more Soons now

and disintegrating USA ghouls

record label news

In mid May, not that long ago, we released a reissued version of Soon by Hana Stretton as a repolished LP with a new jacket and booklets and stuff. Read about it here. But the thing is it sold out really fast, like a few days! So we made 500 more for all those people who’ve been writing saying “what the hell man?” It’s available now here, by clicking these words. MORE SOONS NOW. They’ll ship out at the end of this month, July 2024. Jump on it.

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editorial:

The other day I was eating breakfast at the Main Street Cafe in downtown Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. I was on a family road trip to the place where my grandparents grew up, for a big reunion and for scattering my grandpa’s ashes. He died a few months ago after living for many extra years in a state of mental, but not really physical, decline. I loved him very much. We had many things in common. The loud confidence of a firstborn child, absurd recurring jokes, weird good fortune, our names... It was a great trip.

For our few days in the area my 6 person family group lived in a rented cabin at the casino on the Spirit Lake reservation. I slept in a tent out in the whipping wind coming off the huge lake and it was pretty psycho. On one of the nights we put the presidential debates on the cabin tv and all watched in horror, the kids and everyone. Car crash magnetism. I got fidgety in the middle and started sweeping the sand on the kitchen floor. On the screen two withered corpses bickered incoherently and the drooling violence empire’s last bulb flickered.

But yeah, we were eating breakfast at the cafe in town one of the days and I couldn’t help paying attention to the big table next to us. The place was small. It was 7 or 8 presumably retired farmers who meet for coffee and breakfast frequently to joke and talk about the news and what’s going on on their farms and maybe in their families. Standard north american morning ritual in diners everywhere, every day. It was the kind of table a presidential candidate would love to get photographed smiling and handshaking with. Probably they were all big trump guys, but who knows? So what.

The thing I noticed though was their bodies. Not to be weird, but it was hard not to notice the rough realities of their bodies. They were old but not that old. They were all overweight, big huge bodies. One guy was so extra overweight the chair beneath him disappeared. He wore an extra itty-bitty hat for some reason. One was shiny bald like from recent chemo. They all hobbled when they walked, tipping back and forth like how they transported the Easter Island heads from the quarry. They wheezed. They were just regular guys, friends meeting to catch up and joke and maintain the fabric of their lives. Truly warming village camaraderie.

While driving across North Dakota and Montana and eastern Washington, the vast industrial crop lands, and seeing automated irrigation equipment circling over soy and corn fields sprayed with gnarly poisons, I thought about those farmer bodies. All of us at the Devil’s Lake diner were scarfing super processed food, or “food”: corn syrup and white pancakes and haunted meat. Sleeping on the edge of a lake unsafe to swim in because of decades of contaminated pesticide runoff, I thought about those farmer bodies, living whole lives beneath these spray planes. I thought of these morning diner breakfast buddies as human sacrifices donating their years and lives and bodies on a harsh expansive altar to an abusive god, a bullying deity wielding delusions of patriotism and tradition.

I thought of my grandparents being raised on farms here in this very same place but deciding that they’d rather lunge out into a different life elsewhere, not farming but teaching, raising a new branch of the family out in the pacific northwest. I thought of me and my life descending from these choices and efforts, my modern twerp life as a privileged coastal elite lucky fool driving my futuristic electronic car back to the old tough farm to walk across the mud in my flip flops. I don’t know about farming reality, I just write my little poems and complain from a distance. I wince at the ghosts of my great great grandparents eyeing me through time with black and white confusion. None of it is necessarily good or bad, it’s just a strange dream of lives and unwritten history unfolding in unforeseen ways. The present moment still radiates in its weirdness, and the future remains blank.

And while I’m driving home across this sucked dry continent, the news arrives in heartbreaking waves one after another. I gasp and groan, like my dad on the couch watching the debates. The president is now a king, above the law. France chooses racist supremacy politics. Narcissistic authoritarians are getting more popular, not less. Corrupt judges get to decide on all matters, not the agencies who actually know their stuff. And who has Biden’s ear enough to speak sensibility into it? Only his delusional family who tells him he’s doing great and to keep clinging to his obstructive position. It all feels Shakespearean and tragic, beyond real.

How long do we let grandpa keep driving with his dementia? Do we wait until he kills someone? How long do we keep reinforcing our delusions out of a sense of comfort, or equilibrium, or embarrassment? There is an elephant in the room. It’s shitting everywhere. The room is on fire.

This country is blood-soaked and dishonest, deep in its bones. The violence is foundational, intentional, not some weird occasional fluke. I live in definitely a bubble, in a super beautiful corner where the wild resonance of the land itself still mostly outshines the exploitative human cruelty superimposed by our sick inherited ideologies. It can be easy to just stay submerged in the relief of the welcoming natural world here. That’s actually the whole point of choosing this life. But I never want to let these necessary restorative dips into relief keep me from returning to the reality of our big shared world.

Driving across the country and listening to bleak unfolding news, I was like “oh yeah, duh.” It can get worse. How naive I seem now, remembering during George W Bush’s time thinking “well at least it can’t get worse.” Of course it can. The illness at the heart of the ideas that we built this country from has never been truly addressed, not in a big enough way to heal it. Namely, that some people are more deserving than others, that people in general are more deserving than the non-human world, that looking good is better than being good, that thinking in terms of supremacy and inferiority is cool and normal and should remain the way we do things forever. No. It’s ill. These two dusty ghouls barfing up their insults on TV are the perfect embodiment of this illness, and of the vast apparatus propping them up, deflecting honest accountability.

I haven’t yet aged into my own brain decline enough for the people around me to have to talk about taking my car keys away, but I hope when I do that I’ll surrender graciously. Time comes for everyone and everything. And this metaphor is not just for the old men running for president. It’s for the whole ass country. It’s over. It shouldn’t have even been a country in the first place. I am not actually hopeful that this could happen in my lifetime, or that humans will even survive for very much longer, but still, here’s my half baked un-thought-through vote: disband the “united states”, full land back to indigenous peoples, bow down for years in apology and service, cancel all ambitions and reorganize in harmonious utopian matrilineal hippie village barter networks along the watersheds. Ha ha. I know how I sound. Still though, fuck the way things are.

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anyway

Allow me my tirades. Thank you. I realize that there are deeply educated people way more eloquent than me spending their lives working through these big quesions in an actually productive way, with complex perspectives and unimaginable insights. I hope. I know that despair is a dangerous and contagious thing to spray around and that it stays in the soil basically forever, and that’s not what I want to do. In all of this quote unquote negativity, I am in love with life. The miracle of thought and perception and light falling on the ground never leaves me, not anymore. I’m into it, that’s the main truth. As humanity continues to go through its contortions, we are all so fortunate to be born at all, truly. And maybe it will all work out just fine?????

I’ll be back next time with a cool surprise thing for sale and another bonus recording to share from my upcoming album.

thanks and goodbye everyone, I love you

Phil

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currently reading: The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley

currently eating: the gentlest of broths and teas to recover from the road

currently sleeping: outside