Month: September 2020

by William Skink

I’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile, but wasn’t sure how to begin. It is much easier to criticize local tax policies than to explain why I think prayer is a form of magic that works.

I was raised Presbyterian in the midwest and rebelled against the hypocrisy of organized religion in very predictable ways, like smoking weed and listening to Marilyn Manson. Later, in college, I took an understanding the Bible class and was intrigued/horrified at the extreme violence of the old testament.

The religion I was actually influenced by growing up was the soulless consumerism of a spiritually starved suburbia. I gave that place my most righteous middle finger and arrived in Missoula in 2000 ready to expand my mind.

The story of my time in this valley can be summed up with one word: disillusionment.

Becoming disillusioned doesn’t happen overnight, at least it didn’t for me. It was a process that took years to develop. Working at the homeless shelter was like adding accelerant to the process, and since that work started in 2008, it also acted as an inoculant to the Obama HOPIUM liberals were infected by for 8 years.

Since the previous 8 years were psychotic Bush cabal years, the great Obama betrayal left me politically unmoored. The result was that I became deeply cynical. To deal with that visceral disappointment, on top of the vicarious trauma I had accumulated from working with people in crisis, I self-medicated with alcohol.

I think it’s safe to say most people with unhealthy coping strategies relied on those strategies EVEN MORE once the pandemic hit. I know I did. Until I decided to stop.

This is where I believe prayer played a role. I say “believe” because that is what one must do with this kind of stuff. The story I am about to tell you cannot be held up as proof of anything other than, the cynics would say, a meaningful coincidence.

Like everyone, I was having a hard time with the fear and isolation of our NEW NORMAL, but UNLIKE everyone, I knew there were people praying for me, like my mom’s prayer group. One day back in May I was particularly low. My mom encouraged me ask the higher power for help. Sure mom, I thought, but to appease her, later that day, as I was taking my dog for a walk, I did what she asked.

Did the sky part and the heavens thunder? No, of course not. I said my piece and returned home.

Later that same day, I was in my shop working on my huge Lego project with my oldest son. He had rebuilt the bar I had added to an Italian restaurant, so it needed to be reintegrated. To do this I had to remove a bunch of Legos to level out the area it was to be installed.

It’s important to understand the scale of my Lego project to appreciate what happened next. I am not exaggerating when I say there are probably at least 100,000 Lego pieces involved. I have spent a small fortune behaving like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters, strangely compelled to build this big plastic narrative metaphor in my garage.

So there I was, using a knife to dig out Lego pieces to install a bar. With a flip of the wrist, a green Lego popped off and flew across the table. I picked it up. On the side of this Lego piece there was a message: GOD LOVES YOU.

I recognized the Lego piece immediately. My middle kid had received it at my parent’s church last year during the kid potion of the service. Out of tens of thousands of Lego pieces, that this piece popped out on the day it did, well, you can see why I saw this as extremely significant.

Since then I have continued to benefit from what I see as the grace of a higher power.

During another low point, I received a call from someone who felt compelled to call me at that particular moment. I haven’t met this person IRL yet, and she doesn’t even live in this state, yet circumstances have intertwined our paths, and a shared sense of faith has shown us both that a higher power is at work.

If you are reading this and rolling your eyes, I get it. A dude with a drinking problem finds religion is a tired trope that, if it wasn’t my own experiences, I would easily dismiss, and have actually dismissed for a good chunk of my life.

A lot of factors have contributed to my evolving spiritual perspective, and one of those factors is the belief system of those in power. It is MY BELIEF that a spiritual war is being waged against us by these occult forces, and even though it appears they are winning, there DOES EXIST a higher power with the capability to transform their evil acts into a paradigm-shifting revelation of their spiritual control grid.

Exposing these mechanisms and strategies of control has been, and will continue to be, a major focus of my writing and my art, but I can’t do it alone.

To those who have helped support me, even when I don’t make it easy, THANK YOU.

