8.30.25 ALL HAIL VERMICELLI V2

August 30, 2025

KCMO

Dear gutter cleaners, power washers, and renters-for-life,

Saturday morning and I’m pretty awake.  I started Rollins Stay Fanatic!!! Volume 2.  Oh sh*t! Too many great music recommendations on the way.  Yesterday I listened to the first two sides of the New Christs comp, did not know what to expect, and I dig it. That was a rec from Jeffro Skull.

I had lunch with Squids drummer Boojie Schneider at a secret location.  No, it’s no secret, we met at Pho Nguyen.  I got my usual V2--vermicelli with grilled chicken, egg roll, and shrimp.  It is my favorite dish in all of Kansas City.  I have been doing ok with cutting out sugar.  I cruised past a box of donuts at work like they were last week’s liver and onions. Actually I said “oh f*ck!” and sped up a little bit.  Yes, I know there is sugar in the dressing that comes with V2.

I pre-ordered the Husker Du Miracle Year box set on Numero, on blue vinyl.  Can’t wait.

The school shootings in MPLS got to me. For a long time I have believed that inaction and obstruction around sensible gun control is a purposeful passivity.  The first purpose of obstruction is to engage a relatively small but crucial voting block that demands blood sacrifice.  Shootings are an affirmation and a systems check for a cohort that is waiting for a green light to do far worse. Carnage keeps them in pocket, and a little sexed up.  Distorting the second amendment is just more phony advertising.  Shootings, on the other hand, are a demonic spiritual event on a regular cadence that binds the pro-death cohort with the pro-life cohort and the ultra-corporate water-carriers. 

The secondary purpose of repressing reform is to train a society to suffer the worst, repeatedly, so that lesser evils are allowable.  A coup attempt on January 6; abductions in the street; single party anti-democracy white minority rule; bimbos nitwits, and know-nothings at every podium; accelerating climate disaster for short term profit; funneling more and more money to the ultra-rich; a rapist president; joining forces with the global axis of autocracy. 

None of these things compare to kids getting shot at church or at school. 

Everything else is easy pickings if you can numb out an entire society to kids getting shot.

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Mathew 18:6