A Dangerous Wager

President Trump's open and clear threat to deport American citizens to El Salvadorian prisons should be the final nail in the coffin of our democracy. His repeated Authoritarian attempts to overthrow the United States Constitution, his seizure of power without regard to legality or checks and balances, his complete and total abandonment of all principles of limited government, should absolutely render his Presidency illegitimate.

These "resist" stickers are just virtue signals. They accomplish nothing other than membership in a social club of gentle and fashionable opposition. Don't resist. Revolt. Take off the leash of politeness before these traitorous monsters strangle us with it. The Tree of Liberty is thirsty and it is also brittle. It requires that we tend to it. My hope is that we retake the flag, and turn our attention, our energy, our anger, our hope, to the work of revolution.

Or, you know, we can hold up "this is not normal signs" at his speeches and hope Combover Caligula suddenly grows a soul and conscience. Personally, I think that's a dangerous wager.

Lovetron

 In the 1980's, the world was divided in a way that only young minds could truly understand:

There were those who could graze the bottom of the net.

There were those who could grab the net.

There were those who could touch the rim.

There were those who could grab the rim.

There were those who could dunk a small, round object—maybe a tennis ball or a volleyball—through the rim.

There were those who could dunk.

And then, there was Darryl F*cking Dawkins.

I was still a kid then, and this hierarchy settled deep within me, coursing from my feet to my fingertips like a fire of wonder and want. I was somewhere in that first group, occasionally, desperately leaping with all the might my small body could summon, just managing to graze the soft, puffy threads of the net in the elementary school gym in Seal Beach, California. I’d been playing basketball for three years by then, mastering my hook shot on McGaugh's asphalt courts when I wasn't in the gym with my team, but one year, the team I was on lost every game. And so, it was that year I began to see myself for what I was—a resident of the very bottom of the pyramid. With this came an intensification of a fantasy life, filled with dreams of power, of flight, of soaring beyond the limitations of my own body.

That hierarchy, of course, would eventually give way to the more nebulous traps of adulthood, where the vertical gains of our youth are replaced with less tangible, less triumphant pursuits. I never did make it to the sixth level. I got close once, though. Just once. I can still picture it, a kind of fading photograph in my memory, me, a teenager, pushing a ball through an outdoor rim. The shot felt like a dunk. It felt as if I’d broken through some invisible barrier. But because I could never repeat it with any kind of regularity, I’ve come to believe that the rim was slightly lower than regulation, or that maybe it was a dream—those blurry, half-remembered moments that never quite settle into reality.

Dreams come and go. That’s the truth of it. Now I’m pushing fifty, an age when it’s hard to see life as anything but a slow descent—a decline, if I’m being honest. And yet, even now, life can astonish you. Think about it—being just short of touching the bottom of the net, feeling the weight of that impossible distance, and then discovering that somewhere, out there in the world, there’s a man who can leap so high, so forcefully, that he shatters the entire backboard with his dunk. That’s something else, isn’t it? The counterpoint to the feeling of loss isn’t, exactly, winning. It’s imagining what Darryl Dawkins could do. It’s that moment when the limits you know are shattered by the force of something wild, something beyond.

May you all know Lovetron.

The Towers

 My father, who wasn’t the sort to bother with notions of high culture—certainly not the sort to be moved by the empty grandeur of ivory towers—used to take me regularly to the Watts Towers. A place that, by the time I was old enough to process it, already held its own kind of mythos, woven between the rusty, shimmering spires and the grimy streets where history had quietly coagulated. He never tried to explain it—not in the articulate, “educated” way the world demands of things—because maybe he didn’t have the words. But he’d take me there anyway. It was almost as though he understood, intuitively, that something had to be saved, something worth saving, from the sea of dead noise around us. And in his peculiar way, he knew exactly what it was: the tangible proof that a person, with their hands and their intentions, could create something—a structure, a monument, a physical rebellion against the pull of entropy—that stood, without question, against everything we’d been taught to believe about worth and meaning.

He’d take me to those towers because, well, there wasn’t a map for it, not a single instruction manual to explain what it meant to be there—just the sound of metal scraping metal and the thrum of something primal in the air. You could feel it, the blood pumping through every inch of the steel and the mortar, the grind of existence becoming something more than just dust. It didn’t require an art critic, or some glossy magazine, to make you understand: something had been made, not by the hands of the rich or the highly trained, but by someone who had seen and heard this place differently, perhaps with a clarity the world didn’t want to acknowledge. And in that moment, you knew: that’s the power of art, the real power, the kind that can stand in defiance against the sterile halls of the elite.

