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In early May, I was wandering around one of the lesser-used train stations in the valley, and I came across this sticker placed by a hate group. I’ve probably mentioned them before.

You don’t see this mentioned much, but a certain type of fascist has had a thing about health for a while. The Nazis wouldn’t even drink caffeinated coffee (meth, apparently, was not an issue), and the Muscular Christians of Victorian England were gym rats. Think of today’s fascists, though, and you’d probably imagine the guys haunting gun shows and rural bars: heavyset men with a certain affinity for alcohol, coffee, fast food, and cigarettes. The mighty have fallen, and in case one hadn’t noticed, they’re a little sensitive about that.

So I wasn’t entirely surprised to find this bombastic anti-drug message among the other bits and pieces these people have scattered around the Hudson Valley. This is not polite encouragement from Nancy Reagan; this is about staying in fighting form for when the culture war becomes actual war.

Speaking of which.

If you didn’t already vote, tomorrow is your last chance at rejecting another four years of the poison taking hold in this place. Hate is a drug like any other: it rides in on hopelessness and escapism, it’s capable of disfiguring people into versions of themselves you never imagined, and it’s deeply addictive. The country we call home is headed for an OD.

Show up. Stick it out. And get it done.

vote.org

I hear you.

Root eating a brick.

Good advice.

Takeoff.

I’m not a yuppie yet, am I?

…or maybe a better word is “anymore”?

Beautiful toxicity.

You have to watch yourself around town these nights—the spiders are getting ambitious, building larger and larger webs. I don’t think I’ve seen them this large. At first it was just on the street signs; now they’ve started extending them across the sidewalks. One of them managed to engineer a web stretching between a street sign and a building—I almost walked into it. The next evening, it was gone. The evening after that, it was back. Tonight, I passed one of these guys anchoring the beginnings of a web to someone’s car.

I can’t tell if this means anything. I don’t remember them doing this before—maybe they’ve gotten bold with fewer people around.