My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/23/20 "The Fantasy"

(instrumental for piano) I spent the afternoon listening to a tribute performance to Scott Hutchison, the lead singer of Frightened Rabbit who killed himself on May 10, 2018. I'd seen him perform at the end of February and told a friend, "This is the last time I'll ever see them live." I was already working in earnest to move to Korea and, to fully commit, had to work under the assumption that I'd never come back to the States. On May 10th, I was en route to the Pacific Northwest to see friends and family there for the last time. I started seeing the news alerts about Hutchison going missing while I had a layover, and I just knew. I hoped, but I knew. His music had been such an important part of my time in Philadelphia. I saw them a few months after I moved there at their first sold-out show in the States, introduced every partner I had to their music, and just as his music was the emotional soundtrack to my life there, his suicide has been the establishing tone of my life here. -6/23/20. "The Fantasy" from New Orleans Monday (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/22/20 "The Day of Dread"

"Assemble yourself, dear/Friend. Then watch it come apart. It/Only takes an hour, the day of the dread/Comes upon you. Falter not. Be strong./You don't know anything yet." Columbus police maced a double amputee then stole his legs, leaving him to drag himself to the medics. Protesters had to jump the cops to steal the legs back, and they did. Through a wall of mace, the protesters overpowered the cops and got the legs back. But what a monstrous moment. Stealing someone's legs. You have to decide to do that. On top of the decision of macing someone who is missing parts of their body, to make the further decision to hold them down and disconnect their limbs. And all the cops went along with it. They followed the order to remove someone's legs and then attacked people who tried to return them. This is a level of depravity and sadism that can neither be negotiated with nor endured. It's going to get worse, but the very fact that it's going to get worse is why the protests can't stop. -6/22/20. "The Day of Dread" from London Residency (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/21/20 "He Said Nothing: Part Five"

"And he was so distracting/Imbued with his blustery bellow/And his promenade of gestures/Like a floating benevolent cloud/That captures your imagination/When you’ve nothing to do." The president held his first post-opening rally in Tulsa. Tickets sold out and there was a massive overflow area outside where his speech would be broadcast to all the thousands who couldn't get tickets. Masks were not required and attendees had to sign waivers saying they wouldn't sue the campaign if they contracted coronavirus. Insiders said they scheduled the rally to boost the president's spirits: the plague and the protests were making him sad so they sought to pacify him with a shiny rally. And no one showed up. Tickets sold out, but it now appears that was a prank engineered by K-pop fans. Even without that story, the overflow area was empty. It was everyone's first chance to come our and show support for the strongman, and no one was there. -6/21/20. "He Said Nothing: Part Five" from Dublin Friday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/20/20 "Just a Rehearsal"

"We're ready for big things/To happen right now/We don't know what to expect/Except that keep singing the same way." Who knows what the world to come looks like? Part of the outrage from the right over wearing masks is this is not the apocalypse they were promised. The plague arrived, the country shut down, and people... stayed inside. Helped each other out when they could. Put a lot of hours into Animal Crossing. All the time and money spent on assault rifles and bomb shelters and survivalist practice for nothing. Then on top of that you get a nationwide uprising. Finally! An excuse to use those useless guns! You must defend yourself against... scores of unarmed protesters demanding black people stop being murdered. The end has come and all these people are responding the wrong way! And to make matters worse, they're winning. They're taking to the streets with nothing and tearing down your gods. -6/20/20. "Just a Rehearsal" from Houston Thursday (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/19/20 "Friday Morning"

"Bare your body to the death/You find as you traverse/The lonely fields/You find yourselves walking through." The news is reporting a Korean man broke quarantine six times, and these aren't instances of getting caught buying milk at the corner store. He went to Seoul, Busan, and other places in the country demonstrating that selfish and stupid are not held exclusively by the people of any one country. Looking at the US numbers, even with under-reporting, the death toll is higher than projected. This isn't slowing down. Meanwhile, a friend from the States got back in touch after a while. They're in one of the states that's becoming a new epicenter and were complaining about people not wearing masks. Then they said they were traveling to the West Coast next weekend and Mexico next month, just to get away. None of us is immune to poor choices. -6/19/20. "Friday Morning" from Brussels Saturday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/18/20 "Got My Dog"

