talent is somehow better than what’s popular. Every Artist, I think, harbors a deep, virtuous sense that what they do is profound and indelible. But on a deeper level, they do it because otherwise they’d die. It’s very easy to tell the difference between a piece of art that was created with an invisible gun to the head, and one that was created for the prospect of earning money. And for better or worse, one of the appeals of creating art is comparing it to work by people you don’t like. All art should be, at least in some small way, an act of revenge.

But when imitation AI “art” becomes popular, the realization is: it’s not that people make bad art or the population has bad taste. It’s just that nobody cares.

What The Artist does will never be essential, and that’s how AI is exposing us. In the post-apocalypse, we’re learning that our books, our music, our performances, our ideas would be better put to use as kindling.

****

Most of us have seen Terminator. We’ve imagined what a world would look like if robots became self-aware. In the most grim post-apocalyptic scenarios, we were given a task. Even if it was a pitiable task like recording history, at least there was some agency and validation in that. But now, as robots actually are taking over, it’s looking like we won’t even have that.

****

A few upcoming events

I’m very excited to be part of PLNU’s Winter Reading event on Wednesday, December 17, 7:00 p.m. at Verbatim. [Staind voice] It’s been awhile [/Staind voice] since I’ve done any literary event, and this one will be a winner. I’ll be reading from the Later Fees Blockbuster zine I put together a few months ago, and I’ll have a few copies for sale. If you didn’t get one in its original run, now’s your chance.

The next night (Thursday, December 18) I’m hosting the last trivia of the year at Nate’s Garden Grill. I’ve been doing trivia for about two years now, and I still find much of joy in it. I love to watch how teams work together and facilitate a space where reliance on Google and tech is not only shunned, but shamed. Anyway, this edition is called the Y2K edition because I didn’t want to write a bunch of Christmas-themed questions. Gen Z is gonna love it.

A week before I fly to Vegas for the Best Friends Forever music festival, I watch Jawbreaker perform at The Observatory in San Diego. Perhaps it’d been foolhardy to shell out exorbitant Observatory prices when the punk legends are set to headline one of the nights at BFF, but Jawbreaker’s one of my all-time favorite bands, and I’ve never been good with money.

At The Observatory, the crowd is older, graying punks. Everyone wears a black band T-shirt. We’re all kind of past our peak. These are my people. I could go up to anyone and start a conversation about how many times we’ve seen Jawbreaker, which would segue to similar bands we’ve seen, where we saw them, when, and with how many people. This would eventually lead to talking about the past, how hard it was to find new music, yet yet how rewarding it was to discover something organically. Those were the days, we’d say, before the world got so fast and algorithmic. We’d agree that things were better back then.

Of course, I don’t talk to anyone at the show. Just sip an expensive Truly and watch Jawbreaker run through a sloppy set. Endearingly sloppy, perhaps, but endearing enough for the $70 ticket price? Not sure.

But to be with my people—these aged millennials—and tacitly lament our current state is catnip to me. And that’s why I love BFF, that feels catered to elder millennials who are/were a little more discerning (i.e. pretentious) than the When We Were Young crowd. Yes, BFF is a punk/hardcore/emo nostalgia trip, but featuring bands that never made it onto shirts sold at Hot Topic.

It’s the festival’s second year. I had so much fun at the inaugural event that I bought heavily discounted tickets to the second year before they even announced the lineup. When they did, I was not disappointed.

Pretty sure everyone knows Jimmy Eat World, but if you don’t recognize any of the other bands, no shame (which I’d say to your face, and then quietly judge you for not having as exquisite music taste as me). But there are a handful of bands on this lineup that I had cemented in my CD visor attachment from 2000 to 2005, aka my pizza delivering days. For years, I navigated icy, treacherous roads of Park City, Utah, delivering lukewarm, mediocre pizzas to rich tourists while spinning these bands in the Discman/cassette adapter. Gen Z will have that experience, and I pity them.

This is all to say, BFF is not for everyone, but for us—the graying, kinda sad, out of shape punks—it’s everything.

Day 1

I wake up at 4 a.m. I have scheduled a Lyft to pick me up at six, but a combination of excitement, nerves, and my cat walking on my force me awake. By the time my driver arrives, the sun hasn’t even risen, but I’m already crashing.

I fly out of San Diego’s new Terminal One, a massive improvement from the donut shaped shithole it used to be. There’s a new restaurant, Luna Grill, which looks healthy-ish, but only because it’s next to the McDonalds kiosks. I order a Greek breakfast wrap, which feels healthy, even though it’s basically just a California burrito with gyro meat. Regardless, I eat it smugly while watching the McDonalds denizens creep forward toward the machines.

I land in Vegas early around 9 a.m. There’s a whole contingent of San Diego friends also coming to the festival, as well as friends Ryen and Steph from Salt Lake City. Ryan and Steph are very experienced at Vegas, and have kindly let me crash in one of their comped rooms at The Fremont Hotel.

However, they had arrived the night before and were up late, so I’ll have hours to kill before they wake up. Instead of fighting the Lyft/Uber mob at the Vegas airport, I decide to take a bus. Las Vegas public transportation system seems similar to San Diego‘s in that it’s made for a city that largely doesn’t give a shit about public transportation and, therefore, is not great. I get a little taste of that when I pay $6 for a two-hour pass. But it only takes 30 minutes to get to where I need to go, and I get to listen to my audiobook while not talking to anybody. I’ll call it a win.

I post up at The D, playing video poker and drinking morning beers, which somehow become morning Long Island iced teas, which is funny because the bar at The D is very long and free gambling drinks are very short. Long Island Iced Teas at the long bar, or Short Island Iced Teas? These are the jokes I’m deciding to make when I see my friends, and also how I know that the drinks are working.

By the time Steph meets me at the bar, I’m three Short Islands in and down $100. Vegas, baby.

Steph and I walk across the street to the Downtown Las Vegas Event Center Las Vegas to watch Superchunk. Thick, dark clouds have formed over the city and it starts to rain. I don’t think I’ve ever been in Vegas when it’s any other climate besides hell.

Superchunk rules and the increasing rain just seems to fuel their enthusiasm. They play “What a Time to Be Alive” which was the first Superchunk song I ever heard. It was 2018, right in the middle of Trump‘s first presidency, and it was such a beacon of positivity during that dark time that I became an instant fan. Even in this darker second term, the song still brings me joy. Art will always be there for us.

The next band is Bear vs. Shark. Again, BFF excels in picking bands that I listened to intensely for a short-but-formative period of my life. Bear vs. Shark is another one of those bands. I saw open up for Coheed and Cambria in 2004 at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz when I was an undergrad UCSC. The energy and the singer’s proclivity to climb on things was like catnip to a guy whose post-teenage music taste was defined by At the Drive-In and, therefore, a big fan of watching singers jump around and climb on things.

Ryen, who worked at the same pizza place as I did—and who also had Bear vs. Shark as a delivering album—stands next to me during the show. We share a few looks, and I know we’re both experiencing a nostalgia overload. It’s at that point that I eat a weed gummy. Everything’s better on weed, including nostalgia.

The time away has not aged the band’s energy. Just like that fateful night that I saw them in Santa Cruz, Bear vs. Shark’s singer still likes to climb on things.

By now the rain is coming down hard. Ryen, Steph and I go back to their hotel room to watch the end of the Mariners game. It’s like the ninth thinning and there’s no end in sight so we drink beers and take a little visit to the Coney Island Dog restaurant downstairs. By now my edible is kicking in, so even though all the items on Coney Island Dog’s menu sound just a little disgusting, they also sound good. There’s a delicate line that savory foods must toe, where the flavor profile nudges that of literal vomit. If a food can ride that edge, I’m down.

I order a mountain of chili fries and something called a Loose Burger, which is not a burger but a Sloppy Joe in a hot dog bun. “Loosie,” Steph calls it, and so do I. I’m so enamored with this insider lingo that I don’t notice Loosies are slathered with mustard and onions, two of the worst things that people put in their mouths. But I’m also in a state where my biggest hatred is just a mere inconvenience, so I run my finger along the top of the Loosie, scraping off the mustard and onions, and fling it back into my bag as if it’s a line of snot. I commence eating.

The rain is pouring down now and the BFF social media account alerts everybody of lightning delays for Cursive and Minus the Bear. They’ve closed the gates to keep people from entering, just in case this is a permanent thing.

I pivot between waiting for the gates to reopen and watching baseball back in Ryan’s hotel room. I figure now is about the best time to begin what I call Dumb Drinking. This is what usually happens when I’m overstimulated, or in big crowds, or just pretty much any time I’m in Vegas, really. Dumb Drinking is when I move away from respectable drinks, and take on whatever novelty drink is thrust in front of me. In this case, the gift shop at The D has a deal where you buy two tall cans and get the third one free. I buy Ryen a regular Pacifico and two hard Mountain Dews for me.

I’m halfway through my second Hard Dew when word gets out that the lightning has stopped and they’re letting people back into the festival. I chug outside the gate and listen to Cursive begin their set. Tonight, they’re playing the album Domestica in full, and I watch people sprint to the entry gates, singing along to the words. I wonder, apart from the monolithic acts like Taylor Swift or Charli XCX, what rock bands can still have this power over their fans? There are not a lot of people that go to BFF—at least comparatively to other big festivals—but the people that do go love these bands. These are the bands that get scratched into your soul.

Can rock bands still be scratched into your soul?

I don’t know Cursive’s Domestica album, but I love it all the same.

I skip the night’s headliner, Minus The Bear, because I don’t know their music and also because I’m a 41 year-old man with a solo hotel stay and I no longer feel an obligation to see every band just because I paid money to. So I tuck myself in, pleasantly stoned, and fall into a deep beautiful sleep.

Day 2

I wake up, feeling alert, refreshed. The city ain’t got nothing on me, except for the fact that I’m $100 poorer than I was yesterday and have nothing to show for it. I text the San Diego crew to see if anybody’s up, and meet up with friends (and AWKSD guest stars) Taylor and Renita at a fancy breakfast spot just a few blocks away from Fremont Street. Taylor tells me that Minus The Bear ruled, but he too did not stay up and party. He’s a newish dad, and like me, he’s a big fan of solo hotel stays.

We get back to the hotel, and Taylor leaves to shower or change into another band shirt or something. Renita and I walk around looking at the table games. We find a $10 minimum Blackjack table empty. “You wanna do this?” I ask. Renita doesn’t gamble, but I peer pressure her into sitting with me. Although it’s a $10 minimum, the dealer makes me put $40 down because I’m playing two hands by showing Renita the ropes. I understand why they’d want me to put down $20, but 40? I don’t get it, but I do anyway.

We have some good hands and within 15 minutes we’ve turned $40 into $140. It takes everything in my willpower to pull myself away, but I ride that adrenaline high for the rest of the day.

