15.10.2026
Hey kid! Belated congratulations on making it a month (almost two!). You are doing great. The country, on the other hand, has seen better days. I don’t know if you’ll study this era in school, or if there will be schools, or maybe this will all turn out fine and goodness and common sense will prevail. I certainly hope so, not just for your sake, but yea… mostly for your sake.
To quote George Clooney’s character in O Brother Where Art Thou?*, we’re in a tight spot. The 2026 midterm elections are fewer than three weeks away and we may actually have a chance to turn things around here in the good ol’ US of A, and yet… and yet. There is a pervading feeling that less than great things are primed to happen. Everybody feels it.
The ruling party continues to support grabbing people off the street and disappearing them to South American gulags. Voter roles are being purged as we speak, and our demented leader has declared everyone not on board with his agenda as, “The Enemy™.” So be it.
As a writer of sometimes dystopian fiction, these clowns are really pissing me off with their obvious evil. It’s not just the actual acts of brazen grift and malfeasance, it’s the fact that they aren’t even being clever or stylish about it. Maybe the Hugo Boss people have finally learned their lesson about damaging the brand by outfitting fascism.
Even though I am firmly on the other side, it is a shame from an aesthetic standpoint. There was a faint glimmer of dark glamour when the president posted his planned new outfits for the nascent Space Force and they were a direct ripoff of the Galactic Empire uniforms from Star Wars. I love that no one had the stones to tell him that the Empire was the bad guy. Or maybe they did, at this point, what’s the difference?
Winter is on the way and the price of gasoline, heating oil, and the all-important diesel fuel has all gone through the roof. It probably sounds like a bargain from your perspective, but a gallon of gas is running $6.49** at the station down the street, and that’s not the worst price around. We are lucky enough to be in California where at least we won’t freeze, but I worry about our countrypersons in the east.
The COVID pandemic, now three years in the rearview since it officially ended as an ongoing endemic problem, at least gave a lot of people practice in packing away some food and supplies. Here in the Bay Area, Pacific Gas & Electric has already started turning off the power to several neighborhoods in the hills in hopes of avoiding more disastrous fires if the wind kicks up.
It has become popular to point out that none of this is normal, but people have short memories and do tend to settle into complacency when the pressure is off. I am old enough to remember the 1973 OAPEC gas crisis in which you could only buy fuel on either odd or even days according to the last digit of your vehicle’s license plate. I remember waiting with your grandmother and great-grandmother as the lines snaked out of the stations and down the street while Jim Croce sang about Bad, Bad Leroy Brown*** on the AM car radio.
Which brings me to music. You probably already know this, given your parents’s appreciation for it, but the one thing that has carried me through whatever trials, travels, and travails that have come along has always been music, and more directly, being able to play an instrument. I don’t want to overtly influence your decision, but both your grandfather and I have more guitars than we possibly need. Just sayin’. If I have ended up in El Salvador for some reason, you can have all of mine. Use them well. Make me proud and yell about the government and the patriarchy—if either of those are still a thing.
Sleep tight, little angel,
Tio-avô Ray
*I am rarely going to give you better advice than to suggest a deep dive into the movies of the Coen Brothers if you can. O Brother, The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona, even the darker stuff like Fargo, Barton Fink, and No Country for Old Men, all portray—in the words of Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs—the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork. It is good to remember that this existence is often absurd and to expect anything different is hubris. I am banking on that realization to carry us through whatever is coming down the pike.
**When I started driving in 1984, a gallon of regular gasoline was $1.20, if you can imagine that. You can check my math, but I think that’s a 440.83% increase. Ugh, math.
***He was the baddest man in the while damned town.
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