Before it happened I was already being needled. “Go in earlier than planned. Pay attention.” & I did something that is actually highly out of character for me. I brushed it off.

I was ENJOYING myself out on the river after a month on the Heights. The temps dipped like High Desert in late September due to that delta breeze that birthed an unsung wine country that wrapped around the Capitol. The spread was obscene & divine at the same time. Addictive. A 99 degree day at 4pm that was easily 62 on its way to like 54 by 7pm? Adjacent to the seat of power, no less?

Fuck Yeah.

I low-key thrive in the heat, wet or dry, but even I’d forgotten how good that insane spread felt to my soul.

Even after the troops were announced as on the cusp of being mobilized, I still balked.

God had told me to go early three days before I acquiesced.

Part of it is… I come from a place full of real seasons. I sensorily let it all just work me over, research and delineation, dovetailing together with rowdily adorable dawgs, station to station, back to back, months on end.

& my midwestern palette gorged itself like I was moving through last processed vittles rites-like every cell in me knew it was saying goodbye to any and all flourishes akin to this. To say it was ritualistic is camp. But it was sacred. Because I knew what I was putting down. & I was doing it willingly…but I wanted to roll around innit a bit before I all the way said goodbye.

I think he knew the answer Was “okay.. yes,I’ll obey” …but I was like a fat kid with cake on the heels of having truly made the call to do “the overhaul.”

---

I’d spent a month keto-adjacent… and my body had been ready. Loved it.

But it was my mind, man.

And I saw it for what it was, too.

So I honored it, let it “have” it’s shielded last hurrah for this little bit longer….really relishing the Having of it.

I’ve given up all kinds of Keys to abundance according to the simulation I’d been moving through over this lifetime. Pretty much soon as they’d been dropped into my hand. From..access to things I was supposed to want that I’d learned early on were hollow, to acceptance by things later on that elicited the same psychological falling away when I woke to what was motivating where I’d been granted entry underneath it all.

I could be cast as the most self-indulgent stoic that has ever gone wandering zydduk across the realms. Know how I know the Devil was originally and still is technically an Angel? The book of Job…the wandering to and fro, taking it in. Random aside, but take from it what you will.

I made what seemed on paper to others as little more than fumes … into the most glorious marzipan and feasted, full-frontally. day after day. Gratuitously. So much so that it was occasionally[angrily] called pornographic by those who’d tuned in for belittlement only to be bewildered by how much misery my rondo joy left them face to face with in the chockfulla lives they looked -spied- angrily from into my blissed out, supposed-to-be empty life. There was always a moment witnessing those folks who didn’t know I’d highbeamed them from jump, a moment where they heard every snide remark ‘on the supposed antithesis of abundance they leaned in expecting to witness in these here territories of me’ reverberate in their own heads…and their own guides, Demonic & Angelic ministers alike whispered the truth to them.

“That’s not emptiness…that’s weightlessness~

She is the only happy person your ass has ever met, actually. & she doesn’t care about your hates because she understands what you’ve convinced yourselves you Love, even as you stand here, miserable in every quaking moment of the experience of it.”

Cosmic Guides, fed up with their dumb-assed charges talking shit.

But the one thing I never gave up on abundance-wise…was the sensory experience of food.

Those “food is just fuel people” disgusted me with their supremely arrogant, stupid blasphemy.

I’ve never even fucked a man who couldn’t cook. Something.

Even a wolf can hunt for its pups. You make something food and you bring it back for your fucking cubs. Gruffly. That’s fn manhood 101. Flames. Yaar! Feast! It’s an expression of Provision, no matter what the fuck is afoot in the world.

(Pausing to check the roster to confirm that is the 120% true it feels, but yeah.)

& history plays into this too. For the record, a lot of my father’s younger brothers found their routes to their own working and middle class variants of abundance via food. This country being what it is, allowed Black men to enter kitchens and make something of themselves long before boardrooms & the men I grew up seeing who did that Loved food primarily due to that road it opened. Lot of High-end chefs of all colors and creeds started out in those same trenches and hacked niches of sustenance for their own by elevating the experiential expression of sustenance for others. Salt of the Earth fellas can find their way around a kitchen too.