And to those trying to enact their anti-human endgame agenda, I’ll pray the love emanating from a higher power reveals itself to you as well, and that your soul-sickness is healed.

Amen.

by William Skink

ruby sun I better run
as sirens start to wail
unholy notes like spiky motes
thrust behind my veil

I must say beyond the fray
twins may spin and sing
but I discern transhuman worms
and other wicked things

owls hoot and lasers shoot
as dewey dew drops drop
then double bubble toil and trouble
as news of Q goes hot

fire serpents circle round
my Virgo-19 heart
the day they pulled a scream from tongue
and cut my skin apart

ruby suns and sugar buns
selling cutie pies
onion peelers and tuning healers
it's time to fix our eyes

by William Skink

In a tweet yesterday the Communication Director for Gallatin County, Whitney Bermes, said this about the median home price in Bozeman:

Heard on a call today that the median price for a single family home in #Bozeman rose by $75K between July and August, and is now $584K.

If home prices in Bozeman can skyrocket this much in JUST ONE MONTH, who the hell is going to be able to live in Montana’s hot housing markets by next year?

In Missoula the housing picture got even tighter as yet ANOTHER tech company announced its plans to relocate its operations to Zootown. UNAVCO, a “global engineering and data firm”, made the choice to leave Boulder, Colorado partly due to…wait for it…the HIGH COST OF HOUSING. From the link (emphasis, mine):

“Missoula has a ready and able technically skilled workforce here that we’d love to recruit and integrate into our geodetic workforce,” Bendick said. “Missoula also offers an exceptional quality of life and frankly an affordability that Boulder does not offer to my scientific and technical workforce.”

I’m sure Missoula’s decimated service sector workforce will be excited to hear about how affordable Missoula looks to fleeing Boulderites. And the non-profit workforce should also be energized at the added pressure on Missoula’s housing market as they triage crisis after crisis while our Mayor keeps his hopes (and our public money) pinned to his delusional vision for an event center.

To add insult to injury, this tech company’s mission to locate stuff in time and space sounds like it could have all kinds of creepy applications in our NEW NORMAL. From the link (again, my emphasis):

Using geodesy, UNAVCO studies, records and monitors the position of various bodies, from the rotation of the earth to the movement of tectonic plates. It tracks the movement of ships and aircraft and can be used to guide autonomous vehicles.

It can also measure sea level changes resulting from climate change and evaluate various hazards and risks, which are key to early warning. The data it collects are open sourced and available to the wider scientific community.

“It’s the most useful science that nobody knows what the heck it is,” Bendick said of geodesy. “You might take for granted that you know where things are, but it really takes complicated engineering and science to know exactly where things are. Understanding the position of different kinds of objects in space and time has a huge range of both scientific and technical applications.”

Hmmm, I wonder if “technical applications” could include military and/or law enforcement (I know, pretending like there’s a difference is so OLD NORMAL).

I feel strongly that these local stories are important to track because they signal how Missoula will continue to develop and gentrify, and the changes (and dislocations) in our local backyard is a microcosm of much larger trends impacting this country.

by William Skink

One might assume that when Nick Checota threw in the towel on building a 100 million dollar event center/hotel/condo tower in downtown Missoula after a global pandemic obliterated his business model, that support for this project would finally evaporate. Unfortunately, the John and Ellen Show are refusing to concede defeat to reality, and they are soldiering on, pandemic be damned.

Nick Checota pulled out because his part of the project required HIS OWN MONEY. For the John and Ellen Show, it’s PUBLIC MONEY they are playing with, so of course they are still sounding optimistic about finding SMART and WISE people to keep the gravy train chugging along:

“We’ve got a number of parties who have made contact, and I’ve got some meetings coming up with folks who are interested in talking about that very prospect, right,” Engen said. “We step into the program and design, get it built and we have an operator for hotel and residence and we have an operator for entertainment venue and food and beverage.”

And the city points to the investment that’s already been made by the city and Logjam, things like design and engineering, as pieces that still have a lot of value.

