Posted by Alexander Jerri
Garbage seems to follow me everywhere. When you wash your shirt with some weird-colored cocktail napkin in the pocket, and for the next week you find little magenta dreadlocks in different pants pockets and socks. It’s the sneaky rightwing libertarian agenda disguised as neutrality and objectivity. And it is an infestation of crawling, nibbling, chittering vermin.
I started writing SuperTruth® items for this show as a way to comment on the mishmash of half-truths, misleading distortions, and flat out lies that have become the cultural currency of the steroidally pro-capitalist, regressive “sovereign citizen” movement. This movement, by my mapping, has given us such malignancies as anti-union Right to Work laws, the Clinton deregulation of media trusts, and the Tea Party lunatics, which have bled into diverse policy failures like Obama’s refusal to put a public option to health insurance on the table, usurious credit card interest rates, and the Golem of securities-dicing and debt-bundling which, joined with lax rules on bank capitalization, led directly to the cratering of the global economy in 2008. It’s the neoliberal discourse I’ve been fighting against since Chuck first asked me onto This Is Hell!
But I have to admit failure. I have failed in the sense that a drowning man fails to swim. In the sense that a prophet being burned as a heretic has failed to smoke a pipe or grill a hot dog. I am overwhelmed. The liars are too numerous and duplicitous for me to keep up with anymore.
Beware libertarian think tanks. They skew to the right. And many such larvae have hatched out of the nationalist anti-progressive movement that got Q-pilled and Trump-pilled in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic response.
Beware of new think tanks swarming from stagnant breeding ponds such as The Brownstone Institute, founded and populated by the framers of the Great Barrington Declaration, that screwball screed against the institutions struggling to manage a public health crisis after Donald Trump discarded the Obama Administration’s methodically developed pandemic response playbook. Trump is such an infantile character that he made it his mission to destroy anything with Obama cooties on it. The results of the orange windbag’s scorched earth policy toward Obama’s fingerprints were catastrophic for the public. The worst Covid case and... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
It was a she was a he was a they were a miserable sea felk. Swimming slippery in the weedy shallows, bobbing out deep amid the white-capped seas, looked down upon by the selkies, mermen, and loch monsters. Unlike their meadow-grazing cousins, the land felk, sea felk are smallish, legless sea snakes covered with oily dark brown fur. They are technically ungulates and ruminants, sea ruminants who chew their cud, even though their food often consists of jellyfish, mussels, young herring – or herringlings – and the large carcasses of pelagic creatures. So, not particularly pleasant cud, even by cud standards. The felk are often scavengers of sunken or floating corpses, and thus looked down upon by other sea cryptids.
A felk is technically a werefelk. Slippery dark-brown fur snakes, that’s what felk are, about the length of an average sea otter, but if they were to transform back from their furry state they would be limp flesh tubes, swimming phallic sausages. But they don’t transform back. They are always in their furry felk form.
And the felk in question was miserable, like Lawrence Talbot as portrayed by Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolfman. This one was a her at this point in her life. The sex of felk changes over their lifetimes, which are measured from when they first see the moon – before that they are felk larvae, proto-werefelk, milky-colored worms about the size of a forefinger – until the day they end their lives as felk and take on human form.
How do the felk adopt the human form? By wearing it like a costume. When a felk is ready to metamorphosize, she slithers up the rock rivulets onto land. A felk can slither up a vertical cliff face with ease. But even this ability doesn’t alleviate the felk’s misery. All sea felk are miserable, and every last one of them has an excuse. But more on that later. Sea felk can not only slither up a vertical rock face, they can slither around on the underside of a rock overhang. Basically, they can crawl on the ceiling. Felk have this super power and are still not cheerful. Cryptozoologists are mad frustrated about it.
Are you familiar with the small anus ball? There’s a Japanese river cryptid, the kappa, which likes to steal the small anus ball out of human swimmers. This small anus ball is like the ball on a roll-on deodorant, and Japanese cryptosupernaturalists understand it as a part of the... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Sunday night last week I stayed up as late as I could to watch the Perseid meteor shower. I couldn’t really stay up as late as I wanted to, because it got cold out, and I was exhausted from traveling most of the day. But I stayed up as late as I could. The Earth passed through a cloud of loose debris. Bright streaks flashed, trailed briefly, and faded in the starry sky as the upper atmosphere was pelted with space gravel.
My brother, sister and I were on the beach on Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan, just north of the 45th Parallel. Let me tell you, the American Dream actually happened to my family. My grandparents fled anti-Jewish violence in Belarus. They arrived in the US as children, my grandfather established himself first as a house painter, then as a contractor. My father went to college and became an architect, started his own company, and now we have a vacation house on Lake Michigan, on land purchased when I was around thirteen years old. I don’t think we ever complained as kids when we were brought to the unfinished house, with its floor of bare concrete, heated by a Franklin wood-burning stove.
Over the decades my parents have made it a masterpiece. Though it’s not as large as most houses in the area, with the extra accommodations of a camper trailer parked in the driveway, a few people sleeping in my mother’s art studio attached to the garage, and me sleeping in the enclosed gazebo on a wooded bluff overlooking the beach, we had the entire clan up there at the eponymous Barb and Sam’s House of Wine Drinking and Chipmunk Training: my parents, me, my brother and sister, my brother’s five kids, a wife of one of the kids and a girlfriend of another, plus my brother’s two dogs.
My existence has turned out to be relatively privileged thanks to friends and family, despite my best efforts, conscious and unconscious, to fail at life. I can’t help comparing my oddly fortunate outcome with that of my friend Michael, who recently died of pneumonia at 62 after some years suffering from aggressively progressing early-onset dementia.
In three chairs on the beach, my brother, sister, and I sat next to the dying fire in the firepit. The burning pebbles above at first appeared only grudgingly but soon acquiesced to our demands for a show. We swept our gazes across the sky like lazy satellite dishes, south to north, hooting happily when we... read more
