Century east at dawley farm
tristful
2018.07.26 02:44 JuliusAesar tristful
Pictures, videos, GIFs and paintings that create a deep, yet romantic, type of melancholy. The feeling you get when looking at a 19th-century French landscape, an abandoned farm, a rainy Japanese flower garden or an alley in a small Italian village.
2015.07.07 05:30 MetalGearOffi. V Opp. 5/12/16-16/13/7
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2023.06.03 15:44 Person21323231213242 MMW: If the US intervenes into Mexico (as some American politicians suggest), it will cause a costly, endless war that will result in irreparable damage to the US
TL;DR: The US Intervening into Mexico to defeat the Cartels would spiral out of control very quickly, converting Mexico and quite possibly the Southwestern US into Afghanistan 2.0 for the US military.
There has been rhetoric over the past few months by various right wing politicians in the US that the US should attack the cartels in Mexico, with or without the Mexican government's approval. Politicians like Lindsay Graham, Dan Crenshaw and Marjorie Taylor Greene have floated the idea, and even Presidential candidates like Tim Scott (https://reason.com/2023/05/24/the-republican-primary-consensus-for-sending-the-military-into-mexico/ ) and Donald Trump (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-vows-deploy-special-forces-military-assets-inflict-maximum-damage-cartels). This is honestly a terrible idea for the US, despite the damage that cartels currently do when it comes to the drug trade. It is like shooting your own leg because of a tick so to speak.
Mexico is an absolutely enormous country, the size of Western Europe, with a population of 126 million people. It also has a geography not too different than Afghanistan, lined with several mountain ranges and many deserts - yet differs with the rainforests of the south. These Mountain ranges consist of most of Mexico's interior, with the coasts and east seeming like the only locations where major tank warfare would be very possible. It is a county that would be an insurgent's dream.
These politicians specifically claim that the US should intervene into Mexico as to defeat the Cartels with or without the help of the Mexican government. I need to mention - the latter is almost certainly true. Despite Mexico's problems most Mexicans are still very proud of their country and very much do not want a US intervention onto their territory, a political consideration that could sink any Mexican government who willingly lets in US troops. So any US intervention into Mexico would also have to deal with the Mexican government, and effectively be an invasion of the country. It would not just be a border operation either - some of the main Cartel hotspots like Mihoacan and Guerrero provinces are further south from the US than Mexico City. Any operation would have to go at least that far into Mexico in order to achieve meaningful success.
Sure, the Mexican Government in Mexico City could be overthrown relatively quickly, if they prove to be an obstacle in any US intervention. They struggle against Cartels alone, and using a naval invasion the US government could take Veracruz (the closest port to Mexico city), and then march onto Mexico City in a relatively short time. The government is fragile enough that it wouldn't survive the loss of the capital. Yet this fragility in and of itself is one of the main reasons why a war in Mexico would be so terrible. Cartels - the very cartels the US would try to destroy in this war - effectively control swathes of the country, and have long experience with asymmetric warfare. With a total Mexican government collapse, they would become warlords fully ruling over their little domains. And this would be when they would be most dangerous. The US couldn't just kill one leader and be done with it, they would have to destroy every single faction to win this war. And if the factions ally to fight the Americans, then that simply means divide and conquer strategy is removed from the table as a means to defeat them.
Due to US blunders the cartels have access to US weapons, and some even have US training (https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2010/11/3/us-trained-cartel-terrorises-mexico https://www.propublica.org/article/allende-zetas-cartel-massacre-and-the-us-dea ). Additionally, Cartels apparently have a history of attempting to corrupt US border agents (https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/immigration/border-coverage/as-cartel-power-rises-so-do-concerns-about-cbp-corruption/ , https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/us/homeland-security-border-bribes.html , https://www.businessinsider.com/customs-border-agents-mexican-cartel-smuggling-2016-11 ) , an issue which will allow them to blunt the effectiveness of US operations and continue to access guns within the US. Such problems will be greatly worsened if the Cartels experience similar success corrupting US army troops. These problems will make it more difficult for US forces to fight the Mexican Cartels in an open war, as many of them will be able to counter what the US throws at them.
It is very doubtful that the war would remain a US vs Cartel war anyway. A US intervention into Mexico without Mexican government approval would be seen by the Mexican people as a patriotic war of independence, something akin to how Ukrainians feel about the Ukraine war. Non-cartel nationalist militias will almost certainly pop up to fight the US for this very purpose, following in the footsteps of previous Mexican national figures like Pancho Villa and Santa Ana. Given the broader appeal these sorts of groups would have among the Mexican public than cartels, they could even begin to replace the cartels as the US's main enemy in this Mexico War given a few years time. They would not be without international support either. For instance nearby Cuba has a long history of aiding Latin American guerilla forces against US forces/allies (like in Nicaragua, Columbia and Grenada), and has been heavily sanctioned by the US since the 1960s. Additionally, Wagner Group has already been attempting to establish itself in Mexico (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/18/russia-wagner-group-ukraine-paramilitary-00083553) - a war between Mexico and the US would be perfect for them to offer their services, and recruit Mexicans into their organization. Additionally a rebranding of this conflict from an anti-criminal operation to a war of Mexican sovereignty would bring much more sympathy to the Mexicans than to the US,. A new US war in Mexico would be like a second Iraq war when it comes to how badly it would affect US international relations, perhaps even worse.
This war would also likely require the US to intervene in many more countries than just Mexico. Mexican cartels have already expanded their activities to other countries throughout the region. Countries like Ecuador, Guatemala, Columbia, El Salvador and Honduras have been suspect to activities by Mexican cartels, mostly for the sake of controlling the supply chain of resources needed for producing drugs in Mexico. In these countries (especially Ecuador), Mexican drug cartels have coopted local gangs to help with their goals, and use local farmers to produce plants needed for drug production (such as coca needed for cocaine). Even if the US somehow eliminates the cartels from Mexico, they will simply move their base of operation to one of these countries and continue their practices. The US would need to export this war on Mexico to all of the countries where the cartel is active if they would want any chance of creating an end to such a war once it begins.
