The nicest guy at the racism store
I don’t know about the Parable of the Sower man
Every morning my idiot goldfish brain reboots to factory settings and I wake up thinking to myself I don’t know man people are basically decent overall aren’t they? then I spend 19 consecutive hours on Twitter unlearning that lesson and I will never stop going in.
This morning I woke up at 7 am with a refreshed brain and the ambition to write a really good Hell World for you nice people then I started fucking around with a top 25 emo songs of 2010s list and then it grew to over 100 and it sapped all my creative energy into a pointless diversion but I guess I’ll throw the list in here at the end of the post because who gives a shit. If you’re here for the emo content you may appreciate this post from a while back featuring interviews and essays from Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years, Geoff Rickley of Thursday, Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die and more.
Sometimes people say to me they’ll go Luke writing a newsletter where you compile the most devastating shit over and over again building a fruitless indictment against the unchecked cruelties of capitalism and on top of that smuggling into it your own struggles with addiction and depression seems like it should be a guaranteed hit why wouldn’t ten million people sign up to read that type of shit every day and I say I don’t know buddy. But nonetheless well around 7,200 of you brain perverts are here and I am thankful for that. Now if I could just convince more of you to pay for it… I may despise capitalism but I am nonetheless still as of yet suffering under it so one has to make do.
I'm doing a reading in Brooklyn at Dekalb Market Hall, DeKalb Stage on Monday 11/4 by the way and a book party type thing at Great Scott in Boston on Friday 11/8 so mark your calendars or whatever. Please don’t come and assassinate me. No refunds on Hell World subscriptions if I die.
If you’d like to read a chapter of the Hell World book in French you can do so here and in Spanish here.
I just read a story from ABC News about a man in Japan who was arrested for stalking and sexually assaulting a young pop star and apparently they say one of the ways he figured out how to find her was by studying the reflections in her pupils in the selfies she posted to see which train station she was at.
I’ve been trying to find a good dystopian or sci-fi or horror novel to read this week and I’ve tried samples so far of Ice by Anna Kavan and The Separation by Christopher Priest and Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and I’m not sure why I even bother with that type of shit.
I don’t know about the Parable of the Sower man it’s bleak even for me and I write this newsletter. It’s set in what probably seemed like the impossible future year of 2024 at the time and it’s about Los Angeles after climate change and there’s no water and working people live in walled communities and the poor live naked and feral in the streets and the rich treat them all like disposable dirt and I guess there’s a fascist presidential candidate who I shit you know runs on the platform to “Make America great again.”
Here’s a passage from it when the protagonist a teenage girl and her family venture outside of their walled town to go be baptized in a church:
We rode past people stretched out, sleeping on the sidewalks, and a few just waking up, but they paid no attention to us. I saw at least three people who weren’t going to wake up again, ever. One of them was headless. I caught myself looking around for the head. After that, I tried not to look around at all.
A woman, young, naked, and filthy stumbled along past us. I got a look at her slack expression and realized that she was dazed or drunk or something.
Maybe she had been raped so much that she was crazy. I’d heard stories of that happening. Or maybe she was just high on drugs. The boys in our group almost fell off their bikes, staring at her. What wonderful religious thoughts they would be having for a while.
The naked woman never looked at us. I glanced back after we’d passed her and saw that she had settled down in the weeds against someone else’s neighborhood wall.
A lot of our ride was along one neighborhood wall after another; some a block long, some two blocks, some five. … Up toward the hills there were walled estates—one big house and a lot of shacky little dependencies where the servants lived. We didn’t pass anything like that today. In fact we passed a couple of neighborhoods so poor that their walls were made up of unmortared rocks, chunks of concrete, and trash. Then there were the pitiful, unwalled residential areas. A lot of the houses were trashed—burned, vandalized, infested with drunks or druggies or squatted-in by homeless families with their filthy, gaunt, half-naked children. Their kids were wide awake and watching us this morning. I feel sorry for the little ones, but the ones my age and older make me nervous. We ride down the middle of the cracked street, and the kids come out and stand along the curb to stare at us. They just stand and stare. I think if there were only one or two of us, or if they couldn’t see our guns, they might try to pull us down and steal our bikes, our clothes, our shoes, whatever. Then what? Rape? Murder? We could wind up like that naked woman, stumbling along, dazed, maybe hurt, sure to attract dangerous attention unless she could steal some clothing. I wish we could have given her something.
