I get mail
Hey, so, welcome to the new folks that only caught up to my internet marketing after I’d dropped the first one of these. I know yet another email subscription thing is like the last thing any of us need. Like, I refuse to accept I’m the only person who struggles with this:
That number used to be higher, but I deleted everything about a year ago.
I meet people who have immaculate inboxes. I can think of one person in particular who is going to get this email who has, from what I saw, the most organized gmail inbox of all time. When I go into my gmail it’s like hacking my way thru the rainforest in search of potable water. This other gmail was like going to one of those super organized Swedish spaces where the whole point is to go and like bask in how organized it is. (I don’t think that’s actually a real thing, but I think my idea of it is based on a real thing, which is pretty much good enough.)
But anyway, I’m sorry to add to that sweltering rainforest if you’re someone like me who is on a billion email lists that you don’t read.
Last time I solicited reader comments to be sent here. I got a few. Now, the first submissions basically set the rules here. These may or may not all be from one person. None of them are signed as a real person. That is EXACTLY how you should be approaching these. Let’s let our submissions speak for themselves.
Dear Abby, My mom is 90 years old and has Alzheimer's. I feel really bad because she doesn't pay much attention to me anymore. She thinks that I am my brother and is always telling him what a scum I am just because I stole her old wedding ring. It had been sitting in that drawer for years and no one seemed to even know it was there. I badly needed the money. Do you think it was so evil to pawn the ring. Signed The Unfortunate Son.
It could be argued that you’ve done a terrible thing, but to your credit, I wasn’t totally clear last issue that this is Heath, not Dear Abby. So for now I don’t think you have anything much to worry about.
Your mother thinks you’re your brother and is always telling him that you’re scum. If I am following this correctly, you got away with it, so what you complainin about? Karma is definitely real, and part of it deals with how ya started the deal, but hey - let the sucker that’s behind the wheel in your next life figure it out, right? They’ll be fucked by climate change anyway, a karmic debt won’t make things much worse. And say a prayer for those reincarnated selves after the earth has returned to its original state of being just a bunch of hot garbage hot magma flowing all over the place.
[First 3 grafs referring to some actual work I did recently that I don’t think is a great look to post about on a blog have been removed from this one] I would also like to read your analysis comparing and contrasting Hitler's rise to power with the rise to power of President Trump. Hate is cunning, baffling, and powerful. We may have to fight the power if we still have the power to fight. could you ccccomment on that?
Thanks for the zero post and are you going to number the next issue minus one or plus one?
Speaking as one of the boomers, you should be glad you are poor. Just handling all my investments takes too much time, I hardly have time to feel sorry for myself anymore.
From A Devoted Reader in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
PS if you include this in your next post, feel free to edit my letter to the editor. I know I tend to be verbose.
Cedar Rapids? I’m…. sorry.
I am no fan of Trump, as I think I make pretty clear to everyone I ever meet. And he certainly appears to be making racial appeals central to what he’s running on. But honestly, I think the Democrats are almost entirely complicit in everything that’s happening too. One frustrating thing about the trump administration is they seem to pay attention to what the left is pissed about the Democrats over in general and then they work to inflame it. Because they know the Democratic leadership cares as much about their own base as Trump cares about his. Which is to say, not at all. But they know, for example, that those of us on the left know that Obama was like the deportation all-time champ and also created a lot of these camps. It’s one of the things we really felt let down by him about (one of many, but a really big one). So they cite that knowing full well it’s just chaff. They’re doing it pretty well - they understand the left much better than the DCCC does, IMO. The game of drive down the opposition’s base while ginning up your own - I know it’s disgusting for most of us that were raised not to be bigots, but unfortunately I think we are seeing one version of that that works in American politics.
I also think Trump is what happens when you reduce a political system to a joke, and it stops being seen as the avenue for making regular people’s lives better and having a real debate about what our country should look like. In any healthy political system, the left is actually going to espouse left economic positions (some are mouthing them now in the presidential field, but that’s part of what everyone now just instantly recognizes as fake). Instead, our elected version of the left lost a few blowout elections and then decided ok fine we’ll be just like them except we are racially cooler, we’re cooler with gay people, etc etc. Then we will receive the level of campaign contributions that will allow us to stay in office. So the Dems, basically, have become complicit in dismantling the New Deal. Without the New Deal, we easily could have become a fascist dictatorship ourselves—and there was quite nearly a coup on FDR to make this happen.
They sold themselves out so much in the 90s that Clinton became the face of NAFTA, which led to so many companies moving out of the country. The whole free trade idea was supposedly a Republican, big money issue. Clinton got so far ahead of himself in selling out his base that he got his face on a really stupid and bad deal. Then Trump was free to come in and attack it, even though that should never have been a democratic party issue to defend.