"Got my dog/Got my gun/I go where I want/Don't try put up no fence/I'm invisible/I pass through this world/Like a ghost." Atlanta police, to protest one of their own being fired for murdering someone, have gone on strike. They're just refusing to come to work in an attempt to show the city how much it needs them. It's a risky move. After all, the cops claim that without them (and carte blanche to commit murder) you'll have chaos, riots, and looting--precisely what we've had because of the cops' use of violence. So their move now is to go, "If you think it's bad with us, see how you like it without us." NYPD tried this in 2015 by having an extended strike during contract negotiations. Crime dropped. During the uprising, every city where the police refused to riot stayed peaceful. Early reports coming out of Atlanta say it was the first quiet night in ages. Sounds like the police just struck for a pay cut. -6/18/20. "Got My Dog" from St. Louis Friday (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/17/20 "My Home"

"I'll never forget you/Even though I'm starting to/I'm only doing it because you want me to/I suppose I'll get over you now and then/And I'll be free and easy." Spent my afternoon listening to a tribute album to Adam Schlesinger, a member of Fountains of Wayne killed by the president's pandemic response. And while it's important to be reminded of the victims of this administration's eugenics-based response, it's important to remember the pandemic itself. The curve, despite the meager lockdown effort, enforced too late and lifted too soon, has not flattened. Can you have a second wave if the first never crested and rolled back? Would it emerge as a bump or a doubling, wave building upon wave, presenting us with a tsunami of death? Meanwhile, the president, bored with plague and protest, begins holding rallies again this weekend, gathering his proudly maskless followers to gather tightly together and sing his praises. -6/17/20. "My Home" from Houston Saturday 2011 (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/16/20 "Fantasy Five"

"If I had said some things different/If I had interpreted it all in another way/And had been another person/It wouldn’t be the same." I saw a thread on Twitter from a young white woman detailing all the crimes she'd committed in front of police and how she still didn't have a criminal record. She did it to highlight privilege and give further examples of cops criminalizing blackness, but I did have to wonder who grew up unafraid of the cops? The first story my parents told me was about off-duty New York cops dragging a man from his car and beating him to death for cutting them off in traffic. No charges because officially he choked to death on his own blood. This was 40 years ago. My parents always taught me that police were murderous thugs just waiting for an excuse. It's also worth nothing my parents didn't tell me the victim's race, because that doesn't matter, but, of course, it absolutely does. -6/16/20. "Fantasy Five" from Ghost Passing (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/15/20 "I Know I'm Alive: Excited"

"I thought I was okay/Some time ago/I thought it was all right/But I was dead/I didn't have my obsession/But now I got it/Nobody can take it away/Because it's in my mind." Gov. Cuomo released a statement Saturday telling protestors, "You don't need to protest, you won." The Banned Book Club Twitter noted that in Korea's "2016 Candlelight Revolution, there was one of these 'you won, stop' moments every few days./But people never stopped. It took 5 months, but they got every single thing they demanded. All the way up to the president in prison." Breonna Taylor's murderers are still free. The mayors who ordered police to attack their own citizens have not resigned. And we have not defunded the police. This does not stop until the State stands down and surrenders, disarms, and disbands. This uprising is not for police reform. Minneapolis had enacted many of these reforms and police still murdered a man on camera while laughing. Abolish the police. -6/15/20. "I Know I'm Alive: Excited" from Houston Saturday (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/14/20 "Waiting to Die"

"Hey, let's go for a beer!/'I don't drink anymore.'/Well, what do you do?/'I sit in a chair.'/What, you meditate?/'No. I don't do anything.'/Well, don't you know how to live?/'No. Not really.'" What is our responsibility to each other? How do we live a moral life? I didn't know before and I don't know now. The cynic in me wants to roll my eyes at the announcements of anti-racist activism by YouTubers and podcasters, but the realist in me knows that the naivety of their language does not demonstrate a naivety of purpose or principle. Cynicism is the easy fallback when we have a system built on teaching despair. Where is the opposition party in all this unrest? Where are their acts of solidarity with the protesters if for no other reason than to make things difficult for the administration? They don't know how to do it--how to act to inspire, how to embolden hope. "Defund the police" is met with "aim for their legs" and they're shocked we won't wait til November. -6/14/20. "Waiting to Die" from Athens Saturday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/13/20 The Song of Morgan

