Taylor was walked down the aisle by her lawyer, her accountant, and her business manager for the ceremonial signing of the pre-nup. (We all got copies—Travis gets nothing.) Then a disembodied voice came over the PA and told us to proceed to the rear of the chapel.

We did, and young acolytes handed us red-trimmed black, hooded robes. And none of this costume store satin shit, either: pure imported silk, baby! Mine had an Apple Watch in one pocket and an entire Biologique Recherche skin care kit in the other. “It’s dry-clean only,” the acolyte whispered as I took and then donned the robe.

We were led into a dark chamber bedecked with graven images so horrifying to the mind—yea, to the soul!—that I refuse to burden my readers with a description of them. Adam Sandler sang the ceremony in an alien and disturbing tongue, though this was not helped by him doing it as Operaman.

Selena Gomez pricked her finger with a ceremonial dagger and drew sigils on the altar with her blood. Taylor and Travis then mounted the altar for their ceremonial first coupling, with Boomer Esiason doing play by play and Terry Bradshaw doing color commentary. (I wasn’t sure all the stats were necessary, but to each their own, I suppose.)

Then Noah Kahan came out and sang a melancholy song about the difficulty of being a white man in Vermont. “Let us remember, friends, that marriage, like life, is not only sweet…but also bitter.” Catering staff appeared with shot glasses for all, and we all downed a glass of an unbearably bitter, unholy beverage whose very existence shattered my illusion of living in a world presided over by a loving God. I believe it was called Malört.

The rest of the evening was a blur. At one point a man whose very countenance seemed to bespeak aquatic ancestry—was he a man turning into a fish, or a fish turning into a man? And which possibility is more horrifying?—approached me and whispered in my ear, “Cthulhu F’tagn! Iä! Iä!”

I looked at him, trying to refocus my eyes that had glazed over due to the horrors I had already witnessed. “Don Knotts?” I said. “They brought you back from the dead for this?”

He got right up in my face and whispered, “Anything you desire can be had…FOR A PRICE!” My last memory was of his maniacal laughter.

I awakened this morning in a dumpster in Ho-Ho-Kus New Jersey with no memory of how I’d gotten there.

Overall, I give it two thumbs up!

The city of Boston has 18 cooling centers open. Good for them. The city also has a partnership with five museums, so the Museum of Science, the ICA, the JFK Library and the Edward Kennedy Museum of Sexual Harassment—sorry, Edward Kennedy Institute for the US Senate (tomato tomahto) are all open for free so people can get cool.

All of this is good. But today is a holiday, so public libraries are closed. Which means vital, possibly lifesaving cooling is unavailable to a lot of people. Check out the City’s own map and look at the huge chunk of densely-populated Dorchester that doesn’t have an indoor cooling center open (City cooling centers are represented by snowflakes):

Also note that there are five libraries in the map area (they’re represented by the little “book with a roof over it” icon) with no other free indoor cooling facilities. The spray icons are for spray decks and splash pools, which are good, but maybe not great for an 80 year old or someone in an electric wheelchair.

The city could have opened libraries today. This would have involved paying overtime to a lot of library employees. So the city chose not to do it. Presumably there’s no room in the budget for it.

But remember, budgets don’t just grow organically—they are the result of choices made by the people who make the budgets.

I live near the construction of the new White Stadium, which desperately needed renovation, but make no mistake: the City of Boston is building a stadium instead of helping residents stay cool today.

At this construction site, there are usually two or three Boston Police officers making at least 75 dollars an hour to do nothing. They literally stand there for eight hours doing nothing. Actually sometimes they sit in their cars doing nothing. This is the Boston Police overtime budget at “work.” You’ll see similar scenes all over the city wherever construction or utility work is going on. The police overtime budget was level funded even as the school budget was cut this year because the people who make decisions in our city think that it’s more important to have cops standing idle outside of construction sites than teachers in classrooms. And that it’s more important to have cops standing idle than to open libraries during a heat wave.