The US couldn't simply walk away from such a war. The US border has sections of deserts and mountains which are by definition hard to defend. Not to mention that there is already a huge amount of illegal tunnels between the US and Mexico, many of which are operated by the very cartels which the US would be at war with. These connections into the US are already the main way cartels get their guns and sell their drugs after all, so it would not be so difficult to repurpose them for attacks on American soil. With the population of the areas of the US right north of the US-Mexico border being majority latino, the local inhabitants will be virtually indistinguishable from any Mexican insurgents crossing the border into the US to commit attacks. As such it would be easy for operatives to sneak into the US, commit attacks on US towns north of the border, and then melt into the local population (similarly to the tactics used against US troops by insurgents in Iraq). This ability to vanish into the local population has the potential to cause a massive amount of persistent fear for Americans, and worsen the ethnic tensions between white and latino Americans. This war would be more like a larger version of the Israel - Palestine conflict rather than another Afghanistan in the sense that the line between the "warzone" and US territory would quickly blur.
This war would likely only become worse from there. If either the US starts launching reprisals on Mexican communities for insurgent attacks, or right wing American militias launch their own reprisals on American latino communities as purported "vigilante justice" for these insurgent attacks - latino communities (especially those with closer ties to Mexico) within the US could be pushed towards becoming insurgents themselves. This is more likely than it seems, as the US Army has committed massacres against civilians before as retribution for insurgent attacks (https://web.archive.org/web/20131212141534/http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?id=8518011 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-nov-07-fg-balad7-story.html ). This would be similar to what happened with Arab Israelis during the 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis ) when large swathes of Arab Israeli youths decided to riot in support of the Palestinian factions. After that point there is no going back, it would mean a true open war between US citizens. That is a pandora's box that would only cause greater harm for the US, and permanently render the Southwestern US a conflict zone. If this scenario comes to pass such a war could last decades - in a similar vein to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This cannot be understated, no part of the continental US has been a part of a conflict zone since the Mexican civil war of the 1910s. And the permanent alienation of latino americans - a group which now consists of 62 million people out of the US population - would have severe ramifications for the internal security of the United States. It would be a crippling blow which cannot be quickly healed.
This conflict would eat away at the US's status as a world power. Being stuck in a major guerilla war right across the border, and a conflict spilling into the US proper, the US would have to deprioritize its interests elsewhere. As a rule of thumb (https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/mcgrath_boots.pdf) there needs to be 20 soldiers for every thousand inhabitants for an occupation to be successful. For Mexico alone with its 126 million strong population, that means 2.52 million troops are needed for a successful occupation (to say nothing of the other countries which the Mexican Cartels would use as bases against the US, or the factor that the Southern US would experience spillover from the conflict). The US does not even have that many active troops, so they would have to cut corners like they did in Iraq (perhaps bringing the 2.52 million number down to 500,000 to at least create a semblance of a functional occupation). Overall this would leave the US much weaker on the geopolitical stage, and allow for US opponents to fill in the vacuum left by US power. For example, with so many troops tied up in Mexico, the US would need to rely a lot more on their fleet in order to defend Taiwan against China in the case of a Chinese invasion of that island, as the US simply would not have enough soldiers to fight the Chinese PLA on the ground. And the sheer expense needed to deal with a war in Mexico and insurgents within US borders would force the US to consider a considerable drawdown of their military support for allies like Ukraine.
If either Donald Trump or Tim Scott becomes president in 2024 (with Trump being the nearly guaranteed Republican nominee, given DeSantis's floundering), this war could very well become a reality. It could very well begin before 2026 - though I predict that this war could be started at any point between 2025 and 2028 if one of those candidates were to win the US presidency If this does happen, I highly doubt that the war will end anytime soon after it begins. Especially with the geopolitical destabilization of the Southwestern US, it would create challenges for the US which would harm its position across the world and greatly weaken its internal stability. Any candidate or person who considers this idea should reconsider it.
submitted by Person21323231213242 to MarkMyWords [link] [comments]
There has been rhetoric over the past few months by various right wing politicians in the US that the US should attack the cartels in Mexico, with or without the Mexican government's approval. Politicians like Lindsay Graham, Dan Crenshaw and Marjorie Taylor Greene have floated the idea, and even Presidential candidates like Tim Scott (https://reason.com/2023/05/24/the-republican-primary-consensus-for-sending-the-military-into-mexico/ ) and Donald Trump (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-vows-deploy-special-forces-military-assets-inflict-maximum-damage-cartels). This is honestly a terrible idea for the US, despite the damage that cartels currently do when it comes to the drug trade. It is like shooting your own leg because of a tick so to speak.
Mexico is an absolutely enormous country, the size of Western Europe, with a population of 126 million people. It also has a geography not too different than Afghanistan, lined with several mountain ranges and many deserts - yet differs with the rainforests of the south. These Mountain ranges consist of most of Mexico's interior, with the coasts and east seeming like the only locations where major tank warfare would be very possible. It is a county that would be an insurgent's dream.
These politicians specifically claim that the US should intervene into Mexico as to defeat the Cartels with or without the help of the Mexican government. I need to mention - the latter is almost certainly true. Despite Mexico's problems most Mexicans are still very proud of their country and very much do not want a US intervention onto their territory, a political consideration that could sink any Mexican government who willingly lets in US troops. So any US intervention into Mexico would also have to deal with the Mexican government, and effectively be an invasion of the country. It would not just be a border operation either - some of the main Cartel hotspots like Mihoacan and Guerrero provinces are further south from the US than Mexico City. Any operation would have to go at least that far into Mexico in order to achieve meaningful success.
Sure, the Mexican Government in Mexico City could be overthrown relatively quickly, if they prove to be an obstacle in any US intervention. They struggle against Cartels alone, and using a naval invasion the US government could take Veracruz (the closest port to Mexico city), and then march onto Mexico City in a relatively short time. The government is fragile enough that it wouldn't survive the loss of the capital. Yet this fragility in and of itself is one of the main reasons why a war in Mexico would be so terrible. Cartels - the very cartels the US would try to destroy in this war - effectively control swathes of the country, and have long experience with asymmetric warfare. With a total Mexican government collapse, they would become warlords fully ruling over their little domains. And this would be when they would be most dangerous. The US couldn't just kill one leader and be done with it, they would have to destroy every single faction to win this war. And if the factions ally to fight the Americans, then that simply means divide and conquer strategy is removed from the table as a means to defeat them.
