The 35th Precinct

One hundred days. One hundred days since a microbe entered our consciousness and the world we have made and turned them upside down. One hundred days of fear and misinformation and division stoked by conspiracy theorists and a mad, senile President yet possessed of a low and cruel cunning. One hundred days of panic buying and mandates and the stubborn resistance of some people to this new reality of isolation and lonely, strictured existence inside houses barricaded against the outside world. One hundred days since I have set wheel inside a movie theater or store or had a staycation at a cheap hotel. One hundred days since we have ceased to dream.

I feels sane, but then I suppose most mad people do. If it weren't for the Internet, I have no doubt I would be peeling the shitty, cheap paint just to savor the metallic, zesty tang of the chips. I thought I would do more reading and writing with all this time on my hands, but I've done pitifully little of either. Twenty-ought thousands words of a fic over three months, and I'm three books behind on my annual reading challenge on Goodreads, never mind that I just picked up a new library book today. I still haven't finished my old one. My concentration and interest levels are sad, tattered ruins these days.

Maybe tomorrow, I say. Maybe tomorrow.

The President of the United States is having a strop on Twitter because "The Supreme Court doesn't like me" and is hurling grade-school insults at a former toady who's spilling the beans on his incompetence in a new tell-all book. Can someone, anyone, please make the madness stop? I, for one, would be thrilled to be a colony of the Kiwis.

Today is the last of the cool, dry days. The heat and humidity are slated to return in force tomorrow. I've loved the respite from both and heartily wish it would linger, but my father had a piquant aphorism about such impossible wishes, and I have neither the skill nor the dexterity to shit into my hand. And so, I will bid it a wistful adieu, but not before I savor the last of its company.

Yet another lazy day at Casa Guera. Roomie has tootled off to pick up some spaghetti for lunch and dinner, and then we're in. While he's gone, I'm listening to Youtube and vacillating between dread and hope that my dentist appointment gets canceled by COVID-19 lockdown. Hope because dentist and the accompanying bill, ugh, and dread because my molar is obviously getting tetchier, and if it's nixed, I might be in for a terrible time of it.

I watched Amsterdamned last night because with a title like that, how could I not? It was a slasher flick that swears it was made in 1988, but whose fashion and hairstyles scream 1982 and Miami Vice cosplay night. Originally shot in Dutch, whoever dubbed it into English translated the dialogue into what they thought hip Americans sounded like, only they were using a slang dictionary that was fifteen years out of date and chock full of idioms used by Southerners named Cletus and Jim Bob. It was jarring but bizarrely charming, and even as I hooted and howled at the hero doing his best hardened homicide detective in a city with fewer than five homicides a year, I found myself rooting for him, and for the actor who so gamely waded into the cheese.

The high-speed chase in a VW Rabbit made me cry laughing, especially when his backup was two cops on horseback.

Cheeseball as it was, it made me nostalgic for the overall optimism of the era, when most of us thought things were on the way up and the movie bad guys lost and if somebody dropped a clanger of a pick-up line, your first thought was to roll your eyes, not to declare them a toxic, sexist asshole who should be shunned by society for their harmful -ist views. It was nice to be able to enjoy the schlock without scrutinizing every frame for a hint of -ism or thought unacceptable to the arbiters of current cultural standards.

The '80s were hardly a utopia, and I wouldn't want to go back, but God, I wish constant aimless, lashing fury hadn't become fandom's drug of choice.

A lazy Sunday, I think. We're noshing leftover smoked turkey and brisket from our takeout run and staring at nothing. There's a WWE PPV later tonight that we want to watch, though the weather might put the kibosh on that plan, as we're due for a storm this evening. If it doesn't, we've got the popcorn ready, and if it does, well, that's what the Network is for and we'll just watch it later.

