Living the Dystopian Dream
One zine at a time
It’s been warm and sunny for the last few days here in San Diego. The flowers are blooming and the hummingbirds are visiting our little garden on the balcony. I’ve been baking up a storm here at Casa Sirena. It all feels weirdly normal.
But then I go outside for a grocery run and the roads are almost empty and everywhere I go people are masked up like bandits in a really shitty dystopian novel. That’s anything but normal. Or maybe it’s the new normal. I don’t know.
This week I learned the City of San Diego denied our request for a grant to assist Golondrina during the quarantine. Our little shop doesn’t have much of an online presence—just an Instagram page—and it’s easy to miss when we’re not open. It’s such a tiny little store on Logan Avenue in Barrio Logan. But for the last four years we’ve kept it running every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We don’t have any employees. The six of us do everything ourselves, from making the art to manning the register to mopping the floor at the end of the day. Our lack of full-time employees is why we were denied funding. That’s fine. It’s always been a labor of love.
The news is especially discouraging because last weekend was the 50th anniversary of Chicano Park Day, which is typically our biggest day of the year by a large margin. I drove by the park last weekend and the only people out were the homeless folks who hang out in the park, and a half-dozen lowriders who were determined to bear witness to this milestone that wasn’t.
Our Love Cuts Deep
As promised, I finally finished my new zine. It’s called OUR LOVE CUTS DEEP. Aside from the cover, which I’m very proud of, it’s a no-frills affair: a 32-page short story that I started last year and finished right before the pandemic. It’s about a journalist who goes to interview a reclusive author in Mexico and then things go awry.
I made the cover image by carving the illustration on linoleum and printing it right off the block on my kitchen table.
Pretty cool, right? I sent the first batch out to paying subscribers for free on Monday. If you’d like a free zine, subscribe now and I’ll put one in the mail for you.
If you’d prefer not to subscribe, which is totally cool, but want to buy the zine, you can do so by purchasing it at my Etsy store. (I’m a person who has an Etsy store now. Standby for my yarn bomb blog.)
I’m charging $10, which is kind of pricey for a zine with just one story in it. Here are a few things to consider:
Shipping is free.
Each zine is signed and numbered.
It’s a limited edition batch of 100.
It’s over 6,000 words long. That’s 6,000 words I will never ask you to read online.
Golondrina may be closed but we’re still paying rent and rent is due.
Ditto our studio, which is down the street from Golondrina. Would you like to come for a visit some time?
It’s a funny story, except for the parts that aren’t.
Here are the first few paragraphs. I hope you like it.
A few weeks after I left my husband, I accepted an assignment to interview the once reclusive and now forgotten novelist B in a village an hour’s drive south of Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico. It had been ages since I’d done any kind of reporting like this, or whatever it is one calls these profiles of niche celebrities of the irrelevant arts, but I was game.
The tire fire of my marriage had cast a hazy cloud of resentment over my life. My husband blamed our unhappiness on our careers: I was a “journalist” and he was a video game designer. Both of us professed to be burnt out, but now I understand that I was fleeing a burning building whereas he was simply bored. Our solution, god help us, had been to open a food truck.
We started with noble intentions. We’d serve plant-based cuisine with quality ingredients while traveling around the city, promoting a healthy lifestyle we both aspired to but struggled to embrace. Our friends told us we were brave. No one called us fools, which I wouldn’t have appreciated at the time but would respect now. If anything, it would have provided an indication as to whom in our shared circle was trustworthy. It turns out the answer was nobody.
Running a food truck is very difficult, especially if you have no experience in the culinary arts. There was very little art involved in our business. To be honest, there wasn’t much business either. Just a lot of sweat and frantic flailing in our hot box of a kitchen.
Compromises were made. The healthy lifestyle was the first to go. We pandered to our customers by trimming our menu down to our most popular items, all of which were fried. Next, we ditched quality ingredients as we focused on making more fried root vegetables smothered in sauces that were dairy free but packed with calories. Finally, we stopped trying new locations and settled on the same dismal parking lots where the demand for our garbage food was highest.
We fought constantly. My husband blamed the grueling conditions and arduous hours. I wanted out, but didn’t know how to tell him. (I’ve always disliked quitters.) I found the words when I discovered he was fucking the twenty-three-year-old social media guru (his words) we’d hired to promote the business.
I was shocked, hurt, angry, and confused; but I wasn’t devastated. I thought about the 10,000 hours I spent plunging potato products into spattering vats of dirty oil and I couldn’t believe I put up with it for as long as I did. That, to me, was a devastated life. What I felt was relief. While I wouldn’t call myself happy, at least I was free. That’s what I told myself anyway. I wouldn’t make that mistake again...
