Sugar Street

by Jonathan Dee

Like one’s days on earth, in that respect: pure subtraction.

That’s the beauty of Goodwill; they’re not just restocking the shelves with the same items, reordering as things sell out. It’s passive, even random up to a point. Everything depends on the circumstances of the people who show up at the loading bay door with stuff they need to get rid of, intimate circumstances you’ll never know.

But if you want to live beneath notice, this is how it has to be: no accounts, no subscriptions, transactions only of a certain immediate type, in certain unpatrolled venues. Nothing escapes the world’s attention like a poor person.

The soul of the radio is dark as pitch. It used to be the mainstream, bland corporate realism, but then technology moved forward and what’s left behind is mostly just rage getting shot into space.

What a selfless aristocrat! Thank you so much for giving this kid the thrill of experiencing Delta’s first class, before you put a high-tech gun in his hand and send him to the other side of the world to kill some unwhite people he doesn’t know for the protection of profits he won’t share in!

First off, organized religion—all of it—is mostly just codified misogyny. That’s a fact. But whatever I may think of it, it’s still out here doing its retrograde work.

I worked for a while in the nonprofit world, me and my nifty law degree, and what I learned was something I should have already known, which is that the idea of reforming murderous governments by appealing to said governments to reform themselves is worse than useless.

I lived for years without the internet before somebody thought to invent it. All that instant connection to the world, to friends and strangers, to “the news,” it feels like the human condition when you’re in it, but when you’re outside it you see that all along it was just a product, something sold to you so relentlessly every minute of every day that you forgot it was transactional at all.

I remember reading that somewhere around 2045, white people will be the minority in the USA. God, what a glorious day that will be. I mean, in theory: in practice, it’s going to be war. I only hope to be around to see it. If white people had a tombstone, it would read, “They Stopped At Nothing.” What a cesspool this world is. Democracy, capitalism, liberalism: all in the lurid end-stages of their own failure, yet we won’t even try to imagine anything different, any other principle around which life might be organized: we would sooner choke each other to death, which is basically what we’re doing.

She’s repulsive, but sort of admirably repulsive: like a queen might allow herself to be repulsive, because what are you going to say to her? She’s the queen.

The Judge Hubert sign, incredibly, is still out there, its frame held down by sandbags. I wish I still had Oscar’s saw. There he stands, fit and smug in his desert camo, briefly emerged from the turret of his tank. You know, for Justice. Apparently he came back from a few years of murdering random brown people to protect rich white people’s access to oil—excuse me, “fighting terrorism”—and his big revelation was: You know what kind of career all this arrogant, detached, technologically based racist killing has really prepared me for? The Law! And not advocacy, either, but impartiality, because who causes suffering less partially than me? Presumably white voters saw that picture of him on his tank and agreed: yes, please, let this guy keep up the good work of administering justice in some place that I will never have to see.

Also, just get off the fucking internet. Forget the idea that anything happens there. It’s a playground, it’s an opiate. The whole reason it exists is to ensure that nothing ever changes.