AAAAHH

Dang who would have thought the immortal substance we make out of petroleum and surround all of our food in would turn out to be toxic.

Increasingly, I am disgusted with the act of throwing away trash. Every time you put a wrapper in the bin, you are kicking your problem off to someone else. The plastic isn’t going away. It can’t be recycled, melted down and reformed like a metal ingot. It won’t break down into useful atoms. It will merely pollute the Earth, poisoning yourself and all generations of life that come after you.

We need unified action on this one.

I’ve lost nearly 40 pounds in 5 months! Anything is possible! The world is yours!

Plastic Beach by Gorillaz (2010)

Out on the mail route, phone battery is a limited resource. My dogshit Sony phone can handle an 8 hour shift with %15 left to get me home, but overtime kills it. Hell, sometimes the phone just crashes partway though and I can’t navigate or call my supervisor or anything. These battery issues have lead me to abandon streaming altogether. No spotify, no YouTube Red. MP3 files loaded directly onto the phone! My cellphone is an ipod touch with GPS.

My collection of albums has grown over time, but at first I had only a few mp3 files saved locally on my phone. These initial files were multi-hour video game music playlists. I know what that sounds like, but trust me– Alf’s Video Game Bangers series is awesome! It’s funky EDM, mostly, good for keeping me on my feet during a long day on the mail beat. I listened to Alf’s compilations on repeat, but after a month of vocal-less gamer beats, however, I craved something with more substance. For some reason, I downloaded Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach. Given the choice between more VG music and Plastic Beach, I decided to listen to Plastic Beach. A lot. I listened to it over and over again and quickly fell in love.

“GORILLAZ AND THE BOSS DOG, PLANET OF THE APES!”

– Track 2: Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach (Ft. Snoop Dogg)

Plastic Beach is a black sheep from a band that has always produced strange albums. For first time listeners, the album sounds really discordant. The first track opens with an orchestra alongside Snoop Dogg ushering the listeners into what he calls “the World of the Plastic Beach.” The next son, White Flag, strikes a completely different tone, with bongos, flutes, a violin and then.. British rap? I absolutely hated that transition on my first listen, but there is something catchy about White Flag. When the two singers get going, alternating “White Flag, White Flag!”

“No Castaway, No Survivor! I ain’t lost and this ain’t shipwrecked!”

– Track 3: White Flag (Ft. Bashy, Kano & The National Orchestra For Arabic Music)

On my first few listens to the album, I didn’t really understand its meaning, besides a lot of mentions of plastic. After getting over its overall strangeness, however, I started listening to the lyrics more and realized that the entire concept is hitting the oceanic climate disaster/imperialism nail very hard. Snoop Dogg is asking kids to gather around, telling them that while the world feels so hopeless, “it’s like wonderland.”

“Drinkin’ lemonade in the shade, getting blazed with a gang of pilgrims”

– Track 2: Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach

The next song opens with admittedly oriental sounding music and a depiction of a castaway on a tropical shore. The singers describe coming upon a beautiful paradise, and agree not to bring guns or war. No feds, no rent, no stress, either. It represents an inversion of the typical Robinson Crusoe narrative, where the lost sailor inevitably chooses to colonize this beautiful little place he has come upon. Rather than making enemies with the natives, the Gorillaz castaway comes in peace waving a white flag.

“Hi, little lady // Sex on the beach, wanna try for a baby?”

– Track 3: White Flag (my favorite line from the song)

Of course, paradise doesn’t last in the real world. The next song, Rhinestone Eyes, introduces this concept of “factories far away” making things with “plastic power.” It is also more of a “traditional” Gorillaz song, very listenable. It has cool talking lyrics like their previous hit Clint Eastwood. The next song, Stylo, keeps it moving with awesome beat with some rap and chorus that gives way to some pure poetry vocal solos from 2D and Bobby Womack. Electric is the looove~! If it’s love, it’s electric!

“Your love’s like rhinestones, falling from the sky.”

– Track 4: Rhinestone Eyes

Superfast Jellyfish gives us a criticism of fast food complete with commercial samples. Reminds me of MF Doom. The song is loaded with energy and has some extremely memorable lines. The repeated assertion that “The sea of Radioactive, the sea is Radioactive!” is snuck in there too, hauntingly.

