The following are excerpts from Kentucky Meat Shower #9 “This is Not My Mother’s Room, This is Not My Mother’s Lap”. The first section is an essay juxtaposing Belle Delphine and Shoko Asahara’s selling of their bathwater. This segues (segways?) into an essay on the rash of Bolt scooters that popped up in my neighborhood being an impediment to enjoying walking around in a city as well as some words on Armand Hammer’s “Soft Places”. 

A hoax that seems realer than reality. Belle Delphine, a cosplay model who I’m guessing has some sort of following, starts to sell her bathwater to her followers. The bathwater sells out. Somebody winds up in the hospital.

I saw the hoax on Facebook and laughed pretty hard. I would think about it in random moments and then I realized I could name two people who sold their bathwater: Delphine (leader of Thirsty Gamer Bois) and the founder of Aum Shinrikyo, Shoko Asahara. I couldn’t think of two better book-ends for an age. I’ve held this opinion for awhile that Trump-era America can only be understood as death cults all the way down. This just seemed tailor made for my case.

Of course: the bathwater didn’t actually hurt anyone. And Belle Delphine is not a one to one to Shoko Asahara. Shoko Asahara ultimately planned the murder of Tsutsumi Sakamoto and his family, and that’s before the infamous sarin gas attacks that injured thousands. Selling bathwater to gamer bois isn’t really on the same moral continuum at all, and Belle Delphine is welcome to sell whatever she wants to whoever she wants. So the question goes more to the desire for that exact form of sublimation: what drives a person to be the kind of person who buys another person’s bathwater? What can you get from it? Belle Delphine’s Thirsty Boys and the wandering and disaffected elites who walked into the Oumu Shinsen no Kai club seem cousins to me.

First, the bathwater. Drinking bathwater is almost more intimate than any form of sex because it makes no illusions that it wants the dirt, scum, dead toenails et al, which is why it’s been a staple for the titch too horny. You can airbrush everything but bathwater. Drinking it desires an intimacy beyond intimacy. It makes no illusion how gross it is. There is no value to bathwater. It just goes down a drain and without the addition of holy properties due to the flavor addition of a Japanese holy man or cosplayer it is possibly the most least valuable product on the planet. What you’re really buying access to, in any iteration, is the intimacy of a notable person. And, unlike the French monarchists who ran forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of Louis XVI, you don’t have to witness anything bloody or unpleasant. You just have to buy it. What you gain is an access few can claim to have.

If we take both the idea of Eternal Recurrence and Marx’s aphorism that first we see history as a tragedy and then as a farce, all of a sudden we see see the desire that Aum Shinrikiyo sold was to be the winner of the grand Nuclear Armageddon sweepstakes (which is why Aum tried to buy a nuclear bomb—though if they’d have posed as Pepsi Corporation executives they could have maybe talked the Soviets into selling one off), to be healthy, to be something better, return in the form of a mere product. Aum Shinrikyo was sold as a religion for the elites, and being elite was what it promised, all the way to the fantasia of its bloody end. That in this turn of the gyre we see that desire return in the form of anime avatared neckbeards in thrall to a catgirl dressing cosplayer should at least be a sign of how weird the ride has gotten for all of us.

It doesn’t end at the fringe, though. While I think there was a neglible amount of Russian interference in the election, do I believe that Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham are somehow doing Russia’s bidding? I don’t believe they can see anything beyond themselves and their wealthy patrons. Is Trump a Russian asset and has he been since the late 80s? I dunno, if he is, then we can only imagine Putin saying, “With friends like these, who needs enemies,” as he gets hit with sanctions for using novichok on double-agents and is being pressured to destroy “missiles with a range of 500km-5500km”. Do I believe there’s probably a highly organized ring of pedophiles that includes plenty of the elite? Of course I do, but the idea that Donald Trump, who is an accused pedophile and buddy of Jeffery Epstein, has been playing some sort of long game to bring them all down would require me to think the thoughtless can think of anything but themselves. Yet you know somebody who sees a Ruskie in every genuflect towards cruelty and capital and someone who is looking for patterns in their HAM radio static of the moment the curtain will fall and Donald Trump will show himself to be uninvited guest ending Prince Prospero’s masquerade ball.  The butter is off the collective pancake and the plane crashed into the mountain. The paranoid style in politics is back in a big way and sooner or later we’ll have to find some way to jam the syringe full of adrenaline into the chest of Mia Wallace.

Some rough beast is headed towards Bethlehem, no longer slouching. Instead he travels like the “someone” in John Ashbery’s “At North Farm”:

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,

At incredible speed, traveling day and night,

Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.

But will he know where to find you,

Recognize you when he sees you,

Give you the thing he has for you?

I imagine all this time he’s been hinting what he has: in Greenland’s melting ice caps, in the concentration camps at the border, but only a few have developed any sort of heuristic to analyze his movements, and it’s up to us to recognize it. God knows if there’s enough bathwater to save us when the real final revelation comes and when the someone traveling furiously towards us hands us his gift and asks: do you recognize this or not?

