ALL POWER DEMANDS SACRIFICE

Fictional February

(Painting stolen from the internet, memed by Emil Ottoman, quote by Evelyn Milquetoast? Or someone famous. Cult of the Rainbow Rat…. Uhhh, 2023?)

Denude the walls and stuff Christmas in boxes. Ferry them to the front room, the dead room, the room with the wall cutout swimming in asbestos fibers you let out into the air.

The quote from the hometown boy is wrong, April is not the cruelest month, February is. May 29th takes Cruelest day though.

Coin for attorneys with no guarantee on reward, because there’s never a guarantee on a reward. Unless you’ve got a gun to your head and you’ve already applied enough force, maybe less than three pounds of trigger pull on a Glock, which if you don’t know or haven’t shot one, ain’t much. Then rewards are guaranteed, along with cleanup. But it won’t be of your immediate concern.

The Saint used to say “All power demands sacrifice,” and she was dead on target with it years before she was dead from her doorway. In the mind’s eye it’s nearly a renaissance painting, but worse. The memento mori is not a tidy placed skull to remind the nobility of their eventual mortality often tastefully put in paintings of the period, it’s the noblewoman hanging from the rope attached to the clothes hanger over the door. A Madonna lyric that comes up in the head and makes bile rise.

The kitchen is a ruin and everyone is on edge. Or not. Or you’re paranoid. You’re down on your knees. Like a little prayer. I wanna take you there.

What now? Run out of Ikea tea lights so you’ve lost the glimma, coffee you order four pounds at a time off Amazon the Oracle’s been too scared of how stressed you are to ask you to buy so math says it’s been fucked a week in the kitchen. But hey, Sumatra at the store is seven bucks if you buy two, which is less than half of one of the bags from Amazon, and you can double up on those. Open the box, rip the bags, spill some beans, try to return them, hit the customer service line, talk to that overly polite offshored worker and man, I just want my coffee? Check the order history. This is like the fourth time this has happened from the same facility.

I’m very sorry sir, we can refund you with your original payment method or a gift card. But the gift card, because all you want is the coffee.

Turn four pounds of Sumatra into eight, just like turning one kilo into two. Shit was still fire. What’s half a key turned over and cut into two? When it comes back under the reagent at 98% weight, still better than the shit the kids are overcharging custies for at 90 a gram straight all the way up no deals. 2025 and 1994 still holds, because there ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks. Fucking peasants.

Just like you.

In a cold apartment taking out the trash getting winded because there’s a month of it and the dumpster is full but if there is an asshole of the dumpster, an alpha and omega of it, you are they, for once you’re done the lids are almost caving backwards and the bags are piled gleaming white and coffee ground black twelve feet high. Watch someone complain on NextDoor.

“I’m not sure whether, after a consultation, I’ll recommend your filing suit, but I don’t think your situation or potential claims are frivolous. If you hire me, I hope to provide you with an assessment that you believe was worth the investment.

I will email you the intake form and payment link tomorrow”

You ever wonder what a $900.00 50 or so word email looks like?

Did you hear? No Darling, but please tell me. This isn’t a trick. I’m interested.

Money is a fluid entity comes out in a comment. Then why the fuck you thinkin’ bout days go by and still I think about you? Not you the Saint. You the bag. You the bag man.

You used to work as a debt collector, skip tracing hippies who hopped trains and ran out on drug debts fronted to them at shows. Sport fucking. Buy the debt from Fast Eddie or Slim, Nitrous Mob, at a steep discount. Tool in hand two states and one week over in a train yard Briar is on his knees crying with the short barrel of a Glock 30 in his mouth promising his mom, his mom, she’ll sell her car.

You know the thing about crime you talk about is it better be the shit that no one will care about or that no one could ever prove. The internet is just as good as a phone in county. But yeah. People got it twisted, there’s no shit here that’s organized. You wanna one foot square check the entire Humboldt national forest? You wanna dredge that bay and see what comes up besides crab pots.

Dude on that Netflix Special Murder Mountain, deputy or whatever, yeah face is different but you’re on the phone talking to another old head who did their time up north the Redwood curtain saying yeah, he knows where to find the bodies because the motherfucker put half of them there.

It would be worth a laugh if it wasn’t worth a Xanax.

So Saint Evelyn, there sits the note at the end of the book, but explain yourself. What power did you gain from your sacrifice?

What power is gained from a 900 dollar email and three hour consultation?

What power is gained by the sacrifice of safety, security, home, place, feeling?

They just popped some small players up north and called five kilos run from Texas big business. That’s a Tuesday. Connected the idiots to like nine bodies, sloppy disposal, no professionalism. An ex once had a quote on her FB profile about you, “whatever happened to the classical gangster?” The 55 boys had it coming’ tho, stayed away from them cats like nuclear waste. Violent and desperate, but proud, Fent runners, so bold they made fuckin’ shirts.

Kid are you advertising an interstate drug smuggling gang hauling fenny?

I don’t care how many Dracos or how hard you are, that’s the shit that gets you popped. Poison the town for desperation for money for respiration in a system built to crush you. Don’t blame them for the urge, however they got tapped into it, but they still shoulda run right. You can criticize your contemporaries.

Every five minute run to Bootleg’s house down Meramec where Missouri dead ends there’s always the same car with the same crew serving in broad daylight. Mean mug a motherfucker you don’t know who has the cool grey khaki Subaru lookin’ like some bearded Wash U adjunct lost in the wrong hood until eye contact hits on the slow roll past their vinyl wrapped charger. Eyes every day say motherfucker this ain’t prey.

Never think you know who you don’t just by how they look or talk unless you want to end up done up, run up, fucked up, or getting carried by your best friends in a box while the police don’t do shit. And you’re staring at a version of yourself from another life, and the tragedy is one of color and systemic oppression, history and hatred, division to conquer, conquest and colonize, the invention of whiteness to make us all hate each other while they suck the marrow from our bones.

Pop a Xanax.

Stop the crying.

All power demands sacrifice.

You made yours. They’ll make theirs and if they’re lucky they’ll wake up from the terminal paraboloid fugue society has put them under. At the apex you’re counting out by hand. Never had a wrong count. At the nadir you’re dead, in prison, done your time, or can’t get your shit together.

Every idea has its day.

If all power demands sacrifice and money is a stand in for power, what or who do you sacrifice for the power you need or else this year may end you? Do you sacrifice your peace, and make war? Do you sacrifice your retirement, and take the easy way out? Do you keep hustling other things?

(redacted)

That classical gangster, the one they had to drop Rico charges off of and about four tons of ghost dope disappeared in one hearing because of the Gucci attorney, there’s desperation in every minute that passes, and close by is the lick that comes by any means necessary.

Greyhound doesn’t even check IDs.

But never shit in your own back yard.

You want to set the apartment on fire and leave.

-Fade