read this for instant riches / / cigar-tin stories number one hundred

In the New York Times Magazine there is a feature called This Boy's Life: The enduring spell of S.E. Hinton's 'The Outsiders'––then, now and always. This includes an interview with S.E. Hinton and a fashion spread of bloodless young men in stiff, unforgiving denim and very thin moustaches. The clothes have a gritty, flawed, surplus-store quality. Some items include:

    • Polo Ralph Lauren jacket, $1,998
    • Calvin Klein 205W39NYC sweater, $1,600
    • Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello plaid shirt, $890
    • Helmut Lang t-shirt, vintage, from the David Casavant Archive, price on request
   
Eat your heart out, Ponyboy.
   
I know you're bitter about everything, C says, but those are great books, and she wrote them when she was still a girl.

---

Am I bitter about everything? That feels inaccurate, like the German army crossing the Polish frontier being described as a home invasion. 'Bitter' implies a level of understanding and engagement that I don't know if I'm capable of anymore. You start ascribing motives to people, and then later you find out that they just fell into things, like those ants that just run around looking busy so they still get fed. Very few people have a plan, let alone considered ideas. Attaching blame is fun but pointless. Also, people react badly. As I get older, it's difficult not to twig at how terrible even organized or completely corporatized things, entire institutions, are managed, and just how calcified and immovable these structures are. In a psychic sense, these are windowless black monoliths that only H.P. Lovecraft could admire.

So one joins the crowd, where the only sensible reaction amounts to a sort of shrug and looking away. Politics is the least of it, like some slow-burning ferris wheel on a distant island cliff; you can stand on the beach and see the flames and hear something that sounds like screams but it's almost impossible to tell what's really going on, and no means to get there anyway. The vessels of real change wrecked along the shore. In the meantime, would you like to make a donation to the Children's Fund of Childrenia? It comes with a sticker!

I know at least that I've reached peak Trump. And this isn't just the all-sugar, stunt-casting, Big-Gulp criminality involved (what, exactly, were we expecting?) but also the hysterical reaction to it. Brought to you by the same people who got us here. The technocrats overplayed their hand and this is where we are, where the news cycle makes The Shield look like The Muppet Show, and everyone's supposed to get excited because not all the candidates are middle-aged white men anymore. Not exactly a war of ideas, is it?

---

I visit the downtown branch of TD bank. I stand in line for a teller. I understand that this is a purgatory-for-rookies kind of move but I'm only missing work so there's no hurry. Good thing. I'm wearing earphones so I can only watch as one of the tellers makes complicated hand gestures to accompany a lot of head-shaking to a man wearing pants that do not, by any stretch of the imagination, fit. Also the woman in front of me has left the line to go fondle the miniature green TD armchair on display. There is a monitor for news and other announcements and it displays the information that Carrie Underwood suffered three miscarriages in the last two years. To the right is a pillar with the word EXCELLENT spelled out in individual, fiesta-coloured stickers. Is it strange that we've all reached this place where the only people you see in bank lines are contractors, old people or the human equivalent of gophers with brain infections?

---

Going by the old house to pick up some mail: because of the ongoing chaos (read: the Big Dig) around Division, I am forced to walk up the ass-end of Colborne. The end of the world, really, by appearances. Not even a street, at this point, just a place where students live, and anyone with a car and any sense hides it around back. That particular weed-riven, bombed-out quality that Kingston likes to dabble in. A man walking in front of me tries to text and pull up his pants at the same time, losing badly at the latter.

---

We have a new change dish. I bought the dish, a smart and inexpensive piece of local pottery, in Murray Corner during vacation, and then designated it as the dish for loonies and toonies (I also said quarters, but C somehow vetoed that, because "I don't like clutter") to be used all those times that someone with a juvenile limp or slow-draining speech impediment or dental dam as a fashion statement comes to the door selling smiles and chocolate bars for refugees or escapees or whatever. Some van with tinted windows always idling half a block away.

The trouble, which starts almost immediately, is that C and Oona start using the change dish as a FREE MONEY DISH, as in, "We went to the Fall Fair and it was fucking awful and we blew a shitload of money on absolute garbage but we took most of the money from the change dish so it was almost free anyway." This is always the point at which I go down to the basement and start writing notes to myself.

---

I make a book art object about Macbeth. Not my first crack at that Scottish rodeo. It is my favourite Shakespeare, has all the best lines, doesn't drag out the insanity and death the way King Lear does. My latest Macbeth is young and blonde, and why not, but the fissures are still there, and the background will always be red.

There are other new things in the shop, which is now open again. I have maybe ... 20% of my work listed? So if you live in Kingston, and are desperate for a present for a friend, please drop me a line with the premise of what's needed. 

This is the 100th edition of this Tinyletter! I did it! Some kind of thing, I'm sure.

I hope everyone has a great week.

Draw things, paint things, write things, make things.
djb