But maybe churches are open today. Certainly the mayor could be calling on the city’s faith community to help serve the community at large. After all, they leech off city services without contributing anything to the city’s tax base. The least they could do is throw open their doors to help their neighbors stay cool. Maybe some are doing that—I checked the websites of some prominent churches and found nothing.

This isn’t our first potentially deadly heat wave and it won’t be our last. Hell, it probably won’t be the last one this summer. Our local and state governments have a responsibility to their citizens, and they are failing to meet it. They’re failing to recognize the seriousness of the climate emergency (Yes, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts still operates Hanscom Field, an airport for private jets, lest John Fish have to fly commercial) and they’re failing to prioritize the needs of broke, hot citizens over the needs of Weymouth-dwelling cops with boat payments.

Boston and Massachusetts are villainized nationally by fascists, who talk about our extreme left-wing government. I wish it were true, but I’d settle for even slightly left-wing at this point.

So I’ve seen Ayo Edebiri perform live on stage many times, though, before Sunday, it was only in high school improv shows. I joked before we went to see Proof that the fact that we’d seen her in so many high school improv shows surely meant that Ayo should comp us some tickets to her broadway debut.

(I should point out that she and my daughter were friendly but not close, and I think Ms. Edebiri could probably pick my daughter out in a crowd but certainly not me or my wife.)

Anyway, so we were excited to see Proof, and I knew very little about it except that Ayo (because we’re all on a parasocial first name basis with her in our house) and Don Cheadle were in it.

There are summaries in other places, but this is a play about family and mental illness and what we owe each other. It’s got a lot of funny moments but is ultimately serious, and folks, Ayo Edibiri’s performance is absolutely stunning.

Because there are a few flashback scenes, we see what the character of Catherine was like before spending four years tending to a father with serious mental illness. And so the actor playing Catherine has to whip back and forth between hopeful and enthusiastic and beaten down and nearly broken, and Ayo pulled this off brilliantly. It really was a breathtaking performance. Awards of course don’t mean anything, and the only other show I’ve seen in New York in the last year was Bigfoot the Musical (which was utterly delightful but of course very different) but I am incredulous that she hasn’t been recognized for this performance.

Except of course by the audience, which absolutely roared at her curtain call. All the actors (Cheadle, Jin Ha, and Kara Young) gave good performances, but the play asks much more of the actor playing Catherine, and Ayo absolutely killed it.

(I’m trying to work on not being mean, but I did go to YouTube to look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance in the movie. And it’s…a lot of yelling. Without being too mean to Her Goopness, let me just say it’s a performance that’s not even in the same league as the one I saw on Sunday. And she presumably had multiple takes!)

The only quibble I had was with the play itself because “character seeing and talking to a dead loved one” was a hoary cliché when the play premiered in 2000, and it’s fundamentally a lie about grief because the hard thing about grief is the dead person’s sudden and complete absence from your life.

But that’s not the fault of this production, which is fantastic.

The family at the center of the story is played by Black actors, and this didn’t really have an impact on my interpretation of the story, but you know what it did affect? The composition of the audience. I don’t go to a ton of Broadway shows, but I know that the conventional “wisdom” is that people of color don’t really go to high-profile Broadway plays like this. Well, they certainly do if you cast fantastic actors of color in lead roles! I’m just sayin’!

Which got me on a panel on a local TV show with a former secretary of transportation and a guy from The Pioneer Institute, a pernicious bunch of losers who don’t believe in the public good. They were the pro- and anti- public transportation guys, and I was the regular Joe T rider. Before the show, these two guys talked cordially about things happening in their social circle. I could not be civil to the Pioneer Institute guy because he had the ear of our then-governor and his influence was making my already stressful work life even worse. But the former secretary of transportation had no such difficulty.

I wrote something snarky about this at the time that conveyed my anger but also made me look like an asshole. (Sadly, I have a real talent for this kind of writing.) But what I was trying to say was that the whole debate was a game to these guys. It didn’t affect them like it affected me. And if it did, they’d probably have a harder time making banal small talk with each other.