We All Wear Masks Now
Speaking of zines, it dawned on me the other day that a few years ago I wrote a weird short story about a guy who goes to work at a construction site where people keep succumbing to a mysterious illness.
The story anticipates our current situation in that the work at the site goes on (because of course it does) and the workers are given paper masks that are in short supply. There’s also a subplot that involves a debate about the efficacy of the masks with deadly consequences. Weird, right?
It’s called PAPER MASKS. The story was published at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading in 2018 and you can read it online now.
I thought it might be interesting to explore the story’s influences and how certain aspects of the tale sync up with what’s happening now. I figure I could do it one of three ways:
Make it the subject of a future edition of Message from the Underworld
Read the story on Instagram live and then discuss its influences
Make a zine that includes the story and a short essay about it as well as some artwork inspired by the story
Would you be interested in something like that? If so, which format?
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls
On Friday the Los Angeles Times ran my review of Nina Renata Aron’s deliriously good memoir Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls.
It’s a recovery memoir and Aron’s disease is codependency. The book describes her decade-long relationship with a heroin addict, which is harrowing but oftentimes not, because that’s how addiction works. It lulls you into thinking you’ve got this under control, whatever “this” might be. (Spoiler alert: she doesn’t and neither do you.)
I tend to be fairly restrained in my book reviews. I don’t really gush, even on Goodreads, but I was floored by Aron’s book. It’s a high-wire act in the sense that she puts herself in a place of extreme vulnerability. She starts the book off with a scene where she gives her lover the money he needs to score. (You can read the first chapter here.) It’s not a moment of high drama. It’s rush hour. They’re at the train station. She has to go to work. So does he, though she’s pretty sure he doesn’t have a job anymore. The banality of it is gutting because it’s not at all exceptional. There have been many days like it and the will be many more. A day in the life of a junkie.
I can’t think of a less flattering position to put one’s self in at the beginning of a memoir. But Aron pulls it off. She’s a talented writer and her prose is interesting and engaging, but that opening scene shows tremendous courage. That’s her secret weapon. She goes for it. If you’ve ever had a daredevil friend or someone who is reckless with their heart, you know that audacity is 90% of it. Either you have it or you don’t and when you do it really doesn’t matter what the outcome is. But to pull it off? That’s what makes your jaw drop.
Aron’s memoir isn’t for everyone. Recovery radicalizes you in the sense that you becomes accustomed to tales of extreme behavior. (For instance, it’s the only place I know where someone can talk openly and honestly about suicide without freaking people out.) Aron’s story will take some readers too far out of their comfort zones, but others will find something enlightening, even inspiring, in her unique perspective.
1000 Memories with Clair McAllister
Last week I introduced a new feature to the newsletter: short interviews with fans about their favorite Bad Religion song and/or record. Many thanks to reader Ryan Doty for suggesting the name.
This week’s interview is with Clair McAllister, whom I met last summer in Belfast. She’s a photographer and a big Bad Religion fan. We met up in the city center for a shoot and I absolutely love her photos. The old Punk Van Gogh t-shirt has never looked so good!
You can check out more of Clair’s work on her Instagram page: Fuckin’ Clair Photos.
JIM RULAND: What’s your favorite Bad Religion song and/or record?
CLAIR MCALLISTER: When I was 13 years old, I bought The Process of Belief. Although I’d been introduced to Bad Religion by a friend about a year before through 80-85, Process was the first record I bought with my own money. I’m from a small town in Ireland, and surprisingly, the lone record shop had a more than adequate little punk section, which included quite a collection of Bad Religion albums. After purchasing The Process of Belief, I proceeded to clear them out of anything remotely Bad Religion related over the course of the next few months—an easily achieved feat since no-one within a 20-mile radius had even heard of them.
I remember incessantly listening to “Broken” (and incessantly playing it on guitar), and getting ridiculously excited every time that or “Sorrow” was played on Kerrang! I had no idea how important this record was for the band until a few years later. It was Brett’s big comeback, the band’s first release back on Epitaph, and Brooks’ first time in the recording studio with the guys, but all I knew was that through this CD I had bought with pocket money I’d saved, I had found my new favourite band.
At the time, all I could think about was how much I would love to see Bad Religion live, and how unlikely it was to ever happen (or so I thought). Fast forward eight years, and I finally got my chance on 24th August 2010 in Manchester (despite flight cancellations and absolutely none of my travel arrangements going to plan), with a last-minute photo pass, and a chance to tell my heroes how much their music means to me.
I love that album and I love that band.
Stay safe. Be well. Beat the drum.