What a raccoon told me is mostly true, according to sources
Some thoughts provoked in part by a short subscriber note
Last night, I went for a late-night jog before returning home to resume correcting typos and other conspicuous errata in my most recent post1. Before I started the jog, I looked out the window and noticed a very slight misting underway, an unremarkable version of nature’s most half-assed attempt at honest precipitation. I immediately thought of a business named Drizly I recently learned about owing to a trying-to-stay-sober friend—along with countless people I don’t know—having used its services to over-poison herself on multiple inopportune occasions. Until I consciously drew this association, I had no idea that the specific word my mind defaults to retrieving when confronted with a specific weather phenomenon is “drizzle,” which has many familiar synonyms.
I think there should be a new word for the brain’s powerful, unseen translator of new imagery into specific old words. And grant money to study it. Why doesn’t my brain like sprinkle or light shower as much as it likes drizzle?
Whether it’s drizzly outside or not, I see raccoons in my neighborhood whenever I explore it after dark, with these skulking disease-festivals reaching their highest apparent numbers on Thursday evenings, when almost everyone has already put their garbage out for Friday morning’s pick-up. When I have Rosie with me, this can get precarious because she really wants to catch one of these animals, which I think she thinks of as stink-kittens; the raccoons, for their part, are not at all interested in any role-playing. The other night, Rosie scared three of them into a streetside tree, really more of a sapling, before my headlamp beam even detected the ’coons’ presence. They would have been content, in a surly way, to stay there all night (or until the tree collapsed) had I not forced Rosie, prepared to be equally patient if noisier in her own waiting, back inside.
During last night’s 30-minute solo jaunt—Rosie and I had gotten in some shared cardio at around two in the afternoon, when it had been very warm, so she was sitting this one out—I saw the silhouettes of two or three raccoons about a hundred yards ahead skulking across the otherwise empty residential street. When I reached the approximate location of their crossing, I turned and saw the eyes of one of them, reflecting my headlamp-beam, staring at me from between two bushes right below the main window of a house. I stopped and started at it, because some raccoons will skulk reluctantly away from humans who appear to be challenging their unearned nocturnal dominion over the sewers, spare trash, spare cats, and anything promising filth and septic interspecies ruin. Others will not. I wanted to see how brave this one was.
Suddenly, the raccoon said, in a gravelly croak but also in perfect unaccented Colorado English, “Wassup, Rambo? Think you can take me? Why don’t you try playing some football instead? What are you running from anyway? Pussy!”
I couldn’t see the bastard’s mouth moving throughout this startling soliloquy, just the unnatural glow of those unflinching eyes floating a foot above the earth, and maybe a hint of a snout below that. With a lit joint sticking out of the end of the snout.
“I was just minding my own business, you rabid shit-eater,” I complained from the street. At this point I saw a light go on in an upstairs bedroom of the house.
“Sure you were,” it growled back. “You saw us and just ran on by. Didn’t stop to make trouble at all. When I ran from the street into these bushes, I totally made you stand there and try to stare me down.” I now realized two things about this raccoon’s unusually flamboyant manner of self-expression: It was speaking in the voice of Chris Tucker’s character in the 1995 Ice Cube vehicle Friday, and it was rich in sarcasm, thereby undercutting my repartee with my own weapon of choice.
“Who’s the pussy now?” I asked, but I could hear the bravado draining from my side of the verbal melee by the syllable. A second upstairs light went on in the house, and through the closed windows I heard an irritated assigned-female-at-birth voice say, “Honey, I think some of the ‘Section Eight people’ are vandalizing the new Black Lives Matter sign again.” There was no sarcasm or irony at all in that faint but crisp delivery, only purposeful, dour emphasis on telltale portions of it.
“It was you from the start,” the raccoon asserted. Smug bastard. Or bitch. And if this thing was a mother, and the other ‘coons I’d spotted were her babes, this would ensure that our shouting-match would turn physical erelong.
I knew it was time to declare a stalemate, and get on with the thing I had set out to do solely for relaxation and because the air conditioning was too high on the house. When I did resume jogging, I entertained the possibility that the entire exchange had been imaginary, a detailed projection of my own attitude. If so, this was probably trigged by a short note I got the other day from someone who signed up for a paid subscription to this newsletter. The note said:
"Disagree with you frequently and adamantly, but want to keep testing my assumptions."
