ESCHATOLOGICAL REPORT

Freezing to death with a hole in the roof

(image stolen from the vast internet, circa late 2010’s, Meme by me)

WAKE UP IT’S THE APOCALYPSE

Not my preferred method of being shock induced into the day. You’ve earned at least two more sentences. What is it? What’s going on? Eat some Xanax and come see. You just have to see.

I have a mild respiratory virus. I was dreaming about airplanes taking off from dirt runways in the jungle, trying to sneak aboard them, escaping something, but who knows what.

THE SNOW

It snowed for two days. Whisps of dry snow sidewinding across the highway, ice rain, wet snow, wash, rinse, repeat. Two days straight. The Polar Vortex reigns. MoDot says STL is closed until Thursday. Roads won’t be clear until then. Hunker down with the hot cocoa, sleep in, fuck around and find out on Substack. Blair’s law is a new one this year where you catch a misdemeanor, then a felony, then state time for popping off guns on New Years Eve, and it killed a tradition. Blair’s Law.

The storm name for Polar Vortex January 2025 was named Blair. Now I can say Blair is a name I don’t like because at this point later this week she will have not only killed a sacred St. Louis tradition, though first a little girl named Blair had to take a .223 round through the skull last NYE heading out of the worst year of my life, a comet singing a song of shattered bone and burst blood vessels, yelling “take me to the bridge” of the wound channel then the dancing tumble of the unstable falling bullet turned her off when it thwipped through polyp atop your spinal chord that connects one system to the other. I hope her last thoughts were nice.

But the storm, the storm that shares this little girl’s name. Blair. Winter storm Blair, was all cozy snow days and disappointing movies until I woke up today to the yelling on four hours of sleep.

Thesis statement. I don’t like the name. Fuck you Blair, I’m glad your brain got shot out the bottom of you skull. Next time take two steps to the right, two steps to the left, one clap this time. Unless you’ve escaped Samsara.

The Terror of America

The apocalypse I woke up. If I said I was ready for the image bout time I was done yelling and composing myself, inhaling albuterol, amphetamines, alprazolam, and taking a deep breath. Waking up hard to breathe is always something else. I put on my knockoff Retro Rifle Tyler Durden coffee mug robe and my black fishbone print crocks, headed out the sliding French pocket door I fight every day.

The bad news is as soon as I hit the hallway I could hear the dripping. Dripping is a trickle. Dripping is a gurgle. Dripping is a pissing pour out the ceiling fan never hung flush where it deserved to be since we moved in, cascading off the blades, every seam in the drywall on the ceiling a stalagtite of water forming, a long wormy line of water not heavy enough to fall. Mom mopping a panic off the floor.

Sometimes when I yell fuck it’s an autonomic reaction. When Blair caught a falling round through the cerebellum the severance from consciousness and higher cognition is what killed her, but the cerebellum also controls parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system response, those things you don’t think about: I have to breathe: I have to beat my heart: I have to see storage tubs filling with dirty water and my moms on the verge of tears, 73 years old and ringing out the mop with arthritic hands and my heart breaks and one friend is already on it, messages coming in.

I take a cup of coffee and decamp back to my room. OMGBRB I’ll mop ASAP.

eight inches of snow and ice over about 2400 square feet weighs on the very low side, 4,000 pounds if it is dry snow. If it is heavy wet snow it weighs up to 48,000 pounds. There has been minimal sun melt. The only melt going on is caused by the ambient heat of the flat topped brick box Victorian we live on the second story of. The water has one main mode of egress. The roof slants from the front of the house to the back for drainage, it’s not a steep grade, but standing up there you know it exists.

The roof was fucked before this.

With ice and snow layer caked together. Two inches of snow, a half inch of solid ice. Another inch of snow, an eighth inch of ice, et al. the exact weight is impossible to measure. Guestimate. Low side with fluff it’s 4,000lbs, high side with wet heavy snow it’s up to 48,000lbs. Monkey in the middle and I call it 24k lbs. Assuming twelve tons of snow on the roof all electric sliding back down a hole in my roof above the kitchen fixture, and cappilarying down the inside the porous brick walls, long in need of sealing and replastering, but the old world expense, and you can’t get the good English plaster in the USA, only pale equivalent, plus sheetrock over historic plasterwork looks grade school art project bad.

Not that this is my business. We have a fucking landlord.