I get a text from Steph saying they’re awake and want to go to brunch at Ichabod’s. Two breakfasts in a day? Why not. Pulling out all the stops. Vegas, baby.

Ichabod’s is out in real Vegas, tucked into the corner of an otherwise deserted strip mall that also has a Planned Parenthood and Planet Fitness. The restaurant is dark and dank, with vinyl booths and a sophisticated-degenerate vibe. The chicken-fried steak here has saved me multiple times from hangovers so it feels profane to order anything else. I order a Miller High-Life with my steak and the waitress—who’s been the same waitress I’ve had at Ichabod’s for the past seven years—says “I didn’t know we still served these” when she brings it out.

After brunch, we hit up Lee’s Discount Liquor Store. I buy a 12-pack of citrus-tinged 805s and, of course, two tall cans of Hard Mountain Dew Baja Blast. The total is less than $15. Highly recommend real Vegas.

Back in downtown. There are only a few bands that I want to see today, and one of them is Pretty Girls Make Graves, who aren’t going on until later in the afternoon, so after second breakfast, I hang out in my hotel room, taste-test the Baja Blast (good, not great) and take a nap.

Later, I meet up with Steph for Pretty Girls Make Graves. As with any sort of punk/emo festival, there will always be a dearth of women artists, and BFF really isn’t any better. I think there are maybe four-women fronted bands on the lineup, and Pretty Girls Make Graves is one of them. But when you think about music from the early 2000s, like, how many women were allowed to make it into the spotlight? Regardless of all the sensitivity that these genres loved to espouse, it was (and is still) very much a bro club. Just like how any punk scene will tout inclusivity and anti-racism, but most remain predominantly white.

Steph and I stand in the shaded bar area in the back of the festival. All around me, sleepy concertgoers have staked their claim on the Astroturf, each person looking uncomfortable in too-tight jeans and shirts, including me. We’ve all let the ravages of time destroy our bodies, but we’ve insisted on wearing the same sizes.

I realize the bars at BFF sell Beatboxes, so Dumb Drinking begins. But honestly, at $13 for a 11% drink, it kind of seems like the best deal in the place. So who really is the dumb one here?

The thing about bands like Pretty Girls Make Graves reuniting—and this is true of much of the BFF lineup—is that few of these artists weren’t festival-big in their heyday. Even at their height, they were playing rooms for a couple hundred people. Plus, it’s been 20 years since they performed. Now, suddenly thrust into a bigger spotlight by the sheer power of nostalgia, the seams are big and visible.

During Pretty Girls Make Graves’ set there are long breaks between songs. At one point, a lone voice from the (exceptionally) quiet audience yells, “What are you talking about?” and the whole audience laughs.

After the set, Steph and I invite the San Diego crew—Tony, Taylor, Renita, Darrell, and Aaron—back to my hotel to drink 805s. All of us vibe on the same sort of euphoria that comes from nostalgia, edibles and fruit punch-flavored malt liquor (that last one only applying to me, obvi). We talk about the band T-shirts that we’ve seen—which in itself has become a spectacle that Renita has even made a bingo card activity for.

I’m feeling the two Beatboxes, yet social interaction and excitement pulls me forward. I don’t really know what happens for the next few hours, but suddenly it’s dark and I’m in Ryen’s hotel room, hanging out with him and our mutual friend Clayton. As a trio, we have been doing a Monday night YouTube podcast called Polyester Blend since the beginning of the pandemic, but I’ve only met Clayton in person a handful of times. The first thing I say to him is, “I’m sorry.” I explain the Beatboxes.

Then I’m walking around by myself, looking for something to eat. I find a chicken tender place and order a five-piecer with fries. I take it up to my hotel room and eat that greasy mountain, drunk and pathetic, David Hassellhoff-style. The clock says I have an hour before tonight’s headliner, Jawbreaker, starts. Just enough time for a quick little nap I think

I wake up at 3 a.m., confused for a moment of where I am, and briefly—just briefly—wonder if I can still make it to Jawbreaker.

Based on the text on our San Diego thread, it doesn’t sound like I missed much.

Day 3

I wake up nice and early. There’s a greasy, cardboard basket sitting perfectly square on the pillow next to me. Waking up next to chicken tender leftover trash like it’s a one-night stand: Vegas, baby.

I spend the morning working on homework for a post-graduate education class I’m forced to take for my job. I write about self-reflection (which is good when you work in education, but not when you’re in Vegas) until Evel Pie opens, where I have plans to meet up with Tony, Taylor and Renita for a pizza. On my way there, I see a street busker playing Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” which is incredible because the day before, Steph had been wearing a shirt that read “I don’t mind stealing bread” stylized like the Wonder Bread logo.

I try to take video of the musician, but every time he sees me, he stops playing. I angle for more of a voyeuristic shot, but he sees me again again and waves me away. Ashamed, I drop five dollars into his bucket.

“Sorry, man,” he says. “But this is my first song and my voice isn’t warmed up yet. I didn’t want you sharing videos of me sounding like shit.” I tell him that it sounds beautiful.

Later that afternoon, I head over to the festival to watch These Arms are Snakes. I’ve been stoked to see this band ever since I saw their name on the lineup. Not that I am or ever was a huge fan—I only had their first EP—but they’re a band whose forbiddenness, mystery and maybe infamy (?) has grown in my mind over the past two decades. Was there really a band called These Arms Are Snakes? And they sounded like that?

When they emerge on stage, it feels like, for the first time at BFF, there’s an air of menace. Like they’re bringing something evil to this feel-good fest.

Singer Steve Snere—a rail-thin man with grotesque sideburns—struts around on stage, a sexual/predatory vibe wafting off him. He writhes and rubs himself perversely; he disrobes and rerobes. Compared to all the earnestness that has surrounded us thus far, it feels like a kick in the gut or something. Steph feels differently. “I wish I hadn’t seen that band live,” she says.

I rush back to my room to finish my homework, and I’m doing a sloppy job of it so I can make it back in time for Mates of State. But then I look up Mates of State songs I’d recognize and realize that all along I’ve been confusing them with Matt and Kim. I eat a prime rib dinner at El Cortez with Ryen and Steph instead.

That night, I watch Cursive play The Ugly Organ in its entirety. It’s another album I hold dear to my heart, a rare no-skipper for me. Jenny Lewis comes out and sings back-up on the “The Recluse” and it’s the most lovely moment of the festival.

Next up is Rilo Kiley, a band that I never got into besides a few songs that I learned from seeing friends sing them at karaoke. But you can just tell the moment that Rilo Kiley starts playing that this band is leagues above most bands on the bill in terms of performance and professionalism. Not that I have any issue with watching small club bands play on a big stage, but Rilo Kiley has their shit locked-in. They’re the first band of the whole festival to bring any sort of semblance of romance. I watch couples swoon and slow dance to Jenny Luis‘s love songs. A woman standing next to me is crying.

The final headliner is Jimmy Eat World. I’ve been saying that this is the band at BFF that I’m most excited to see. When I tell people that, I can practically hear what they’re saying: so basic. So pop. Whatever. Jimmy Eat World has written some of the best songs this century, and I will stand by that.

And, oh man, do they deliver. Just like Rilo Kiley, this is a band that has been polished to play on big stages. Their set is tight as hell. And the best part? They play the majority of Clarity—the album before their breakout album Bleed American. This set is for the real Jimmy heads.

Of course, what a delight to hear them end with “The Middle,” which might be the best pop song of our generation.

The show’s over, and we funnel out of the event center. All at once, it feels like life sort of returns to normal. When you’re at a multi-day event, it becomes its own little world, and the feeling of leaving it is strangely untethered.

I meet up with my writer friend Aaron Burch, who is also in Vegas with his partner, Amber, celebrating her birthday. I find them at Circa, at a craps table surrounded by gamblers. We move to Blackjack and quickly lose all our money. I take them to Coney Island Dogs, where they don’t order any food, but I order another mountain of chili cheese fries. At one point, Aaron questions why they’re spending their night just watching me eat slop.

That night, I lay in my hotel room and watch all the concert videos I’ve taken on my phone, reliving the past three days over and over. Even ignoring my terrible angles and zooms, there’s something missing from the videos—the feeling of being close to others, of nostalgia, of community, of an inarticulable “energy”. Or maybe all of the above. Maybe you just had to be there. And maybe that’s the keystone of nostalgia: the feeling of having been there.

For my birthday this year, I finally visited The Old Spaghetti Factory in downtown San Diego (ironically [?] one of the oldest restaurants in downtown). We used to go to the one in Salt Lake City all the time when I was growing up, so the nostalgia runs deep. Anyway, the experience was everything I wanted/remembered, and I don’t need to do it again. Part of growing up is realizing maybe you’ve been an Olive Garden guy all along.

Anyway, the trip inspired this story. It’s called “The Mirror No Longer Works.” Hope you enjoy!

The Mirror No Longer Works

My reflection was facing the wrong way the morning after I killed my neighbor’s dog.

I stumbled into the bathroom to assess just how hungover I looked. If it was bad, I wasn’t going to work. Not like we get sick leave at the warehouse, but I’d rather go unpaid than have to deal with Mr. Kolchak, who said he’d write me up if I showed up one more time “looking insane.” His words.

But instead of my bloodshot eyes, 9 o’clock shadow and 40-watt teeth, I just saw the back of my head. I waved; my reflection waved. I scratched the back of my neck and saw the lines left by my fingernails.

Had I been dosed? I tried to remember everything I had at The Old Spaghetti Factory the night before. I’d never been, but wanted to take Kelleigh somewhere nice. This whole thing with Kelleigh is new. We met on an app. On her profile it said she liked spaghetti, so.

Not going to lie, The Spaghetti Factory is not cheap, but the warehouse pays me well (when I show up). I was about six glasses deep of The Spaghetti Factory house red when our bill came, and when I bid Kelleigh adieu, it sounded like “I do.”

I drove home with double vision. As I turned into my driveway, my car went whump-whump and the neighbor’s dog was now a red star splashed across the concrete.

Can’t say I felt particularly bad. The dog was always barking and it was nice to have some quiet. But it didn’t last long, because another dog that looked exactly like the first dog started biting my heel. I guess I didn’t realize that the neighbor had two of the same type of dog. So I killed that one, too. Just sort of punted it back into the neighbor’s yard. It made sense at the time. If it were me, I’d hate to have a reminder of something I once had.

I watch my reflection walk away from me, turn a corner in my reflected apartment, and disappear forever. It was at that moment that I heard someone pounding on the door. It was the neighbor. I knew because he kept screaming, “You killed my dogs!”

Come to think of it, I never really liked the neighbor either. Always in my business, like Mr. Kolchak. I took one more look in the empty mirror and imagined myself smiling back.

That night, before our spaghettis with Mizithra cheese arrive, Kelleigh asks if I’ve already been drinking wine. “Your teeth are all red.”