Which brings me to Peter Thiel. You know, the Bond villain who runs the surveillance company and owns J.D. Vance? The guy who’s obsessed with the apocalypse and the antichrist? Who moved his family to Argentina because he’s afraid of the plebes rising up in the US? Well, turns out Mr. Tech genius was holding some kind of conference for powerful people, and the agenda and attendees were visible in plain text by looking at the code for the website. Oops!. As The Nation puts it: Session titles include “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and, somewhat randomly, “How’s Your Sex Life?” “Other talks include ‘Build-a-Cult,’ moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com,” write Wired correspondents Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova, “and ‘Build-a-Party,’ run by a former White House national security official.”

Yikes. So there are a lot of unsurprising names going to this thing: Ted Cruz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, and Grover Norquist.

But also? Democrats Preet Bahara, Cory Booker, Robert Rubin, Jim O’Neill, Lisa Monaco, Margaret Hamburg, Atul Gawande, Wes Moore, and centrist podcaster and self-styled expert on what Democrats need to do to win Ezra Klein. (Also, weirdly: Joseph Gordon Leavitt?)

And a bunch of other corporate shitbirds as well as Epstein pal Steven Pinker.

About a year ago I wrote a thing about the ignorant, classist take that was going around that pro wrestling somehow explained the Trump presidency. It’s a good piece—you should read it.

Reading about Thiel’s little party, I started thinking about kayfabe again (for the uninitiated, that’s the wrestling-specific term for the show of wrestling—the characters, the feuds, the stories that make the matches more exciting. Actually it covers the matches too. It’s basically everything about wrestling that’s a performance. So, like, the whole thing.). And I realized that though I’d framed my snarky piece about the MBTA TV panel as being about civility, it was really about kayfabe—putting on a show for the marks.

Looking at Thiel’s list of attendees, I think I can be forgiven for concluding that much of American politics is kayfabe. Corey Booker is great at thundering on the mic in committee meetings for YouTube clips that the perpetually unkempt Meidas Touch guy will report breathlessly. But apparently Booker is just cutting promos like Macho Man Randy Savage. (Actually, he just wishes his mic game was as strong as Macho Man’s. But I digress.)

Ezra Klein will probably come out with some think piece about how Democrats need to embrace bigotry and Peter Thiel’s crazy eschatology in order to win in November, which is horrible, but even his assertion that he cares about Democrats winning is kayfabe. He’s fine either way!

With this many establishment Democrats going to bend the knee to an unhinged, power-mad personification of evil, I don’t see how the Democratic establishment can be mad at voters for thinking the game is rigged. To put it another way: if ostensible opponents Cruz and Booker are both working for Thiel (and, more broadly, the Epstein class), who’s working for us?

The thrust of those pieces about how wrestling explains Trump was “ha ha, the rubes love a good show, that’s why they fell for Trump.”

Except here’s an important thing to understand about wrestling: everyone is in on the joke. Wrestlers, broadcasters, refs, fans—we all understand perfectly well what’s going on. So perhaps people are more sophisticated at spotting bullshit when they see it than folks inside the beltway think, which could explain why even voters who hate the Republican party are not excited about the Democratic party.

We know what it’s like when people who are genial co-workers pretend to have vicious feuds and insult each other ruthlessly. We understand that Peter Thiel and his ilk are setting the agenda no matter which party controls government. Yes, there will be some non-trivial differences in how the parties govern. But the bottom line is that the interests of the Thiel/Epstein class are always going to take precedence over ours.

When all these people are hanging out together, when all our politicians are bending the knee to the same big money people, American politics is strictly kayfabe. And the sad thing is, it’s not even a good show.

“You just don’t understand. It’s complicated,” say people, like, for example, Massachusetts legislators, who know damn well it’s not complicated—they just don’t actually want to do anything.

Let’s take Boston traffic, for example. Right now Boston simply doesn’t work for cars. I’ve recently spent time in Cincinnati and Philadelphia—in both cities you can get around in a car relatively easily. As everyone knows, that’s simply not the case in Boston.

There is only one solution to Boston’s traffic problem: we have to have fewer cars on the road. Duh. Fucking duh.

But because a lot of people inexplicably love to drive, they freak out every time anyone proposes anything to try to get fewer cars on the road.

