Paige🦜

Dude if the Democratic Party has a place for anti-trans and anti-abortion candidates then I’m not a democrat and I won’t vote for one

I don’t know what to tell you man, there’s already a political party who believes these things

It’s not a “big tent” to have zero fixed values in pursuit of power

Facebook post from Kaleb Horton, September 18, 2017: Toys R Us is probably going out of business this year. I'm fascinated by the collapse of retail, because what it really signifies is the collapse of the 20th century. The reason I pushed to profile guys like Harry Dean Stanton, Merle Haggard and Chuck Berry, was that writing about them is a way of writing about the 20th century, and how different it was from where we are now. How shockingly different, in retrospect. The migration out of the south, the descent of the Dust Bowl, which was a Biblical plague; the millions of people who were killed during World War Two. Monoculture, and the idea that a great episode of a television show would be seen by *half of all people.* The arrival of flight, and the end of horses. Homes without electricity. Coming of age without computers, without television. Listening to the radio for entertainment. The 20th century was a long time ago and it's a ghost now. It's a ghost you see in the places you wouldn't expect. It's seen in towns that were bypassed by the freeways, the dusty little towns out west that still have old diners and motels and payphones. It's seen in the places that we left, places where mines shut down, places where tourist attractions died off. It's seen in Bakersfield with Buck Owens' Crystal Palace and it's seen in Roswell, which stubbornly maintains the relics of the '90s UFO boom. Things like that won't be around forever. Someday owners will die and towns will burn and they won't be rebuilt. And it's difficult to suss out what those things are, because they're on roads, physical and metaphorical, that we no longer travel.

The ghost sightings happen in stupid places, unexpected places, and uncool places. A few months ago, I went with Marie to the Toys R Us on Victory Blvd. in Burbank, which still looks exactly like it did in Back to the Future in 1985 somehow. It's not nostalgia that you see there, it's just a customer base and economic model that's aging and won't be around a lot longer, and it's *boring.* There's no reason for anyone to ever go to Lancer's, the little diner by that Toys R Us. Because it's not good. People go there out of tradition, and old habits. 80 and 90 year olds go there. We were lining up for a Nintendo, which is still a hard thing to keep stocked in stores. Toys R Us was actually the best place to obtain one, because it's no longer a place children beg their parents to take them to. When we went in, wham, there it was. The ghost of 1996. I was 8 years old, for a fraction of a second. The feeling wasn't nostalgia, it was a kind of temporal dislocation. A confusion. But it wasn't an immaculate 1996, it was a fading 1996. It was lonelier than I remember it. It's time for Toys R Us to go out of business. It was time ten years ago, fifteen. There are reasons to be nostalgic about the 20th century. We weren't plugged into so many wires, so many screens. We were a little bit closer to the process of manufacturing and agriculture than we are now. We made more things by hand, and our goals as people were uniquely audacious and driven by mad, desperate power that was temporary and had to end.

But the 20th century was hopelessly cruel and soaked in blood. The 20th century gave us flight, but it also gave us bombs that can end the world and Richard Nixon and his evil sidekick Kissinger and it gave us new mutations of slavery and race and class subjugation and it gave us useless, disgusting monuments to Confederate slavers and traitors and cowards. It gave us President Trump, who wouldn't exist today without New York City's collective cocaine addiction in the 1980s. I want to find the ghosts, not because I miss the past -- the good old days can't return because they're imaginary and what you really miss is youth and if you're lucky a warm feeling of safety -- but because I don't even know what things we'll lose, or when we'll lose them, or how long we have to document them. I know ghosts when I see them. Toys R Us for the mundane side and the Salton Sea for the widescreen wasteland side. But I have absolutely no idea how many there are. I figure people go first, then places. Those are the things we have a limited time to physically document and historically examine and preserve on film. The ideas will go away much slower, and some of them may be eternal, like cold wars. But those are a lot less fun because you don't get to drive to them.

And now I'm just spelunking around and here's this Facebook post by Kaleb Horton from September 2017. It was three months after MTV dumped its freelancers. I'm sure it would have been a piece there; instead he posted this on FB just to have it written out: Toys 'R' Us as societal microcosm.

one of the most important technological revolutions in modern history and you're likely not hearing anything about it because it's making the oligarchs who control our information environment poorer instead of richer

this motherfucker managed to do fucking stagflation. do you know how hard that is

The scene where he's being amputated and he's high and confesses his love for Corday? Classic evil romance stuff.

RIP Dr Romano, my favorite ER character by season 8 or 9. A man who was so angry and vindictive but acted with such charisma and love for his character.

I've never liked Dr. Kovač. Not a likeable character even with his obnoxious self serving white knight complex.

Doctor Romano doing 1 handed surgery on a pig. Unfortunately hes my favorite evil Muppet.

Makeup artist get called the vanity crew in a derogatory manner often enough. Its so sweet to see when a production actually cares about their behind camera staff.

There's an episode of ER dedicated to their passed Makeup Artist right at the top of the episode. I dont believe I've ever seen anything like that before.

100% we are about to hit depression level economic numbers and they’re just going to hide it as best they can

Who could ever hate Kerry Weaver?

All of the rights of women that people use to make comments about other countries are relatively new.

People making comparisons to us backsliding into other countries and cultures makes me realize how few people know the history of the suffragette movement in this country or the general history about how women have been treated in this country.

"We're all throwing dildos at women athletes to promote our memecoin" really puts a fine point on not just how sexist, mean and stupid so much of right now is, but also the grim degree to which we're just inundated with Stuff a 15-Year-Old Dipshit Would Think is Cool. A confederacy of Beavises.

HELLRAISER (1987) dir: Clive Barker

I have reached the first ER episode to reference 9/11

Christina Hendricks has really always been typecast as a women with a bad (ex)husband

Carter's best girlfriends are women he cant close with or the pervert girl from season 1 who's absolutely using him as a human vibrator.

Another season of ER another blonde I hate that Carter is dating. I could scream.

I'm going to hold everyone's hands when I say this. Citizen's United injected so much rich people money into politics that it has completely fucked American elections and everything we see has a direct line back to that decision. You cannot have an effective labour movement until it's overturned.

Looks like season 8 of ER is another Weaver is a villian season again.

I can legitimately blame Morgan Wallen for how fucking sick I've been this week and its true that the man is evil

TV will NEVER be this good again.

Dr Romano is basically like a cartoon Muppet villian. He'll show up in gi defensively screaming that he can't wear a paper in the dojo before rushing into surgery.

when i was in the womb my mom would kink the umbilical chord like a hose until i was about to starve and then she would let it go and i would get blasted with a tidal wave of nutrients that was almost too much for my small body to handle

POP CRAVE Pop Crave @PopCrave A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump has struck down a Biden-era rule that would have removed medical debt from credit reports. MEDICAL BILLING STATEVENT Patient Name, Adoress. Payment mos Medical Pes+

A true populist

This was me

I guess I understand why my mother was afraid of me as a child when I was really obsessed with the old burlesque bit where women pop out of a cake

im just glad to feel anything