That’s anywhere between 10 to 20ppsf of downward pressure on the roof. This was when I started to notice the other parts of the ceiling bucked in other rooms, new cracks in the walls. That’s up to 20+ppsf headed for the path of immediate least resistance into our kitchen.

I’m taking art off the walls. I’m organizing an exodus. I’m packing my go bag. I’m exhausted. The rain in the kitchen slowed, but now I’m keeping watch on the seams. If the ceiling starts to bubble or bow, it’s coming down. I’m wrapping my valuables. I’m taking pictures for renters insurance. I’m about to be calling hotels.

The cars aren’t even dug out.

Roofers and anyone who can help isn’t even dug out.

The Saint hangs silent and I can hear her cackle. “Oh god,” dramatic downswing in tone from nearly crying in her voice “it just gets worse.” and then her perfect laughter.

I’m projecting my anger onto a dead child because fuck them kids, and she had the same name as the storm set to most likely render me homeless.

I’m projecting rage because my grief only comes out that way while I wrap sacred artifacts, The Saints paintings; The Saint’s notebooks; The Saint’s art; in plastic sheeting, in the hopes that the whole roof doesn’t cave and crush my life.

I’ve run six successful GoFundMe’s. One helped a friend recover from a shoulder replacement surgery in a sanitary environment because he lived in a trailer on a pot grow that the Paradise fire had burned until it was a toxic waste site. One for my brother the Octopus (we share this nickname) when he needed rent help right the fuck now. One for my friend Stephanie when she had stage 4 “you shouldn’t have this, you’re so young” non Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. One for The Saint’s younger brother’s funerary expenses after he overdosed in the bathroom of the house The Saint hanged herself in seven years later. One for The Saint’s narcissistic mother who decided me and the other closest friend of the Saint, the one who was too young and too beautiful for cancer that rare for her age, until it wasn’t, were enemies because we hold the truth of how The Saint, hanging behind me, felt about her mother. No, how she REALLY felt.

If I could turn back the clock I’d make the wording on the GofundMe, the one where so many people came together and opened their hearts and wallets I can’t fathom it without my eyes getting a little watery from my sinus infection, yeah, just my sinuses, so vague that the dispersal of the money would be within my legal rights to give to ANYONE but her. Two dead kids in the same house she lives in today and she’s living her best life. Fuck you Trish.

Digressing Pynchonian when I’m a Dollar General Palahniuk at best.

The next GoFundMe I write, is probably going to be for me. But money is tighter than 2023. Sarah was the pretty half of us. The successful beautiful intelligent fucked up theater kid who read Strindberg and was problematic and didn’t care because no one ever called her on it. She was so beautiful, bitch could slit your throat in a crowd with a thousand witnesses and get off with it. But she shackled herself to her disabled mother. Now living her best life on money I raised.

Probably going to start off with this obligatory, “so, almost all of you have a really good reason to think I’m a tyrant, an asshole, a piece of shit,” this is where I skin myself. “But now my mom, you all call her mom. You call her the Oracle. I deserve this. I’ll stay and let the house collapse on me. Just save her, for the love of god, because the last mom I helped save was a cunt, and she didn’t honor her dead daughter the way I had been instructed to handle her last wishes, will, and testament.”

I’m going to go see if Holiday Inn Express in the Central West End has any rooms left tonight and tomorrow. See if someone will bring me a shovel to get out the vehicles. Go have a vegan treat with mom and lament this start to another year.

MY APOLOGIES IF THE AUTOPSY IS LATE, THE WORLD JUST MANAGED TO SET SNOW ON FIRE, BUT ONE WILL GET DONE THIS WEEK.

in the meantime.

The most successful sign we ever ran. 11 of us sitting on a threadbare Persian rug stolen from I don’t know where on Haight street, drunk and dosed, a violin, weed for sale to tourists, a harmonium, and the best sign we ever ran, because we were young and feral and runaways and train hoppers, criminals and Deadheads, tour kids and gang members, it was three feet tall and four feet wide and said “AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU’RE NOT US!” We made enough money for everyone to get drunk and get a hotel room.

Never mind that I had 60 racks banded in my pack. That wasn’t the point. The point was. Fuck you pay me.¹

So in the meantime. This is America, we have no savings, you want more words. Fiction, notes, discourse, autopsy, advice, kindness, any of the slow fading love of others this year is quickly robbing me of.

I wish these pictures did it justice, but you know, it won’t let me upload videos. So fuck ‘em.

1. Old habits die hard. This isn’t the tone I wanted. But the ship is sinking.