Due to US blunders the cartels have access to US weapons, and some even have US training (https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2010/11/3/us-trained-cartel-terrorises-mexico https://www.propublica.org/article/allende-zetas-cartel-massacre-and-the-us-dea ). Additionally, Cartels apparently have a history of attempting to corrupt US border agents (https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/immigration/border-coverage/as-cartel-power-rises-so-do-concerns-about-cbp-corruption/ , https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/us/homeland-security-border-bribes.html , https://www.businessinsider.com/customs-border-agents-mexican-cartel-smuggling-2016-11 ) , an issue which will allow them to blunt the effectiveness of US operations and continue to access guns within the US. Such problems will be greatly worsened if the Cartels experience similar success corrupting US army troops. These problems will make it more difficult for US forces to fight the Mexican Cartels in an open war, as many of them will be able to counter what the US throws at them.
It is very doubtful that the war would remain a US vs Cartel war anyway. A US intervention into Mexico without Mexican government approval would be seen by the Mexican people as a patriotic war of independence, something akin to how Ukrainians feel about the Ukraine war. Non-cartel nationalist militias will almost certainly pop up to fight the US for this very purpose, following in the footsteps of previous Mexican national figures like Pancho Villa and Santa Ana. Given the broader appeal these sorts of groups would have among the Mexican public than cartels, they could even begin to replace the cartels as the US's main enemy in this Mexico War given a few years time. They would not be without international support either. For instance nearby Cuba has a long history of aiding Latin American guerilla forces against US forces/allies (like in Nicaragua, Columbia and Grenada), and has been heavily sanctioned by the US since the 1960s. Additionally, Wagner Group has already been attempting to establish itself in Mexico (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/18/russia-wagner-group-ukraine-paramilitary-00083553) - a war between Mexico and the US would be perfect for them to offer their services, and recruit Mexicans into their organization. Additionally a rebranding of this conflict from an anti-criminal operation to a war of Mexican sovereignty would bring much more sympathy to the Mexicans than to the US,. A new US war in Mexico would be like a second Iraq war when it comes to how badly it would affect US international relations, perhaps even worse.
This war would also likely require the US to intervene in many more countries than just Mexico. Mexican cartels have already expanded their activities to other countries throughout the region. Countries like Ecuador, Guatemala, Columbia, El Salvador and Honduras have been suspect to activities by Mexican cartels, mostly for the sake of controlling the supply chain of resources needed for producing drugs in Mexico. In these countries (especially Ecuador), Mexican drug cartels have coopted local gangs to help with their goals, and use local farmers to produce plants needed for drug production (such as coca needed for cocaine). Even if the US somehow eliminates the cartels from Mexico, they will simply move their base of operation to one of these countries and continue their practices. The US would need to export this war on Mexico to all of the countries where the cartel is active if they would want any chance of creating an end to such a war once it begins.
The US couldn't simply walk away from such a war. The US border has sections of deserts and mountains which are by definition hard to defend. Not to mention that there is already a huge amount of illegal tunnels between the US and Mexico, many of which are operated by the very cartels which the US would be at war with. These connections into the US are already the main way cartels get their guns and sell their drugs after all, so it would not be so difficult to repurpose them for attacks on American soil. With the population of the areas of the US right north of the US-Mexico border being majority latino, the local inhabitants will be virtually indistinguishable from any Mexican insurgents crossing the border into the US to commit attacks. As such it would be easy for operatives to sneak into the US, commit attacks on US towns north of the border, and then melt into the local population (similarly to the tactics used against US troops by insurgents in Iraq). This ability to vanish into the local population has the potential to cause a massive amount of persistent fear for Americans, and worsen the ethnic tensions between white and latino Americans. This war would be more like a larger version of the Israel - Palestine conflict rather than another Afghanistan in the sense that the line between the "warzone" and US territory would quickly blur.
This war would likely only become worse from there. If either the US starts launching reprisals on Mexican communities for insurgent attacks, or right wing American militias launch their own reprisals on American latino communities as purported "vigilante justice" for these insurgent attacks - latino communities (especially those with closer ties to Mexico) within the US could be pushed towards becoming insurgents themselves. This is more likely than it seems, as the US Army has committed massacres against civilians before as retribution for insurgent attacks (https://web.archive.org/web/20131212141534/http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?id=8518011 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-nov-07-fg-balad7-story.html ). This would be similar to what happened with Arab Israelis during the 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis ) when large swathes of Arab Israeli youths decided to riot in support of the Palestinian factions. After that point there is no going back, it would mean a true open war between US citizens. That is a pandora's box that would only cause greater harm for the US, and permanently render the Southwestern US a conflict zone. If this scenario comes to pass such a war could last decades - in a similar vein to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This cannot be understated, no part of the continental US has been a part of a conflict zone since the Mexican civil war of the 1910s. And the permanent alienation of latino americans - a group which now consists of 62 million people out of the US population - would have severe ramifications for the internal security of the United States. It would be a crippling blow which cannot be quickly healed.
This conflict would eat away at the US's status as a world power. Being stuck in a major guerilla war right across the border, and a conflict spilling into the US proper, the US would have to deprioritize its interests elsewhere. As a rule of thumb (https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/mcgrath_boots.pdf) there needs to be 20 soldiers for every thousand inhabitants for an occupation to be successful. For Mexico alone with its 126 million strong population, that means 2.52 million troops are needed for a successful occupation (to say nothing of the other countries which the Mexican Cartels would use as bases against the US, or the factor that the Southern US would experience spillover from the conflict). The US does not even have that many active troops, so they would have to cut corners like they did in Iraq (perhaps bringing the 2.52 million number down to 500,000 to at least create a semblance of a functional occupation). Overall this would leave the US much weaker on the geopolitical stage, and allow for US opponents to fill in the vacuum left by US power. For example, with so many troops tied up in Mexico, the US would need to rely a lot more on their fleet in order to defend Taiwan against China in the case of a Chinese invasion of that island, as the US simply would not have enough soldiers to fight the Chinese PLA on the ground. And the sheer expense needed to deal with a war in Mexico and insurgents within US borders would force the US to consider a considerable drawdown of their military support for allies like Ukraine.