Sorry if you don’t like it, but there is literally only one solution. You can’t cure traffic congestion by widening roads or building new ones. The only solution is to have fewer cars on the road.

Okay, so how do we get there?

1. Let people know about the T’s improvements. I get it—when Orange Line trains are catching on fire, it’s newsworthy. When they zip downtown with no slow zones and come at regular intervals, as they’re now doing for the first time in 10+ years, it’s not headline news. But (and credit to the otherwise lackluster Healey administration for getting this done) the T works really well now, and we have an entire generation of Bostonians who have never known fully functional MBTA service. Let ‘em know that we have it! I don’t know how much of Boston traffic is people taking Ubers and Lyfts because they don’t think the T is a reliable way to get anywhere. Even getting those cars off the road will help.

2. Free public transportation. Free, I say! Just like driving on the roads! Yes, even the commuter rail! Seriously, this is such a freaking no-brainer. All you have to do is look at the evaluations the city has done on the free 23, 28, and 29 buses. Eliminating fares increases ridership. Increased ridership means fewer cars on the road. For buses, it also means faster transit times because they can open all doors and people can board without the slowdown of paying. And faster transit times make buses more efficient. Which helps not only with traffic, but also with the fact that we’re in a freaking climate emergency.

3. Bus rapid transit wherever possible. For a couple of years I took the 22 bus down Columbus ave from Walnut Street to Prentiss street. The center lane busway from Walnut to Centre made this a viable alternative to taking the train. Even though MBTA train service has improved a lot, there are still large swaths of Boston that are pretty underserved by rail. People who live there deserve decent public transportation too, and center-lane busways are a way to achieve this, especially on big, wide roads like Blue Hill Ave, Columbia Road, Washington Street, and Centre Street. It’s maddening to me that Miniard Culpepper and other Boston City Councilors are advocating against this, like their own constituents don’t deserve decent public transportation.

4. Separate bike infrastructure. Everybody hates bike lanes. Drivers hate them, and bikers aren’t too crazy about them either, unless they’re significantly separated from traffic. Painting a bike lane on the pavement is a nice reminder to drivers that bikes exist, but these bike lanes still make people feel vulnerable as bigger, heavier cars go past them with no physical barrier, and they’re frequently blocked by delivery vehicles, cop cars, rideshare vehicles, and people double parking “just for a minute.” But let me tell you as someone who bikes on the Southwest Corridor (a paved path completely separated from traffic), it gets used year round. People (not everyone, but a lot of people) like to bike. If you build the infrastructure, they’ll use it.

Now let’s address some common objections:

1. But what about people with disabilities and mobility challenges! Not everyone can bike or even walk to the bus stop! True! And such people deserve to be able to get around the city in a car. See above—everybody knows Boston currently doesn’t work for cars, and the only solution is fewer cars. But that doesn’t have to mean no cars. The idea is to get people who can bike and use public transportation to favor those options over driving, not to get every single human out of a car.

2. Think of the emergency vehicles! I am! They currently have a hard time getting through traffic because Boston doesn’t work for car traffic. And the only way to improve this situation is to have fewer cars on the road. Road diets, center lane busways, bike paths and free transit will only help emergency vehicles because they’ll have fewer cars to get around.

3. Great pie in the sky utopian vision, but how are you gonna pay for it? Just imagine it’s a war, or paying GE to not move their headquarters to Boston. We can find the money. We can always find the money if the will is there. But more specifically, I have two common-sense, transportation-related proposals.

The first is congestion pricing, which has done wonders in New York City. There’s no reason to believe it couldn’t do the same here. Or, failing that, tolls on 93. People who drive into the city on the Pike or Route 1 have long complained that it’s not fair that they have to pay tolls and nobody else does. I completely agree! Tolls for all!

Also, it’s time to close Hanscom field. It’s actually embarrassing that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts operates a whole-ass facility at taxpayer expense so John Fish doesn’t have to fly commercial. We are, as I noted above, in a climate emergency, and it’s nothing short of ridiculous to be subsidizing private aviation at the expense of transportation that 99.99% of people can actually use. Shut this facility down immediately.