Those critics, who scurry about in the shadows of their own high towers, trying to control the language and the narrative, don’t understand this. They couldn’t. They’re busy with their jargon and their curated collections, too far removed from the pulse of what real creation feels like. But my father, in his way, showed me what mattered: a single man, with the audacity to construct something lasting and true, in the middle of all this chaos, standing there like a beacon to everything that refuses to die.

Farce And Fascism

 What a bizarre spectacle this has become. The Democratic Party, putting on a show for the ages, turning up to the State of the Union Address dressed like they’re auditioning for a second-rate high school play, complete with their silly color-coded costumes and absurd "you're a meanie face" paddles. It’s almost too perfect. This, right here, is cowardice wrapped in theatrics. They have managed to turn our national crises into a joke.

For years, they screamed, flailing their arms and clutching their pearls, casting Donald Trump as the grand fascist, the evil tyrant-in-waiting. He was the boogeyman, the man who would bring about the downfall of everything we’ve ever fought for. The New Republic slapped his face on the cover with a Hitler mustache, warning us that Trump’s rise would be the existential threat to the Republic. It was a panic-driven campaign of fear, paranoia, and moral posturing. Every prediction screamed that the United States as we knew it would be destroyed.

And now, here we are. Standing on the edge of that very precipice. The evidence is in front of us, undeniable. The warnings weren’t just the rantings of the paranoid—they were prescient. So, what’s their response? A farce. A pitiful charade designed to distract us from the unraveling of everything they claimed to fight for. It's a sad spectacle—empty gestures that serve only to underline their impotence.

Now, the big question we all have to ask: How did fascism creep into the heart of America, despite the so-called opposition party’s might and supposed resources? How did this happen when they were supposed to be our bulwark against such forces? What were they doing? Collecting their paychecks, watching the train wreck from the sidelines?

In the future, political scientists will look at this with stunned disbelief, their minds racing to explain how this was allowed to happen. Of course, this will all be discussed in some other country, because by then, any inquiry into such matters will likely be illegal here. God help us.

Schmitty

To be alive, to truly be alive, is to be a fragment spinning out in the void, like some errant piece of the great cosmic machine lost in the dark. Before birth, you are whole, one with everything; after death, you return to the void. But in life, in the middle of the mess, you're just drifting; part of something larger, but forever dislodged from it. I felt this most vividly on an acid trip in my early twenties. A piece of flesh, tumbling through the emptiness. But then my brother tossed a baseball at me, mid-trip, and for a moment, I wasn’t falling. I was caught in the pulse of something shared—a connection that hummed across the air like an echo, the daylight stretching long and slow; from my own impending death back to the memories of childhood.

Eating, though—eating was a childhood ritual, a language all its own. That's the thing I remember most vividly growing up. As a kid, it was Saturday mornings, especially. The perfect day to disappear into a bowl of sugar-laden cereal, washing it down with milk and toast, while cartoons like Thundarr the Barbarian and Goober and the Ghost Chasers hummed in the background, filling the void. Each bite, each moment a steady drumbeat of repetition, a foundation to build your day upon. And so, I’ve carried this act of consumption with me, this search for something to fill the empty space. I’ve never outgrown it, though I wonder if I should have. It’s a curse of genetics, this need to consume—thankfully, Saturdays are still a rarity, and I’ve yet to fully expand to the size of a sofa, but I've flirted dangerously with such a reality.

Life isn’t a box of chocolates. When you’re handed life, you don't get to poke at it first, test for the poison; you just dive in. Whether you choke or swallow it whole, that’s your fate, your trial.

But then, life... it’s more like a pack of baseball cards. It's the other thing I remember with utter clarity about childhood: my relentless pursuit of baseball cards. You buy them with the promise of newness, the thrill that this time, you’ll get the one card that’ll make it all worth it. But mostly, you get duplicates—the same old faces, the same old players posing for the same tired photos. The world shrinks back to its mundane cycle. But sometimes, buried in the pack, you find a card that shatters everything. I remember pulling that Mike Schmidt card, his mustachioed face glowing from the plastic, an electric pulse of hope. At that moment, I wasn’t just a kid holding a card. I was holding lightning. A crack in the Universe.

When I Say I'm In Love, You Best Believe I'm In Love, L-U-V...

There are no living members of the original MC5.

And now, there are no living members of the original New York Dolls either.

That’s the joke, isn’t it? Birth leads to death. It’s the rule of the universe. You can’t escape it. It ends this way for all of us - a short ride from womb to tomb. And now, as I write this, just like the last of his Dolls bandmates, David Jo is gone.

