by Travis Mateer

Today’s post will be brief, as I’m currently in a rainforest near the ocean. We arrived on July 3rd after a 12 hour car ride from Missoula. Apparently we are outside the blazing heat dome baking the Pacific Northwest, because last night (as celebrating freedom sounded indistinguishable from war) I experienced the strange sensation of being cold.

A year ago I drunkenly declared my intention to stop pounding box wine. Over the years my relationship to alcohol had become an unhealthy dependency that I realized needed to change. It was no longer a tool to lubricate my creativity (one of the more enduring rationalizations I told myself).

Today I can say it’s been a full calendar year since I took my last drink of booze. Since that time last summer I’ve lost over 50 pounds and have never felt less in need of Big Pharma interventions to bolster my health. Even my digestive problems have mostly cleared up.

Taking more active measures to improve my health highlights how incredibly UNHEALTHY our society has become. In America, we are consumers first, and THAT is the primary value we hold for the predator class. If they can’t extract profit from us, then we run the risk of being seen by these predators as useless eaters.

Tomorrow I’ll post a pre-recorded reading of a poem I wrote last December for this week’s episode of Zoom Town. The text of the poem will be available for subscribers of my Substack. Then, for the rest of the week, any subsequent posts will be brief.

Thanks for tuning in.