I don’t know this person, but I did not take this in any way as “You’re swinging me to ‘your’ side.” Instead I saw it as an acknowledgement that my writing here strikes at least one reader as being imperfect but also compelling in some way. I think that translates to, “Whatever else, you’re working hard and earnestly at this.”
That’s all the praise I need. It’s worth looking at what might bridge any gaps out there between curious but skeptical readers and the ways I go about inspiring a quasi-loyal form of curiosity, deliberately and otherwise.
When I look back on not so much individual outbursts but patterns in my writing I think are most likely to turn otherwise interested people off, I don’t think it’s the profanity and insults per se, but the unintended theme these pyrotechnics tend to support: that I’ve been uniquely, consciously, and personally victimized by all of the ills I complain about in some kind of cosmically synchronized way. Maybe it doesn’t actually look that way from the outside, but if I were not me and I were reading this blog as someone with an outlook similar to my own, I might conclude as much.
This is especially true when I grouse about not getting e-mail replies from people I hector for their sins. While I can say that in every case I was addressing a specific wrong, I can’t say I ever had a realistic expectation of hearing back from any of those people or organizations. The way I worded these—usually a form of “This, this, and this is how you screwed up—now admit it!”—by itself all but ensured serial silence.
But the issues I have been raising were never going to garner replies no matter how diplomatically I introduced them, especially given that the people I e-mail from a position of consternation tend to be smart enough to figure out that their replies are extremely likely to be made public. Hell, even had these e-mails been sent by a transgender paraplegic of color, they’ve all been far too “hot” far anyone to touch. (Okay, the Runner’s World stuff I’ve bitched about lately is unique to my situation, but not because the actors at the other end had bespoke gripes with me as an individual.)
Also, while these repeated non-replies have been cumulative in my mind, none of the individuals ignoring my entreaties is part of some smirking cabal. I may have made a few of them feel somewhat…denuded at times with my unrestrained and corrective observations, but whether I like it or not, it is entirely normative behavior in 2023 for people to just blow off anyone who interferes with the progress of whatever scam they’re running or whatever bullshit they’re otherwise slinging. I have been slow to accept this, and have often attributed the silence of my would-be interlocutors primarily to shame and embarrassment, merely because I myself would be ashamed and embarrassed if I were spreading lies, unhealthy suggestions, and superfluous tribalist-racialist static for a living. Maybe these folks are a little cowed at times, but mostly, these are just people living their lives as they believe they’re entitled to and who genuinely don’t care what anyone outside whatever tribe they belong to believes.
And on the subject of tribalism: Although I’ve gone out of my way to assert that the government’s machinations are ruining the country for everyone but the very well-off, with political partisanship a non-issue and class the entire story, and have also identified myself as a disaffected liberal, I still aim most of my criticism specifically at those I classify as shitlibs, masked Karens, and so on, and throw flames almost exclusively at CNN and MSNBC while sparing Fox News.
That one is pretty simple to explain. Only ten years ago, cable-news outlets were unpretentiously partisan, but to my knowledge refrained from telling outright lies; at the time this would have been an iffy business decision, and there were still plenty of ethical, old-school reporters such as Matt Taibbi in the mainstream rotation. The lefty outlets exaggerated the accomplishments of Democratic figures while underemphasizing their flaws, and at the same time dutifully bashing Republicans in exaggerated ways while derogating their positive—or, more accurately, counter-conservative-narrative—contributions. Fox News, meanwhile, ran exactly the same script with the emphases reversed.
Today, the “news” landscape is completely different. Donald Trump being elected president became an excuse for lefty outlets—cable-news, print-legacy, and online-only—to simply start making things up. “Russiagate” was an utter fabrication, nothing more than an extended, out-in-the-open breed of election denial—something now allegedly considered a felony, at least when public figures engage in it. There are no guardrails on anything; almost everyone on CNN and MSNBC has direct ties to the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the White House, or a major defense contractor.
In short, the apparatus underlying the U.S. Government can’t have a loose cannon who doesn’t take One World Government2 directions like Trump as the American president. Trump is no fascist; he’s just a rich blowhard seeking to enrich himself, and now he has a host of fully legitimate grievances against the real fascists. Those fascists are petrified that Trump will win an honestly conducted and tallied election, because at this point, he would. He’s by far the most honest of a stupefyingly dismal lot, and he still lies plenty.