(instrumentals for piano) This is an 8 1/2 hour 9-CD set of hour-long piano improvisations, or at least I thought it was. Each hour-long track has distinct segments broken up by silence. You could think of them as movements, but there's no musical theme running through them, no connection other than being piano music. Listening to the whole thing in one day meant running it in the background as I did other things. So I was always listening and not listening, aware and trying to ignore it at the same time. The music became background static until one of the silences arose. Has this passed, is it over, only for a new chord to emerge. You can find parallels in that with both the pandemic and police brutality--the lulls are what drag us back to be shocked again by the constant sameness of the horror. If we don't relegate it to static, we can't live, but that static is the sound of thousands dying. -6/13/20. The Song of Morgan (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/12/20 "Girl With the Pink Bag"

"Have you seen enough/Girl with the pink bag/You saw all the tables/Along the line/With all the paraphernalia/Items and explanations." Police have been releasing photos of items allegedly seized from protesters, items that are then supposed to justify police murdering people on the street: a garden bucket with some pebbles in the bottom, coffee cups contractors at build sites used to test concrete mixtures. The police post the photos and then say the items are not what we're seeing, and that's supposed to counter video after video of police attacking unarmed people with batons, gas, and guns. The police are shocked that it's not working, that people aren't simply taking their word for why they had to throw a 75-year-old man to the ground and then lie about it. The New York State Police Union boss has gone viral, screeching and whining about police being judged by what they do, just because everyone can see them do it. -6/12/20. "Girl With the Pink Bag" from Richmond Sunday (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/11/20 "Outcast of Civilization: Part Five"

"And they are following you, to kill you if you haven't died/To obliterate your secret knowledge/Because one who really knows is a threat to the establishment/Where all kinds of causes and occupations/Are offered to generate compliance." Systems always try to co-opt their critics, to bring activists into the system to give the appearance of taking action and then diffusing tension. Take the charismatic organizer and put them at the head of the committee to schedule the meeting to plan the agenda to be voted on in the hearing of maintaining the status quo. The US hasn't been doing that for at least 20 years. Seattle '99 was violently put down, Occupy was violently put down, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were violently put down, and Black Lives Matter has been consistently met with violence. It's evidence of a system that cannot survive the idea of an alternative, let alone resistance, and, as even Machiavelli knew, there's a limit to what violence can do. -6/11/20. "Outcast of Civilization: Part Five" from Atlanta Saturday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/10/20 "Maze of the Phantom"

(instrumental piano with female vocalizations) I was obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, specifically Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The covers seemed to shout at me from their displays at the Waldenbooks or B. Dalton in the mall. The books always seemed off-limits though, not because of the satanic panic which, despite growing up in the Midwest, felt like something happening in that other America where people were still backward. The word "Advanced" made me think I wasn't skilled or experienced enough for it and the scope and variety of products spoke to a vastness of imagination that I wasn't ready to approach. AD&D, from the outside, offered structures for imagining worlds that were impossible for preteen me to conceive. But the fact of them being there made it seem achievable. Those worlds which were beyond my imagining would become mine given enough time. -6/10/20. "Maze of the Phantom" from Maze of the Phantom (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/9/20 "Leave Me Alone"

"I'm going to wake up now/I'm going to make my bed/I walk among the living/And talk to the dead/I remember what I learned/From the story that I read/Leave me alone/Leave me alone." Reflecting can be a paralyzing act, the work of looking backwards in hopes of finding meaning blinding you to the work of the moment or the possibilities of the future. In conversation a little ways back, I lamented that I no longer read fantasy, that I'd let my imagination atrophy, that if I'd kept that muscle active I could foresee what was coming. What's to come, the world after, the utopian vision is essential work now, or at least part of it. The fact that we have these visions available is due to the work that people were doing long before this moment seemed possible. I have to teach a book in my school that argues if you think things are bad, you're ignoring facts. But I give my students lessons that say you do not have to accept the miseries of the world. You can imagine something better. -6/9/20. "Leave Me Alone" from Indianapolis Saturday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/8/20 "Queen Anne Avenue"