“All hail King Neptune and his water-breathers
No snail thing too quick for his water-feeders
“Don’t waste time” with your net
Our net worth is set
Ready, go many know others but
We be the colors of the mad and the wicked
We be bad, we re-brick it
With the twenty-four hour sign
Shower mine habits
While you dine like rabbits
With the crunchy, crunchy carrots
(Oh that’s chicken)
Gotta have it super fast!”

– Track 6: Superfast Jellyfish (Ft. Gruff Rhys & De La Soul)

Empire Ants is next with an addictive opening beat underneath some elegiac singing. I really only get interested in this song when Yuimi Nagano starts singing after the bridge. The female voice is more welcome than 2D’s sad verses, though the actual lyrical content is kind of disturbing. Nagano sings:

“Little memories, marching on
Your little feet, working the machine
Say will it spin, will it soar?
My little dream, working the machine
Soon, like a wave, empires will fall
And closing in on you, they’re going on.”

– Track 7: Empire Ants (Ft. Little Dragon)

We are likened to a colony of ants building a vast empire, but my personal headcanon is a little more disturbing. I always heard the lines about “little feet” as a reference to the actual children that keep our production going. There are a lot of little feet, child labor, making the little plastic things that we buy and then throw into the ocean.

Empire Ants gives way to the song Glitter Freeze, which is just a ton of noise that I happen to like. I like electronic sounds and heavy synthetic sounds, and I also know this taste was acquired. This song might annoy the shit out of the uninitiated.

The next few songs represent the peak of the album. Some Kind of Nature, track 8, has our singer musing about a material, some kind of plastic, that he can wrap around his lover. Next up, Melancholy Hill, which everyone has heard. That song reached far beyond the confines of this weird album. A few songs later, we get the titular song Plastic Beach, which is on-par with Melancholy Hill IMO.

“It’s by the light
Of the plasma screens
We keep switched on
All through the night while we sleep”

– Another not so subtle social critique in Track 11: Broken

Plastic Beach (track 13), brings it all together. The song opens with an image of the “only whale” watching ships pass by before exploding into an awesome repeated verse:

“It’s a Casio on a plastic beach, it’s a Casio on a plastic beach
It’s a styrofoam deep sea landfill, it’s a styrofoam deep sea landfill
It’s automated computer speech, it’s automated computer speech
It’s a Casio on a plastic beach, it’s a Casio”

– Track 13: Plastic Beach (Ft. Paul Simonon & Paul Jones)

I like to think that the whale is the last survivor in a polluted, plastic strewn ocean. The beaches themselves are plastic. In fact, the island paradise described at the start of the ocean is at this point a floating island of trash composed of multicolor styrofoams and wrappings.

The next song, and one of the last, hits me the hardest:

“I’ll wait to be forgiven, maybe I never will
My star has left me to take the bitter pill
That shattered feeling, well, the cause of it’s a lesson learned
‘Just don’t know if I could roll into the sea again
Just don’t know if I could do it all again,’ she said—it’s true”

– Track 14: To Binge (Ft. Little Dragon)

I had a long as relationship that I poured my entire self into, and then it was over. I don’t know if I can roll into the sea again. The thought of doing it all again makes me feel very tired. I don’t know what it is about music, but a song has the power to capture a feeling that one has felt for a long time but never put into words.

“I’m caught again in the mystery
You’re by my side, but are you still with me?
The answer’s somewhere deep in it, I’m sorry that you’re feeling it
But I just have to tell you that I love you so much these days
Have to tell you that I love you so much these days, it’s true”

– Track 14: To Binge (Ft. Little Dragon)

The album is functionally over at this point, but there are still two songs left to usher the listener out of the door. Bobby Womack comes back for a grandiose song about love and the movement of time and the tide. Lost at sea. The final song, Pirate Jet, I always forget about. It comes on as the last song and then leaves. We’ve left the taps running for a hundred years, you know. Water’s gonna rise.

The project is kind of sad in a catchy way. It talks a lot about love that doesn’t work out, oceans filling up with plastic, and makes fun of us for watching TV and eating fast food. All that is wrapped up in an experimental Gorillaz foil. Genre? A quick look at a Reddit thread gives me “Zombie Hip Hop, Psychedelic Surf Rock, electronic/experimental rock, Pirate Pop. I don’t think the Gorillaz have a genre, but Plastic Beach is definitely a Gorillaz album of all time!