These are bold proposals, but they’re not radical. They’re things that have been done elsewhere and proven successful. Here in Boston, we’re in a traffic crisis and a climate crisis, and we desperately need leadership willing to take bold action to actually address these problems. Where is it?

Most of you will probably not know what a ghost bike is, so here goes: when someone is killed on their bike, bike advocates will often paint a bike white and lock it to something at the scene of the crash to memorialize the dead and to draw attention to the shortage of good bike infrastructure.

Most people, as I said, have no idea what ghost bikes are about, so if the intent is to make a statement to the wider community, I don’t think it’s succeeding. But also—I don’t think the presence of a ghost bike helps change the behavior of car drivers. In the unlikely event that they know what it means, they’ll doubtless think the bike had it coming because that’s how it’s always reported when people in cars kill people on bikes.

But of course we don’t have ghost people at the site of pedestrian fatalities (at least not ones we can see) nor ghost cars where fatal car crashes have happened. So the presence of ghost bikes gives the impression that biking is a uniquely dangerous mode of transportation. This, of course, isn’t true, but also it discourages people from biking, and the more people who bike, the safer it is to bike.

So, yeah, like I said. Counterproductive.

Also? Waste of a good bike.

I was fortunate enough to be trained as a high school teacher, so I did get explicit instruction on this: I was told to not be alone with students with the door closed, to not touch or hug students, and to be constantly aware of, basically, the worst possible interpretation someone could put on your conduct.

“But I’m not a teacher!” you say. Okay, but the same rule applies. You’re gregarious and social and want to talk to people but have no creepy intent? Sorry, but creepy guys have ruined this for you.

“It’s not fair for people to assume I’m creepy!” That is true. It’s also not fair that women get sexually harassed. They’re playing the odds here, willing to forgo knowledge of you personally in order to protect themselves from potential creeps. You don’t want women to consider you a potential creep? You need to go out of your way to show them that you’re not.

Let’s start with physical space. If possible (obviously if you’re jammed into a packed subway car it’s not, but otherwise), give women more space than you think they need. And if you’re walking in the same direction as them, maybe cross the street or slow down to give them space or speed up to get past them. Just send the message that you are about your own business and not trying to interact with them. “Geez! That seems like a lot of work!” It’s not actually that much work. It’s just a small exercise in empathy. Now obviously if you’re on a crowded street it’s different, but if you’re the only ones on the block? Especially if it’s nightttime? Give her some space. Now give her some more space.

Now on to conversations. Again, you need to remember that every time you open your mouth to talk to a woman you don’t know, you’re setting off her creep alarm. Perhaps your intentions are innocent, but what’s happening here is especially unfair because you get to be relaxed and she gets to be tense, waiting for the conversation to take a turn, or just resentful because she doesn’t get to decide whether she’s having a conversation on this flight.

“But people like to talk to me!” Do they, though? Because you should know that most women are very good at humoring men. Perhaps they’re like the woman I saw on a recent train ride who spent the entire length of Connecticut being regaled by a guy, said, “it was such a pleasure to talk to you!” to him as she got off the train, and then slumped, laughing and exhausted, against her companion as soon as she was off the train and out of sight.

Now if you’re a gay man or a trans man, do these rules still apply? Yep! You still need to give women personal space and assume they don’t want to talk to you.

But what if you’re neurodivergent? Irrelevant! Giving women extra space and not forcing conversation on women are within the capability of every single neurodivergent person I know. Except for the ones who use their neurodivergence as an excuse for being an asshole. Don’t be that guy.

But how will I flirt and find a romantic and/or sexual partner? By meeting someone at a party, or being introduced by friends, or because you’re both working in your community garden plots or because your kids are in the same first grade class or whatever! Demonstrate that you are a person with interests and not just a random perv, and then women will talk to you! If they feel like! And not if they don’t! And that’s okay!

Here’s what it was like. (We did this in Greater Cincinnati, so obviously the details may be different depending on your location, but I just wanted to give people an idea of what the process is like)

First, the burial ground is a beautiful and peaceful meadow that is also a nature preserve with hiking trails. Scattered around the meadow are little mounds with grass growing out of them where folks have been buried. So it doesn’t feel like a cemetery—there are no rows of granite markers or anything—it just feels like a field.