“Oh, whoops,” I say, covering my mouth. “I didn’t know. Something’s wrong with my mirror.”

When I was 18, I worked at Blockbuster Video for two months between high school and college. It was an experience that many people will never have, and one that I’ve always wanted to write about. So, last summer, without any novels or large writing projects in queue, I decided it was the perfect time.

It’s also been many years since I designed anything for print, and I wanted to see if my InDesign skills were still up to par. I started writing my essay with the intention of turning it into a physical zine—it seemed like the only appropriate delivery method for a love letter to physical media.

Now it’s finished, and without trying to brag too much, I think I still got it.

I’m very excited to announce Later Fees, a 40-page, full-color collection of three essays from me and two authors I greatly admire: Emily Costa and Kirsti MacKenzie.

Description:

Picture this: you want to watch a movie. You leave the house to go to a building with stained carpets (there were always stains) and hundreds—hundreds!—of movies. You don’t know much about any of them apart from what’s written on the back. Mostly, you go by the cover art and photos (be careful, though, because if you venture too far into the horror section, you might see something that you’ll wish you hadn’t). After an hour of browsing, you finally find one. Maybe you watch it that night, or maybe the whole rigmarole has left you depleted and tired. Before you know it, the movie’s due. Back to the store you go.

And now, for some reason, you miss it.

Love, heartbreak, nostalgia and physical media—Later Fees is a zine of nonfiction essays by authors Emily Costa, Kirsti MacKenzie and Ryan Bradford about working in the dead/dying industry of video rental stores.

I can’t remember when Emily mentioned that she basically grew up in her family-owned rental store, but we’ve been talking about making a zine like this for over a year. I met Kirsti at AWP two years ago and I didn’t know she’d also worked at Blockbuster in the 2000s, but once I found out, I had the vague feeling of “well, that explains why she’s so cool.” Jkjkjk. But seriously, I think there’s an unspoken bond between former Blockbusterers.

(Emily has published two books and co-writes a fantastic LISTLESS newsletter; Kirsti has a novel forthcoming. You should read/pre-order it all).

Click here to order Later Fees! I hope you enjoy. I’m very proud of how it came out and am endlessly thankful for your support. I’m also thankful for Emily and Kirsti for trusting me with their stories.

Look at this piece of shit.

Just fucking look at it.

The worst.

I circle my classroom, eyes fixate on every scrap of paper, candy wrapper, and smashed Taki. Blood boils inside my veins. How am I going to clean it up now? Do I drop to my hands and knees, scouring the ground for bits of debris like a goddamn animal? Not going to lie: the idea of succumbing to those primal behaviors. Just turn feral, my dude.

The vacuum is broken, obviously. It’s my second vacuum over the course of the year. I got it because the custodial staff only has time to do the floors once a week. But have you seen teens? Each one is a literal Charles Schultz Pig Pen—mystery trash just falls off them. To go an entire week would mean to endure an increasingly soiled room closing in on me, one layer of filth at a time.

No, I need my classroom clean. In a profession characterized by chaos, unpredictability and seat-of-the-pants decision-making, it’s a form of control that I crave.

But this goddamn thing.

My first vacuum was also a cordless model, a Shark that I bought from a guy literally selling them out of the back of his van in deep-outskirts National City. “This is top of the line, barely used” he had said, just before informing me that the $40 advertised price on Craigslist had been for another model. “This here’s $70.” I paid it. Vacuum shopping is very low on my things-I-like-to-do list, and even though I haven’t done a lot of haggling with people selling shit out of their vans, I didn’t want to start them.

For months, the Shark was a gem. Imagine me zipping through my classroom between each period, sucking up the chemical, organic and biological debris left by students. If you pictured me with a smile, you would be correct.

But nothing gold can stay, especially vacuums sold out of the back of some guy’s van. The Shark’s decline was rapid. The battery life became so diminished that I could maybe get a few seconds of suck power after each charge, and then it stopped working altogether. The Shark used its final breath to suck up any notions of control, sanity, and cleanliness. With a few weeks left of the school year, I had to get a replacement.

I didn’t want to haggle or endure another shady deal at a stranger’s car. I just wanted something easy. I went to Amazon and shook hands with that devil.

Cut to this motherfucker, the Nadaly cordless stick vacuum.

At first, it worked like a dream. Those final two weeks of school, when kids seem to be especially dirty, I’d whip this baby out at the drop of a hat. It was lightweight, nimble, maneuverable. I could even reach the mystery trash kids cram in the center of a four-desk grouping.

The year ended, and I closed my classroom door for the summer. That’s where the Nadaly remained.

When I returned, I was happy to see my old friend. Have a good summer? I thought, sashaying around the classroom, sucking up any dust that had collected over the break.

The Nadaly lasted one week into the new school year, and then it died. I went to turn it on one afternoon, and the battery just flashed blue. I consulted the online manual which said the blinking lights meant it needed servicing.

Servicing for a $70 vacuum that I only used a few times? Fuck outta here.

I tried returning it to Amazon, but the summer vacation—when the Nadaly sat blissfully dormant—put me over the 90-day return policy. I could imagine Bezos, red-faced and cackling at the top of his throne made from Amazon driver piss bottles. Part of me knew it was karma for patronizing Amazon, but also: has the consumer experience been so enshittified that we’re just expected to eat our losses so long as the means of consuming remain convenient?

In what could only be described as a delusion of righteousness, I called Amazon customer service. The guy on the other end asked for the order number. I heard him click around.

“Looks like you bought this last May. It’s been over three months.”

“Yes, but I only used it for two weeks,” I said, feeling the breathlessness of hysteria creeping in. “Shouldn’t that factor in?”

There was a brief pause before the man spoke again, but when he did, there was a new urgency in his voice. I felt my heart swell. Finally, a level of concern that matched my own feelings.

“Okay, Mr. Bradford, I’m going to guide you through this next process. I want to make this right, but there are many steps. I just sent an email with a link in it. Did you get it?”

A message from no reply appeared in my inbox.

“Yes.”

“Click on the link inside.”

“The link?”

“Click on it, Mr. Bradford.”

His voice had the calm seriousness of an explosives expert relaying instructions for dismantling a bomb. Was that my pulse quickening? I wiped my brow.

“What do you see?” Amazon guy asked.

It looked like a forgotten page from the early 2000s. Had my dude just hacked into the past? I felt good. This guy was giving me the VIP treatment, leading me through back channels on our quest for customer satisfaction. Over the phone, he guided me on what to click. It felt like we were getting deep, with each successive page a little less modern than the previous. I was Inception-ing Amazon.

Finally, we came upon a page that consisted of an empty text box with a blinking cursor. Dark web, I thought.

“Mr. Bradford, what you do here is very important. Please bear with me and type in exactly what I tell you.”

“I’m ready.”

“Okay, type this. ‘I ordered this vacuum three months ago and it has stopped working, and I would like a replacement ASAP please.’”

I typed feverishly into the text box, whisper-repeating the man’s words verbatim.

“Mr. Bradford, go back and add how disappointed you are!” His voice was now a battle cry. “Add ‘this is unacceptable!’”

“Unacceptable!” I repeated.

“Did you add it?!”

I read the message back to him, emphasizing the word unacceptable. There was a brief moment of silence. Then, calmly, the man whispered, “Hit send.” I did.

I was Oppenheimer; I had become death.

“All right, we’ll see how they respond,” the man said, his voice cheery again. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“Uh... no? Wait—”

“Okay, have a good day.” He hung up.

The reality of the situation hit. The man on the other line had not navigated me through a series of secret channels, he had not emboldened me to become some sort of righteous consumer crusader—he’d just walked me through how to leave an angry comment. Literally the only thing all internet-users know how to do.

The Nadaly company wrote back a few hours later, requesting to see pictures of the vacuum. What was there to show? A vacuum that doesn’t work looks the same as one that does. And I knew pursuing this action would just lead to endless email threads, the hassle of shipping it back to the manufacturer, and waiting the allotted weeks for a replacement. It just felt too much. I’m a busy man. Sort of. Plus, I needed to look for a new vacuum. Corded this time. No more messing with batteries for me.

I sent back a photo of me flipping off the Nadaly. The company still haven’t responded.

SCHOOL STUFF

As the above story illustrates, teachers spend a lot of their own money on supplies. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone with ears and eyes—the blight of public education is very real and well-documented.

DonorsChoose is a teacher-centered crowdfunding site, similar to Gofundme. I only learned about it last year and thought I’d give it a try. I currently have two projects there.

1. Shedding a Light on the Immigrant Experience Through Shared Narratives: This year, me and a group of teachers are working to incorporate more storytelling across all disciplines. Since I’m working solely with English learners this semester, my goal is to capture their stories—from their respective journeys to the United States, to their experiences in this new and often-terrifying country. While the final project is yet to be determined (video, podcast, newsletter), I’m asking for smartphone mics that will capture crisp audio and give these kids’ stories the quality they deserve.

2. Help Create a Safe, Comfortable Reading Nook for English Learners - I’m also asking for funds to build a comfortable reading nook in my classroom for English learners to practice. Many of these kids’ lives have been upended, and many are still in survival mode when they get to school. The least I can do is provide a safe, comfortable spot where they can chill and practice English with hi/lo books (high interest/low complexity).

Thank you in advance if you contribute to any of these projects!

Over the summer, I saw a few variations of posts like this:

I get it. The rage. The sense of injustice. The helpless feeling of watching our government dismantle all the empowering social services (public media, public health, education) in favor of funding an American gestapo.

It’s an enraging post, meant to enrage. But at this point, I feel nothing.

First off, comparing the salary of an educator to that of an ICE agent is like saying “would you rather have a small starting income, grade-A health care, and lots of room for advancement? Or a small-dick’d loser who will carry the stench of shame with you your entire life?” Hmmm, hard decision.

Teaching is not an easy profession, but I always feel resentful when pundits, the media, or Very Online people try to lionize it as some impossible or sacrificial feat. There’s a lot that I love about teaching that has nothing to do with valor: I like working with teens more than adults (when teens are assholes, they have a developmental excuse), teaching gets me off the internet, it’s purposeful and mentally stimulating, the wins are tangible, and it connects me to my community. Yes, it does feel great when a kid succeeds, but anyone who thinks teaching is purely a selfless endeavor is mistaken.

This is all to say that if people want me to be mad that I’m not as financially compensated as a Nazi, then they’re wasting their time.

Also, I’m pretty sure that bootlickers don’t get summers off. And Teacher Summer is the best. It’s not the reason I’m a teacher, but it’s also not not the reason. When I was young, I wanted to get a job at REI because I’d heard that if you worked at REI for 15 years, they’d give you a one-month paid sabbatical to do whatever you want. Before I was old enough to join the workforce, I was aware of the value in this kind of freedom.