If either Donald Trump or Tim Scott becomes president in 2024 (with Trump being the nearly guaranteed Republican nominee, given DeSantis's floundering), this war could very well become a reality. It could very well begin before 2026 - though I predict that this war could be started at any point between 2025 and 2028 if one of those candidates were to win the US presidency If this does happen, I highly doubt that the war will end anytime soon after it begins. Especially with the geopolitical destabilization of the Southwestern US, it would create challenges for the US which would harm its position across the world and greatly weaken its internal stability. Any candidate or person who considers this idea should reconsider it.
2023.06.03 15:44 PeasantryIsFun Karuta Pilgrimage #1: Invited into a karuta practice session in Tokyo, at the building where Chihaya and friends made their names known in the East!
 | submitted by PeasantryIsFun to chihayafuru [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:43 Orions--Belt 38 [M4F] #USA -- seeks traditional girlfriend material 👍
Hey sup! I'm looking for a long term commitment with the right person irl, not anything online or short term fun. I'm tall, dominant, successful, very traditional, takes the lead; seeks a traditional minded girlfriend. The cute stay at home mom type, submissive, wants to breed, and take as a wife makes sense to me. I'm attracted to affectionate feminine woman and prefers country, farm, small town type woman. And doing cool stuff. On another note, I like children and don't mind if you have some and want more
Send a dm about yourself to discuss more 👍
Pictures attached
submitted by Orions--Belt to Singles [link] [comments]
Send a dm about yourself to discuss more 👍
Pictures attached
2023.06.03 15:43 Orions--Belt 38 [M4F] #USA - seeks relationship 👍
Hey! I'm looking for a long term commitment with the right person irl, not anything online or short term fun. I'm tall, dominant, successful, very traditional, takes the lead; seeks a traditional minded girlfriend. The cute stay at home mom type, submissive, wants to breed, and take as a wife makes sense to me. I'm attracted to affectionate feminine woman and prefers country, farm, small town type woman. And doing cool stuff.
Send a dm about yourself to discuss more 👍
Pictures attached...https://imgur.com/Zlx8SCm
submitted by Orions--Belt to ImpregPersonalsReal [link] [comments]
Send a dm about yourself to discuss more 👍
Pictures attached...https://imgur.com/Zlx8SCm
2023.06.03 15:41 PotableRecreat Building a house at East Legon will be difficult for any Ghanaian actor- Ekow Smith Asante » GhBase•com™-Everything & News Now
 | submitted by PotableRecreat to Myocosmo [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:41 AutoModerator [Download Course] Igor Kheifets – Email Farming System (Genkicourses.site)
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2023.06.03 15:40 LoveMangaBuddy Read I Learn to Kill Gods in an Asylum - Chapter 20 - MangaPuma
Have you ever thought that behind the city filled with neon lights, monsters from ancient tales reside? Have you ever thought that high above the sky, behind the moon, stood a God watching over the mortal world? Have you ever thought that in this crowded 21st-century city, there are superhumans who are Seraph’s agents? In this society ruled by humans, multiple weirdness lurk within. Mikaela the Se ... Read I Learn to Kill Gods in an Asylum - Chapter 20 - MangaPuma. Read more at https://mangapuma.com/i-learn-to-kill-gods-in-an-asylum/chapter-20
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2023.06.03 15:38 SourceOfTheSpring Crave Café Now Open at 1200 East-West Highway
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2023.06.03 15:38 blaringbrunch4331 Building a house at East Legon will be difficult for any Ghanaian actor- Ekow Smith Asante » GhBase•com™-Everything & News Now
| | submitted by blaringbrunch4331 to Bavicwead [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:38 obeliskposture Short story about bad times & bad jobs
I've shared fiction here before and it didn't go altogether too poorly, so I'm going to press my luck and do it again. This was written about a year ago, and I'm tired of trying to peddle it to lit magazines. Might as well share it here, know that it met a few eyeballs, and have done with it.
It's relevant to the sub insofar as it's about urban alienation and the working conditions at a small business run by IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE people. (I tried to pitch it as a story of the great resignation with a momentary flicker of cosmic horror.) It's based on a similar job I took on after getting laid off during the lockdown, and the circumstances of the main character's breakup are faintly similar to one I went through several years back (her job sucked the life out of her).
Without further ado:
* * *
It was getting close to midnight, and the temperature outside was still above 80 degrees. We’d locked up the shop at 10:15 and walked over to Twenty, the dive bar on Poplar Street, where a single wall-mounted air conditioner and four wobbly ceiling fans weren’t putting up much resistance against the July heat baking the place from the outside and the dense mass of bodies giving it a stifling fever from within.
Just now I came close to saying it was a Wednesday night, because that was usually when the cyclists descended upon Avenue Brew, the gritty-but-bougie craft beer and sandwich shop I was working at back then. Every Wednesday between March and November, about fifteen to twenty-five Gen Xers dressed in skintight polyester, all packages and camel toes and fanny packs, locked up their thousand-dollar bikes on the sidewalk and lined up for IPAs and paninis. They reliably arrived around 8:00, an hour before we closed, making it impossible to get started on the closing checklist and leave on time at 10:00. The worst of them were demanding and rude, and even the best got raucous and stubborn after a couple drinks. There were nights when bringing in the sidewalk tables couldn’t be done without arguing with them. Most were sub-par tippers, to boot.
After Wednesday came and went that week without so much as a single 40-something in Ray Bans and padded shorts stopping in to double-fist two cans of Jai Alai, we dared to hope the cyclists had chosen another spot to be their finish line from there on out. But no—they’d only postponed their weekly ride, and swarmed us on Friday night instead.
I was the last person to find out; I was clocked in as purchaser that evening. The position was something like a promotion I'd received a year earlier: for twenty hours a week, I got to retreat from the public and sit in the back room with the store laptop, reviewing sales and inventory, answering emails from brewery reps, and ordering beer, beverages, and assorted paper goods. When I put in hours as purchaser, my wage went up from $11 to $15 an hour, but I was removed from the tip pool. On most days, tips amounted to an extra two or three dollars an hour, so I usually came out ahead.