My stepmother says she and my father stopped to help an injured woman once, and the guys who had injured her jumped out from behind a wall and almost killed them.
I usually do most of my book reading before bed and I’m not sure I want to read too much more of that type of shit my dreams are bad enough as it is.
Splinter which was one of the only popular left-of-liberal news sites in existence was shut down out of nowhere this week by the latest in a series of finance ghouls who have been conspiring to ruin what was once Gawker for the past few years. I don’t know why they did it and they don’t either these equity vultures keep stepping on the same bag over and over and selling it on to the next dumbass who steps on it until it's nothing.
It reminded me of this piece I wrote a couple years ago about the future of journalism we have to look forward to:
Here is how it will go. Men with no fewer than four boats and at least as many divorces, whose monetary interests are best served by going entirely unreported on, will continue to purchase existing media properties, either gutting them, running them into the ground, or rendering them effectively toothless, as we’ve seen with numerous alt-weeklies and newspapers throughout the country in the past few years.
Sometimes we won’t even know whose hand it is pulling the lever on the guillotine. The publications who would’ve reported on who bought the publications won’t exist anymore.
Ah we offered like $400k of some bank's money that we definitely don't have for an Arrested Development model home looking ass condo in Salem next to a hospital an hour plus commute to Boston and it wasn't enough for the people selling it who don’t live there and never did. Guess we'll go fuck ourselves. I worry sometimes it’s going to make it seem like I’m rich on here because I’ve been talking about trying to buy a house but it’s not like we have the money for a house we just have to take out a loan that is the equivalent of paying to go to Harvard for ten years in a row.
Amber Guyger a former Dallas cop was sentenced to ten years in prison for shooting Botham Jean to death inside his own apartment earlier this month. A neighbor named Joshua Brown was one of the witnesses to testify against Guyger and weirdly he was shot to death himself about a week later outside his building. The Dallas police got to the bottom of that shit real fast though because they said they had a suspect in custody a couple days later who admitted that he and two friends had driven all the way to Dallas from Louisiana to purchase weed from Brown. Brown’s alleged past as a drug dealer never came up from either the defense or prosecution who used him as a witness against Guyger but never mind.
So Brown did the deal out in the open near where he lived and it went wrong somehow and he shot one of the guys during the giant weed deal he was conducting after being all over the news for testifying against a cop and the dudes took the gun off him and shot Brown and then took off. They dropped the one who had been shot at the hospital where he immediately copped to all of this.
Meanwhile the cops showed up and found a bunch of cash and twelve pounds of weed in Brown’s apartment that — again — he was selling drugs out of a few days after a trial where he was one of the most famous witnesses against a police murderer in recent memory. Seems real as hell.
That same week there was what I guess was a meeting of Dallas’s new Community Police Oversight Board and apparently they didn’t want to open up comments to the public at first so things sort of got hectic and you can watch it in videos here in this thread.
People were naturally upset about what’s going on with the Dallas cops there in the aftermath of the Brown shooting. The reason I bring it up is because in one of the videos you can see this cop pushing around a guy who’s like I’m an elected official get your hands off me and at one point you can see that the cop has a Punisher skull on his hat.
If you’re unfamiliar the Punisher is a comic book vigilante who murders at will whomever he considers to be the bad guy in any given situation based on the whims of his PTSD derived psychopathy and paranoia and cops and troops everywhere just fucking love putting the scary skeleton drawing he wears on his comic book tights on their equipment and cars and that would be funny if it weren’t a perfect illustration of how professional gun havers perceive what their job is. Only way it would be weirder is if we lived in an alternate universe where cops decided for some reason to start wearing the Spider-Man logo on their shit. Ay I’m Spider-Man over here don’t disrespect me.