I won’t do ratings, as I don’t think I have listened to nearly enough music in my life to accurately rank anything. I will say, however, that Plastic Beach is probably my favorite Gorillaz album (but not by far). It was released in 2010, and the songs have only grown more timely. When I was listening to this album repetitively, Massachusetts was going through a drought and my own home suburb of Middleton Massachusetts was literally burning. The smoke from the wildfire carried all the way down to East Boston where I worked and settled upon the city in a cold haze. The reefs are dying, too. Great islands of plastic continue to form in the Pacific Ocean. Bits of plastic have been found to be embedded in our very bones. And worse, it is coming to light that plastic itself might be a toxic material, slowly poisoning us.

Will we find another pristine coast to escape to, another planet perhaps? Or have we shipwrecked ourselves on toxic shores?

kissed a latina last night

came into work 6am, before light

gulls soaring high above the IMC

😀

Americans, despite making up only a fraction of the global population, have the highest consumption of resources on the planet. If that pisses you off to think about, well… 😉
Enjoy the salary. All of this is for you.

Big revelations tonight– I see the whole picture now.

America is a country of immigrants. From the very first pilgrims, our country has always followed the story of `people from far away trying to make it in a foreign land. My own family came to this country a hundred years ago, fleeing poverty and crime in Europe. My father’s grandfather was part of the Italian wave, Catholics among Catholics trying to make a home in Boston’s West Side (demolished to make certain iconic highways). My mother’s great grandfather came around the same time, Ukrainian Jews fleeing certain death from Russian Pogroms. My father’s family sold fruit on the streets of the North End. My mother’s collected greasy rags in East Boston and tried to recycle them. It wasn’t glamorous. They were called criminals, they were harassed, and they were forced to live in the shittiest tenements in Boston. Then they got educated, their kids got educated, and they began to plan bigger lives. They fought for their country in wars across the sea and came home to open businesses of their own. The rest is history.

But history isn’t dead. In fact, the country hasn’t changed much at all. A new generation of immigrants, southern instead of eastern, still Catholic, is coming to roost in Boston. They are living in the same area too– East Boston is the stage again, as it always has been for time immemorial. They are working rough jobs and getting by. Their kids are going to school and hopefully learning something. Some of them will go to college and become our doctors. It’s always been this way. The cycle of immigration in this country is an endless stream. It is deeply, intrinsically, cosmically American. Trump is the son of immigrants. Obama was the son of immigrants. Biden was Irish. Even the Anglos came here on a boat and roughed it for a while, though they try to pretend this land was made for them!

Republicans can try to cause as much terror as possible, but the tide will not be halted. People across the globe will always swim that current in search of the shining beacon on a hill that is the United States of America. They are Americans.

It’s such an unbelievably bad idea.

“Adding fluoride to water is considered one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century.”

Ever see a communist drink a glass of water?

Freaks and weirdos are under attack this election. If you believe in trust busting, universal healthcare, or taxing the rich, you are a Marxist! A Communist!

If you oppose war in the Middle East, you are antisemitic! A Nazi!!

Well, both candidates have abandoned people like me. This election has highlights just how transient the national discourse is. Politicians will swerve from controversial ideas and mold their policies around the low hanging fruit. Four years ago Obama was fighting for healthcare. Now what? I went into this election cycle prepared to fight like hell for Joe Biden and his progressive ideas. Well, Joe Biden is gone and the progressive policy standpoint has gone up in smoke. Kamala is on the campaign trail with Liz Cheney, and Trump is making war on all the so-called mutant freaks invading America. The “Enemy Within.” Am I really so evil?

We’ll see if this insanity plays in their favor 🙂 They won’t be getting any help from me.

Sukkot is the Jewish Harvest Festival. Sometime in October according to the Jewish calendar, we are commanded to go outside and construct a small dwelling. This little bower is called a Sukkah (or as my aunt would call it, a sukkus). Then, for a week, we dwell in it, eating our meals and lighting our candles out in the open autumn air. Some really serious Jews even sleep in their sukkah. I haven’t gone that far yet, but I want to when I have the time and space do it right.

Sukkot (pronounced sue-koe) is a special holiday because it asks us to engage our creative side. As human beings, we are unique among animals in that we collect various materials and combine them to build elaborate places to live. Only birds and termites and beavers come close. This holiday acknowledges our special talent, and asks us to spend some of our time working with our hands directly to make something useful. If you have never built a standing structure before, the task is actually quite hard! My own sukkah last year barely stood up. I definitely couldn’t lean on it, but it managed to survive the wind and the rain. It eventually withstood the snows too. I was damn proud of it, and I made it with dead wood from the backyard nailed together and bound with some twine I picked up at Home Depot. Sukkot is a craftsman’s holiday.