This was back in 2021. I don't know what Avenue Brew pays these days.
Anyway, at about 8:15, I stepped out to say goodbye to everyone and found the shop in chaos. Friday nights were generally pretty active, the cyclists' arrival had turned the place into a mob scene. The line extended to the front door. The phone was ringing. The Grubhub tablet dinged like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Danny was on the sandwich line and on the verge of losing his temper. Oliver was working up a sweat running food, bussing tables, and replenishing ingredients from the walk-in. The unflappable Marina was on register, and even she seemed like she was about to snap at somebody.
What else could I do? I stayed until closing to answer the phone, process Grubhub orders, hop on and off the second register, and help Danny with sandwich prep. After the tills were counted out, I stayed another hour to take care of the dishes, since nobody had a chance to do a first load. Oliver was grateful, even though he grumbled about having to make some calls and rearrange Sunday's schedule so I could come in a couple hours late. Irene and Jeremy, Avenue Brew's owners, would kick his ass if he let me go into overtime.
Danny suggested that we deserved a few drinks ourselves after managing to get through the shift without killing anyone. Not even Marina could find a reason to disagree with him.
The neighborhood had undergone enough gentrification to support an upscale brunch spot, an ice cream parlor, a gourmet burger restaurant, a coffee and bahn mi shop, and Avenue Brew (to name a few examples), but not yet quite enough that the people who staffed them couldn’t afford to live within a ten-minute walk from the main avenue where all these hep eateries stood between 24-hour corner stores with slot machines in back, late-night Chinese and Mexico-Italian takeout joints with bulletproof glass at the counters, and long-shuttered delis and shoe stores. Twenty on Poplar was the watering hole set aside for people like us. It was dim, a bit dilapidated, and inexpensive, and usually avoided by denizens of the condos popping up on the vacant lots and replacing clusters of abandoned row houses.
When we arrived, Kyle waved us over. He didn’t work at Avenue Brew anymore, but still kept up with a few of us. He was at Twenty at least four nights out of the week.
So there we all were. I sat with a brooding stranger freestyling to himself in a low mumble on the stool to my left and Oliver on my right, who tapped at his phone and nursed a bottle of Twisted Tea. To Oliver’s right sat Marina, staring at nothing in particular and trying to ignore Danny, who stood behind her, closer than she would have liked, listening to Kyle explain the crucial differences between the Invincible comic book and the Invincible web series.
I recall being startled back to something like wakefulness when it seemed to me that the ceiling had sprouted a new fan. I blinked my eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore. It reminded me of an incident from when I was still living with my folks in South Jersey and still had a car, and was driving home from a friend’s house party up in Bergen County. It was 6:30 AM, I hadn’t slept all night, and needed to get home so I could get at least little shuteye before heading to Whole Foods for my 11:00 AM shift. I imagined I passed beneath the shadows of overpasses I knew weren’t there, and realized I was dreaming at the wheel.
I was pretty thoroughly zombified at that point. Heather and I had broken up for good the night before, and I hadn't gotten even a minute of sleep. Calling out at Avenue Brew was tough. Unless you found someone willing to cover your shift on like six hours' notice, you were liable to get a writeup, a demotion, or your hours cut if you couldn't produce a doctor's note. So I loaded up on caffeine pills and Five-Hour Energy bottles at the corner store, and powered through as best I could.
I finished the last thimbleful of Blue Moon in my glass. Oliver wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a napkin and covered his mouth to stifle a laugh at the KiwiFarms thread he was scrolling through. Pool balls clacked; somebody swore and somebody laughed. The TouchTunes box was playing Bob Dylan’s “Rain Day Woman #12 & 35,” and enough bleary 40-something men around the bar were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to make it impossible to determine which one of them paid two bucks to hear it. A guy by the cigarette machine who looked like a caricature of Art Carney in flannel and an old Pixies T-shirt was accosting a woman who must have been a toddler when he hit drinking age, and she momentarily made eye contact with me as she scanned the area for a way out. Danny was shouting over the bartender’s head, carrying on a conversation with the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, who was sitting on the horseshoe’s opposite arm.
I never got his name, but when Oliver first referred to him as the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, I knew exactly who he meant. Philly scene kid par excellence. Mid-20s, washed-out black denim, dyed black hair, thick bangs, and dark, gentle eyes. He was only truly alluring when he was on the job, because he seldom smiled then—and when he smiled, he broke the spell by exposing his teeth, stained a gnarly shade of mahogany from too much smoking and not enough brushing.
“How’s Best? Marcus still a joker?” Danny asked him.
“Yeah, you know Marcus. You know how he is.”
So the Hot Guy had been working at Best Burger (directly across the street from Avenue Brew) ever since Pizza Stan’s owners mismanaged the place unto insolvency. (Afterwards it was renovated and reopened as a vegan bakery—which incidentally closed down about a month ago.) Danny used to work at Best Burger, but that ended after he got into a shouting match with the owner. I happened to overhear it while I was dragging in the tables and collecting the chairs from the sidewalk the night it happened. It wasn’t any of my business, and I tried not to pay attention, but they were really tearing into each other. A month later, Oliver welcomed Danny aboard at Avenue Brew. I hadn’t known he’d been interviewed, and by then it was too late to mention the incident. But I’d have been a hypocrite to call it a red flag after the way I resigned from my position as Café Chakra's assistant manager two years earlier—not that we need to go dredging that up right now. Let's say there was some bad blood and leave it at that.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving in and buying a pack of cigarettes from the machine—and then remembered that Twenty didn’t have a cigarette machine. I looked again. The Art Carney-lookalike was still there, fingering his phone with a frown, but the girl was gone—and so was the cigarette machine.
I had only a moment to puzzle over this before Danny clapped me on the shoulder and thrust a shot glass in front of me.
“Starfish!” he said. (Danny called me Starfish. Everybody else called me Pat.) “You look like you need some juice.”
He distributed shots to everyone else. Marina declined hers, but changed her mind when Kyle offered to take it instead.