Speaking of comic books I finally saw the macabre twisted nightmare film we all know about and it instantly short-circuited my brain like I was a racist in a Lovecraft story.
jk I thought it was fine overall. Phoenix was predictably excellent and it was tense throughout most of it and it looked good but ultimately it just seemed like a dull guy’s idea of what a smart film is supposed to be like or maybe more like a cynical guy’s idea of what a dull guy who thinks he’s a smart guy thinks a film should be like?
Sometimes when I think about having children I know that I would love them more than anything else in the world obviously but then I think about how it takes like twenty years of intense labor all to just send some random putz out into the world and it doesn’t seem worth it. You spend two decades paying for them to stay alive every single day and the rest of your life being shaken down to your very bones about the wellbeing of what in the best case scenario is gonna turn out to be some fucking nerd and worst case is a total chode.
Yesterday I filed this piece to the Guardian about how criticism of Trump from Fox News and other rightwing outlets like Drudge seems to be increasing and my genius thesis was hmmm maybe the right is starting to hedge their bets by floating out post-Trump trial balloons to their audience of red-assed Uncle Coaches and yard sale nanas whose 9 and 1 have been worn off their phones from overuse.
“As fractures within the Fox network have grown, and many of their news anchors have become more stridently critical of Trump following the revelations of the impeachment inquiry, it may well be that Fox News, and other conservative media, are starting to wonder if it might be wise to make plans for a post-Trump future,” I wrote and then literally less than an hour after it was published Shep Smith was apparently pushed out because he twisted Tucker Carlson’s bowtie sideways too many times and I guess I should just go ahead and shut the fuck up forever now when it comes to trying to divine the political winds in the Trump era.
In any case RIP in peace to Shepard Smith the nicest guy at the racism store.
Ok here’s the list of my personal favorite 118 emo(ish) songs from the 2010s. A couple things to keep in mind:
I probably forgot like ten obvious bands and I’ll go ahh fuck and add them in later.
Lists like this aren’t real and outside of say the top 25 nothing matters. Obviously there is not much of a measurable difference between song 74 and song 75 for example. Some of these aren’t technically emo or even what we mean when we say emo now but everyone who likes emo likes or will like all of these songs so leave me alone. I was gonna make a Spotify playlist of all these but then I remembered I didn’t feel like it.
Mostly this is just a list of a lot of great shit you should listen to if you’ve never heard of a lot of these bands. If I’m being honest my real top 30 is basically everything off of Koi No Yokan and Diamond Eyes by Deftones and Body Talk by Robyn.