I got a bit of streaming in yesterday. I watched a pair of horror movies, neither of which was any great shakes, and an episode of Whitechapel, which was fabulous. The Collector, the first horror flick I watched, turned out to be torture porn. If I'd had a brain and an ounce of self-respect, I'd've turned it off once visible intestines came into play, but Josh Stewart was so pretty and such a perfect bad boy with a heart of gold that I soldiered on. I did, however, end the movie once the little girl was rescued and he was in the ambulance because I had no desire to see the inevitable twist where the baddie isn't dead after all, ha ha, fuck you for thinking perseverance ever pays off, sucker. That "twist" was old twenty years ago; now it's just rancid, mean-spirited nihilism. No, thanks. In my world, Arkin and Hannah survived and recovered and built lives for themselves, and no hapless paramedics were slaughtered for the crime of driving the injured to the hospital.

Warning: Do Not Play was the other horror movie I watched. It was a subtitled Korean ghost story about a desperate indie film writer and director who tracks down a movie allegedly filmed by a ghost, oooooh. It's actually better than it sounds, if also a passel of cliches and tropes familiar to anyone who's watched more than three of these things. I'm sure some nuance was lost in translation and the lack of cultural context for someone ignorant of Korean folklore and death customs, but the ending was a confused muddle of gorgeous imagery whose ultimate intent flew over my head.

Does anyone know why so many ghosts in Asian horror have icy blue eyes?

Whitechapel was the perfect nightcap. It's a British police series about the hunt for a modern Jack the Ripper copycat. Opinion on the first season was evidently divided, with sniffy critics calling the plot imbecilic and the acting risible, but I loved it. Yes, there was a fair bit of ham in the squadroom scenes, but it never descended into hokey farce, and if that's what the Brits consider risible acting, might I have a spot more, please? Their dregs outshine our thespian embarrassments by several orders of magnitude.

Now that the hysterical over-correction phase of social change has started, I wonder how long it will be before they try to expunge all fictional cops from the entertainment historical record. Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and The Wire are all critically-acclaimed, award-winning shows that critics and viewers drooled over for the entirety of their runs. Are we now going to pretend none of that happened and seal them in shame vaults deep within the bowels of the earth, right next to all the uranium we used to obliterate and poison vast swathes of the planet? CSI was a pop culture craze for a decade. We going to consign it and its spinoffs to the land of Neverhappened just because it has cops in it?

We shouldn't, but I know what the answer's going to be. Instead of putting a warning or disclaimer on them and letting them air as intended, the drive to be the most righteous will cause the sniveling hippies and the spineless studios to rip them from the airwaves, never to be seen again and spoken of in shamed whispers, as though it were the time Uncle Bob got ripped at Thanksgiving and pissed in Aunt Myrtle's gravy boat. The natural and dangerous consequence of streaming writ large.

I have DVDs of some of these shows, but not all, and the series are incomplete. I wish now that I had completed them because I will never be able to finish them before the purity police come knocking with their outrage and hypocrisy and fanatical determination to cleanse the world one problematic genre at a time.

I signed up for online billpay today. Stop laughing, you there in the back. It's a step into the twenty-first century, one which I was reluctant to take without a credit card. Now that I have one and the protection it offers, why not? I did not opt for paperless billing; I still want a paper copy of what I owe and to whom just in case the Internet shits the bed, but it's nice to be able to click a button and have done with it.

We were supposed to have severe weather tomorrow, but the weather shamans have now backtracked and are predicting merely a few showers and a thunderstorm instead. Far be it from me to complain about not getting my ass blown off by the vengeful hand of an intemperate God, but I don't trust these hapless motherfuckers. "Just a shower," they say, and three hours later, you're clinging to a tree and watching your house roll down the street like a tumbleweed, with a saucy little twitch in its hipped dormers. So we're probably still going out tomorrow, maybe to scoff Italian food and hunt down some hand soap, or maybe for steak and potatoes and a new Sling card.

Happy 48th birthday, Karl Urban. May it bring you all happiness.