In the meantime, I recommend he use a dockless scooter.

THIS IS NOT MY ROOM–THIS IS NOT MY MOTHER’S LAUGH

You just have to look and you see them. Yellow and black scooters, card operated, that call the police if you try to ride them without paying. From the scooter barks a voice that says, “WARNING: IF YOU CONTINUE TO DRIVE THIS SCOOTER WE WILL CALL THE AUTHORITIES”. It’s Robocop the long way around; it’s Chopping Mall with a better budget. We can only understand this moment through 80s science fiction.

When Bird scooters were a going concern, I rarely saw them in my neighborhood, a pretty nice one I’m at because it was the cheapest rent I could find (in fact, it was equivalent to the rent I paid in a less bougie one). And I fell in love with it here, a neighborhood where I’m close to the VMFA, to my favorite coffee shop, to everything I’ve ever wanted.

It took me a year before I realized how nice this neighborhood is to walk, all its Victorian houses painted in pastels, the porches covered in plants. I still have legs, so there’s nothing stopping me from walking, but I do see a disruption now: in the dockless yellow and black scooters that only serve as a reminder of which bar you should avoid that night.

Disruption was always probably the aim. It’s become a bit of a cliche, that silicon valley efforts by yakked out venture capitalists look to disrupt an industry that exists, to cast evolution as something revolutionary.When I realized this was going on, I went back to a piece of writing I read in college and hadn’t revisited: Michel De Certeau’s “Walking In the City”. I didn’t understand it in full when I was younger and still don’t fully but the gist of it is this: a city can be read much like a book. The act of walking is an interpretative act. Just as when you’re reading a book, there’s two actions going simultaneously. You take in the text, then reflect and contextualize it as you read, in the matter of your own experiences, no matter how foreign it may be to your current experience, all in an attempt to bring yourself in harmony with the text. A similar thing happens when we walk: you may be physically putting one foot in front of another, but you’re also reflecting on the walk, thinking about one thing or another, taking in what you see. Both the city and the text exist to bring you into an experience, beyond their immediate purposes. The practical becomes something personal.

When I realized this was going on, I went back to a piece of writing I read in college and hadn’t revisited: Michel De Certeau’s “Walking In the City”. I didn’t understand it in full when I was younger and I”m getting better, but the gist of it is this: a city can be read much like a book. The act of walking is an interpretative act. Just as when you’re reading a book, there’s two actions going simultaneously. You take in the text, then reflect and contextualize it as you read, in the matter of your own experiences, no matter how foreign it may be to your current experience, all in an attempt to bring yourself in harmony with the text. A similar thing happens when we walk: you may be physically putting one foot in front of another, but you’re also reflecting on the walk, thinking about one thing or another, taking in what you see. Both the city and the text exist to bring you into an experience, beyond their immediate purposes. The practical becomes something personal.

So what of disruption, then? When a city looks like a mistranslated book with a billion types and wingdings, when the city is drunk with yellow and black steel that screams when you try to ride it, what are we witnessing?

All I can give is my interpretation. I don’t think the disrupting of walking, of interpretation is an accident. It is merely another skirmish in the war of who owns and who doesn’t. The sidewalk is the most public place there is. If you walk, you walk the same path, rich or poor, monied or unmonied. If you can square the circle of how to privatize that even a bit, you’re doing better than most.

The song “Soft Places” by Armand Hammer is instructive in this context. Both the rappers in Armand Hammer, billy woods and Elucid, are black New Yorkers. Obviously, I am neither, but what we do have in common is we sell our time and labor. The song “Soft Places” is about gentrification. In Elucid’s final verse, he raps:

Neighborhood borders keep shifting
These names keep switching
When the bodega starts to stock the better beer, papi
Wet the fear

I moved in after the good beer moved in, so all I have are the scooters, but me and the song has to take in this piece of information and realize that in order for capital to sustain itself, it has to continue expansion. Not only do the brands of beer have to change, so does walking. While it wouldn’t be in their interest to clog the walkways totally, they would settle for a hard split where walking becomes an annoyance, a psychic tax. With that would go interpretation of the flora, fauna and life of the neighborhood.

In the same way a text becomes the reader’s, the neighborhood becomes its denizens. Beyond the typo metaphor, we may be moving closer to the experience of being riddled with pop-up ads after reading five pages in a book.

The Armand Hammer song calls these places “Soft Places”. That’s what gets seen by anyone looking to invest: somewhere that won’t be too much trouble, somewhere they can strike ground and be rewarded with a bubbling brook, like a spoon striking a soft boiled egg and getting yolk. Where a need can be met, a need shall be considered, all for a right price.

But I don’t believe this is the end, just a new wrinkle. As long as citizens have the power of interpretation, they have a creative capacity to work around whatever hare-brained scheme a VC foists on a neighborhood. That’s why I’m proud to report Richmond, Virginia is currently the scooter destruction capital of the world. Sometimes you fall in love with a city all over again.