WEIRD WAR

We have plenty of water to fight these fires.
-Deputy Cal Fire Chief Scott McLean

But journalism, as this president, who became a media celebrity because of the New York tabloids should know, can be a contact sport.
–Scott Simon

Nixon might have survived if he had Fox News and the conservative media that exists today.
–John Dean

You’ll come to unseen doors.  Knock if you have to; let yourself in if you can.
–Julian Root

It doesn’t take much to get the world on your neck. Enemies abound, bad news is everywhere.  I recomend you rattle your chains. Take to the territory. Break out long enough that when your bad blues finds you it won’t clinch ‘cause you’ll be slick with sweat. I’ve done over 8,000 miles this summer. I didn’t watch the news but I’m no better. In Brussels, I told front desk at checkout, Trump’s a fuckin’ asshole, and bought him a Nescafe. We clinked mugs while out the window my partner motioned to rush me out to the cab like a jerkoff. Life’s hard but death’s worse. You got to get your shots in and I plan to take mine. When people ask what my inspiration is I tell them I’m making up for lost time. If I don’t publish a book a year from now until 2025 you can bet I’ve checked out and am self-publishing in Heaven or a much hotter print shop. I have more worlds to conquer than I know how to tell. I can’t articulate it sometimes ‘cause it makes me jiggy but it’s got to do with self-publishing, world travel and freelancing in the wind with an iPad, a 2-track and a blonde photographer. What all this has to do with the news, and life & death, is this blog.  I come home from trekking 3 countries in twenty days but my eyes glaze over at the screen, or I have to take it outdoors and get horizontal on the grass in Rittenhouse Square. Blood sugar and excericse and caffeine’s glass ceiling are the order of the day, and these 600 words are what writer Julian Root calls the spiritual whetstone. You bet.

Not only that but I’m walking the streets of my heart, here. There’s a grit and grain to Hostile City you won’t find anywhere—except maybe New York in the 80s or Sofia in July. You move or get out the way in Philly and I’m happy to do either. Now when I take the Orange Line though, I’m bigger ‘cause I’ve swallowed the European night and I’ve the stars splayed above the Canal across my shoulders and a sack full of Varzulitsan pears and chalky Belgian avenue cement on the soles my shoes. Which is all a poetic way to say that Philly has my heart but my heart has tripled in size. I’ve made the trip and from the mountain I am coming down. I suffer a restless boredom and malaise but I’ve got more to write on the dais than I’ve ever had before. Travel pieces, to Amsterdam and Berlin; and a feature, about a native striking out into the Other Hemisphere with an aspiring ex-Pat tee-totaling travel writer, and winding through foothills of the Balkans stepping on to train platforms in strange cities I might not ever see again, looms.  My July was hot, black and with white sugar.  Now I’m holed up, posted in the old Bell Telephone Building, back in the America, in Hostile City remembering that only blocks from here I was a 20-something know-nothing with bigger dreams than I knew with what to do.  The crowd I ran with then have all peeled off and it’s just as well. I’m reptillian now and solo, mostly.

I hope this Philly dusk will find me well. That I’ll have made some progress and these articles will be closer, or submitted, and I’ll find for work that doesn’t break me like it did in the Spring before all of this ever went down. The hometown ain’t bad for being stranded in. Stranded’s probably the best way to describe my youth here anyway but I’ve seen some harbors and long lines concluding on the GMT+3 horizon. I know what I’ve come for just like always and the bullshit and bad news of the dark new century can just roll right offa me as long’s I take the time to process it, like this, neat and fine. Thank you for joining me. You’re a compatriot and I won’t forget you reading me.  Thank you for being an enemy too and for doing the same.  The art of war is neither, the only losers are underground though up here we’ll be missing them for the rest of our days.

See you in Philly, motherfucker.