It hit 89 degrees today, and the house is a sauna at 85. The ceiling fans are trying, but they're oars against the ocean. I would give my left tit for air conditioning, but that's not happening until a)they do in-home installation and b)I get my befrigged filling and pay down the credit card. My mouth has cost me a ridiculous amount of money since I started on the oral straight and narrow. Curse my shoddy dental genetics and lack of proper hygiene or care in early adulthood. A lot of it was sloth and fear of needles, but being broke had a lot to do with it as well, and it looks like my teeth are going to make me poorer for a while yet.

I should watch something, but I don't know what. Maybe I'll just read a bit instead and call it a night. The bedroom has A/C.

My God, are people on the Internet twisting themselves into pretzels trying to get their latest outrage fix. Their latest Big Idea to Save the World and End Racism is to cancel all shows that put the police in a positive light. No more copaganda, they say, and the racism and police brutality will just disappear like morning fog.

Ha. Ha. Ha. What a gaggle of earnest, whiny simpletons. The world doesn't work that way. Cops aren't brutal assholes because TV shows portray them as the good guys forever and always. Cops are brutal assholes because they're trained to be and then given government sanction to use their power to the fullest possible extent, and because they are inhabitants of a society that mistakes snide cruelty for cutting-edge humor and empathy and consideration weakness. The TV shows only magnify what is already there.

But sure, cancel the TV shows. Much easier than tackling the issue with actually effective solutions like firing bad cops instead of protecting and excusing them, better training techniques that don't depend on depersonalization of bystanders, suspects, or offenders and that emphasize brute force and lethality as options of last resort, and an end to the idea that if you report a fellow cop for misconduct, you're a rat who'll be abandoned to the bad guys when the shooting starts. Who wants to do all that? That would take effort to implement, and money, and time to see results. Fuck that noise. Better to just nuke all the TV shows we suddenly find offensive. Getting rid of Blue Bloods and Brooklyn-99 and Law and Order: SVU is an instant, tangible result. Plus, it'll give us the righteousness high we're jonesing for. We can pat ourselves on the back for a job well done with one hand and jerk off with the other, and a grateful world will thank us.

Go fuck yourselves with a hot railroad spike. There are no easy roads to the world you want. Get off the Internet, get your hands out of your pants, and pull your heads out of your asses. You want change? Go after the real police; go after Congress. Take a risk beyond getting flamed on a forum. Do something beyond worthless, masturbatory slacktivism and leave the TV shows alone. Change the world and the shows will follow.

Every day, I intend to write an entry, and every day, I find I have misplaced my give a damn. The country is imploding, and no one in charge seems to care, so rather than exhaust myself by thrashing ineffectually in the chaotic, soul-sucking quagmire of irreparable division, better to keep quiet and watch TV and hope that the petty fuckweasel currently befouling the White House doesn't get his jollies by ordering the military to crush its citizens in the streets.

Sling is my least favorite streaming service. The ads are repetitive and obnoxious and often cut into one another. If it weren't for ESPN, which Roomie wants, and the cloud DVR, which comes in handy now and again, I'd cancel. I still might if I can add ESPN+ when Disney+ comes up for renewal later this year. Anything to escape the ads from smarmy ambulance chasers and shady roofing companies.

We are officially Slingers. We signed up for Sling TV yesterday because Roomie wanted ESPN and I wanted ID, and Sling has both. Our monthly price is nearly thirty dollars cheaper than our late and not-very-lamented cable package, and that makes us happy campers, indeed, and will come in handy should we ever decide to bump up our Internet speed again.

To celebrate, I've been binging The Dead Files, and we've got a date tomorrow to watch the first half on the Lance Armstrong documentary on ESPN. Some cheese fries, maybe, some popcorn definitely, and just a night in doing nothing, which, to be honest, is just like most nights these days. It's a good thing I like living this way, because with the number of cases in my state exploding again, it won't be long before we're back under strict quarantine.

I just hope I can get my cavity filled before it does. Living with an abscessed tooth does not appeal in the slightest.