But Teacher Summer is two months of paid sabbatical, and it happens every year. (Unless you’re a parent, in which case....sorry). As soon as that final bell of the school year rings, my brain begins its process of smoothing. Bye bye pedagogy. See ya critical concepts. By the end of the first weekend, there’s just a shiny, pink, perfect orb in my head, molded that way by booze, weed, and relaxation. Henceforth, my Teacher Summer becomes Dirtbag Summer™.

Alas, with school starting, it’s time to close the book on another Dirtbag Summer. Here are some highlights.

I bought a hacksaw

I know a lot of teachers who do house projects over the summer. Me? Not so much. I sweat enough just reading on the couch. This summer, though, I thought it’d be nice to finally install a drain-stopper in the bathroom sink, which I had broken a few months prior. For just a second, I was like “Eh, I’ll just wait until we remodel the bathroom to get this fixed” regardless that, as of yet, we don’t have plans to remodel the bathroom.

Turns out I didn’t need to wait years or spend thousands of dollars—drain stoppers are pretty cheap. They even have magnetic ones that don’t require any plumbing disassembly. However, the metal lever-thingy in the back that controls the upsy-downsy (plumbers, please hire me) of the stopper was too long to fit in the space below the sink. The directions said that if this is the case, cut it down with a hacksaw.

This is how I became a man who owns a hacksaw. Even though it felt like an annoying sidequest (without fail, every house project I attempt has at least one), the hacksaw worked! Plus it gave me an indelible sense of power while using it. Will I ever hack anything again? Probably not. Forty years of being alive and I’ve never had to use one. But I’m not going to lie: I like the idea of being a hacksaw man. It’s fun to think fondly of my sweet, sweet hacksaw, resting in its forever home out in the shed.

Jaws wine

Jaws is not just the perfect summer movie, it’s the perfect movie, period. I watch it every year around this time, and with the 50th anniversary underway, I became borderline obsessed.

Over the 4th of July weekend, Jessica and I drove out to Pioneertown to meet up with two friends from Utah. Before leaving San Diego, however, I’d learned that Jaws-themed wine was a thing. So like any hot blooded American, I went to the grocery store and bought four bottles of it. I had the choice between red, white, and a blue wine spritzer. I opted for blue, because, well, it seemed the most fun.

Blue was the wrong choice. It tasted like blue. It tasted like the Jaws: The Revenge of wine (fun fact: the poster for Jaws: The Revenge is what popularized the “This time it’s personal” cliche). Everyone else hated it so ended up drinking Jaws wine until my eyes rolled black, lifeless, like a doll’s eyes.

Jaws wine hangover was not great. This time, it really was personal.

PBL at Weiner Hall

For the first two weeks of summer, I was engaged in professional development with a bunch of other teachers, developing plans to incorporate project-based learning (PBL) at our school.

Sure, that’s probably the opposite of dirtbagging, but the workshops were held in the Weiner Hall multipurpose room at De Portola Middle School. Every day, I got to go to Weiner Hall, and that never failed to bring a smile to my face.

Weiner Hall.

Jorts

This summer, I had not one, but two pairs of pants graduate to jorts. I come from the school of thought that jorts are earned rather than bought, and it takes at least two seasons for them to become eligible. Nothing quite feels like summer like drinking a Miller High Life while summer breeze blows the frayed threads of a once-respectable article of clothing softly against your legs. Jorts truly are a fuck you to Big Jeans, and any opportunity to show Big Jeans who’s boss, you gotta take it. I took it twice.

Macguffins

I like going to movies with friends, but I also love going solo. People sometimes give me shit for it, but there’s something about being in loud, dark, public spaces without having to make conversation that just hits right for me (same thing for concerts). When you go to the theater by yourself, you don’t have to worry about friends’ availability, finding seats together, or having to think of something smart to say afterward.

I went to a few movies by myself this summer, often going in the middle of the workday when all you other suckers were tied to your computers.

To level up the indulgence, I always visited the makeshift, pop-up bar in AMC theaters: Macguffins. I fucking love Macguffins. I have dreams of becoming a regular. Imagine rolling up to AMC Mission Valley on a Friday night, plopping down at the Macguffins booze kiosk and chugging $16 double Jack & Cokes while making chitchat with the 21-year-old who’s the de facto bartender only because they’re old enough.

When I showed up to a 11:00 a.m. showing of Eddington on a Tuesday and ordered a $16 double whiskey-coke, there was no look of pity from the bartender—she just said “hell yeah.” Big dirtbag energy (BDE™) right there.

Teacher Leadership Academy

In mid-July, I attended the Teacher Leadership Academy on the CSU Fullerton campus. The conference was aimed at supporting and providing strategies for early-career teachers. It was incredible and inspirational, and I met tons of nice teachers. Plus they paid for my hotel, and oh boy, do I love 2-3 nights of solo hotel livin’.

But the hotel bar was empty every night. Unusual! What kind of teacher conference was this?? I expected a lobby full of proper dirtbags.

On the final night, I met up with some LA friends—also teachers, but not attending the conference—and we found a divey karaoke/biker bar. By the end of the evening, I was at the level where belting out Red Hot Chili Peppers “Suck My Kiss” to a room of rough-looking biker boys.

The morning after, I lay in my free hotel room, wishing for death. How was I supposed to confront a room of kind, emotionally-intelligent people with my head pounding and eyes red with shame? But somehow, I called upon the god of dirtbag summer, did a little maintenance puke, and rallied. I made it to the final sessions like a man half my age. Still got it, I thought, sitting in the back, not talking to anyone and refraining from sudden movements.

Primus concert

Primus is a dirtbag band, full stop. As we discussed in the last “Is This Band Good?,” Primus appeals to a dirty, nerdy, dude-heavy population that seems stuck in the ‘90s (perhaps the most dirtbag decade, imo). I was on the fence about paying money to see them, but I saw a recent write-up that they had started playing songs from their much-maligned but my favorite Brown Album, so I bit the bullet.

There were a lot more women (and children, teens!) at the Primus show than I was expecting, but the line for the men’s room was endless. They also played “My Name is Mud” which is very much a dirtbag anthem.

Possum Party tattoo

I don’t put a lot of thought into my tattoos. I’m not willy-nilly about it, but I’m past the point of imbuing profound significance in the designs put into skin. It’s usually just a matter of having a cool or funny idea and then getting it before I can chicken out or second-guess.

This summer, the phrase possum party jumped into my head, and I immediately knew that it would be the official slogan/mascot of Dirtbag Summer, not to mention my new personality. And although we’re closing the book on this Dirtbag Summer, these possums will always be a reminder of what I can look forward to every June.

When did things get so bad? It’s a question that many of us ask ourselves daily as we scroll through images of genocides, government terrorism, and encroaching fascism. Was it the election of Obama, an event so triggering for racists (i.e. Americans) that it turned the dial of progress back 50 years? Was it 9/11 and the ensuing nationalism that pushed us toward unquestioning fealty to the state? Was it Reagan, who set about killing the middle class by creating wealth division so pronounced and ubiquitous that white men still believe that success is akin to a birthright?

(The answer, of course, is always Reagan).

All those are true. But in the middle of all that, there’s an event that many have forgotten, and it’s no less damning.

On March 25, 1995, Pizza Hut unveiled an advancement in pizza technology that changed our cultural fabric: stuffed crust pizza. By rolling the outer edge of the pizza dough over a ring of cheese before baking it, they had succeeded in solving the eternal question of: where can we put more cheese? Pizza Hut proved scientists and skeptics wrong. They had found it. Stuffed crust was Pizza Hut’s Lost City of Atlantis.

To introduce the world to this breakthrough, they needed a bold campaign fitting for such a momentous event.

They got Donald and Invana Trump.

Three years prior, Donald and Invana had gone through a very public and acrimonious divorce, which, unsurprisingly, was on the grounds of “cruel and inhumane” treatment by Donald. But rich people love attention, so like fame-hungry moths to a gauche and vulgar flame, the two agreed to appear in Pizza Hut’s first stuffed-crust commercial.

The commercial, with its softcore lighting and soap opera acting, shows the two about to engage in some forbidden tryst, acting in “the wrong way”. And just as we think they’re talking about getting back together, we find out they’re going to eat pizza crust-first. Very funny. Good stuff(ed).

This commercial feels like a premonition. Ignoring the rules, bragging about bad behavior, shirking integrity in favor of attention and money are signature moves of the Trump we know, and it was all right there in the commercial. Thirty years ago, he ate pizza “the wrong way”, and now that’s how he runs the country. The cheese-pull might as well be the threads of humanity, stretched thin.

It’s been nearly three decades since I last had Pizza Hut stuffed crust, but what I remember is that it’s gross as fuck. Just a lukewarm tube of rubbery cheese. Which is also a fitting description of a man we’ve elected twice to the highest position in the world.

In the video, California Assemblymember Carl DeMaio looks very mad.

He waves a stack of paper in the air—presumably a printed out copy of House Resolution 43 (HR-43 if you’re nasty). He holds it high, like a man from the ‘50s brandishing a comic book while espousing its evil effects on youth.

“This resolution doesn’t affirm, value or respect the LGBT community... what this resolution does is endorse very controversial and extremist policy positions, which is very—” he pauses for effect here. “Unique.”

CA Assembly Speaker Josh Lowenthal cuts in. “Mr. DeMaio, just a moment please,” he says, and asks the clerk to hold DeMaio’s speaking time. “Mr. Juan Carrillo, I believe it is your birthday today. Members, will you join me in wishing Mr. Carrillo a very happy birthday.”

There’s an uproar in the audience. People cheer. The camera cuts to Assemblymember Carrillo wearing novelty glasses.

“Wishing you very many happy returns, Mr. Carillo. Enjoy your day,” Lowenthal says. “Mr. DeMaio, you may continue.”

It’s an amazing sequence. Lowenthal’s deadpan delivery, his thousand-yard dead-eye stare before ceding time back to DeMaio, Carrillo’s fucking birthday glasses—just a masterclass in comedy.

“So where we left off...” DeMaio jumps back in, red in the face, eyebrows arched like a comic book villain.

For those of us who aren’t familiar with house bills, legislations, or resolutions, it’s a little confusing as to why DeMaio’s so mad. What could be so offensive in those papers in his hand?

But then he gets to it: “...Extremist views in this resolution, which includes ending girls sports, the integrity of girls sports...”

Ah, there it is. “Girls sports.” The transphobe’s dog whistle. A Very Important Issue for thousands who’ve likely never been to a girls or women’s sports game, and a nice little anti-trans scapegoat for people who’re too cowardly to admit it explicitly.

If it’s not clear, DeMaio sucks. Always has. He’s been a thorn in the side of San Diego politics for decades. He’s a grifter without shame. I could go on. How he managed to become elected to the state assembly after a decade of political (and hilarious) failures is indicative of how stupid our timeline is.

