Whew. That was weird.

So. 

Breathe.

Donald Trump's reign of stupidity will end in January, cooler heads have prevailed.

There's going to be SO MUCH NOISE between now and then – fights over elections, foreign influence, fake news, propaganda – it's going to get nuts. Since nobody is asking for it, here is my opinion: 

All of that is in the past. All of the protests and marches – those become celebrations. Don't protest the past, influence policy for the immediate future. Say their names, then describe the proposed policy that could have saved their lives. Defund the police, then fund the proposed program that frees the police to do police work, and keeps them out of fragile situations that require specialists.

In the background, through the noise, look for the shy, quiet republicans speaking rationally. Those who gave us Trump identify as RED, so let's look for the purple thinkers among them, and establish a counter-argument to the monikers "Never-Trumper" and "RINO - Republican in name only". Those which the RED thinkers identify as RINO's – those are their rational thinkers, and we need to be able to walk toward the middle of the road to talk with them there. Those on the fringe should be left there, in the past, as we move forward, toward a less partisan future. 

This is NOT to say let's all put on a happy face and let bygones be bygones. The majority of "republicans in suits" who are irredeemable assholes who need a serious de-programming, and sometimes jailtime. This is also not to say that it is now our job to re-educate those who believe that Hillary ran a child-prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor, or JFK Jr. is secretly running things from behind a curtain. Don't befriend a proudboy or listen to someone's defense of "Q". We don't have time for any of that crap.

We need to let government be government until January, let pundits do their punditry, and focus on next spring. What do you want your first day in April to look like? Personally, I'd like to be rejoining my masked friends for the first time after a mandatory nationwide 60-day lockdown, when we watched the "New Cases" plummet for the first time in a year. I'd like to have a roof over my head, which was preserved through the lockdown by the first-ever "Citizen Bailout" – where everybody got $10,000 to keep themselves afloat through the very-effective lockdown. I'd like to see different uniforms on my streets, folks trained to be able to care for folks dealing with "issues" in public. I'd like to know the plan to re-establish normalcy.

One way to get there is to look for the normalcy on the other side, and highlight it. Saying "Trump/Barr/Rudy is an asshole, here's yet another reason to think so" over and over gets us nowhere – they're all in the past. A republican speaking logically about covid, or women, or racism – we need to listen for those voices and amplify them. We already know what we think, and we think we know what they think, but let's look for the outliers. I'm sure we can find some.

I think that might be the only way to avert civil war. Republicans need to talk other republicans down, and we need to identify a path to do that. If someone says, "That guy's a RINO," say "No, he's really CONSERVATIVE. He's a republican." Let's point out the fork in the road, clearly: "Those trumpers WERE assholes, glad that's IN THE PAST and we can just have a normal CONSERVATIVE party again."

It's worth a try. 

D.

The Long Blog – big thoughts, small ideas

I was on Twitter, reading of the Oregon rightists who are drunk on Q Koolaid, raving about the Antifa terrorists who have been arrested by their local sheriff for starting all the Oregon wildfires. All made-up bullshit that people, who think they're patriots, are willing to die for.

I went to my profile, to change my screen name to something anti-fascist, when I realized that I was about to establish a portion of my identity as AGAINST something. That's always been my main beef with the GOP – they exist only to be against things. Abortion, immigration, equality in ANY way, conservation - which is BIZARRE, considering they're supposedly the conservative party. Anyway, I think it's hollow to only be against something, and I couldn't think of a positive way to say antifascist.

  

I don't want to be that guy. So I've decided to purposely, forcefully change my perspective, and I'm inviting you to read my mind. 2020 is the most surreal thing I've ever seen – more than I could possibly imagine, and I'm a surrealist. So – as a surrealist living in a surreality, I should be in my element, right? This should be my sweet spot. My whole career is making stuff up, imagining a thing and then making it, so what's stopping me?

The insane politics that have invaded every aspect of life - I'm done with it. I will vote the moment I receive my ballot, nothing will affect that decision. I'll await my ballot and can ignore the vitriol. BUT: I can't live in denial, many things are horrible, so I'll make them better.

Going forward, I'm turning disgust into positive action items before it hardens into hate. It's very easy for me to type here that I hate the GOP, the NRA, the KKK – but I hate that. It shouldn't be that easy to hate. So now that hate is disgust, and like other disgusting things, I will step around them rather than attack them hatefully. But you also need to clean up disgusting things after you've avoided them, you can't leave them lying around.

So, to defeat the obsolete GOP, I'm going to seek out unregistered folks, and help them learn to want to vote. I believe the Democratic party has better ideas than the others, and I think people want life to be generally good. I believe there are more good people than bad, so if we can outnumber them ASTRONOMICALLY, we may survive to celebrate some day together in 2022. With high fives and hugs and such. I will work in positivity toward that day.

