Blame the Butcher
The syringes and the diabetes testing strips are just two sides of the same bad penny.
We are not the giants we were meant to be
What have they ever got done?
Poverty, like butchery, is the commodification of the parts to the desecration of the whole. America is a people in squalor, trafficked by godless, market-based renderings. Our bodies are monetized, while our souls are demonetized. It’s unholy, the grifts we bear. From birth house to death house, we are hustled for parts. Our parts.
South Phoenix is 50 percent Latino, 25 percent black, 25 percent white, and 100 percent piss-poor. Myself, I’m three quarters bastard, one quarter Irish. We’re always working, so we’re always in the Poor House. When my girl Cricket and I moved here in 2009, peak Great Recession, we came for proximity to the cancer-discharging fuel terminals and concrete plants where the trucking jobs are always available. We were both hazmat tanker truckers at the time. I still am. I drive a bomb that has yet to go off.
The air here is acrid from auto parts recyclers, plating factories, …
Bieler's Broth
A diet of mostly alkaline foods, especially green ones, can make you feel heroic: clear, calm, solid, steady, focused.
Cindy Crawford emerges sylphlike from a treatment room.
Being immoderate, I stayed on the thin green gruel longer than I was supposed to.
There’s a chapter of my life during my late 20s and early 30s that I refer to as “the Hollywood years.” I was living with my ex, an exacting man who badgered me constantly, in an unfurnished bungalow tucked away in the Hollywood Hills, high above the teeming, seedy parts of the city. He’d written a bestselling book and went off on the lecture circuit for a year; meanwhile, my own writing career had begun to take flight, and I had magazine assignments that stretched as far into the future as I could see. I spent many nights alone in that spooky house, which the actor Rudolph Valentino had supposedly bought for his mistress, listening to it sigh and creak and groan.
I frequently stayed up all night to meet my deadlines, haunting around our near-empty house, fueled by mug after mug of strong black tea. My diet involved a lot of toaster waffles and frozen chicken sausages. As my relationship disintegrated and …
Bouquets and Brickbats
Brickbat
For the Boeing Corporation, which has stranded US astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore in space since June with no end in sight, thanks to the faulty engineering and construction of the company’s supposedly reusable Starlight spacecraft, which experienced software failures, five helium leaks, and five thruster failures and has repeatedly been judged unsafe for flight by NASA engineers, who now expect the astronauts to remain stranded in space for another six months. Not that NASA had a particularly great record in building spacecraft that didn’t explode, but at least they didn’t leave astronauts stranded in space and shrug their shoulders. American air travelers can relate, having endured a summer of record travel delays and cancelations thanks in part to the repeated mechanical failure of Boeing aircraft. Hiring skilled engineers and metal-workers …