"Resting here so peacefully now/Feeling my best days are coming/And all my troubles left behind." Pessimism is an easy pose to strike and one I can be accused of relaxing into more than once over the course of this journal. It's a "plague journal" though, discussing the pandemic, fascism, and the music of an artist who can seem terrifying to the casual listener (and my self-imposed brevity prevents me from offering the anecdote to counter that claim). I am leery of premature claims of victory, but that does not mean I don't believe in or celebrate the very real victories that have come out of this moment. The communal response to the pandemic--not the political--has been an embracing of shared sacrifice to protect those at risk. The same spirit is on display in the protests: people who'd previously been silent coming forward to say "these are our neighbors and we won't abide their suffering." -6/8/20. "Queen Anne Avenue" from Seattle Friday (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/7/20 "Where Do You Go From Here: Part Nine"

"Where do you go from here?/Make up your mind./Decide/Where do you go from here?" Woke up to videos of massive rallies across the US. In Philly, the sheer amount of people flooding the Ben Franklin Parkway was stunning. They don't get that kind of crowd on the Fourth of July. Mayors are announcing that their police departments will stop using tear gas for 30 days. It feels like victory. Until you learn that the department has used up all its tear gas and it'll take 30 days to resupply. Small changes are happening, victories are being won--Frank Rizzo no longer curses the streets of Philadelphia and the Marines have banned the Confederate flag--but, as I said before, I'm worried this will lead to complacency. People might start imagining the work is done. In that context, it's somehow good that the police remain actively monstrous--it keeps people in the street demanding change now. -6/7/20. "Where Do You Go From Here: Part Nine" from Where Do You Go From Here (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/6/20 "Let Me Go"

"I’m tired of the mirror/I’m tired of the window/I’m tired of words/And numbers too/I get blues in the city/And down on the farm." Where is the place for me? I tried to step away from the news today, but got contacted by a friend instead about everything going on. Talking to them made me realize I hadn't bought any music on Bandcamp on the special day where they donate the full purchase to the artists. And that's a pathetic thing to highlight. They were contacting me about their city preparing for another wave of protests and I was thinking, I haven't been listening to new music for a while. Literally hours before the first protests broke out last week, another friend introduced me to the term "hedonic adaptation"--our tendency to get used to anything. One of the reasons I'm keeping this journal, listening to all this Jandek, is to avoid complacency, to take time every day to reflect that this isn't normal, but even Jandek is just becoming background noise. -6/6/20. "Let Me Go" from Chicago Wednesday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/5/20 "The Duality of Self: Part One"

"Strange the mind is seeing one thing/And the body another /Move the body sight to the mind image/The timeless work." Being witness to state terror is exhausting, but imagine living through it. I am living through it, though. Despite being in Korea, I'm still bound to the US, still looking behind me to see how it tries to pull me back. I'm in a liminal state of exclusion: not quite an exile, not quite a refugee, and neither would allow me to divorce myself from what's happening there. However, I'm not there, and the relative clam and normalcy of daily life here feels schizophrenic. Things are not okay, the world is on fire, and everywhere I go feels calm and normal. Daily life is gaslighting me. The pandemic's shadow still touches everything. The produce section at the supermarket keeps getting rearranged to mask the removal of bins and declining selection. -6/5/20. "The Duality of Self: Part One" from Toronto Sunday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/4/20 "Don't Go Out"

"Don't go out don't go out/It's only flowers and trees/people and machines/buildings and despair." In talking to my students about the police riots in the US, I started telling them not to go. That they can't go to the US right now is obvious--the pandemic is still on, the country has no plan to handle it, and no healthcare system even if it did. I'm telling them not to apply to college there, that things will not be better by fall 2021. And it sound alarmist. It feels alarmist. I think I'm being understood as saying the police will still be rioting in a year-and-a-half, and I don't mean that. Instead, the systems that have made this moment happen--police impunity, their co-ordination with white supremacist groups, and the racialized violence that is the bedrock of our nation, like the compete absence of anything resembling a healthcare system, will still be present next year, and it's not worth risking. -6/4/20. "Don't Go Out" from Canticle of Castaway (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/3/20 "The Lesson"

