Weekly entries from the Bum Diary staff
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JANUARY 24TH
CHRISTOPHER BUCHANAN
It’s been a suspiciously bright and comfortable few days in Los Angeles after our temporary dark age. You could easily forget that it’s still Winter. The apocalyptic sunburnt clouds hardly stayed their welcome, and reserved themselves to novelty; a cruelly gorgeous, combusted phenomenon. Though the clouds have subsided, All has definitely not returned to normal, especially on the northern perimeter of the whole giant town — it’s still quite an unfortunate case up there — but All has become tame and tolerable enough that the world can avert its eyes and carry on as per usual. Ashes to ashes. There are more flamboyant trainwrecks to see every minute and all around.
I’m a shining example of one of these railroad track tragedies, so I can speak expertly to their current existence. I’ve been quite the irresponsible fool this week — a confused one, at that. This final ten-week stretch of academia has plagued me with mental absentia; an irredeemable, treacherous fog that lies low and lingers… I barely have the heart to contemplate another one hundred and fifty-word discussion post. I'll be one blessed soul if this math requirement — the final, meanest villain of my academic career — is fulfilled by the end of these grueling, grievous decade of weeks. Does a decade of weeks even make any sense? This damned fog! God save my mind.
Despite these troubles, I’ve been given the grace of a sound body; a blessing to cling onto and be thankful for. Everyone around me is a terminal patient: Most likely, the thousandth wave or variant of COVID-19 has attached itself to our kinfolk. I’ve heard murmurs of fear for the still quietly ongoing pandemic, but the whole health fiasco seems as distant as its early-twentieth-century Spanish compadre — it just sounds like a whisper now. As I said, there are better trainwrecks to see every minute.
45 turned 47 in the most official sense this past week, and on what day but Martin Luther King’s? Our future is sealed, signed and sent, however wild or tame it comes to be. Mediaheads predict that Trump will approach this term in a bolder, more organized manner, all the way to the retro-futuristic 1950s ends he speaks of in his vindictive speeches. The gears rapidly turned on the anti-immigration machine Trump plans on America to be, with several guerilla ICE operations, thousands of arrests in cities across the country and a turn of face from some of the most crucial world organizations and obligations with equivalent speed. He knows the seat well.
I think Elon did it. I don’t have to provide any more detail to be understood, and that in of itself is bleak. It was bold, brash and wholly void of sympathy for his fellow, suffering man. On Twitter/X the other day, I also saw a repost of his with a man from South Asia talking about the dangers of “race replacement” and “aggression against whites” in Europe. Put him on the team! American History X... I’m proud of that one. File for trademark.
I assume it boils down to a bet between him and some fellows from 4chan who are making cruel fun of the sad, old fool. I wonder what he won for his gung-ho, South African cowboy cruelties. Probably more than I can fathom and then some. He has pitched a wretched tent of fear and the once-again president has sworn to establish the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with him at the head. I laughed. Put me against the wall. The White House announcment made the “DOGE Agenda” sound more like a glorified maintenance company, a renaming of the Digital Service, but who knows what kind of access that will grant to Grimes’ biggest stalker... We’re treading dangerous, dangerous waters with this one.
It’s early Saturday morning, about 1 AM. This entry was supposed to publish yesterday, but who gives a damn… Most things have gone to hell and caring is next. It’ll probably even publish Sunday, but I needed a drink at a chichi bar to soothe the pains of a long, winding week that feels like it might repeat again. I spent most of the deadline night on Sunset Boulevard, in the back seat of a speeding, spangled electric vehicle that swerved around each and every curve so that it looked like the street scenes tipped to a steady forty-degree angle. Whenever I could pull myself up far enough to look out of the window at Sunset Boulevard, the low, flat stucco buildings glowed without light, creating an obscure beige streak above the deathly black road as the car raced to straights. The sharp turns threw my oversized army-green dress shirt and flooded khaki capris around like a hot cycle. My feet soared into view above my head in the small corner of the backseat and I laughed. I was full, and unconscious of this fact, for a good enough time to live another week.
Our late Friday night romp was a refreshing break from the hundred miles of rough road we are facing. More trainwrecks to see. In a lucky moment on the way home, I saw our man-made world and mother nature in their forced coalescence — Repeating stretches of raven black hills with houses that looked like insignficant controlled fires and palm trees standing opposite of electric towers in firing line formation, prideful of their demise... The fog is gone and I feel the wind and I can breathe.
I sat straight for the rest of the drive and peered just over the impossibly high skyscrapers with my hands as support, and sometimes wrenched my neck in the process. I had lingering, raw cramps that wouldn’t cease until I was numbed by new, refreshing sights.
To see the other side makes it worth the infinite strain.
Still straining,
Christopher Buchanan, Editor-in-Chief
Christopher Buchanan, Editor-in-Chief