It also should be noted that the resolution he’s yelling about is not a law, more of a statement of decorum regarding how the CA State Assembly conducts business. You can read the resolution here, which is only extreme or controversial unless you think respecting trans people is extreme. (Also, DeMaio continuously cites the “LGBT community” for agreeing with him, apparently forgetting what the T stands for). The fact that DeMaio spends so much energy and vitriol on this is a testament to his inane priorities. The dude’s only been in the assembly for six months and you can already feel the sheer exhaustion from his colleagues.

But back to the clip.

Now, DeMaio’s getting fired up. He’s slashing the air. He shows everyone the papers again.

“Mr. DeMaio,” Lowenthal interjects again. “Just a moment.”

“We’re gonna have another birth—?”

“Excuse me,” Lowenthal says, shutting him up. “Members, you’ll have to forgive me, but on Thursday last week, I forgot it was Damon Connolly’s birthday.”

Just incredible. SNL couldn’t have done it better.

And then a few minutes later, they do it again. Three interruptions during DeMaio’s speech, all for birthdays.

This video, my friends, has been giving me life for many days. It’s a reminder that beauty can still exist in the world. Sure, this is about the extent that Democrats will go to #resist the encroaching fascism (whoops, almost forgot about wearing pink), but if we know anything about Republicans, it’s this kind of shit that gets to them. In fact, I wouldn’t have found this clip if it weren’t for DeMaio’s Reform California emailing me about it, accusing the assembly of “bullying” DeMaio.

Imagine a man whose main talking point is ripping joy away from trans kids accusing anyone of bullying.

At the risk of reading too much into it, I also think this clip shows the power of joy in the face of oppression. Interrupting an anti-trans rant to celebrate birthdays is a powerful display. Part of what makes our times so miserable is the rampant catastrophizing that bombards us every day. “The world is on fire...” might as well be an English language prefix now. And I’m not saying our current timeline is not bad—it is, indeed, quite bad—but concern and joy don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Joy should not feel like a privilege.

A few weeks ago, I attended the No King’s rally with a sign that read “This is nothing compared to the party we’ll have when you die.” The day after, so I decided to share the pic on Reddit. It quickly went to the top of r/sandiegan and then to the front page of Reddit. It’s now been seen by more than 3.5 million people.

The reason I think it spread so far is that it’s a message of joy. Or, at least that’s what I intended. Once MAGA found it, they accused me of wishing death upon the president (“the tolerant left” was an oft-repeated comment)—a predictable and intellectually dishonest interpretation from less-than-critical thinkers. The point is: The president will die, as we all do. And when that happens, many will rejoice. Many many many. I mean, in the history of the United States, has there ever been a rally the size of No Kings against a single human being? Has there been anyone in history that has so thoroughly sucked the joy from everyday living like him?

So we find hope and joy where we can. Or in the words of the dead-eyed, fed-up-with-this-shit Assembly Speaker: “Enjoy your day.”

It costs $20 to park at the San Diego County Fair, $25 if you go on the weekends. There’s a free lot seven miles away at an affluent high school that has deigned to let commoners park there, and a fleet of school buses that shuttle to and fro from the fairgrounds.

That’s why we’re on a school bus.

Our driver is listening to Sunny 98.1 at full volume. It’s a wonder there are even DJs on this station since it plays the same 10 bands. Just a repeating cycle of Prince, Bon Jovi, Bananarama, Toto, Huey Lewis and the like. Feel-good music for a feel-good city.

The station breaks for commercial and an ad of US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem aka ICE Barbie comes on, telling undocumented immigrants to “Leave now. If you don't, we will find you and we will deport you.”

The bus driver, a tough-looking Latina woman with tattooed eyebrows, makes no motion to turn it down or change the channel. Good chance that she’s not even paying attention, seems stressed about something that’s going on over the walkie-talkie. So all of us—me, my wife Jessica, and about 10 other passengers—just sit there, stewing in Lady Goebbels’ propaganda.

In hindsight, this should’ve been an omen. Foreshadowing, at least. Something about the sinister elements that lurk under the veneer of good times.

I’ve also been sick with a hacking cough since school let out—a goodbye present from one of my students, no doubt. But by god, I will get to the fair. Encroaching fascism and a collapsed immune system cannot keep me away.

I love the county fair. I think? The blinking lights, the shit food, the art, the carnies, the trashiness, the kitsch. It's a mix of everything that’s cool and untouched by the creeping technocracy that has soiled every other aspect of our daily lives.

Tonight is also opening night, which is exciting enough, but we’re in for an extra special treat: performances from Collective Soul and Live. How the fair managed to score two of the most mediocre titans of post-grunge alternative radio is beyond me, but I’m here for it. I owned at least two CDs by both bands, which is way more than anyone with discernible taste should own. Some people move on from the dumb shit they liked in the past. Not me. The best kind of nostalgia comes with a little bit of self-flagellation.

Or, maybe I just fucking love Collective Soul and Live? Maybe I just mask my enthusiasm with an air of irony? Maybe I just love spending money on dumb things? Who knows. It’s summer, and I don’t have to go back to work until August, so introspection is minimal.

I’ve been tracking the ticket prices ever since the concert was announced. The hitch with these fair concerts is that they’re [makes the “lots of money” gesture with thumb and forefinger]. You’re looking to spend at least $80 general admission. Who in this day and age are paying that much for Collective Soul and Live? Nonetheless, I’ve set an alert just in case ticket prices drop. I’ve set a threshold of $40 which still feels too much to pay, but looking into the abyss has never been cheap.

On the day of, the price falls to $31, and I buy tickets so fast that I salivate.

Our bus pulls into the fairgrounds, and even though it added an extra 45 minutes, I can’t help but feel smug about passing all the suckers who have paid the park. No matter how much money the fair pulls out of me, you can’t put a price on moral superiority.

The moment we get through security, I chew an edible, which helps me forget about my sickness, as well as numbs me against the fleecing that’s bound to take place. Also have you ever had a jumbo corn dog while you’re, like, high? It’s akin to what God must’ve felt like when He invented jumbo corn dogs.

Our first stop is a “tiki speakeasy” that’s “hidden” but also very well-advertised throughout the fairgrounds. After an unnecessarily complicated system of getting a wristband and then saying a magic phrase, we’re on a rooftop that’s decorated like an under-the-sea-themed prom. I order a “tiki old-fashioned” that costs $25 and try not to think of how many hours of minimum wage someone would have to work to buy one. Despite their lure of “handcrafted cocktails” it tastes like someone just mixed a lot of bourbon and a little bit of juice together. Not that I’m complaining. It tastes like cough syrup and has the same medical effect, and for that I’m ever so thankful.

After spending $50 on two drinks, we make our way to the concert, which is just a big stage set up on the horse racing track. Our seats are on the third level, normally used by the cheapest gambling degenerates hoping for a lucky break, and honestly, there really isn’t too much difference between them and us. There’s something absolutely deflating about seeing a stage set up on a horse track. And when Collective Soul comes out, they play like they are playing on a horse track.

It’s at that moment that I realize maybe I actually don’t like the fair.

They play the hits, and they play well, but seeing old men go through the motions doesn’t inspire much, not even trainwreck curiosity. I struggle to find nostalgic satisfaction. If they were excellent, that would be one thing, or if they were truly awful, that would be even better. But to see them perform adequately in broad sunlight on top of what’s essentially a horse graveyard is just sad. The singer wears a sparkling suit, looking like this gig is just a pit stop on their way to an Indian Casino residency.

When they play their hit “Shine”, only a measly few people in the audience sing “yeah”. More like dun nu nu-nu nu nu-nu nu-nu nu nu nope, amirite?

Halfway through, they do a little medley of Aerosmith’s “Living on the edge.” What are we even doing here, I think. Not just the fair but in life. Months ago, I had seen the band Refused bust out a Slayer medley in the middle of a song and it fucking ruled, and this is just the opposite of that in every way.

At this point, I buy two more beers and happily tip on the $40 total. The weed gummies must be kicking in. We leave before Collective Soul ends to scour our food options I find my jumbo corn dog. Only $13. Compared to everything else, it feels like a deal. There are hardly any vegan options at the fair, so she buys a potato taco that’s just lettuce and unseasoned potatoes O’Brien stuffed in a dripping fried taco shell. It’s like if aliens landed on earth and were tasked with making a potato taco, going off knowledge of “potatoes” and “tacos” they’ve seen in textbooks.

She doesn’t have to tell me that it’s the saddest thing she’s ever eaten; I can just tell.

A 16-year-old girl—employee or volunteer, I don’t know—yells at us for accidentally taking our beers outside of the beer zone. We spend $20 on a brick of curly fries and make it through about half before feeling slightly ill. Bad vibes all around.

We head back to the stage just in time to see Live start their set. At least the sun has gone down, which makes it a little less pathetic, but my coughing has become ragged and nasty, and all I want is to go home. Plus, singer Ed Kowalczyk no longer has his gross braided rat-tail (as made famous in the “I Alone” video), and that was part of the draw for me, and because the edible is still going strong, I spend a lot of Live’s set imagining a grotesque scenario where he could instantly grow a new one via a painful process of shitting it out of the back of his skull.

I take a video of the band playing “Lakini’s Juice” off their album Secret Samadhi (which was one of their albums I owned, and I knew even at 13 that it was an incredibly dumb album). I post the video and a friend responds “We don’t need Tool, we have Tool at home.”

We leave before the band “Lightning Crashes,” so I don’t get to hear the lyric “her placenta falls to the floor,” but sometimes you gotta cut your losses. On the way out, we see a guy in a trucker hat that says “Shaved Head, No Shirt, Rat Tail” which might be better than seeing Live play their most famous song.

The total price tag of our little fair visit comes out to over $200. I don’t even have kids. How do families afford to go to the fair? How can families afford to see washed-up bands as a lark? Is that why no one’s happy anymore—because even gags are unaffordable? Or does the fair just suck?

The bus ride back to the car is quiet. Thankfully, there are no more Kristi Noem ads, but I remember her words—“If you leave now, you may have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American Dream”—I can’t help but feel the SD County Fair is emblematic or even a microcosm of this American Dream she speaks of, and all the dumb and bad things that hide beneath it.

(Read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4)

The next morning, Stanley lay sprawled out on his bed. THE MASK rests on the pillow next to him. Been a big night for Stanley/THE MASK, and he deserves this little beddie-bye.

But his respite is short lived, for Lt. Kellaway bangs relentlessly on his door. “Ipkiss, I know you’re in there!” he shouts from the hallway. Not even poor, sweet Milo can sleep through this disruption.