In this new, obscene, all-propaganda-all-the-time corporate-news model, lefty outlets lie about everything when a Democrat is president and Fox News has the luxury of lying entirely by omission. Fox News is obviously reporting on the Biden family corruption scandal and hammering away at Wokish lunacies, but that network’s job while a Democrat holds office is to feign significant disclosures while still serving the aims of the One World Government. Rupert Murdoch makes sure the Overton window doesn’t move too far in the course of playing the "conservative” side of this game.
This is why Murdoch fired Tucker Carlson. Although Carlson himself is reportedly a CIA asset, he was going too far with both his questioning of covid narratives and his criticism of the American contribution to the horrific boondogsterfuck somehow still underway in Ukraine and Russia. His exodus had nothing to do with sexual harassment or his role in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit.
Were a Republican to become president tomorrow, Fox News would start lying about anything that, if truthfully disclosed, might alarm its non-wealthy viewers and exaggerating the accomplishments of this president. It’s hard to imagine anyone lying more flagrantly and triumphantly than the current talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, but the point is that all shifts in coverage would be directed to ensuring the promulgation of the same general diabolical narrative.
If you’re a conservative who thinks Republicans are mostly your friends, why hasn’t anyone been impeached yet? Not just Joe Biden, but Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, to start? These people are, on top of being criminal conspirators, either mentally incompetent and bereft of all decency or strictly following instructions to behave as such (mostly both, I’m afraid). Save for a few either brave or delegated souls, Republicans in Congress aren’t interested in doing diddlyshit about censorship, endless proxy wars, the raping of foreign countries’ natural resources, or labor unions, although now that I think about it Republicans were never big champions of labor unions.
Forget the parties the key figures in the U.S. Government officially represent, and consider instead what it means for a country when a significant burden of its citizens are okay with living in a cold, dismally failed, openly inhumane state.
I can’t believe the U.S. has fallen into the hands of so many bloodthirsty people. Some of them are undeniably sociopaths, while others are tabling what remained of their consciences when they took in roles in government and trying to not drink themselves to death. Or maybe trying to drink themselves at least comatose, judging from the caliber of the decision-making.
I am no more a target of these progressive cruelties and idiocies than anyone else is; I’m just nosier and like to make more direct inquiries than others do. And I wouldn’t be writing any of this if I didn’t think it was both accurate and broadly important, because it’s certainly not helping me raise my status in any “tent” that I know of. That said, I am trying to avoid unloading on everyone who seems wrong on the Internet as if they all set out to be assholes. That’s not how most people are. But we have a number of serious, serious problems, all certain to explode into something straddling a massive crash of the smoke-and-mirrors-backed banking system and kaleidoscopic, gory, Mad Max-level coast-to-coast anomie in the months to come. Road trip!
But we’re all in it together. Not by choice, so we may as well make it one. Those of you who believe otherwise for now will be unable to stave off reality much longer. At this point, most people aren’t clinging to their beliefs because they’re Republicans or Democrats; they’re doing it because they’re scared shitless and it’s dawning on them that there really is no one out there waiting to rescue anyone. Not the cops, not the National Guard, not the biomedical complex, not even a nationwide carpeting of rainbow-flags.
People, working together—looking out for their people on the ground, and trying to get a little closer to comfort—are everyday people’s only hope, even if a lot of programmed preconceptions and long-cherished misapprehensions and barriers must be smashed along the way. As the clamping-down continues unabated, we’re all going to discover the restive libertarian inside of us shortly.
At least we had sure the hell better.
If you subscribe to this newsletter’s e-mails, you’re almost assured of a wealth of typos and other misrepresentations of the words my brain was imagining as my fingers were working. I do proofread these posts, but in the process I often insert at least one new mistake for every two I catch. But after a post hits the Web, I become remarkably more adept as proofing and editing.
The result is an ongoing advisory to either click on the post title in e-mails to see the latest Web version or use the Substack app to read posts, as this also offers the latest version of any post.
If you read a post more than six hours after its time-stamp, chances are that’s as clean a version as you’ll ever see.
Think WHO/Bill Gates, the WEF, the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations, and the dozens-strong and growing spawn of warmongering, censorious, hedge-fund-powered NGOs such as the Atlantic Council and the Aspen Foundation.