I Refuse to be Silenced

Okay, everybody. I refuse to be silenced. I will not let the fascists win.

First they took Jimmy Kimmel from us.

Before that, they silenced other people. They executed fourteen men who were guilty of riding on boats.

Boats are sometimes used to smuggle fentanyl. Therefore, no one on a boat is innocent of trafficking fentanyl.

The new penalty for fentanyl trafficking is instant death.

I never watched Jimmy Kimmel’s show. I thought it wasn’t very good, the couple of times I was stuck in a room with it. Still, it is weird that they let him go like that. People who like unfunny comedy should get to have what they want.

Somewhere in the USA there’s a guy who never missed a Man Show, and who has been a faithful Jimmy Kimmel viewer ever since then. He can’t get enough of the things Kimmel says to his guests. Some of the quips he flings at them are so unforgettable, so piquant. He has this way of asking Charlize Theron about her upcoming film, when she’s on the show, that you have to see to believe.

I really am kind of floored by the brazenness of what’s going on, in general I mean. What happened to Jimmy Kimmel is bad. The kidnappings, detainments, and deportations, the thing where they incinerate people on boats and brag about it, and the demonization of transgender people, are far worse. And that’s not even all there is.

I recognize Jimmy Kimmel’s being fired as a bad sign. I also don’t like Jimmy Kimmel very much. It’s complicated.

If the FCC had gone after Jiminy Glick, I would be incensed. Jiminy Glick is a national treasure. And he’s not even a real guy.

I’m pretty sure there is a real guy inside the Jiminy Glick suit costume. I haven’t seen yet if that’s been proven by anyone.

Have you ever seen the movie Diggstown?

I haven’t, but I know it’s about boxing, or at least it seems to be, based on the VHS box I used to see at Stone Church Video in Elm Grove. There’s a guy in it who probably almost gets beaten, but doesn’t get beaten. He fights back and finally wins.

It’s a really inspiring story for me right now.

Last week, I thought I was beaten. I thought the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand had to end.

I was like Lou Gossett Jr., in a scene from Diggstown, I imagine, where he’s almost knocked out, he is barely hanging on. But somehow he finds the strength to continue. He gets to swinging his arms again, and against the odds he beats his indomitable opponent, Leonard Wells Diggstown. He is played by James Woods, and his whole thing is he’s a boxer who wears a suit and tie into the ring, with exceptionally baggy pants that prevent his opponent from seeing where his legs are.

This newsletter is now on beehiiv. A helpful reader pointed out in a comment on my last post that beehiiv accounts can be had free of charge. It also means there can’t be paid subscriptions.

It’s kind of a funny catch. beehiiv advertises how they don’t take a cut of any subscription money you get through them, the way other services do. But then, in order to have subscriptions, you have to upgrade your account and pay $49 per month. So they’re not taking a cut of every subscription, they’re just charging you a bunch of money up front, which in my case would be a lot more than any subscription money I would bring in.

Also, as far as I can tell, there is no feature like what the last place had, where I can record myself reading the newsletters and send those recordings with the written versions.

But this is a way to carry on, to keep the torch lit, to make my voice heard via email.

I am so defiant!

I’m like the sun.

I considered renaming this newsletter. I thought about calling it The Procrastinator.

There’s an album I like by trumpet player Lee Morgan that’s called that. I’ve had jazz fever for like four months, now. All I want to hear, all day long, is jazz.

Spotify says the album came out in 1995. It was actually 1978. Spotify is bad.

Lee Morgan, though, was great at naming albums. There’s The Sidewinder. There’s Cornbread.

I may still rename this newsletter The Procrastinator. I’m not sure.

I kind of want to write an essay collection and call it that. If I do, I’ll have to write 40,000 more words worth of essays.

I will not make any money from it. Everyone will be mad at me, for publishing another book. And when we die, it is possible that what will greet us is nothing whatsoever. There may only dreamless sleep to follow all of this writing, reading, and eating and stuff.

Everyone should go and see the Demon Slayer movie that’s in theaters now. Even if you never watched the show, you should see it. Why? Because it looks really good on a big screen, and it is an emotional journey like no other.

I am so unwilling to be silenced, I’m considering taking up streaming video games on Twitch.

I know, right? Wouldn’t that be something.

I would not be good at it, and I wouldn’t pull in much of an audience. But picture it: I’m playing a game that’s on sale on Steam right now for $14.39 called Katanaut. There’s one guy watching me, and he’s at the bottom of a well in a war-torn nation. Everyone he once loved is dead. He is fighting for survival every day of what’s left of his life, and I am giving him hope by playing Katanaut with my reading glasses on. I wear a frown, because it’s late at night and I’m thinking about how my kids, who are now ten and thirteen years old, used to be so little. I’m proud of who they are, and I miss who they once were. These feelings are like parallel lines that should never intersect but do somehow, and the result is an eruption of happiness-in-grief that is impossible to properly describe. I’m also listening to a podcast while I stream, and I’m not saying anything—but the man in the well can see me as I press X and the Katanaut jumps. It’s completely unbelievable.

I found something I thought I had lost.

It’s the transcript from a live chat I had with a vanity publishing company. I had just written the short book Heavens to Betsy, and I wanted to do something with what I had written. I didn’t know what that was, but I felt certain my short book had some kind of value.

I thought the only thing I could do with Heavens to Betsy was self-publish it and use it as a weapon against everything in the world that isn’t me.

What ended up happening, as you may know, is that I sent it to a contest at the magazine Cutbank. It didn’t win, but it was named as a runner-up and will be published there, likely at the end of this year.

I probably wasn’t really ever going to self-publish the thing, because that costs money, and I try to be careful with money.

But I thought if it cost, I don’t know, fifteen dollars to print fifty horrible copies I would do it. I knew that wasn’t possible, but still I tried having this live chat with a customer service representative. I’ll end by showing you how it went.

In it, I insist that Heavens to Betsy is bad. I say it’s horrible.

I don’t think that it is bad or horrible. I didn’t think it then, either. But I wrote Heavens to Betsy in a way that I don’t write most of the things I write. I wasn’t trying to make something good in a normal way; I was trying to make something good in a way I don’t know how to describe. So I defaulted to saying I had made a horrible thing.

Honestly, now that I’m really thinking of it, I think my thing is that when I write something in which I am taking risks I don’t normally take, when I’m trying to write something unlike what I’ve done before, my tendency is to both claim it and reject it at the same time. I want to say, “Look what I made,” and also, “Look at this terrible thing I made,” so that I can have it both ways, I can take pride in something and also act like it doesn’t matter. And if people don’t like it, I’ve already agreed with them. It’s like insulting yourself in front of a bully so that he won’t insult you worse.

Maybe from now on I’ll try to be more like Miles Davis, and insist that I know what I’m doing and that what I’m doing is good. He did a lot of things, and that’s one of them. Something like it, anyway.

I say in the chat that I want the book to have a terrible cover. Now I recognize my work as deserving of a great cover.

Farewell for now, but not for long. I am indeed The Procrastinator. But I usually get around to doing all of the stuff I’m supposed to take care of.