My mom’s body was in the back of the hearse, wrapped in a (thick and definitely not see-through) shroud that was in a big wicker basket. Me and five of my relatives moved the basket onto a little wagon, and I pulled the wagon to the gravesite. Once there, we lifted the shroud out of the basket and placed it on planks that were over the grave.

My mom’s priest said some words, and a representative from the place said some words. We had a moment of silence and listened to the breeze and the birds flying overhead. There were straps under the shroud, and we grabbed those and held my mom’s body up while the staff pulled the planks away. We then used the straps to lower my mom’s body into the ground. And then a mix of staff and relatives grabbed shovels and filled in the grave. (It was hot and I was in a suit, so I did one shovelful. Some of my relatives really went hard on the shoveling).

I’ve been to a fair amount of funerals, and this felt much better to me than seeing a body in a metal casket lowered into a concrete vault. My mom’s body quite literally returned to the earth, and in a few years there will be nothing left of her as the matter of her body will have become the soil that feeds the grass. There will be a marker—a little stone flush with the ground that has her name on it. Like, a literal stone, not a granite monument.

Once the grave was filled in, they gave me a rock to place on a cairn that was made up of rocks placed in honor of everyone who’d ever been buried there.

I was really struck by the beauty and simplicity of the entire process. It felt very natural and respectful, and at no point in the process did I feel like anyone was trying to upsell me in that “Don’t you want the $500 pillow for your loved one?” way that funeral directors so often do.

Throughout the day afterward, people kept coming up to me and saying how much the appreciated the green burial and that they’d never heard of it but now wanted one for themselves.

I should also mention that the entire process cost about half what a traditional burial would have cost.

There aren’t too many places that offer green burials yet, but I think as more people experience green burials, more people will want them. If you’re have questions about the process that I didn’t answer here, please feel free to click on the ol’ contact me link above. I’m just a consumer here, but I think this is a really nice process, and I’d like to help people who are interested.

Michael Jackson was a gifted singer (for a while—more later) and performer, but he was not a musical genius. The musical genius was Quincy Jones. That’s why the three albums Jackson made with Jones are classics (kind of—more later) and the ones he made without Jones are…not classics.

I don’t know exactly what the process was in shaping those records, but my theory is for the songs he wrote, Jackson came in with a melody and some extremely unremarkable lyrics and Jones made a hit song out of it. (Again, see Dangerous, et. al for evidence of this theory).

But let’s look at those classic albums. Not one of them holds up from start to finish. There are some awful duds on each of those records. Admittedly, the hits are mostly absolute bangers, though if you can stomach a pedophile singing about a pretty young thing in 2026, you’re either tougher than I am or in serious denial, and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is basically a retread of “Shake Your Body Down to the Ground” and “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” with a little ripoff of “Soul Makossa” thrown in.

But nobody is cueing up “Speed Demon” or “Liberian Girl” or “The Girl is Mine” in 2026. The record industry blueprint for an album at that time was “hits and filler,” and while these records certainly had more hits than most, they are all about half filler.

So, okay, he couldn’t make a good album without Quincy Jones and he couldn’t make an album that holds up start to finish even with Jones’ help. But still, a great singer! Right? Well, yeah, until he destroyed his ability to sing. Go listen to “She’s Out of My Life”—flawless vocal performance, and one of the things that makes it work is that he had a gorgeous vocal tone. You can hear this in all of his pre-Thriller work. He had a beautiful voice and made great choices.

And then he decided to do violence to his face, specifically his nose, where that gorgeous voice resonated. I mean, not just his—your nose is key to your vocal tone. That’s why Barbra Streisand never got the nose job that probably would have helped her acting career—she didn’t want to ruin her voice. Michael had no such reservations.

Which is why, on Thriller and everything after, he starts with the hee hee chicka chicka bullshit. He can no longer depend on his voice to sell the song, so he starts making weird, desperate choices to try to put the song over. And we never got the equal of “She’s Out of My Life” out of him again.