Stanley groggily rises, but the reality of the situation quickly sinks in: there’s a policeman at the door, and the incriminating MASK is laying right next to him. “Oh my God,” Ipkiss says. He scrambles out of bed, looking for a hiding place for his cursed object. He opens a closet door and a wave of cash flows out. Egads! How THE MASK was able to fit so much money in there is yet another example of his terrible power.

Kellaway’s knocking continues as Stanley tries to sweep the money back into the closet, but with every effort, more just falls out. A Sisyphean task. Stanley tries to use Milo’s frisbee as a shovel, but Milo latches onto it, rightfully forbidding Stanley to use it for his illegal quandary. Stanley uses his entire body as a plow, ramming face-first into the pile of cash.

“Let’s go, Ipkiss!” Kellaway yells.

Stanley opens the door. All traces of this crime have magically disappeared. The cash, gone! That sonofabitch, he did it, we’re thinking.

Kellaway pushes into Stanley’s apartment and proceeds to interrogate him. “Where were you last night?” He gauges Stanley’s knowledge of “this mask character” and draws connections between the robbery at Stanley’s bank and the presence of Stanley’s nautical pajamas at the Coco Bongo.

All the while, Milo is sniffing, scratching, barking at the closet door where Stanley has all the cash hidden. We can’t fault Milo for trying to do the right thing. Stanley pulls the dog away and makes up some idiotic excuse about his pajamas being stolen.

“What’s a city coming to when a man’s pajama drawer is no longer safe?” Stanley asks. And, uh, that’s the end of the scene?

Then we’re at the police station, and Kellaway and his crony, Doyle—who’s been pretty much relegated to background action until this part—watch security footage of the bank robbery. On the tiny, black and white screen, THE MASK zips around the bank, throwing money in the air, mugging for the camera, having a blast. THE MASK moves with impossible speed, yet the cops watch with dumb acceptance. Perhaps this is yet another commentary on the nightmarish unorthodoxy of Edge City: a police force so jaded by the Lovecraftian horrors of their city that they can only compartmentalize to keep their sanity.

“I don’t know, boss. That’s one hell of a rubber mask,” Doyle says.

Kellaway, having returned from Stanley’s apartment (how that interaction ended, we’ll never know), wants Doyle to run some of the fingerprints found at the crime scene to see if they match Stanley’s.

“Ah, you figure it’s an inside job, huh?” asks Doyle, smiling, very much relishing this idea.

“All I need is a couple of prints to lock this whack job up til doomsday.”

We cut to Dorian, who opens a briefcase full of cash and displays it to his crew. “Fifty grand,” he says. “Fifty grand for the man who finds that green-faced son of a bitch before the cops do.” Good narrative structure: Two opposing forces are now after THE MASK. “A classic conceit of good vs. evil fighting toward the same goal,” I’d say if we were watching together, and then trail off because I notice you looking at your watch.

Dorian continues: “I want you to get the word out to every street hustler, to every lowlife in this town. To every criminal, and villain, to every ne’er-do-well, to every knucklehead, to every thug, baddie bad bad, to every shady character, to every stranger with candy, to every Hitler, to every Oscar the Grouch, to every Magneto...”

“We get it boss,” someone says.

This doesn’t happen, but you get the idea.

“I want him here tomorrow,” Dorian says. “Alive.” And then a second later, he says “What are you waiting for? Let’s go!” His goons stand up, obedient. Nobody really seems stoked about the task nor the reward money. One guy takes a shot of booze before standing up. Free booze at the gang meetings, hell yeah.

The goons leave and it’s just Dorian and Cameron Diaz left in the room. “You’re losing it, Dorian,” Cameron Diaz says.

“I’m not losing anything,” he says, moving around his desk so they’re face-to face. “Except maybe some extra baggage around here.” He gestures to her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know you weren’t putting up much of a fight with that freakshow last night when he tried to kiss you.” Dorian, we can conclude, is butthurt.

“Did it look like I had much of a choice?” Cameron Diaz snaps back, and we all know she didn’t because THE MASK is not big on consent. Cameron Diaz defiantly continues to read her newspaper (props to Edge City for keeping print media alive), but then Dorian, humiliated, tears it out of her hands.

“Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. Who knows, right?” Dorian says with kind of a chuckle. “But I’ll tell you one thing. It’s going to be payback for anyone that crosses me.” And the camera holds on Cameron Diaz’s very sad face.

However, the camera doesn’t let us stew in Dorien’s threat, because—hark!—there’s still a movie to get through.

We cut to Edge City Bank, a scene of chaos. The place is crawling with cops, investigating the previous night’s robbery. Stanley has to shove his way through a crowd of reporters to even get through the door. And man oh man, does he not look great: sleep-deprived, unhinged, cartoonishly wolf-like. He scours the scene with paranoid, coked-out eyes.

“Ipkiss!” his boss, Mr. Dickey, yells. “We have a crisis on our hands and you stroll in an hour late? If I have to put up with your slovenly behavior—”

Before the boss can finish his reprimand, Stanley snaps. “BACK OFF, MONKEY BOY!” He screams. “Before I tell your daddy that you’re running this place like it’s your own personal piggy bank. Or maybe I should call the IRS and see if we can arrange a little vacation for you at club FED!” When I was younger, I thought Stanley said “Club FAT!” which seemed unnecessarily mean because Mr. Dickey is not that large of a man.

This truth is a painful swallow for Mr. Dickey. For once in his life, Stanley has the advantage. Mr. Dickey, frankly, is cooked. “That’ll be all, Ipkiss,” he says before retreating out of the scene.

As soon as he’s gone, Stanley withers. Charlie, Stanley’s airhead friend and colleague, appears out of nowhere, ready to kiss Stanley’s ass.

“That was genius,” Charlie says. “What side of whose bed did you wake up on?” Just a joke, perhaps, but we all know that Charlie is the person who would 100% love to hear about Stanley’s sexual exploits. He’s got that dawg in him.

“I haven’t been myself lately,” Stanley responds.

“Well you don’t look real fabulous, Stan,” Charlie says.

“Really? Do I look bad?”

“Not to worry,” Charlie says, reaching into his jacket and pulling out two pieces of paper. “This will put the color back in your cheeks, my friend. Two tickets to the charity ball at the Coco Bongo this Saturday night.” Charlie gives the tickets a little validating flick. “Anybody who’s anybody will be there. Want to be my date?” Another fucking night at the Coco Bongo? Jesus, why doesn’t Charlie just marry that club already?

Stanley briefly considers Charlie’s offer, but Cameron Diaz walks into the bank. Compared to the last time she entered the bank, there’s no objectification. It seems that he is finally able to see her as human. Perhaps the kiss Cameron Diaz shared with THE MASK last night has somehow seeped into Stanley’s psyche, providing him the motivation to counterbalance THE MASK’s unhinged id.

“What are you doing here?” Stanley asks, seriously concerned. A little too concerned if you ask me (you didn’t).

“I just wanted to thank you,” Cameron Diaz says. “But I’m not sure if I’m going to have much to open an account with you anymore.” Imagine doing this now—showing any consideration to a financial institution whose sole purpose is to take money from you. Of all the crazy shit in the movie, this might be the craziest.

Cameron Diaz starts to explain more, but Stanley pulls her aside so they can talk privately about her personal affairs. Let me remind you that Stanley and Cameron Diaz only really had two interactions before this—she does not know he is THE MASK—so the amount of intimacy going on during this conversation is wild.

We cut to somewhere else in the bank, somewhere quieter for this wildly inappropriate conversation between banker and client to continue.

“You didn’t come here just to see me,” Stanley says, in his hangdog, woe-is-me way. Straight out of the incel handbook. “It’s okay. Tell me.”

“The guy they say robbed this place—” Cameron Diaz says.

“THE MASK,” Stanley responds, thereby giving his alter ego the titular moniker. How long had he been planning on dropping this little tidbit into conversation?

“I think he was at the club last night,” Cameron Diaz says, clearly lustful.

“Really? They say he’s pretty... weird looking,” Stanley says, testing the waters, prodding Cameron Diaz, gauging her reaction.

“Yeah, but...” Cameron Diaz says, dreamily. “You oughta see him dance.” The way she says this, you’d think she was remembering a former lover. What would be real funny at this moment is if there was a quick cut to THE MASK skanking.

“So did anyone find out who he is?” Cameron Diaz continues.

“Why, are you interested?” Stanley smirks.

“Just curious, I guess.” She looks down. “Well, I guess I better get going. Thanks for everything, Stanley.” Uhhh what’s she thanking him for? Opening a bank account for her? Ogling her outside the Coco Bongo?

Cameron Diaz stands up and begins walking away. Stanley, his eyes glazed over, unblinking like a man suddenly possessed by evil, says, “You’d like to see him again, wouldn’t you?”

Cameron Diaz hesitates. No, we’re thinking. It’s a precipice, a brief moment that nonetheless damns her soul in a Faustian exchange. All she has to do is keep walking. Run, hide.

But she doesn’t.

She turns back toward Stanley. “I um... wouldn’t mind.”

“I know him, you know,” Stanley says, his eyes paradoxically wild and dead, as if the great eldritch powers of THE MASK have seeped into his very being.

“You do?”

“We’re old college buddies, him and me,” Stanley says through a demonic smirk. Sidenote: what college courses do you think THE MASK would take? “It’s funny you should mention the way he dances because...” Stanley slides over to Cameron Diaz. “I taught him a couple dance moves myself.”

Oh really, which ones, Stanley? The one where you twist your fucking legs up like spaghetti? Or twirl a woman around you so fast that her heels start literal fires? Or maybe it was that non-consensual kiss? Do tell, king.

But Cameron Diaz, bewitched, is putty in Stanley’s hands. “Do you think you could have him meet me tonight?”

“I might be able to work something out.”

“How about landfill park?”

“Okay. Sunset.”

“Perfect,” Cameron Diaz says. The chemistry between these two during this rapid exchange is fire. “Anyone else feel hot all of the sudden?” I’d say to you, wiping the sweat from my middle-aged brow, pulling the shirt at my soaked armpits.

“Thanks Stanley. You’re a really nice guy,” Cameron Diaz says, and then gives him a cute little kiss on the cheek. She walks out of frame, and Stanley remains for a beat, eyes closed, breathing heavily. Given the sexual tension leading to this, we must assume that Stanley has just come.

Cut to a new scene. Black fills the screen except for two almond-shaped windows. There’s a man moving between the holes, looking through them, looking at us, the viewers. It quickly becomes obvious that we’re experiencing the POV of THE MASK, a shot reminiscent of John Carpenter’s Halloween where young Michael Meyers dons a mask to kill his sister.

We quickly recognize the man as Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money. Savvy viewers will remember him from earlier in the movie, a scene in which he appeared on a talk show. Conveniently, that brief scene established him as an expert on masks. Somehow, Stanley has booked a meeting with Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money, who is now assessing the cursed artifact.

“This is an interesting piece, Mr. Ipkiss,” Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money says in his signature droll monotone. He moves the mask away from the camera and we see that his office is full of wooden masks hanging on the wall. Pretty good set design, if you ask me (again, you didn’t). “Looks like fourth or fifth century Scandinavian. Possibly a presentation of one of the Norse night gods. Maybe Loki.”

We get a view of Stanley, full-on sprawled out on Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money’s couch. His body language is that of a man who is both exhausted and impatient. Why he’d come to Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money’s office just to sit like an asshole? Who can say.

Stanley lifts his head at the mention of the night god. “Loki?” he says, befuddled. “Who’s Loki?”

“The Norse god of mischief,” says Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money. “Supposedly, he caused so much trouble that they banished him from Valhalla forever.”

Stanley leans forward. “Then he could’ve banished him into that mask,” he says.

“I’m talking about mythology,” says Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money. “This is a piece of wood.” He taps THE MASK gently, punctuating his nerdy mansplaining.

Stanley stands, grabbing Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money’s book from off the coffee table in front of him. He practically lunges at Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money, book-first. “But your book,” Stanley says at the end of his rope.

“My book is about masks as metaphor, Mr. Ipkiss” says Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money, which like an odd thing to say considering the amount of fucking literal masks on the guy’s wall. “A metaphor. Not to be taken literally. You’re suffering from mild delusion.”

Stanley nods at this insult. He deliberates for a moment before coming to some awful conclusion. “All right. I’m going to prove it to you.” He backs away from Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money. “But I am not responsible for the consequences. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, Mr. Expert.”

Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money, in classic Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money-mode, says dryly: “You don’t scare me, Mr. Ipkiss. Go right ahead.”

Let’s pause here to just peruse Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money’s wiki. Did you know he was a speechwriter for the second-most pathetic president, Richard Nixon? Did you know that he is deeply religious, right wing, and anti-choice? Did you know that he really misses the original Aunt Jemima mascot, which, for some reason, is important enough to mention on the wiki?

At Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money’s behest, Stanley braces himself to release THE MASK. “See ya,” he says and slowly raises the wooden MASK to his face. The camera zooms in and—

Nothing.

Stanley stands there, holding THE MASK to his face. There is no lightning, no transformation. Something is wrong. THE MASK is not working.

Panicked, trying to save his last scraps of dignity, Stanley decides to imitate the ghoulish transformation. He convulses, moving his body like a guidebook of sexual perversions. He dances birdlike, high-footing it in a pathetic circle. Cut to Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money, clearly not impressed with this foolish charade. Just like Tommy Lee Jones on the set of Batman Forever, he cannot sanction Jim Carrey’s buffoonery.

Stanley gives up. “Okay! You said Loki was a night god. Maybe it only works at night.”

“Mr. Ipkiss, I should warn you that I don’t work personally with really sick people.” Again with the insinuation that Stanley is suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness. “There are private institutions for things like that. However, if you'd like me to arrange for a safe environment for you tonight, I can do that.”

Stanley doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the accusations. Instead, he’s overcome by some feral desperation. It seems to take all his control to hold it together.

“No, I’ve got to see Tina. But what do I do? I mean, do I go as myself, or THE MASK?”

Nonplussed, Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money says, “If I tell you, you promise to leave my office right now?” Feel like this was a line they put in the movie trailer, but who could know. I mean, someone with access to the internet and Youtube could easily look it up, but that’s a lot of work. Nonetheless, Stanley agrees.

“All right,” says Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money. They both stand up and Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money crosses around the table to put an arm on Stanley. “Mr. Ipkiss go as yourself AND the mask. Because they are both one and the same beautiful person.” He gives Stanley a fatherly pat on the chest. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to write a letter to Aunt Jemima” he says. Just kidding. But maybe?

Outside, Detective Kellaway watches Stanley hail a cab outside Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money’s office. He looks as calm as a monk. Over the radio, a woman tells him that the prints retrieved from the bank heist belong to Stanley, and there’s no change in Kellaway’s demeanor. A true pro, this detective. Yet, we must assume that his doggedness in this case belies something personal. Just a general love of law and order? Or trembling, deep seated fear of Edge City’s future if green-faced freaks take over?

He puts the radio transmitter to his mouth. “I’m looking at him,” he says. “Keep a SWAT team standing by.” A SWAT team? For one guy? Typical cop move. ACAB, etc.

And then he says, “If this guy is half as bad as he’s supposed to be, we’re gonna have a full dance card.” A very weird thing to say over the police radio, in my opinion. If I were the woman on the other end, I’d be like uhhhhhh...

Doyle, Kellaway’s partner, sticks his head in the screen and asks Kelleway if he has the pickled relish. We have to assume that the filmmakers added this scene to poke fun of Doyle, who is a large man, and making fun of fat people was really popular in the ‘90s.

“Get in the car,” Kellaway demands, irate.

“But I ordered onion rings,” Doyle says.

“Doyle!” Kellaway says in a singsong fashion, as if he’s delivering a sitcom punchline. But there is no laugh track.

The scene crossfades ominously to the entrance of Landfill Park with its gothic, art deco lettering and dramatic lighting. The movie forces us, the audience, to sit uncomfortably with the juxtaposition of Doyle’s buffoonery paired with eerie austerity of the transition. This is what I’d be saying if we were watching together, and at this point you’d have given in to my commentary and succumbed to the notion that I am a man of knowledge and wisdom.

Landfill Park is the cheapest-looking set of the whole movie. Its sparsity—basically a park bench and some foliage—tells of a budget that was spent on visual effects. Even for a movie that wallows in artificiality, the care that went into this set feels like an afterthought.

Stanley paces nervously by the aforementioned park bench, the foliage surrounding him is cast in Edge City’s signature eerie blue light. For a moment, unaided by makeup, prosthetics, CGI, Stanley/Jim Carrey looks like an amateur actor in a student production. He checks his watch dramatically, he sighs dramatically.

A quick cut reveals Kellaway and Doyle lurking in the bushes, watching.

Stanley nervously sits down on the bench, opens the briefcase, looks around. Again, we’re treated to some high-school black box theater-style acting. “No, no,” he says, shutting the briefcase.

He stands up, only to find Cameron Diaz is right there! She’s wearing a black and white suit blouse or something.

“Stanley, what are you doing here?” she aks.

“I uh,” Stanley stammers. “Just wanted to come by and make sure you two got together all right.”

“Mmm, that’s nice,” Cameron Diaz says.

“You know I hardly ever stop by here,” she says. “It’s kind of hard to believe it was just a garbage heap.”

They sit down on the bench, and the camera shifts so we get a view over their shoulders. Before them lies Edge City’s skyline, an adequate matte painting where the sky is ribboned with northern lights-style greens and pinks.

“It’s really beautiful right around sunset,” Stanley says. “The methane emissions really pick up the colors.” Good lord, this interaction has taken an eternity (not so different from reading this novella). This is what happens when filmmakers who don’t know how to do drama try to do drama.

“All those... pinks and greens,” Cameron Diaz says before giving Stanley a knowing look. Not quite sure what Cameron Diaz is doing here. Insinuating coitus?

“Uhhh, my friend will be along any minute. I-I better go,” Stanley stammers. He runs behind Landfill Park’s biggest bush. Cameron Diaz, for whatever reason, chases after him.

“Stanley, wait!” she cries.

Lightning strikes, thunder claps, and a tornado twirls out from the opposite side of the bus. When it stops, we, uh, behold yet again, THE MASK. Cameron Diaz jumps back, startled. He leans against Landfill Park’s lone tree, adorned with a beret, red scarf, black jacket, black and white undershirt, the boy’s a time bomb (Rancid fans will get that one).

“Hello, cherie. We meet again,” THE MASK says with a French accent. “Is it fate? Is it meant to be? Is it written in the stars that we are desssstined to fraternize? [he puts extra stank on “destined”]” THE MASK then drops the accent. “I’d like to think so!”

THE MASK twirls forward and sweeps Cameron Diaz off her feet. He embraces her in a lovers dip. “Kiss me my dear,” he says, his French accent reemerging. “And I will reveal my croissant. I will spread your paté. I will dip my ladle in your VICHYSSOISE!” With each threat, terror fills Cameron Diaz’s face. And while all this is kind of rapey and gross, whomst amongst us has not tried to seduce someone using French culinary euphemisms?

Cameron Diaz knees THE MASK in the balls. He freezes in agony for a moment before regaining his composure. “She is so coy,” THE MASK says, his voice high from the infliction to his genitals. He shakes it off. “I LOVE EEET” he yells, Frenchly.

He spins to intercept Cameron Diaz, this time it’s like a mini tornado. THE MASK stands proudly in front of her, impervious to the distress he’s causing. He does his unnerving jaw moving thing: ayeyiyiyi. Tango music swells from somewhere.

“Our love is like a red, red rose,” he says, encroaching on Cameron Diaz. “And I am a little thorny.” Not as good as the French food stuff, but okay. Cameron Diaz backs into the park bench and falls. THE MASK climbs on top of her. “Je t’ador. Je t’ador,” he coos. “Je te window! I don’t care!” he yells. THE MASK swipes; Cameron Diaz dodges. “HAHAHA!” THE MASK says, laughily.

We cut to Kellaway and Doyle, still watching the proceedings while lurking in the foliage. A little strange that they do nothing to stop THE MASK’s impending assault, but that’s cops for ya. Also strange that they saw Stanley’s demonic whirlwind transformation and are not absolutely shitting their pants at this twisted perversion of normalcy.

“I need backup and I need it now,” Kellaway says into his radio.

On the bench, THE MASK whips out a cigarette, and offers one to Cameron Diaz, who remains silent. “No?” THE MASK says, and takes a long drag. He exhales a cloud of smoke that turns into a heart, and with a finger against one nostril, snot-rockets a smokey arrow through the heart. Cameron Diaz finds this mildly amusing. She begins to lower her guard.

“Now, like Napoleon, I will divide and conquer.” He flicks his cigarette away and there’s a cute little zip sound effect as it whizzes off into the sky, but there’s nothing cute about THE MASK’s intention. Terror returns to Cameron Diaz’s face.

“Ipkiss! Police!” Kellaway says. He and Doyle emerge from the bushes.

“Merde” THE MASK says, which means shit in French. Imagine if THE MASK just said “shit”? How would that change the movie? It occurs to me that THE MASK never swears, but what if he just let loose?

Somebody fuckin stop me!

FFFFFFUuuuuuckin! (Smmmokin’)

THE MASK jumps off the bench right at the moment Kellaway yells “Freeze!” and he stops midair as he’s encased by ice. “Get it?” I’d say if we were watching together, nudging you hard in the ribs while you cry and cry.

A swarm of cops join Doyle and Kellaway, and Cameron Diaz runs offscreen. This is the last time we see her during this scene, and no one asks where she’s going.

The cops run up to THE MASK, still suspended in air. “Put your hands up,” Kellaway says.

“But you told me to freeze,” THE MASK says, teeth clenched, mouth frozen shut, an icicle hanging from his nose.

“All right all right, unfreeze,” Kellaway says, playing into this madman’s game. THE MASK’s icy layer breaks away and he falls to the ground. “You’re under arrest.”

“No, it wasn’t me,” says THE MASK, affecting the voice of what I think is supposed to be a damsel in distress. “It was the one-armed man.” Kids today might not get that reference, but it was from—ah fuck it. Just google it.

THE MASK stands up, and as he’s wont to do, changes his disposition immediately. “All right, I confess,” he says, olde-time gangsterly. “I did it ya hear! And I’m glad. Glad, I tell ya!” But in yet another 180, he drops to his knees and begs for mercy. “What are they gonna do to me, sarge? WHAT ARE THEY GONNA DO?!”

Kellaway straps cuffs on THE MASK. “Sorry son, that’s not my department. Search him!”

Two cops flank THE MASK and roughly lift him to his feet.

“Ow! Where’s a camcorder when you need one?” THE MASK says, snort-laughing, which I think is making light of the Rodney King beating. Kellaway, like us, shakes his head in disapproval.

“Should we do a gimmick, like, trying to find a good hoagie or cheesesteak?” texts author Kevin Kearney as we’re nailing down the location for this interview. Both options seem good. I lean toward hoagies, because, well, hoagie is objectively the funniest name for a sandwich. Cheesesteaks, on the other hand, would be thematically better, seeing that Kearney is from Philadelphia.

But after some contemplation, I nix both options. The place has to be quintessentially San Diegan. In fact, considering that Kevin and his partner are leaving town a day after the release of his second novel, Freelance, we need to find somewhere that’s the most San Diegan. It needs to be a place by which he’ll remember us.

“We could go to Sombrero,” he texts back. “I’ve known about it since I was in sixth grade and still have not gone.”

Bingo. We have our place.

Kearney doesn’t even have to explain himself, because I know he’s referring to “Josie”, the blink-182 song off 1997’s Dude Ranch in which Mark Hoppus immortalized the Mexican food chain: “She laughs at my dumb jokes when no one does/She brings me Mexican food from Sombrero just because”.

There are many locations in San Diego, but we make sure to meet at the blink-182 Sombrero nestled in a mundane shopping center in Poway, where the band’s affiliation is immediately evident by the shrine on the wall—a collage that appears to be the band members sitting in the restaurant after the release of Dude Ranch.

“We made it,” Kearney says, his voice soft with reverence, as if we’ve just arrived at our holy land. And maybe we have.

We order our burritos and sit down. We might as well have the entire restaurant to ourselves. It’s quiet, intimate. Just two blink bros unwrapping their burritos to the whirr of an AC unit.

I begin by telling him how stoked I am that he suggested this place, because so many people insist on doing interviews over the phone or zoom or email. It’s just easier to handle these things virtually. But, I tell him, I miss the writing style of Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair articles that set the scene—what the subject is wearing, how they look, what they’re eating (btw, Kearny’s burrito: pollo; mine: mixed).

Maybe even five years ago, that type of writing felt self-serving and indulgent. But now that writing is content, and most content is churn, and AI is creeping into every realm of the internet, I’m nostalgic for articles that don’t feel created, mediated or facilitated by technology.

And this uneasy relationship between humans and technology that plays a huge role in Freelance. The story follows Simon—a 19 year old borderline incel with few prospects, who lives with a bunch of left-leaning slacktivists, and whose only social lifeline is an OnlyFans girl to which he pays six dollars a month. Out of desperation, Simon signs up to be a Dryver with the mysterious rideshare app, HYPR. His loyalty to the app proves fruitful, and Simon begins to experience social and financial success that he’s never known before. Without giving too much away (because the book is, quite literally, a ride), Simon’s loyalty turns to obsession, and his relationship with the app becomes parasitic. It’s sort of like a vampiric horror story, where the app is Dracula and Simon is Renfield.

“It's funny you use the word horror,” Kearney says. “Because that was another thing that D.T. [Robbins, Kearney’s publisher at Rejection Letters Press] talked about—this opportunity to lean into one of the novel’s strengths, which is that it's kind of framed like a horror story.”

“But horror is not a genre that I've ever been a huge fan of,” Kearney says, which makes sense if you’re only familiar with Kearney’s first book, How To Keep Time—a simultaneously serious and surreal novel about father/brother/familial relationships. In contrast, Freelance is gleefully tense and insidious.

“I don't read horror, I don't really watch horror movies, but I think that if you're writing about tech, you need to lean into science fiction and horror. I think those two genres have to be at play if you are honestly writing about tech.”

Freelance benefits for that reason. When non-horror fans dabble in the genre, the results are more compelling and subversive that artists beholden to genre tropes or expectations. Some of our greatest horror films, for example, were directed by non-horror directors: The Shining, The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs.

Because of this, Freelance skirts the usual story beats and style that bog down most tech-themed horror. Shows like Black Mirror or any recent novel about tech can be boiled down to “whoa, tech be crazy!” or presents it with an ironic detachment that expects readers to tacitly agree that, whoa, tech indeed be crazy. Ultimately, it’s just preaching to the choir.

What’s refreshing about Freelance is that it’s a sympathetic look at the allure of AI technology, treating its power as something more internal than external—that the fear of tech isn’t really about the technology, but tech’s ability to amplify the anxieties that already exist within us.

“I had the idea for [Freelance] when I was still living in Philly,” Kearney says. “Then the second we got to Oceanside, it was pretty much all I focused on. I had just left teaching—I’d been in the classroom for 10 years. It was my vocation, this is what I said I was gonna do since I was 15 years old. This is what I'm called to do, and then suddenly I wasn't doing it.”

Untethered from his profession, isolated, lacking community, and financially panicked, Kearney spent his days processing the existential crisis through his writing.

“I was without a job, and I just had the idea of a rideshare driver and technology kind of taking over. But I very quickly realized that a lot of what I was projecting onto Simon's job was really just about teaching. Like, feeling under the microscope, feeling like you're always going to be doing the wrong thing. I started to realize that, yeah, [Freelance] is not even specifically about teaching or rideshare driving. This is just like, what it means to be a worker right now.”

[Tom Delonge voice]: Work sucks, I know.

A few months after his move to San Diego, two of Kearney’s out-of-town writer friends wanted to read their work here, and asked if he could put together an event. This not only felt like an opportunity for Kearny to build community in a new city, but also create something that we needed: a regular reading series that didn’t feel pretentious.

“When I was in high school, I was firmly enmeshed in the punk scene,” Kearney says. “I was booking shows, I ran a label, playing in bands. I think I'm pretty good at this type of stuff.”

On May 13, 2023, Kearney put on his first Small Press Nite—a semi-regular, exquisitely curated literary event held at Book Catapult in South Park. In any other city, Small Press Nite may not seem novel: four or five authors read, the audience drinks free booze (that Kearney supplies), and then everyone hangs out.

But this is San Diego, a city where getting people out to an arts and culture event—especially a literary one—can feel like pulling teeth. Not to say it doesn’t happen (Verbatim, Burn All Books, and Libélula all do the lord’s work in this department), but Small Press Nite has been the first recurring series that I’ve found myself anticipating since covid killed the others (RIP The Foundry and Last Exit). For the first time in years, it feels like we have an event that mirrors the DIY vibe of AWP’s offsite readings (which, as I’ve written about, rule).

“[A literary reading] should feel more like a show or a house party rather than an academic conference,” Kearney says, explaining the ethos of Small Press Nite. “Something that I think a lot of writers struggle with is the notion of what a literary reading is. Like, they think it should be something from an MFA course or seeing a famous writer at a university. And I just have no interest in that at all. I don't want to go to a lecture on a Saturday night. I want to go to something that feels fun and feels like an arts community rather than a sanctioned university event.”

“[The first Small Press Nite was] really successful, and I was encouraged by that,” he continues. “I felt suddenly like, Oh, this is the type of community that I'm always aiming for. This is why I make art in the first place: to be able to share it with a group.”

And there couldn’t be a better place to celebrate the release of Freelance, which will go down on Saturday, May 31 at the Book Catapult. It marks the 10th iteration of Small Press Nite, but it’ll be Kearney’s final one before he leaves for Alaska. Finally, Kearney will be able to participate as a reader in this beautiful thing he’s created, and he’s ceremoniously passing the torch to San Diego writer KKUURRTT (still don’t really know whether to yell his name or growl it) who will hopefully continue to grow and develop Small Press Nite’s for a city that needs it (no pressure, KKUURRTT).

We finish our burritos. “That was...” Kearney pauses, probably considering all the pollo he just ingested, searching for words to express the profundity of sitting here in this historic Sombrero, a part of San Diego and punk rock history. “Okay.”

He’s right. The burritos are meh. Maybe they used to be better. Oh well. Things change. I guess this is growing up.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze opens with a helicopter shot, floating into New York City. The Big Apple. The center of the world. The World Trade Center towers still loom large as symbols of American exceptionalism.

But this was 1991—pre-Giuliani, pre-Disneyfied Times Square. New York, for all intents and purposes, was still a very dangerous place. In March 1991, Simon Hoggart described the city’s residents in the New York Observer as such.

‘To have to admit that you have never been robbed, or burgled, or held at knife point is to admit a special kind of failure. What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you even worth mugging?’

Yet, for all the foreboding and sinister elements, we cut to street-level and see a city bustling with humanity. A bouncy 90s rap beat underscores the sounds of cars honking and food vendors hocking their wares. A distant voice yells Pizza!

Now we’re in the horse-drawn carriage district of Manhattan, where the camera follows a tourist carted around by a horse taxi until the shot lands on two people—a top-hatted carriage driver and a plainclothes schlub—both digging into giant slices of cheese pizza. After taking a bite, they both nod. An agreeable mouthful, indeed.

This is the power of pizza: erasing class and political divides. The great equalizer.

We get a shot of two Wall Street types out on a date. From out of nowhere, they pull out slices. Truly nothing more romantic.

Two cops chow down as their perp eyes their pizzas with mournful regret. Freedom, as depicted, is a slice of za.

Over and over, we’re treated to shots of people eating the same large slices of cheese pizza, which now as I’m older, look disgusting. The cheese pulls like rubber, and people eat it with maniacal glee. The pale cheese evokes memories of bland elementary school lunches, and we can all remember what those slices tasted like, right? But back when I first saw Secret of the Ooze, there was nothing I wanted more than house down one of those slices.

And perhaps that’s why this is what I immediately think of when I think of food scenes. It’s not that the pizza in The Secret of the Ooze makes us want to eat it (unless you’re 9)—it’s a reminder of the joy that comes from feeling safe in a community.

It’s not the turtles who save the city, it’s the pizza