She and Kyle had stopped sleeping together after Kyle left Avenue Brew to work at the Victory taproom on the Parkway, but Marina was still concerned about his bad habits, which Danny delighted in encouraging.
We all leaned in to clink our glasses. Before I could find an appropriate moment to ask Marina if I could bum a cigarette, she got up to visit the bathroom. Danny took her seat and bowed his head for a conspiratorial word with Kyle.
I watched from the corner of my eye and tried to listen in. Like Marina, I was a little worried about Kyle. He got hired at Avenue Brew around the same time I did, just before the pandemic temporarily turned us into a takeout joint. He was a senior at Drexel then, an English major, and sometimes talked about wanting to either find work in publishing or carve out a career as a freelance writer after graduating. But first he intended to spend a year getting some life in before submitting himself to the forever grind.
He read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. He relished the gritty and sordid, and had already been good at sniffing it out around the neighborhood and in West Philly before Danny introduced him to cocaine, casinos, strip clubs, and a rogue’s gallery of shady but fascinating people. (None were really Danny’s friends; just fellow passengers who intersected with the part of his life where he sometimes went to Parx, sometimes came out ahead, sometimes spent his winnings on coke, and sometimes did bumps at titty bars.) Kyle recounted these adventures with a boyish enthusiasm for the naked reality of sleaze, like a middle schooler telling his locker room buddies about catching his older brother in flagrante and seeing so-and-so body parts doing such-and-such things.
Marina hated it. She never said as much to me, but she was afraid that the template Kyle set for his life during his “year off” was in danger of becoming locked in. The anniversary of his graduation had already passed, and now here he was trying to convince Danny to contribute a couple hundred dollars toward a sheet of acid his guy had for sale. He wasn't doing much writing lately.
I was the oldest employee at Avenue Brew (as I write this I’m 37, but fortunately I don’t look it), and when Kyle still worked with us I felt like it was my prerogative to give him some advice. The longer he waited to make inroads, I once told him, the more likely he’d be seen as damaged goods by the publishing world. He needed to jam his foot in the door while he was still young.
I could tell the conversation bored him, and didn’t bring up the subject again.
The bartender took my glass and curtly asked if I’d like another drink.
“No thanks, not yet,” I answered.
She slid me my bill.
I missed the old bartender, the one she’d replaced. I forget her name, but she was ingenuous and energetic and sweet. Pretty much everyone had some sort of crush on her. Sometimes she came into Avenue Brew for lunch, and tipped us as well as we tipped her. Maybe three months before that night—Danny witnessed it—she suddenly started crying and rushed out the door. Everyone at the bar mutely looked to each other for an explanation. (Fortunately for Twenty, the kitchen manager hadn’t left yet, and picked up the rest of her shift.)
She never came back. None of us had seen her since. But drafts still had to be poured and bottlecaps pulled off, and now here was another white woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black tank top, a pushup bra, and a scrunchie, same as before. Twenty’s regulars grew accustomed to not expecting to see the person she’d replaced, and life went on.
“How’re you doing?” I asked Oliver, just to say something to somebody, and to keep my thoughts from wandering back to Heather.
“Just kind of existing right now,” he answered. His phone lay face-up on the counter. He was swiping through Instagram, and I recognized the avatar of the user whose album he hate-browsed.
“And how’s Austin been?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not even three weeks after getting over the jetlag from his trip back from the Cascades, he’s off touring Ireland.” He shook his head. “Living his best life.”
He’d hired Austin on a part-time basis in September. We needed a new associate when Emma was promoted to replace a supervisor who'd quit without even giving his two weeks. There was a whole thing. I'm having a hard time recalling the guy's name, but I liked him well enough. He was a good worker and he seemed like a bright kid, but he was—well, he was young. Naïve. One day he found Jeremy sitting in the back room with his laptop, and took advantage of the open-door policy to ask why the store manager and supervisors didn’t get health benefits or paid time off. Jeremy told him it "was being worked on," and that he couldn’t discuss it any further at that time. I understand the kid got argumentative, though I never knew precisely what was said.
Irene started visiting the shop a lot more often after that, almost always arriving when the kid was working. No matter what he was doing, she’d find a reason to intervene, to micromanage and harangue him, and effectively make his job impossible. A coincidence, surely.
It’s something I still think about. By any metric, Jeremy and Irene have done very well for themselves. They’re both a little over 40 years old. I remember hearing they met at law school. In addition to Avenue Brew, they own a bistro in Francisville and an ice cream parlor in Point Breeze. They have a house on the Blue Line, send their son to a Montessori school, and pull up to their businesses in a white Volkswagen ID.4. But whenever the subject of benefits, wages, or even free shift meals came up, they pled poverty. It simply couldn’t be done. But they liked to remind us about all they did to make Avenue Brew a fun place to work, like let the staff pick the music and allow Oliver and me to conduct a beer tasting once a day. They stuck Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, and Progress flag decals on the front door and windows, and I remember Irene wearing a Black Trans Lives Matter shirt once or twice when covering a supervisor's shift. None of the college students or recent graduates who composed most of Avenue Brew's staff could say the bosses weren't on the right team. And yet...
I'm sorry—I was talking about Austin. He was maybe 30 and already had another job, a “real” job, some sort of remote gig lucrative enough for him to make rent on a studio in the picturesque Episcopal church down the street that had been converted into upscale apartments some years back. Austin wasn’t looking for extra cash. He wanted to socialize. To have something to do and people to talk to in the outside world. He wanted to make friends, and all of us could appreciate that—but it’s hard to be fond of a coworker who irredeemably sucks at his job. Austin never acted with any urgency, was inattentive to detail, and even after repeated interventions from Oliver and the supervisors, he continued to perform basic tasks in bafflingly inefficient ways. Having Austin on your shift meant carrying his slack, and everyone was fed up after a few months. Oliver sat him down, told him he was on thin ice, and gave him a list of the areas in which he needed to improve if he didn’t want to be let go.
When Austin gave Oliver the indignant “I don’t need this job” speech, it was different from those times Danny or I told a boss to go to hell and walked out. Austin truly didn’t need it. He basically said the job was beneath him, and so was Oliver.