In fact, that’s the explanation for multinationals wooing me with fine dining experiences that, to this day have yet to be outdone by those trying to be ‘highhanded and highbrow’ towards me for fun. That’s the underbelly of supplementing my journey underground & off the designed grid by working for restaurants helmed by crazy chefs obsessed with the craftsmanship in whatever their artistic focus was.

Food has always been both Medium and Medicine to me. A Mediator, a Message, a Messenger… and oftentimes…even showed up as the Messiah himself.

To, for and through me. Before I had any idea who the fuck the Son of the Most High was, nor any idea of the feast even he offered himself as, brokering my happily lone wolfing ass onto the familial team for eternity.

---

This is not the first psy-op-level gear-up , roll-out, roll back or aftermath I’ve moved through. I have a long history of having an affinity with being a delivery system or feed for boots on the ground type shit. My first two travelogues are rooted in this type of “reportage”, anchored to collage work produced in the field, as it were. But he always brings me in on weird angles to make sense of shit that otherwise doesn’t, for y’all who are positively keyed to how he speaks through me in regards to the things we all find ourselves faced with having to see.

(In fact, that is why I was so spooked in regards to the LA fires that hit earlier this year. The God orchestrating as I have known him to move me had every opportunity to have me being evacuated boots on the ground from both the Palisades or Altadena, in full mode. And instead…he had me take a staycation in a favorite hotel in Venice in the downtime I had before a regular assignment up in the Palisades that I would’ve spent in decompression mode onsite or hanging out with folks I love the fuck out of in upper Pasadena.)

And as I watched the coverage online up around the Capitol, my hackles were up. Because what he was making sure I saw was the depth of the tonal dissonance being shouted out into the world regarding LA, watching the propaganda lies jump as the target market to consume the chaos kept getting smacked awake by business as usual being afoot and broadcast out as such. The dissonance was all the more extreme up north because it was ramming into something that most of the denizens of California have no real clue was going on.

Frankly stated… it was a pincer move.

The reason that it took a day or two before any news was broadcasting anything being said BY Newsom in regards to the beginnings of this ICE onslaught was because in the weeks leading up to it, a woman who’d been appointed to a position of importance revealed herself to be an operative of sorts for T-dawg’s regime. & this chick, moving on the assurance that if she did …the things she did…she’d be a shoe-in for California governor, post-newsom, with the Tdawg machine draining the state dry…had been busy. It’s some of the most Machiavellian shit I’ve seen pulled off by a bitch in a while.

The week leading up to this ICE explosion in LA was the climax of “talks” people who worked for the state were in to keep their positions as they were. They were trying to wipe out remote work in California at the state level, threatening layoffs for all those who didn’t comply, refusing to honor raises that had already been signed for etceteras, all orchestrated by the machinations of this Cali Oligarchy offspring chick whose family made big money in, you guessed it…Commercial real estate. So …no raises that people had contractually accepted jobs due to, eradication of remote work, no assistance when it came to the parking of approximately $30 a day, no child care assistance…all in the guise of saving commercial real estate. Propping up a corpse.

Even though the numbers, fiscally, psychologically, ecologically and pragmatically all showed the benefits of the current state of things at the state level in Both directions[ the workers and those who had to reach out to them]… a commercial real estate trustfundarian was doing her best to orchestrate the yoke back onto the necks of those enslaved to the system her parents and grandparents had gotten rich from milking.

The Battleship Los Angeles propaganda bruhaha was expertly designed to drown out exactly how they’re trying to Fuck the population of California out of the bit of quality of life improvements still resonant in a post-covid world.

I only know about this due to 95% of my clients in the Capitol being either retired yet still engaged former pension grabbing employees of the State, or current workers withstanding the current attacks that are coming not only for them in Sacramento, but also for State workers up and down the coast of California.

Because the news wasn’t covering any of it.

Everyone was being fed images of outright anarchy as though the city had been consumed by it. So that no one would reach for feeds that even tried to express what was afoot at the state level that will affect all.

Day before yesterday, it bleated out that they’d “averted layoffs~” in this ‘local fight.’ But the fight itself against the parameters they want to force onto everyone continues. & what was announced immediately after, news-wise up north? that Mayor Bass had slammed a curfew on all of LA.

I knew the propaganda Fox News and all the talking heads on either side of the line were blown out of proportion. That’s also why I balked about returning earlier than planned. I’d had a perfectly timed schedule, ARR-wise. Was going to hit the coast just before sunrise.

But God intimated I’d understand when I saw it , in motion. What was being asked.

So I coordinated with my client-who returns from Hawaii in about an hour[ & is one of the 95% fighting the state attack], woke up at 430am to make sure I was on the road by 530am, and groggily made my way down the corridor strung between Lodi and Bakersfield on the train. About ten minutes past Lodi I snapped awake, looking around, it hitting me in the face.

God wasn’t ‘activating me’ or my reportage whathaveyous due to the riots. It was about the food.

---

The road from Sacramento to Bakersfield is chock full of orchards and fields that are usually brimming with energy and industry. I tend to get a lot of work done on that trek because the energy itself has a cadence to it. It almost feels like it is bantering with you, writer head-wise…it low-key massages the imagery out of me so I love it. It hits as bucolic and prosaic and just…all the things that makes lovers of trains love them. & it hits everyone onboard. Those who have the time, take it because it demands you luxuriate in the simplicity of it as people work away on all the farms the tracks cut through.

One of the things I’d been led to in my uptake before getting on the road was a clip about Caesar Chavez, and what he’d really been up to in this exact area. It gets writ large across The Who shot the dog history of California that he was a fighter for the farmer.

What is not spoken about as loudly is that he was actually fighting for the dignity of the Black, Brown and poor white American farmhands…who’d been on strike against abusive conditions and slave-like wages being forced upon them as American citizens.

What is NOT spoken about is that the very farm families helming these farms today… brought the undocumented workers into the country as SCABS …because they , not knowing what the fight was truly for…saw the scraps as gold they could send back home, enslaving themselves to the system that those they’d replaced had fought to escape from.

They never stopped doing this.

The racist, white farmers.

Even as they bitched about the undocumented ones… they are who built the machines that lure migrant workers illegally into the country, pay them a pittance, treat them like shit to this day …and then voted for the guy who PROMISED TO KICK ALL OF THEM OUT. The very fuckers calling the migrant workers an infestation(basically) are the ones who set up the system to treat them like animals here out of not wanting to pay American farmhands sanely.

& there’s a well duh level to this. But it hits deeper…when you’re on a train…slicing through all this usually bustling farmland…today as it rings with…emptiness. because people are rightly terrified.

ICE is charging into cornfields chasing undocumented men and women…with National Guardsmen flanking them… while the Farmers who lured them here to work as a slave labor force they’d never have to do right by think they’re getting away scot-free.

But they’re ignoring the fact that the man they voted for already took away the brunt of the government subsidies that kept them afloat in their depravity in the first place. & that the class of men he is enamored with are the broligarchs who’ve spent the last 15 years trying to buy up all that farmland in the first place anyway. If he bankrupts them, his pirates can buy the land[ MUCH more of it stolen from fn Japanese American farmers when this government sent them to concentration camps after Pearl Harbor and let their White farmer neighbors abscond with the land] for dirt cheap.

And that was eerier than any driverless car burning on the street by the[ IMO} literally repurposed insurrectionists post pardon supplied by the- everyone conveniently forgets- Latino led Proud “Boys” to make it look like America is “under invasion” of that sort.

But in the strangest , simplest way… as a populace? It is deserved.

Why? Because this is a culture that raises its citizens to remain caught up in zombie-like gluttony so they will sleepwalk through life.

THIS is why they fuck with the food in the first place.

That is why we as a populace let them… in ways no other country on earth allows them to.

Because the feeding is eating away at us all, but as long as we keep throwing food at it, cravenly or elegantly, the inner gnawing to drop the entire enterprise for your own good is drowned out. & it …doesn’t matter if you are 500 lbs and addicted to Jack in the box or proudly hovering around 102 daintily mewing around food at a table outside of Erewhon, scarfing processed vegan & vegetarian for the sanctimonious sake of cows you relate to more than humans that don’t look or eat like you, or religious raw foodists seemingly doing it to stop time, remaining desirable from the outside, in for as long as possible.

It’s all diversion. It’s all the same trigger. It’s all the same AR-15 pointed at our pineal gland to knock us the fuck out so we don’t band together and burn this shit to the ground.

Food is a shield & a sheath in America.

& just like we know about the chemicals they load”food” with to trigger incessant eating , we also look the other way at how they have systematically eroded the definitions of Organic until the labels are meaningless, even as the price points stick.

The correlations between what we are fed for real in the United States( for better or for worse) and what they are breaking their necks trying to feed us in a propagandic sense is that it all has the same goal:

Control the feed.

But back to pregaming Riding in to Escape from LA…on fire… that everyone outside of LA country is getting lambasted with.

The more incendiary the coverage became up north in this past week, the more I watched myself reach for food to drown out the alarm bells, even as I made myself watch me do it. & in enjoying all the scallion pancakes and gyoza and fried fish and popcorn… so that I could take the uptake… I witnessed the nullification of the ringing bells as I went. & in letting it be that kind of food…where the healthily decadent 75/25 norm I tend to live by was flipped & steam-rolled by the preponderance of prepared airfry-able whathaveyous… I finally saw it was the same itch my nails were being eagerly dragged across.

Same trigger, same gun.

What I liken it to… is being underwater. all of this. Have you ever noticed… how much softer the world rings out when you’re under water?

Well… we’re 80% water internally. & when we eat capriciously or protectively…what often happens? We get bloated. Which, said another way could be that we… kinda float through our lives and bounce off of things on a day to day, collectively unscathed or unmoved by the incessant barrages of despair & insanity so many of us really have to work not to be exposed to. Maybe none of the news stories stick to the point of galvanizing us to change things because we’re doing all we can to create some semblance of buoyancy within us that can help us withstand the literal pressure of the world around us.

& those who have an opposing response to this, what do they do? They do everything in their power to deflate and/or desiccate themselves in order to even be able to breathe here. Either way, either extreme , the reality of the realm we all are living in doesn’t stick in ways that embolden us to change things.

What we eat or drink[from] is all but packaged by pride of life, shame or guilt… and all the chaos amplified by the packaging shields our eyes from the realities of what is afoot within the other primary components baselining our lives collectively lived. & that may be the explicit point.

Convince a man he is hungry and that you can solve that for him without him going inward, he will give you anything you want. & he will blame himself when he is never made full by what he has sold his soul to you for. He will just keep eating it, blindly, believing for something magnificent to manifest and be erected within him, or resurrected. That will drown out all the pains he is scared to face that he has suckered himself into believing he has to bear.

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We got to Glendale. Before the curfew, thirty minutes outside of Union Station. & I actually braced myself. Not sure what I was actually going to run into. Giving them the benefit of the doubt with a chip on my shoulder over the dank possibility that there Could be carnage our charter was going to have to roll through, that I was never going to be able to unsee. Holding space for the space that was going to take up, just in case.

All I wanted to to do was plow through to where I knew I needed to be, but I did get hit with a macabre desire to “see.” & for me, the reality of it all was going to be contingent on one zone only, a zone that was included in the much smaller blast zone of the protests boots on the ground than was ever alluded to up north. Bunker Hill-

(to be continued)