Covid rendered me nonessential in the business world. It will be temporary, but it slammed the brakes on my involvement in downtown retail. If you look at a map, my studio is under the N in Los Angeles. Smack dab in the middle of things, which was a fun adventure until covid. My immediate neighbors were homeless and millionaires and everyone in between, and most of my traffic was tourism. Tourism stopped, mask etiquette became a thing, and my wife was diagnosed with cancer. Quarantine suits my condition. 

I've sublet my studio to become a temporary extension of my studio neighbor - win win - and I'm considering what it might be next. I love things like Meow Wolf, and I've enjoyed having my shop downtown – enjoyed watching others enjoy my work, the conversations and interactions. I'm thinking of using my space for smaller, more specific interactions, and opening it up more to others. I could even dress it for influencers, and leave it for them to promote me over the ethers, without the chagrin of being there watching them pose. With me and my mess out of the way, it can be a teaching space, a performance space, a reading room. 

I never intended to be a shopkeeper. Vera found the building a decade+ ago and my studio was up in the building, first on the 9th floor, then 8, then 4. I thought my 4th floor studio would be mine until I retired. I hung my work on the mezzanine every ArtWalk, we had lines out the door, described in the press as "the epicenter of ArtWalk." Then the bookstore moved in. They made an empty room, a room I'd previously used to assemble big projects, into a globally-known phenomenon. When they expanded onto the mezzanine – my mezzanine – they only rented half.

The owner of the building came to talk to me, we've become friends during my time there. He realized the impact dividing the mezzanine had on our ArtWalk traffic, so he wanted to divide the remaining mezzanine into individual studios, and asked me to talk to a handful of people – those in the building who had been exhibiting recently/currently. We built out 5 studios, and the front room became our collective gallery. Then the tourists coming to see this cool store slowly turned each of our studios into retail shops, to varying degrees.

Anyway, I drew it up. I taped out the walls on the floor and then they were built and acquaintances who would become friends moved in and I've always felt responsible for it. This is our ninth year. Now I've been forced into nonessentiality by covid, and my friends will keep it going without me. It's bittersweet, and it opens up possibilities. When frivolous retail and tourism return, I think I want to approach it differently.

I abhor influencers, yet I love making experiential art. The bookstore grew up as Instagram became a thing, and my shop and my work in the store became a background that influencers felt entitled to fuck with. Now I'm looking at new ways to do things. How can I interact with folks, distanced, from home? I think art, and especially CRAFT, is better in person. I make dimensional, tangible things, so I'm challenged to make those pertinent in a virtual world, and present them in real life, in a drive-by fashion. I like a challenge, but I'm a ruminator. I won't be the first to crack the code, but I'll find a way that works.

The virtual world doesn't suit me. Social media is quickly swelling negative, the positives becoming like a "but her emails" weak-ass excuse to stay there. Facebook enables rampant, viral explosions of conspiracy, YouTube provides undeniable proof for every wacked-out theory. So I'll bend these tools to my will, become more of a producer than consumer. Post an interesting picture, tell a story, interact through dialogue on my OWN page, stop reading the rants of others. I have developed an allergy to social media, it makes me break out in a rash and gives me fits of tourette's. So I will treat it like poison ivy along a path I like to walk, and tread quickly and lightly.

I'm also incredibly pissed off at America. I grew up as a patriot. All my family's birthdays are in July, so the 4th was our big patriotic birthday holiday. I sang the anthem at ball games, flew the flag on flag holidays. Now that flag brings revulsion, because of who has been waving it. I lost my patriotism when Hillary Clinton's popular vote win was denied by the system.

But California has a flag, and it even has a bear on it. America doesn't have a bear. So I embrace my Californianess and turn my back on America. America wants conspiracy theories and whiteness, and I'm done with it. California is loosening its bonds with America, so I'll look for ways to support that effort, to help my existence be less federal-dependent. 

Yet, America is horrible to some of my friends. I need to do what I can to protect them from its trend towards harm. I will embrace this need to protect, rather than hate America's need to harm, and it will be the driving force to get me to register voters, as that's not something I want to do, but it's necessary.

So that's my new reality, strangely less surreal than actual reality. I'll accept the things I cannot change, but I'm perceiving them through my own filter to bolster personal sanity. We'll see how this one reads in six months. If you made it this far, either you're really bored or we're on the same page. Join me in surreality.

What rightists are thinking during coronavirus.

Published September 11th, 2020.

I've been doing some thinking lately and came to my seldom-published blog to write my thoughts. Before I start, I want to publish this collection of MAGA tweets from April 5th, 2020. I closed my business 3 weeks before I collected these, obviously with a specific thing on my mind. They became a draft, now a time capsule. It sat here, unpublished, and was what was onscreen when I logged on.