It got deep under Oliver’s skin. He did need the job and had to take it seriously, even when it meant being the dipshit manager chewing out a man four or five years his senior. He earned $18 an hour (plus tips when he wasn’t doing admin work), had debts to pay off, and couldn't expect to get any help from his family.
The important thing, though, the part I distinctly remember, was that Oliver was looking at a video of a wading bird Austin had recorded. An egret, maybe. White feathers, long black legs, pointy black beak. Austin must have been standing on a ledge above a creek, because he had an overhead view of the bird as it stood in the water, slowly and deliberately stretching and retracting its neck, eyeing the wriggling little shadows below. As far as the fish could know, they were swimming around a pair of reeds growing out of the silt. The predator from which they extended was of a world beyond their understanding and out of their reach.
The video ended. Oliver moved on to the next item: a photograph of the bird from the same perspective, with a fish clamped in its beak. Water droplets flung from the victim's thrashing tail caught the sunlight. And I remember now, I clearly remember, the shapes of like twelve other fish stupidly milling about the bird's feet, unperturbed and unpanicked.
Danny peered at Oliver’s phone and observed a resemblance between the bird—its shape and bearing, and the composition of the photograph—and a POV porn video shot from behind and above, and he told us so. Elaborately. He made squawking noises.
“And mom says I’m a degenerate,” Oliver sighed. “Can you practice your interspecies pickup artist shit somewhere else?” Oliver flicked his wrist, shooing Danny off, and held his phone in front of his face to signal that he was done talking.
Danny sagged a little on his stool and turned away. I sometimes felt bad for him. For all his faults, he had the heart of a puppy dog. He really did think of us as his tribe. There was nobody else who’d only ever answer “yes” when you asked him to pick up a shift, and he did it completely out of loyalty.
He was turning 29 in a week. I wondered how many people would actually turn out to celebrate with him at the Black Taxi. Kyle probably would—but even he regarded Danny more as a source of vulgar entertainment than a friend.
Then it happened again. When I turned to speak to Oliver, there’d been a pair of pool cues leaning side-by-side against the wall a few stools down. Now they were gone.
This time it might have been my imagination. Somebody passing by could have casually snatched them up and kept walking.
But a moment later I seemed to notice a second TouchTunes box protruding from the wall directly behind me. I let it be.
Marina returned from the bathroom. Danny rose and offered her back her seat with an exaggerated bow. Before she got settled, I asked if she’d like to step outside with me. She withdrew her pack of Marlboro Menthols from her canvas bag, which she left sitting on the stool to deter Danny from sitting back down.
Marina never minded letting me bum cigarettes from time to time. I couldn’t buy them for myself anymore; it’s a habit I could never keep under control, and was only getting more expensive. Like everything else in the world. About once a month I reimbursed her by buying her a pack.
The air out on the sidewalk was as hot as the air inside Twenty, but easier to breathe. After lighting up, Marina leaned against the bricks and sighed.
“I wish Oliver would fire Danny already and get it over with.”
I nodded. Marina rarely talked about anything but work.
“He sneaks drinks and doesn't think anyone notices he's buzzed,” she went on. “He steals so much shit and isn’t even a little subtle about it. He’s going to get Oliver in trouble. And he’s a creep.”
“Yeah,” I said. These were her usual complaints about Danny, and they were all true. “At least he’s better than Austin.”
“That’s a low bar.”
Three dirt bikes and an ATV roared down the lonely street, charging through stop sign after stop sign, putting our talk on hold.
“Remind me. You’ve got one semester left, right?” I asked after the noise ebbed.
“Yep.”
Marina was a marketing major at Temple. She’d had an internship during the spring semester, and her boss told her to give her a call the very minute she graduated. Her parents in central Pennsylvania couldn’t pay her rent or tuition for her, so she was a full-time student and a full-time employee at Avenue Brew. Her emotional spectrum ranged from "tired" to "over it." She’d been waiting tables and working at coffee shops since she was seventeen, had no intention of continuing for even a day longer than she had to, and feared the escape hatch would slam shut if she dallied too long after prying it open.
She’d considered majoring in English, like Kyle. She went for marketing instead. I couldn’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been kind of off all day.”
“I’m terrible.”
“Why?”
I gave dodgy answers, but she asked precisely the right follow-up questions to get me going about what happened with Heather the night before.
It was the new job. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a server at a Center City bar and grill. (That's where I met her; we were coworkers for about a year, and then I left to work Café Chakra because it was quieter and closer to where I lived.) When the place closed its doors and laid everyone off during the lockdown, she got a stopgap job at the Acme on Passyunk, and hated it. Then in March, she found a bar-and-lounge gig in a ritzy hotel on Broad Street. Very corporate. Excellent pay, great benefits. Definitely a step up. But her new employers made Irene and Jeremy look like Bob and Linda Belcher by comparison. It was the kind of place where someone had recently gotten herself fired for leaving work to rush to the hospital after getting the news that her grandmother was about to be taken off life support, and not finding someone to come in and cover the last two hours of her shift.
Heather seldom worked fewer than fifty-five hours a week, and her schedule was even more erratic than mine. At least once a week she left the hotel at 1:00 or 2:00 AM and returned at 9:00 the next morning. Neither of us could remember the last time she’d had two consecutive days off, and it had been over a month since one of mine overlapped with one of hers. She’d spent it drinking alone at home. All she wanted was some privacy.
I’d biked to South Philly to meet her when she got home at 1:30. The argument that killed our relationship for good began around 2:30, when I complained that we never had sex anymore. Heather accused me of only caring about that, when she was so exhausted and stressed that her hair was falling out in the shower. Quit the job? She couldn’t quit. The money was too good. She had student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, and for the first time in her life she could imagine paying it all off before hitting menopause.
So, yeah, I was cranky about our sex life being dead in the water. Say whatever you like. But at that point, what were we to each other? We did nothing together anymore but complain about work before one or both of us fell asleep. That isn’t a relationship.
She said my hair always smelled like sandwiches, even after bathing, and she was done pretending it didn’t turn her off. I told her she was one to talk—she always reeked of liquor. As things escalated, we stopped caring if her roommates heard us. “You want to be a father?” she shouted around 4:00 AM. “Making what you make? That poor fucking kid.”