Well, we’ve now gotten rid of the basic protections against the more unpredictable and damaging aspects of free-market, trickle-down capitalism on the average working person. And people are hurting - tons of people underemployed and student debt and none of our safety net programs working and I think it was honestly quite natural for America to go, fuck this. I think people who voted that way were really super short-sighted about how potentially dangerous the “fuck this” candidate happened to be this time, but imagine it’d been Bernie Sanders instead. That would have been justifiable.
Basically, nobody can come in and say “Group of people X are responsible for how fucked our economy is” if you don’t keep fucking the economy by wanting to believe that if you remove all regulations from it, history won’t just repeat itself. And honestly I know it sucks for the rich of this country to have to accept it, but that means giving people REAL choices about the direction the country is going in, not just in terms of how it treats protected classes when people are paying attention in public or whatever, but the economic direction of our country should also always be up for debate.
I’m sorry, Cedar Rapids, you got me going off on this. As much as I hate Trump, I equally hate the idea that he’s some freak accident. He’s the product of a culture that has run out of ideas and has resorted to reality shows as the mass narcotic to distract us all from our pockets being picked. And even on the racist shit—Man, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to nail him on the awful, inciting, probably illegal shit he has stirred up about Ilhan Omar if Nancy Pelosi hadn’t spent pretty much this whole congressional term trying to figure out different ways to undercut the popularity of these young women of color congresswomen? Just as Trump was doing this, Pelosi’s folks were running a total set-up poll of white working class men with 2 years or less of college to see what the favorability numbers for all 4 of them were. Obviously, they were bad. What they didn’t ask on that survey that i would have liked to have seen was that same sample’s opinions on Pelosi. Which is obviously like maybe a tenth of what the numbers for AOC etc were.
I think that’s honestly the main parallel to draw to Nazi Germany that is actually warranted at this point. The fact that the SDP was more focused on eradicating what should have been its ally against the Nazi threat, which was the Communist party. Because of the war between the “libs” and the left, Hitler was basically able to sneak in with a really weak coalition.
I don’t think Trump has it in him to be a Hitler. He has the hate and the bigotry, but he is too content to just sit around and watch TV and eat hamburgers and tweet etc. He doesn’t want the hassle of trying to take over the world, he’s perfectly content with his completely unearned life—except when he isn’t, when that narcissistic wound gets brushed up against a little too much. I feel like he’s got all the necessary components except drive and possibly intelligence.
But what do I know?
The candidate who actually has the solution is Marianne Williamson—in all serious now, not even ironically—but not enough people have taken enough psychedelics to understand why that’s the case.
uh- hi, Heath, in your blog you said--"but send me a note at hdgfreelance@protonmail.com and tell me what’s on your mind."
Well, I've decided to tell what is really on my mind is how many times a day I have to pee. How many times do you pee?
It seems like sometimes I no more than sit down and have to get up again and go to the bathroom. Like right now...just talking about it makes me feel a real urgency, so much so that I had to quit in the middle of a sentence to go to the bathroom. I tell myself it's all in my head, but my brain tells me I'm about to be wet. Any suggestions? Thanks,
I think the failure to leave a name at the end was brilliant. I actually laughed my ass off at that part. It made what had felt like a pointless message up til that point feel earned. The dude peed at least 3 times during that email. LOLz.
Eight simple rules for reading my teenage email blogs
Kind of a lame gimmick to base a section’s title on a long-canceled TV show that probably no one remembers, but watch as I commit to the bit. Or maybe I just came up with 8 parameters on how this is all gonna work. And they’re not rules, it’s more just what to expect. So yeah, it’s definitely a stupid bit I’m about to commit to in 3…2…1..
1) Topics will be set and sequenced according to my whims. By that I mean when something sticks in my ol’ craw, or when something thrills me close to the point of no return, I will come into this here sub-sub-sub-stack (shouts to Melville) and at least throw down a header. Then I’ll know to come back when I’m feeling particularly hot-take-y, and I’ll fill ‘er in like an essay exam. Once I’ve got a few headers filled in, I’ll send it. That will result in…
2) A complete lack of any sort of day-of-the-week expectation for when these go out, or how many times per week, etc., to be held by the readers. Look, man, I do this when the spirit moves me. I’m not getting paid for this, and as far as I know, you’re not getting paid to read it (unless you’re one of the 3 people I paid to sign up for this so I could hit my ‘launch requirement’ for how many subscriptions I needed before BLASTOFF). So, like, get off my back. It’ll come when it comes.
3) Thou shalt know that I am unlikely to edit these much as long as it’s a thing I’m doing for fun. This is not meant to be a reflection of my professional abilities, god help us if it was, and while I’ll edit a little bit, it’s really hard to edit my own stuff without a pretty serious commitment to allow X amount of time to go by and then just later approach it with complete vicious determination to kill as many words as I can in a spree. I noticed instantly on scanning my last one that I had made several glaring errors I would have fixed if I’d given it a proper edit. So, when something like that happens, do your best to figure out what I meant—but here’s the fun part—if you can’t figure out what I meant, create your own meaning for whatever I wrote that doesn’t make sense. Have fun with it!
