Digest 6.25.16

The U.S. Supreme Court, still short a judge, ruled that the police can stop anyone for any reason, legal or not, and use whatever’s found on them in court. Five of the most intelligent judges in the land forgot that some cops plant evidence, and failed to extrapolate that into the shitstorm that’s coming.

Freddie Gray’s spine-severing driver was acquitted this week, like all the other unaccountable cops from the last few years I mean always.

A civilian drone completed the first shore-to-ship, ship-to-shore flight approved by the U.S. government. The tech is ready to deploy in the next medical crisis, like an Ebola epidemic, and will shorten the time it takes to test a blood sample from 60 days to an hour. Faster decisions, far fewer deaths.

I’m being haunted by fragments of someone else’s life again. I think it might be Ruth Reichl’s. The food critic. I read one of her books. I will suddenly feel this gentle but clear sensation that I’m cooking the dinner equivalent of an Emerson poem with a loving family at French-summer pace on the Upper West Side, when I’m actually walking through the West Village at pre-therapy-session speed, bargaining with myself to blow my budget on another restaurant meal because I haven’t cooked in four months. I don’t know what to do with that.

Maybe some of the Africans whose lives are saved by the faster decisions will get to visit America someday, where the drone was developed. Maybe they’ll come to New York.

This week the NYPD sent helicopters and dogs after a black teenager who hopped a subway turnstile, then escaped from a precinct. A subway fare is $2.75.

The Department of Homeland Security gives states and police departments a billion dollars a year to buy military surplus weapons and gear.

You have to draw a through-line or you’re not a writer. Readers want a trodden path, not a trampled accident. A vanishing point where the story stops happening and starts meaning. I don’t know how to choose that point. The selection is too vast so I guess this is a digest. Or a diary. Diaries are childish. Diaries stay private for a reason.

The English elected a fake-wrestling celebrity, Jesse Ventura, governor of Minnesota I mean elected to withdraw from the European Union. The people’s power, versus market and military masterminds, has been so puny for so long, of course they drove the truck into a tree. Their feet barely reach the accelerator, never mind the brakes. At least they’re conscious enough to weep as Boris takes the wheel out of their hands.

This isn’t my diary.

This is my diary. I share it with everybody. We can redact the headlines as soon as we read them just to make it through the day, but it’s still ours.

Okay, I can pick one vanishing point. Maybe the meaning will show up when I get to it. Things will stop happening in this story when I stop writing, probably around midnight or one, and pour milk into a bowl of Cheerios. Within twenty minutes of eating it I will pass out on my bed without flossing or brushing my teeth or clipping on my Invisalign retainers or coconut oiling my hair or anything else I do instead of decaying. I probably pass out because it’s hard to digest milk but I’m not awake to know about it. Breakfast at night feels like breaking the rules. It’s delightful.

What kind of rules am I living with in my head that that’s how I “break the rules.”

There are people, many people, whose nested brain domains, “at home in the world,” don’t include a Dickensian orphanage. They have different rules. They get things done.

A website is accepting uploads of pictures of hotel rooms from around the world. Police use the photos to identify the backgrounds of sex trafficking advertisements, which helps them solve cases and present stronger prosecutions in court. If only this URL popped up on people’s phones like a weather advisory, so that millions of people would add to it.

Ten million people watched the recent Game of Thrones episode this week. Violence with a vanishing point is like a little staycation.

There was a year when the Ruth Reichl extra life wasn’t that, wasn’t the Upper West Side. It was reading by lamplight with a silent piano nearby in winter in Brooklyn Heights. Ever since I’ve moved here there’s also been a Christmas tree in a first-story apartment with high ceilings and a large window facing any side street anywhere in Manhattan except Inwood. Maybe these are simply feelings. Maybe my brain is accidentally visualizing them, instead of tightening up the relevant mood-specific muscle groups and limiting my oxygen intake.

I miss the guy I stopped seeing over a year ago. I miss him every day. He was a ballbag in some ways but I understood why he was a ballbag so that meant no matter how terrible I felt every week when I went through a mental breakup with him, I could ignore it as soon as he came around again another week later. He was always supposed to come back. He was my ocean wave, that was the promise of the relevant mood-specific muscle groups. Never on my timeframe, which hurt, but always in time. He forgot me. I still tighten with the tide.

I understand that he’s easier to miss than the previous guy. He just forgot. No need to hate him. All I have to be is sad. Maybe that was the promise all along.

I’ve had a theory for decades that the fastest way to get to know a character is to watch how they make breakfast.

There may be a new guy on the scene. I know I like him because as soon as I left his presence I started listing reasons why I can’t be liked. Listing is such an unsuspicious word. I meant firing a nail gun into my stomach.

I looked up unsuspicious. It doesn’t mean what I want it to. It means naïve. I want one word that means above suspicion.

The American Sign Language for Jesus is touching each palm in turn, where the nails went in. ASL values brevity, and it’s easier to talk about pain than empathy, which I think was supposed to be our lasting impression from the whole sad story. Empathy was supposed to be the staycation.

Not picking on ASL here; pain is better than the “power and money” translations in other languages.

Last night I learned that I’m not a good person to have political conversations with yet. I still need to express my anger and frustration more than I want anyone else to.

Ricky’s on Sixth Avenue put up a window display of lube for the NYC Gay Pride Parade tomorrow. POTUS declared Stonewall to be the first LGBTQA national monument, after people gathered there to weep over the massacre in Orlando. Just one day after the shooting, the public was flipping the news channel scripts and telling itself the truth: that the shooter was motivated by homophobia, not by ISIS. Just one day. We are using the Internet to get smarter faster, and a federal court just protected net neutrality. We are strapping ourselves into Ellen Ripley’s exosuit.

In two to four years, six at the outside, we’ll have a Queer Congress that flattens the NRA back into a reasonable shape.

Last night I learned that teenage boys will do things like watch the drill sergeant scene in Full Metal Jacket so that they’re pumped to go out and talk to girls. I had thought I was starting to understand men.

I’ve gone past the cry-through-“Purple Rain” phase into pretending the song doesn’t exist so I don’t keep crying through it.

The solution to the fracking debate can be built and launched into space, right now, for $2 million. That’s it. I met the engineer. Also Hillary Clinton just insisted that the Democratic Party platform include fracking, wrecked water supplies, chemically laced soil, and exponential increases in earthquakes for the world.

There used to be an Office of Technology Assessment in Congress that reviewed new inventions and predicted consequences for the public, including people under-considered in white male incubators. It allowed senators and representatives to make informed decisions about tech. Newt Gingrich gutted the budget for it in 1995, the year the World Wide Web was born, which in policy terms is like taking away GPS and handing Congress a star chart. This week Congress voted against reinstating its budget. Its budget was $2.5 million.

A Scot called Donald Trump a “weapons-grade plum.” Many other Scots called him many other glorious names.

Trump saw American Idiot on Broadway and loved it.

Green Day’s response to his response is going to make me glad to be alive. Maybe the album will drop next year.

My computer just announced in a British accent, “It’s one o’clock.”

It’s 1:31 now. It’s still this week because it’s Sunday.