“For the right developer, what we have is a turnkey project,” Engen said. “I think wise investors and smart developers are going to recognize the value that’s there.”

This “turnkey project” is now waiting for another savior to swoop in, and according to Ellen Buchanan, there are SERIOUS people sniffing around this opportunity:

“The developers we’ve been working with are serious developers,” Buchanan said. “This is not, you know, some passing fancy or a way to fill time. These are serious business people spending serious money.”

Isn’t it very exciting to hear that Missoula’s gentrification czar is talking to SERIOUS business people with SERIOUS money to spend? So what if a global pandemic has upended our world, escalating our financial malaise and spiking unemployment to depression-era levels.

If you think the global pandemic is not registering AT ALL for our elected braintrust and their sycophants (like Queen TIF), the last paragraph of the KPAX article should definitely NOT put your concerns to rest:

Engen says the pandemic may change the conference business, with a trend away from larger gatherings. But he believes people still want to meet face-to-face, and enjoy entertainment, and that Missoula is poised to serve that market.

If you think Mayor Engen is a delusional development addict who is refusing to let reality set any limits on his vision for this community, then next year is your chance to send Engen packing. Stay tuned…

by William Skink

While I feel a bit buried by the layers of technical difficulties I keep encountering, there are silver linings to some of the inconveniences I’m navigating, like being consistently out of data by the 10th of each month.

Since end-of-the-night Netflix is not an option for my partner and I for 2/3 of the month, we have relied on DVDs. That’s why I wasted money on the third season of True Detective.

Something I’ve noticed as a consumer of high-production narrative programming is the overall decline in quality. Part of this decline is embodied by the over-reliance of big studios on “the reboot”.

The regular commenters at Moon of Alabama (who can generally be described as astute observers of geopolitics) recently got into a debate over reboots like Disney’s Mulan and the new Dune. Having been influenced by this forum for over a decade, I was impressed with how little value this conversation produced.

Back to True Detective (warning, possible spoilers ahead).

Season 3 of True Detective was absolutely terrible. While this is obviously a subjective claim, it’s coming from someone who was totally blown away by the acting and subject matter of the first season. For a quick summary, here is wikipedia’s breakdown of the first season:

The first season of True Detective, an American anthology crime drama television series created by Nic Pizzolatto, premiered on January 12, 2014, on the premium cable network HBO. The principal cast consisted of Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan, Michael Potts, and Tory Kittles. The season had eight episodes, and its initial airing concluded on March 9, 2014. As an anthology, each True Detective season has its own self-contained story, following a disparate set of characters in various settings.

Important context to consider is when this series first aired. 2014, even though it was only 6 years ago, was a different world. While there had been plenty of exposure of Hollywood as the cesspool that it is, 2014 predated the general public’s awareness of predators like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.

After trudging through season 3, we re-watched season 1 and are currently watching season 2. Watching all this material again in 2020 is giving me a much different impression than my first go-around.

For me, the decline in fictional storytelling seems to correlate to a growing awareness that the screen is bleeding into real life and the monsters are real. Fiction can no longer compete with what’s actually happening in our fucked up world.

Now, in 2020, this is how I see the series.

Season 1 is the apex of what we can hope to expect from a true detective. Traces of the “buddy cop” motif are still visible as our culture turns to quicksand beneath our feet.

Season 2 plunges the viewer into a totally corrupt industrial armpit called “Vinci”. Here the best thing the corrupt/damaged male detectives can do is martyr themselves as the female detective escapes, mirroring the gender-tensions being promoted at the time, which have fully blossomed today.

Season 3 furthers the cultural commentary with an old detective struggling with dementia as he and his partner try to figure out the case over the decades. It’s so disappointing I have made up a fictional scene in my mind where True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto is brought into a room after season 1 and told explicitly that he got too close for comfort…so here’s the script for season 2, Nicky Baby, and remember what we got on you!

Maybe next time I’m looking for something to watch I should pick a comedy.