There is something transcendental about Sukkot as well. God is asking us to abandon our comfortable (and heated) homes for the harder reality of the sukkah. He wants us to eat and drink under the stars like the shepherds of old. For folks that have never roughed it before, Sukkot is a wake up call. Even an hour out in the cold is enough to teach a little humility. I can’t think of any other holidays that demand its practitioners literally go outside and experience the elements just for the sake of remembering that they are there. It shows us how far we’ve come, and also how much we’ve lost along the way.

I definitely faced some hard reality when I tried my hand at making a sukkah for the first time last year. I pictured in my mind a fully enclosed cabin with chairs and a table, a little window and maybe even a shelf to hold things. Well, the final product didn’t even have walls. Just trying to dig 4 post holes in that petrous New England soil was nearly impossible. I dented the tip of my shovel on a glacial boulder lurking not a foot beneath my favored spot. I used thick branches as legs to buttress my sukkah’s main posts from the ground, but perhaps it would have been smarter to create tresses attached to ceiling so that the structure could internally support itself. Fitting the wood was laborious– my only cutting tools were a little leatherman knife and battery powered sawzall my uncle let me borrow. The roof of my sukkah was composed of as many branches as I could fit together, bound with twine, but I just couldn’t get them thick enough. Pine branches with their needles intact provided the best cover, but rain penetrated the whole structure regardless. I plopped a mold plastic chair inside and called it a day.

Faulty as it was, I loved that thing. I made it, it was mine. The neighbors thought I was a little nuts, but I pushed through the shame and sat and ate in it. Smoking in it was nice.

The joy of that Sukkot was cut short unexpectedly when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023. Smack dab in the middle of Sukkot, as I remember it. My stomach dropped when I read the news– not because of the atrocious violence that was committed against my fellow Jewish people, but because I knew immediately that this was the start of another horrific episode in the violent hatred of the Israelis and the Palestinian People. I was proved right in short order. 2000 Palestinians were dead within the first few weeks, and over months the number of direct deaths grew to tens of thousands (untold tens of thousands more have died from complications arising from the annihilation of all infrastructure). As of now, almost every school, hospital, and university in the Gaza strip has been leveled. In the name of revenge, Israel has literally transformed Gaza into a sandy parking lot. The Jews have succeeded in taking everything from the Gazans.

While I was having my cozy transcendental experience building my sukkah in the woods of New England, Israeli settlers in the west bank were interpreting the holiday in a darker way. In Huwara, a town in the west bank, the sukkah was being weaponized as a symbol of conquest. A funeral procession was being held for Labib Dumedi, a 19 year old Palestinian that was shot and killed by a settler. Zvi Sukkot, a member of the Knesset (Israeli government), decided to erect a sukkah right in the middle of Huwara’s main road, blocking the procession and daring the Palestinians to get angry about it. And so, Zvi illustrated the dark side of construction– colonization, the claiming and transforming of land for the benefit of the settler at the expense of previous occupants. He used the sukkah as a political icon. A weapon.

This incident occurred two days before the events of October 7th.

This year, some Israelis are rallying behind Sukkot not as a means of connecting with God and nature, but as an exercise in settlment. An organization called the Nachala Settlement Movement is holding a “Preparing to Resettle Gaza Conference”, stating that the conference was “planned not only as a theoretical conference, but as a practical exercise and practical preparation for resettlement in Gaza.” They built 50 sukkahs along the Gaza-Israel border.

“The return to settlement in Gaza is no longer an idea, but a move that is currently in an advanced stage with the support of the government and the public.”

I like my Sukkot better. Humility, modesty, and a love of God and the miraculous world he created for us…. that is what the Sukkah should represent. Using it as a tool of conquest, the germ of an expanding empire that seeks dominion over others, that’s just not right. As human beings, we have the power to create and destroy. The choice is ours!

I did not build a Sukkah this year. But I did build a little log hut in Minecraft.

Flowerchild was a mysterious online figure who, over the course of ten years, created and updated Better Than Wolves in his free time. Not much concrete information is known about his identity in real life, except that he was bald, probably Canadian, and served in the military. Online, however, he was radiant. His presence on forums and in chat rooms lit up the whole place. His insights into making games were so fundamental as to be groundbreaking. He literally rewrote Minecraft from the ground up, creating a new genre from scratch. Indeed, over the course of his short decade of productivity, a unending stream of exciting updates flowed from his fingertips, through the web, and across the screens of millions of people around the globe. He was also hilarious.