"I married control/How else to keep from sleeping in the fields and streets/When the shock and despair returns as it does/I watch it and use it and learn from it." I'm seeing articles in the Korean press about the police riots in the US and they're doing the propaganda work of shifting the narrative: are protesters just ignoring COVID (cities are shutting down testing centers to punish protesters), why are Korean-owned businesses being attacked (because cops won't provide protection in minority neighborhoods), how does looting protest racism (when these businesses called cops who kill black people to arrest black people)? It's not complicity nor are people lamenting the destruction of their livelihoods wrong to lament that, it's indicative of how ingrained white supremacy is even in non-whites. Black people are being murdered, and the reaction is, "how dare they make that my problem." -6/3/20. "The Lesson" from Bristol Wednesday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/2/20 "The Crushed Image"

"I know how to leave everything/I just wanted to say be prepared/for a smashing close/to all the years we knew only sleep/in the shadows that dream these shadows." Vigilante gangs from the white neighborhoods of Philadelphia marched to Center City today with baseball bats and golf clubs. People with clear violence in mind were met with open arms by the police, putting the lie to any claim that the police are trying to maintain peace. When I lived in South Philly and would go on my regular run through deeper South Philly, I'd always see the "Blue Lives Matter" Neo-Nazi signs come out after each and every murder committed by a cop. When a member of the Philly PD was outed as a Nazi--shirtsleeve tattoos and all--the signs became more prominent. Now those people have what they've always wanted, their own Kristallnacht, and they want to make sure everyone sees. -6/2/20. "The Crushed Image" from Camber Sands Sunday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/1/20 "Painstakingly Critical"

"I’m painstakingly critical/Not just of the world outside/I criticize myself/And do damage unto me." Since leaving the US I've worried that I turned my back on my family and friends, abandoned them to their fate. I'd been an activist, a journalist, a teacher, and a union organizer, but when fascism dropped the mask and Nazis openly marched in the streets, I left. I've been worrying about how the eugenic ideology of the administration would play out with COVID and then I woke up Sunday to pictures of Philadelphia on fire. Every time I open social media I see new videos of police driving into crowds in ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks. I had to explain to my colleagues what was happening, and I don't have the words. How do you translate "police state"? How do I tell them the administration grew up envying Soviet-style oppression? I don't have the words in my own language. -6/1/20. "Painstakingly Critical" from What Was Out There Disappeared (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/31/20 "Can I Be With You"

"Can we walk around in the wonderland of the new place that we found/All flowers are in bloom/The placid river scintillates/Can I be with you/This time we have/All the people are around/Buildings and streetcars/We can be amongst it all/In the world that we share." America is on fire. Cops are rioting all over the country because one of their own has been arrested for murder. Cops are arriving at peaceful protests in riot gear and proceeding to cause fires, vandalism, and looting. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are both under curfew as are no doubt many other cities. But if police openly rioting after murdering someone on camera isn't enough of a threat to keep people from coming out to protest, how can they possibly enforce a curfew? The threats no longer work. And this is partly due to COVID. 25% unemployment means people have plenty of time to take to the streets and protests don't cost a penny. -5/31/20. "Can I Be With You" from Portland Thursday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/30/20 "Silent Wander"

"The sought after was not to be found/The contemplation was scattered/Ravaged and torn at the seams/The country lanes were far away." I remember the county roads in Indiana, the place I think of myself as being from even though I tell people I'm from Philly, Pittsburgh, Iowa, Houston, Detroit. The seams of asphalt running forever to an unmarked horizon taking my friends and I to the no-place of Midwest living, every destination an excuse for the sense of movement, the feeling that we were destined for other places. We weren't trying to find a new world to inhabit, we were looking for a world that had room for us, a space we could occupy and live. Instead, a new world with the worst echoes of the old world engulfed us, all spaces of possibility sealed off. We've been squeezed out of the old world and now find ourselves stuck still, aching for that sense of movement toward nothing. -5/30/20. "Silent Wander" from Not Hunting for Meaning (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/29/20 "Sleeping in the Dream"