4) Go to comments section on the website version of these posts, and GET INVOLVED!!!!! Don’t make me invoke those pain points again. Also, guess what, you’re all charter subscribers. Nobody else is going to be a damn charter subscriber, not even if they sign up before I send this. That means that even after this newsletter becomes the next. .. what was the last wildly popular email subscription thing, Politico Playbook? god help us if sos … and it goes behind the paywall substack reaaaally wants me to use, y’all never gonna have to pay a RED CENT. Pretty generous of me when there’s no plan to ever charge money for this and the odds of my humble young substack blog becoming a hit are basically nil, I know.
5-8) These rules are secret, not because I was all along unprepared to write 8 actual things in this section, but because some things are better left unsaid and more exciting when left a mystery. I’ll sprinkle clues about these last clues throughout my next several posts, but seriously, don’t go too crazy looking for them. If you look too much you’ll never see them, they’re those sorts of clues. They’re more subconscious clues than anything, so really don’t look for them all, just read, absorb, and all will become clear. Scout’s honor!
The Mike Gravel 2020 Debate Qualification Twitch Stream Highlights
If you aren’t familiar with the story of Mike Gravel’s 2020 campaign and the extremely online high school kids that are basically running it for him, click the link you just skimmed over. It’s worth it to discover it on your own. It’s, along with Marianne Williamson and Bernie 2020 and some of Warren’s proposals, the best part of the primary cycle thus far.
Basically, you might remember Mike Gravel as a crank who ran in 2008 and had a weird ad where he dropped a rock into a stream and walked out of frame (and that was literally it). But if you’re a student of history or if you’re just old and pay attention sometimes, you may know that he was a distinguished Senator who was famous for attempts to end the draft during Vietnam and for reading the pentagon papers into the public record, which was an act of civil disobedience that took no small amount of courage.
And now, despite having been out of politics since 1982 aside from that go-nowhere 08 bid, he’s way more relevant on Left Twitter than most of the candidates that are trying really hard to play to Left Twitter. And it’s precisely because these high school kids decided he’d be a great person to get into the debates and just go after centrists. That’s what his twitter presence has been up to for the past many months - just owning the fuck out of the libs and making everyone go, wait, isnt that guy like in his late 80s? How did he get so fluent in posting? But it literally was these HS kids were smart enough to see that Bernie (their actual preferred guy) couldn’t just go attacking Biden and establishment candidates all on his own, and that he was pretty unlikely to go as far as they wanted given senate decorum etc. So they wanted a guy in the debates to just be that attack dog for the left.
And they succeeded for the second debate! They got enough contributors to qualify. I went to their live Twitch stream (lol - i clicked to it but I still am claiming this as shoeleather reporting) when they were celebrating and took some fun screenshots of extremely online teenagers writing crazy things in YouTube chat as a 90 year old man and a bunch of 17 year olds drank celebratory sparkling grape juice.
Unfortunately, after this joyous occasion, the DNC decided that even tho Gravel had met one of two requirements that had been set out as two different tracks to make the debate (# of contributors or standing in polls) they were now going to require both. And thus yet another generation of potential activists learns the first time they try to do anything involving the Democratic party that they’re not welcome.
It went from joyous to sad, but I still have all these screen grabs of things people said that delighted me at the time, and I don’t want them to go to waste. So here is a portrait of the Gravel debate-qualifications-victory livestream via what some of the spectators were saying as it went.
Fucking electoral office.
Someone referring to their candidate of choice as a “little bitch” for being a couple minutes late starting the live stream.
Asked and answered. At least this guy is polite about it.
True to ALL of it.
This is the truest thing i’ve seen on the internet in a long time, and I’m not even kidding, y’all. This was a fellow shaman droppin knowledge.
As Bobby Kennedy once said to a crowd before the ‘60 wisconsin primary as crucial steam was being built to elect his brother in that state.
Thanks to the good doctor for this trenchant analysis. (This was apropos of nothing, I tried hard to find the context for this and it was apparently just what was on this person’s mind.)
The betrenchcoated teen must not have the toxic associations that went along with it in my day anymore.
Dude, me too. (This was also apropos of nothing but I didn’t have to search to understand)
Nothing like realizing you’ve thrown a gravelanche in the MF chat and nobody’s come.
Supplementary materials
This is where I’ll normally throw down a few links of interest. However, I cannae find the links I copied down for this, so I’ll just put them in the next one.
I want you all to know that despite the fact that this world is brutally cold, that people can be monsters at worst or just totally self interested at best, despite that the sea is going to overtake the land and we’re all going back to that magma floe rider, that all of you are loved. Not a single one of ye doesn’t have someone whose life just wouldn’t be the same if you weren’t around. You might not know how much you mean to folks - and sometimes you might forget - but in this crazy, fucked up world it’s important to remember, I think. That’s the shit at a deeper level than politics or culture or economics etc that I really think we all need to rediscover - our interconnectedness. We’re all just molecules vibin at the same frequency man! #NeverForget #blessed
Love,
HZA