But what they created? That’s something else entirely. The birth of those bands, those wild-eyed sons of thunder, is the living proof of that old truth about the sum of parts. The MC5, the Dolls—they weren’t just bands, they were revolutionary acts of destruction. They’re part of the same rope that ties Little Richard to the Sex Pistols, Chuck Berry to the Ramones, Link Wray to the Stooges, the Velvet Underground to the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and so on, ad infinitum. A line that’s been dragging us forward, dragging us through the madness, until it snaps.

David Johansen? That man took a lot of shots early on. Called a Mick Jagger rip-off. They said he was just a cheap copycat, a phony. And that’s bullshit. If anything, David Jo was just as much a copy of a Chicago bluesman as he was anything else—everyone drinks from whatever well they like. Johansen had the look, the swagger, the attitude—but calling the Dolls a Stones knockoff? Not a chance. The New York Dolls were the kids from the tough streets, wisecracking outer borough sons raised on the Shangri-La’s, with a freakshow dollop of the Coasters, Alice Cooper and Bo Diddley stirred into the mess.

And their music? Jesus Christ, that debut album—that record is the purest shot of rock ‘n’ roll ever recorded. It’s not music, it’s a bloodshot, brutal cry from the gut, an atomic explosion that still makes the earth tremble. You put that on, and 52 years later, it still feels like you just got punched in the stomach. The sound of something raw, something true—untamed, unpolished, and unrepentant. That’s why it’s still perfect. Why it hasn’t aged.

But here’s the rub—their push for fame, their hunger to be stars, kept them from ever truly being the songwriters they could’ve been. The follow-up album? Let’s not kid ourselves. It was the B-side to their genius, leftovers from a fire that couldn’t reignite. But even those scraps—hell, even their leftovers—crushed everyone else’s so-called “best.” "Human Being"? You put that against the pre-punk, post-glam rubble of the ’70s, and it still knocks everything else flat. Every time.

But that was just one chapter of Johansen’s odyssey. His solo stuff, with a little less of that reckless heat from his Doll days, was still incredible. Then came Buster Poindexter—the smart-ass, lounge-singer alter ego who gave us that damn “Hot Hot Hot” hit, and God, how he hated that song. DJ’s one and only mainstream hit—the bane of his existence, he’d joke. But he was right, in a way. It was his curse.

Film and TV came next—little bit parts, always with that sneer, always with that self-aware wit. He reunited with the Dolls too, though it was a shadow of what once was. Morrissey called, and he came—humble, amused by the whole damn thing. But the truth is, as we all know, time doesn’t wait for anyone. Cancer and a bad fall pulled him from this world. The world didn’t even have the decency to let him go quietly.

But damn, those lyrics. No one else wrote like David. He carved through every cliche and pretension, turning it into something real, something alive. He wore humor like a badge, cutting through the weight of self-importance with a wink. His love songs never fell into the sappy shit we’re all used to—they were raw and real. His rockers were full-throttle—nothing polished, nothing sweet. His voice? It wasn’t the smoothest, but it had soul. It was the sound of truth. It was the voice of someone who didn’t give a damn about being pretty. And in that? He was the odd soul brother to Ronnie Van Zant—another guy who made the truth sound ugly, beautiful, and, goddamn, unforgettable. No one ever sang to me like David did. No one. Ever.

And so, to David Jo and his four brothers in arms that preceded him in death—those wild, reckless, beautiful bastards—I love you all. You gave us everything. Hell, you gave ME everything. So from one Lonely Planet Boy to Another, Rest Forever in love, in admiration, in gratitude; in that glorious wreckage we call rock ‘n’ roll.

I Wanna Be Your Dog

Right from the chaotic opening that gives way to the raw sonic sludge of the main riff, I Wanna Be Your Dog doesn’t ask for your attention—it takes it. Iggy’s voice howls like a wounded animal, the music’s a dirty, filthy mess, and it’s glorious. It’s the sound of a broken man crawling through the gutter, begging for someone, anyone, to give him a scrap of affection. But it’s not love—it’s a goddamn fetish. It’s animalistic, desperate, and utterly raw. The Stooges don’t care about being pretty or polished—they’re here to drag you through the mud, make you feel things you probably shouldn’t, and leave you shaking in your boots.

And God, the chorus: "Now I wanna be your dog"—it’s not a request, it’s a command. There’s a sick pleasure in Iggy’s voice, like he’s reveling in the degradation, in the emptiness of it all. This isn’t romance. This isn’t tenderness. This is submission, and it’s ugly, and it’s beautiful in its own twisted way. The riff is as dirty as the lyrics, and the whole track feels like you’re falling deeper into a pit of self-destruction with no intention of climbing out. But you don’t care. You’re already lost. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the point. The Stooges didn’t make this for anyone who wanted comfort—they made this for people who wanted to feel alive, no matter how damn filthy it got.