120 Take Me Home – Blis
119 The Sunshine Bus – Prince Daddy & the Hyena
118 You Just Won’t Be the Same – Stars Hollow
117 Life – awakebutstillinbed
116 Thread – Now, Now
115 Always Hazy – Macseal
114 Heart of Gold – Field Mouse
113 Distant – Like Pacific
112 Mr. C’s Amazing Trip – Save Ends
111 Brilliant Dancer – Lemuria
110 That Kind of Girl – All Dogs
109 Teen Challenge – Great Grandpa
108 Shit Twins — Dads
107 Southern Comfort – Michael Cera Palin
106 Fed Up – Gouge Away
105 Nearer My God -- Foxing
104 Tire Swing – Dad Punchers
103 Kill My Compass – Daytrader
102 Untitled – Half Hearted Hero
101 Collector – I Kill Giants
100 Disdain – Knuckle Puck
99 Don’t Need to Be Them – The Sun Days
98 Wut I Liek ABt U – Jank
97 I Don’t Wanna Be An Asshole Anymore – The Menzingers
96 Pash Rash – Jeff Rosenstock
95 Creature – It Looks Sad
94 Words That Rhyme With Different, Etc. – sports.
93 Resevoir – PUP
92 Cinco De Mayo Shitshow – Marietta
91 Smother – Frameworks
90 In Colour – Departures
89 Luck Has A Name -- Crash of Rhinos
88 Unless – Pentimento
87 Most of the Time – Turnover
86 Time Capsules – Misser
85 In Love Or Whatever – Future Teens
84 No Below — Speedy Ortiz
83 Serenity – WATERMEDOWN
82 Scotty Get the Van, I’m Moving – Cayetana
81 Still Into You – Paramore
80 Killin It – Polar Bear Club
79 Skipping Stone – Transit
78 War – Brutus
77 Tail Whip, Struffle – Free Throw
76 I Was Sixteen Ten Years Ago – Joi De Vivre
75 Tough Love – Forth Wanderers
74 Edward 40Hands – Mom Jeans
73 Always Focused – Tiny Moving Parts
72 Sister Cities – The Wonder Years
71 So I Shotgunned a Beer and Went To Bed -- Snowing
70 Two Year Plan – Such Gold
69 Real Thing – Turnstile
68 Smooth – Tiny Moving Parts
67 Flicker, Fade – Taking Back Sunday
66 Apology Not Fucking Accepted – Dikembe
65 Zero Day – Nothing
64 Youth Cars – Secret & Whisper
63 Montrose – Man Overboard
62 Scud Running – Prawn
61 Aftermath – Rolo Tomassi
60 Dead Wrong – Somos
59 Something About Lemons – Chumped
58 ~ -- Touche Amore
57 Catalina Fight Song – Joyce Manor
56 Irrevocable, Motherfucker – Glocca Morra
55 DVP – Pup
54 Whatever – All Get Out
53 Overly Verbose Email Series Pt. III – Pool Kids
52 The Downfall of Us All – A Day to Remember
51 Safety, Football, Etc.
50 We All Float Down Here – Four Year Strong
49 Your Clothes – Can’t Swim
48 Their/ They’re/ Therapy – Their/ They’re/ There
47 Dizzy On the Comedown – Turnover
46 Be Here Now – Basement
45 Head in the Ceiling Fan – Title Fight
44 Let’s Talk About Your Hair – Have Mercy
43 I’ve Given Up On You – Real Friends
42 Saturday – Remember Sports
41 Uncomfortably Numb – American Football
40 Lost (Season One) -- Camp Cope
39 An Introduction to the Album – The Hotelier
38 The Silver String -- Saosin
37 Asleep – Makthaverskan
36 I Tore You Apart In My Head – Balance and Composure
35 No Good – Knuckle Puck
34 A Thousand Miles Away From Here – Hostage Calm
33 Award of the Year Award – You Blew It!
32 Passing Through a Screen Door – The Wonder Years
31 Quitting – Donovan Wolfington
30 Scott Street – Phoebe Bridgers
29 Map Change – Every Time I Die
28 Roam – The Story So Far
27 Guardian – Tigers Jaw
26 In On It – Superheaven
35 Daydreaming – Paramore
34 Ambulance – Eisley
33 The Knock – Hop Along
32 Architects – Rise Against
31 Be Here Now – Basement
30 Say Nothing – Pianos Become the Teeth
29 Your Graduation – Modern Baseball
28 Sleepless Nights – Turnover
27 There, There – The Wonder Years
26 Twin Sized Mattress - The Front Bottoms
25 Plane Vs. Tank Vs. Submarine – Tigers Jaw
24 Rapture – Touche Amore
23 Repine – Pianos Become the Teeth
22 Reindeer Games – Oso Oso
21 Storm och längtan -- Vi som älskade varandra så mycket
20 Right Back At It Again – A Day to Remember
19 Lost Your Name – Balance and Composure
18 A Satisfactory World For Reasonable People – Pity Sex
17 The House That Heaven Built – Japandroids
16 Reach Out To You -- Adventures
15 The Sun – Tigers Jaw
14 The Summer – Citizen
13 Save That Shit – Lil Peep
12 Dirty Laundry – Cayetana
11 Covet -- Basement
10 Quicksand – The Story So Far
9 Two Beers In – Free Throw
8 Funny You Should Ask – The Front Bottoms
7 Your Deep Rest – The Hotelier
6 Came Out Swinging – The Wonder Years
5 Hiding – Pianos Become the Teeth
4 Au Revoir – The Front Bottoms
3 Archie, Marry Me – Alvvays
2 If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will – Pup
1 Constant Headache – Joyce Manor
deftones!!!! we have one (1) whole band in common this is gonna be an Adventure. thank u!!
Have you read N.K. Jemisen's Broken Earth trilogy? Finished it recently and thought it was really good post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy.