8.29.2025 - Weekly Digest
Did you know you can read all the archives (over 150 posts) by just clicking on the 'Without a Gun' header at the top of this email? Well ya can. And I clearly need to update the design of this site to make things more clear and accessible.
Busy week out here in The West. But the weather's good and the company's even better. Thanks to all who've kept up with these over the last six months, and quadruple thanks to ye who've purchased a paid subscription. Means more than you know and is more helpful than I care to admit. May your weekends be labor free.
-JA
8.26.2025
Tour of neighborhoods. The one named for a park. The Laurel. Mills College. Oaktoberfest. First Fridays you can see tradesmen, brick makers and sword swallowers. Houses of yellow and blue and white and orange in all shapes like children's building blocks stuck to the sides of hills. All falling toward or away from something. This is what the West Coast looks like when I close my eyes. Color and topography. Cliffside villages first founded by dolphins. College kids are sleeping in their cars in Humboldt, they're saying. What kind of dystopian shittery is this. Over here there's poverty. He's a good boy but if you get in the way of him eating something on the street he'll bite your face off. Obsessed with picnic tables. Where they found him on the reservation they were sources for scraps and safety. I can relate to that. The pizza place, it's pronounced Rat-sos. Do they put cheddar cheese on Detroit style pizza? Not if they want to stay in business. Sounds like a Ratsos move. But I was uneasy and I looked it up later. Apparently it is a thing they do, these Detroit pizzarios, they put cheddar cheese in the mix with the mozzarella. I admit my ignorance before you all. One shouldn't have to go this far to learn these things.
8.27.2025
Counterclockwise around Lake Merritt. First wildlife refuge in the U.S. The information plaque glides over the whole transition from indigenous communities to Spanish Empire to American Empire thing so you have to fill in some gaps in the timeline. Anyway those funny lookin' birds out there are allegedly safe. What's crackin in Oakland? A text from Your Friend. Not the pavement, for which I'm grateful. I mean there are cracks in the asphalt but there's this looming vision I have where the ground shudders and buildings collapse into a jagged chasm that opens without warning and splits the ground. I know that rarely happens but doesn't mean it won't. These dreams are more frequent the more coffee I drink and the less I write. So the remedies are obvious enough. But then there's a sense of crisis over everything like a red shadow isn't there. The most peaceful folks I know talk about Should We Get a Gun? Only if you learn how to use it. Me, I want to train how to stop the bleeding. Gonna set up a tourniquet stall on Jack London Square. Save lives and profit, that's my motto. Not that I've done much of either. All the more reason, I say. Who am I talking to?
8.28.2025
The lawlessness of Castro Valley. No zoning, no enforcement. Amazing how they keep the peace. No law at all, they say, in Deadwood? That first scene with the horse thief in jail in Montana, trying to talk Bullock into letting him go so they can strike it rich together but you know the guy's a scumbag more like to murder than collude. Sets the tone. Not sure there are any other similarities between the fictional tv show I watch all the time and this unincorporated township or whatever it is. There oughta be a saloon, a base of operations. There oughta be a whorehouse for that matter and to be fair I haven't Googled whether there isn't or is. For all I know they're running one out back of the library. Except if you don't have a town you can't have a library either. Excuse me? I'm told there is in fact a library. Back to the theme I've been on all year: What Makes a Community a Place. Maybe not as interesting as I thought it was, but when I was on an island with clear boundaries where everyone shares at least one tongue it seemed a reasonable topic for consideration. Here what we have in common is the sun shines hard on all of us the same during the day and at night it's windy and cool and the dogs sleep through most of it until a delivery truck shows up to ask if this is the right address, it's just a blur on the GPS, and all hell breaks loose all of a sudden.
8.29.2025
The rabbit's name is Dennis Hopper. I approach the cage with an offering of leafy greens. The rabbit grips the bars of the cage. I'm a small man, it says, he's a great man. That's from Apocalypse Now. He follows it up with some shtick from Easy Rider, then Speed. Y'know the only evolutionary advantage you all have, I tell him, is how fast you reproduce. You sonsabitches multiply faster than Gremlins. I'm not even sure I should put water in this dispenser. I'd say he looks crestfallen but that's an archaic word. He doesn't look anything. Not a care in the world but if I let him out he'll zigzag limp over to the shed and disappear into the space underneath. I had rabbit meatballs the other day, I tell him. This has the virtue of not bothering him one bit. I remember when this place had chickens, I tell him. The chickens, well one of them at least, the one I called Tuco, was clever enough to bust out of the coop. Then it would sprint chickenlike toward the Bay. It had ambitions. It wanted to be somebody. It was inspired by Jack London or whoever else you associate with Oakland. The rabbit Dennis Hopper doesn't care.