Flowerchild was not without his controversies, but time has made those things feel like the arguments kids have, remote. The dramas that so captivated us in years gone by will probably soon fade out of memory, but it is my hope that the unbreakable character of Flowerchild is not soon forgotten. In the sea of ass kissing and pettiness that is our internet, Flowerchild was not afraid to tell people no. He really wasn’t afraid to tell anyone exactly how he felt, and that authenticity was liberating. In Flowerchild’s corner of the internet, words retained some value. A little spark of the enlightenment, or at least some 20th century perversion of it, burned on in his carapaced heart.

All told, Flowerchild was a man of exquisite taste.

For the second time now, I have a start date with the United States Postal Service (USPS). Previously, I was set to be a city carrier in New York’s own Manhattan. I would have had to pass a driving test in NYC. How wild would that have been! This time, I am to report to Chelsea, MA. Chelsea happens to be the place where my grandfather was raised. My great grandfather moved there from East Boston.

I am excited to work hard and work a lot. Plenty of OT in the postal service, I hear. I hope I get a day off once a week, but with December coming…. I may have to play Santa long into the night. I’m not too stressed about it honestly. I’m at a stage in my life where I just want to work hard and do my own thing.

I have to pass a driving test of course. I’ve been driving for over 10 years, should be easy enough…

Anthony is the saint of Mail Carriers. Please, guide my path!

My hand starts to hurt these days if I write too much by hand. Hard to imagine that most of the writing I have ever done in my life was through a keyboard! To keep my writing hand sharp, it is important to put pen to paper every now and then. Copying is good sport. Hunter Thompson famously copied The Great Gatsby word for word to understand how Fitzgerald put words together.

I did a brief job in Roxbury for a nonprofit teaching literacy on the road. It was a tough job, and housing problems (which continue to plague me to this day) forced me ultimately to give it up just as it was getting good. I managed to accomplish a lot with little time, however. I just unearthed this document summarizing the things I created while I was there:

The conservative wing of the Supreme Court does not sleep. Today, it has ruled that Donald Trump, acting officially as the president of the USA, is shielded from legal fallout for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. For the uninitiated, Donald Trump asked Mike Pence (then VP) to not ratify the results of the election. He asked his DOJ to direct all of its legal power to overturning the results of the election. When his DOJ did not comply, he attempted to install a new head of the DOJ that would do it. Etc. Etc.

So, the stage is set for criminality to run free within the highest office of the USA. As long as the president has a friendly court, judges can rule that any action taken by the executive is a protected action of the office. Even if that action includes, say, plotting to overturn an election or directing his staff to attempt fraud.

America will look more and more like Russia every day. I suppose that was the plan all along.

“The precedent, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, is one of the most cited in American law, underpinning 70 Supreme Court decisions and roughly 17,000 in the lower courts. Critics of regulatory authority immediately hailed the decision, suggesting it could open new avenues to challenge federal rules in areas ranging from abortion pills to the environment.” – Adam Liptak

The conservative Supreme Court is having its way with the law. Any pretense of upholding longstanding precedent is gone– if advancing the goals of conservative ideology means smashing a well accepted and often cited precedent to the ground, then they will do it.

Kicking regulatory power out of the hands of the executive branch is a major mistake. Corporate America, which has consolidated into a few major companies controlling the production and flow of goods, is already vastly under regulated. Now, the role of regulator is in the hands of congress. Congress is in gridlock most of the time, so its ability to pass even minor pieces of regulation is severely handicapped. Strategically speaking, this has likely been the goal of the Republican movement and its donors for a long time– to neuter the federal government’s power, gum up congress to a legislative standstill, and give the authority to determine legality purely to the unelected judiciary branch. In short, the conservatives are putting up a total opposition to the mechanisms that allow our country to function with any degree of autonomy.

Who benefits from this? Federal regulations are in place to protect individuals, people that have no power to determine if a can of soup is made with mystery meat or not. So, by removing federal regulatory power, conservatives have dis-empowered individuals. The corporations are likely very happy. It will be harder than ever to curb emissions, cut plastics, stop child labor abuses, and protect the rights of the little guy against the big. The elites of this country rejoice!

Just last night we had a presidential debate in which Donald Trump applauded his own tax bill because it saved money for the highest earners in the country. Does saving the elites money really trickle down? Nope.