(instrumental for piano and harp) Police continue to riot in Minneapolis--breaking windows, setting fires, attacking anyone documenting it, and then whining about mourners and violence. The murderers who laughed on video while murdering a man are still free and the cops are still outraged that they were held to any kind of account for murder. All this in the midst of the pandemic. Poor timing on the cops' part: it seems face masks block facial recognition. The cops can't identify the activists and mourners saying "stop." No doubt that's doubly infuriating to the paid protesters of the reopen riots: by protecting their neighbors' health through wearing masks, the Minneapolis mourners and activists are able to take action to defend the lives of their community. As with every step of this pandemic, every assertion of a right-to-life must be met with violence. The President is threatening to deploy the military. -5/29/20. "Sleeping in the Dream" from Helsinki Saturday (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/28/20 "The Places You Left Me: Part One"

"When I tried to get out, you pushed me down/Hit me and kicked me/Left me hurt so bad/Well, I tried to tell you how it really was/You didn't care to listen/You just walked away." In Minneapolis, the police riot has expanded to include cops from nearby cities like St. Paul coming to riot and insist on their right to murder people. Police show their hands a bit when they say they can't do their jobs unless they're allowed to murder people. What do they imagine their job is? At the same time, police have escalated the violence against mourners to the point where looting has broken out: if the government won't tell cops to stop murdering, you move to the next level of power to make your demand--the corporations. The cops want to see looting because they imagine it legitimizes their presence and violence. "Only cops can stop this looting sparked by police violence." -5/28/20. "The Places You Left Me: Part One" from Hasselt Saturday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/27/20 "I Know My Name"

"You brought me so low today I'm happy to curse you world/Get the hints from me/and don't put me in no black suit." America passed 100,000 deaths and in the pursuit of returning to normal, police in Minneapolis murdered a black man on camera. The officers choked him to death by kneeling on his neck and laughing at him. The mayor fired the four officers involved in the murder which sparked the expected response: a police riot all night with officers raging through the city, attacking mourners and terrorizing communities as the opportunity arose. The core of the coronavirus response, I've said, rests in white supremacy. 100,000 deaths isn't being treated as a tragedy requiring massive change because of who's dying. Every day, every step of the way through this pandemic, the US response has been we'll kill you if you insist on your right to life. -5/27/20. "I Know My Name" from Skirting the Edge (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/26/20 "No Mind Was a Good Mind: Part Three"

"There's no way to go back/The innocence is lost/The king took a vacation/Left all the subjects to their own." This is the third time I've written about a song from this album and those older posts remind me of what's already been forgotten: the administration withholding aid from insufficiently fawning governors. It's a threat he returned to as some states sent out applications for mail-in ballots. Again, the degree to which you're allowed to live tracks with your degree of fealty: only the righteous shall receive salvation. So all states are open to some degree, those that want continued economic aid will fudge their numbers, and we'll hear how not crossing 100,000 deaths over Memorial Day Weekend is evidence of success. Instead we'll cross 100,000 this week. The President went golfing. It's not like there was something important going on. -5/26/20. "No Mind Was a Good Mind: Part Three" from London Tuesday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/25/20 "The Grassy Knoll"

"But at some time, it seemed to me, the thoughts were filled with falsity/It was a plan to enslave us, to bring us to their world to stay/Damaged by their perverse thinking, losing our minds and souls to them/I quickly knew I couldn’t be there, but also I knew I had to stay." Outrage in the UK as it's revealed a senior Tory ignored isolation orders because he wanted to. He said he had to and people all relate more desperate situations where they didn't. But lockdown, for conservatives, is not about protecting the populace, it's about protecting the powerful. When politicians are at risk of contracting the disease, lockdown goes into effect. When their stock portfolios are at risk, it gets lifted. The politicians will continue to self-isolate, maintain social distancing, but will starve you if you choose your life over your job. They get to. Their only philosophy is power equals permission. -5/25/20. "The Grassy Knoll" from Glasgow Sunday 2005 (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)