I can’t fault his unparalleled talent as a performer. He not only commanded a stage in a way few artists have ever been capable of, but also created a “bizarre manchild too pure for this world” persona to disguise the fact that he was a monster. The man’s entire adult life was a performance.

But let’s be clear-eyed about not only his life, but also his career. In a solo career that lasted over 30 years, he released about 15 great songs, or enough to fill a single CD. Admittedly, that’s 15 more great songs than most artists release, but simply not in the same league as Stevie Wonder or Prince.

Michael Jackson was incredibly popular for about ten years. His songs are inextricable from the lives of an entire generation of people. But that doesn’t make him a genius.

The Jockey Club was a dive bar where someone had convinced the crochety old owner (known only as “Shorty”) to let them book punk rock shows. It was not a nice place. But it was fun and weirdly wholesome. There was sometimes overly enthusiastic moshing (which we called “slam dancing.” This term inspired the title of Wayne Wang’s underrated 80’s film noir Slam Dance, starring Tom Hulce!), but otherwise it was just a bunch of kids hanging around enjoying the music and thinking they were sophisticated as they sipped from bottles of Guinness or oil cans of Foster’s Lager.

The venue made a little money because people would pay to see this kind of music that couldn’t get booked at any other clubs. And people started and joined bands because they knew they’d have a place to play. That’s how you get a scene of independent artists doing their thing without corporate attention or interference.

This isn’t a lighting in a bottle phenomenon. It just requires cheap rents. The recent documentary Secret Mall Apartment shows how a similar art/performance scene grew up in disused warehouses in Providence. And then got displaced by development, which is what’s happened in so many cities.

Cheap rents are in extremely short supply in most major cities in the USA, and art and culture have suffered as a result.

But last night, I went to a pro wrestling show in Elmwood Place, a small municipality northwest of Downtown Cincinnati and got some hope. I pulled up in front of an empty storefront church. You could see the pews through the windows, and the owner had put up a big sign that said, “FOR RENT: RETAIL ONLY.” I passed two more empty storefronts on my way to the venue, which was an unmarked storefront.

I paid ten bucks cash at the door and walked into the venue. Grimy wall-to-wall carpeting covered the floor. The walls were stained enameled cinderblock. There was a tin ceiling that was rusted in spots and had paint peeling pretty much all over. And in the center of the space, a wrestling ring. Oh yeah, and like most indoor athletic facilities, especially carpeted ones, this place had a certain funk in the air—it smelled like feet and shaving cream.

I pulled up a chair in the front row next to a couple of kids who had brought signs. “This,” I thought, “is where the real shit happens.”

And it was! I enjoyed a really fun wrestling show with about 30 other fans, and I couldn’t help thinking of the Jockey Club. Not only because of my physical surroundings, although also that, but because I was watching art that people were making for love.

The gate from this event was probably 300 bucks. They might have cleared a little more than that from concessions, merch, and the 50/50 raffle. Nobody was here trying to make it big—they were just making art for people who loved it.

Now don’t get me wrong—I do believe artists should get paid. But, and I speak from experience as someone who was a professional writer, as soon as money enters the picture, it demands changes and compromises, and while you can still make great art under those circumstances, the lack of money allows you to be weird as hell, to say, yeah, I’m making this thing, and you can like it or not, but it is EXACTLY what I want it to be. It is what I want to put into the world.

Now look—maybe indie wrestling isn’t your thing. (though, if it is, head on over to kayfabe.ink and sign up for my newsletter. I’ll be writing up this very show in the next couple of days!) But somewhere near you (and, admittedly, if you live in a major city, it’s probably not in your city), people are making cool, weird, authentic art on a block where you can’t get a good cup of coffee. It’s not corporate, it’s not capitalist, and most importantly at this point, it’s not fascist, because of course fascism is all about conformity and cruelty.

Find the weirdos and go dig their art. Or, better yet, be one of those weirdos. Go start your own band! Put on a play! Paint something and hang it on the wall! Art makes us human and makes life bearable and meaningful. Go make some!