We fought until sunrise, and I left her apartment with the understanding that I wouldn’t be coming back, wouldn’t be calling her ever again. I biked home and sat on the steps facing the cement panel that was my house’s backyard. After my phone died and I couldn’t anaesthetize myself with dumb YouTube videos or make myself feel crazy staring at the download button for the Tinder app, I watched the sparrows hopping on and off the utility lines for a while.
At 11:40 I went inside. One of my roommates was already in the shower, so the best I could do was put on a clean Avenue Brew T-shirt before walking to the shop and clocking in at noon to help deal with the lunch rush.
“That’s a lot,” Marina finally said. “Sorry.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. She was sixteen years my junior, after all, and just a coworker. She didn’t need to hear any of this, and I definitely didn't need to be telling her. But who else was there to tell?
She’d already finished her cigarette. I still had a few puffs left. She went inside.
I decided to call it a night.
The second TouchTunes box was gone—naturally. Danny had taken my stool, and regarded my approach with a puckish you snooze you lose grin. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just pay my bill, give everyone a nod goodnight, and walk the five blocks back home.
And then Danny disappeared.
One second, he was there. The next—gone.
Danny didn’t just instantaneously vanish. Even when something happens in the blink of an eye, you can still put together something of a sequence. I saw him—I seemed to see him—falling into himself, collapsing to a point, and then to nothing.
You know how sometimes a sound is altogether inaudible unless you’re looking at the source—like when you don’t realize somebody’s whispering at you, and can then hear and understand them after they get your attention? I think that was the case here. I wouldn't have known to listen if I hadn't seen it happen. What I heard lingered for two, maybe three seconds, and wasn't any louder than a fly buzzing inside a lampshade. A tiny and impossibly distant scream, pitchshifted like a receding ambulance siren into a basso drone...
I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain I remember a flash of red, and I have the idea of Danny’s trunk expanding, opening up as it imploded. A crimson flower, flecked white, with spooling pink stalks—and Danny’s wide-eyed face above it, drawn twisting and shrinking into its petals.
For an instant, Twenty’s interior shimmered. Not shimmered, exactly—glitched would be a better word. If you’re old enough to remember the fragmented graphics that sometimes flashed onscreen when you turned on the Nintendo without blowing on the cartridge, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It happened much too fast, and there was too much of it to absorb. The one clear impression I could parse was the mirage of a cash register flickering upside-down above the pool table.
Not a cash register. The shape was familiar, but the texture was wrong. I think it was ribbed, sort of like a maggot. I think it glistened. Like—camo doesn’t work anymore when the wearer stops crouching behind a bush and breaks into a run. Do you get what I’m saying?
Nobody else seemed to notice. The pool balls clacked. A New Order track was playing on the TouchTunes box. A nearby argument about about Nick Sirianni continued unabated.
Finally, there was a downward rush of air—and this at least elicited a reaction from the bartender, who slapped my bill to keep it from sailing off the counter.
“Danny,” I said.
“Danny?” Kyle asked me quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Danny?” Oliver repeated in a faraway voice.
After a pause, Kyle blinked a few times. “You heard from him?”
“God forbid,” said Marina. “When he quit I was like, great, I can keep working here after all.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Kyle. Did I ever show you those texts he sent me once at three in the morning?” The color had returned to Oliver’s face.
“No, what did he say?”
Oliver tapped at his phone and turned the screen toward Kyle.
“Oh. Oh, jeez.”
“Right? Like—if you want to ask me something, ask me. You know? Don’t be weirdly accusatory about it…”
I pulled a wad of fives and ones from my pocket, threw it all onto the counter, and beelined for the exit without consideration for the people I squeezed through and shoved past on the way.
I heard Marina saying “let him go.”
I went a second consecutive night without sleep. Fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to come in the next day.
The schedule. It’s funny. Oliver was generally great at his job, and even when he wasn’t, I cut him a lot of slack because I knew Irene and Jeremy never gave him a moment’s peace. But I could never forgive him those times he waited until the weekend to make up and distribute the schedule. This was one of those weeks he didn’t get around to it until Saturday afternoon. When I found it in my inbox, Danny’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
As far as I know, nobody who hadn’t been at Twenty that night asked what happened to him. We were a bit overstaffed as it was, and everyone probably assumed Danny was slated for the chopping block. The part-timers were, for the most part, happy to get a few additional hours.
Oliver abruptly quit around Labor Day after a final acrimonious clash with the owners. I never found out the details, and I never saw him again. Jeremy and Irene took turns minding the store while a replacement manager was sought. None of the supervisors would be pressured into taking the job; they knew from Oliver what they could expect.
About three weeks after Oliver left, I came in for my purchasing shift and found Jeremy waiting for me in the back room. I knew it was serious when he didn’t greet me with the awkward fist-bump he ordinarily required of his male employees.
“You’ve seen the numbers,” he said. Business for the summer had fallen short of expectations, it was true, and he and Irene had decided to rein in payroll expenses. My purchaser position was being eliminated. Its responsibilities would be redistributed among the supervisors and the new manager, when one was found. In the meantime, I'd be going back to the regular $11 an hour (plus tips of course) associate position full-time.
Jeremy assured me I'd be first in the running for supervisor the next time there was an opening.
I told him it was fine, I was done, and if he’d expected the courtesy of two weeks’ notice, he shouldn’t have blindsided me like that.
“Well, that’s your choice,” he answered, trying not to look pleased. His payroll problem was solving itself.
I racked up credit card debt for a few months. Applied for entry-level museum jobs that might appreciate my art history degree. Aimed for some purchasing and administrative assistant gigs, and just for the hell of it, turned in a resume for a facilitator position at an after-school art program. Got a few interviews. All of them eventually told me they’d decided to go in a different direction. I finally got hired to bartend at Hops from Underground, a microbrewery on Fairmount.
I’m still there. The money’s okay, but it fluctuates. Hours are reasonable. I’m on their high-deductible health plan. There’s a coworker I’ve been dating. Sort of dating. You know how it goes. In this line of work you get so used to people coming and going that you learn not to get too attached. I walk past Avenue Brew a few times a week, but stopped peering in through the window when I didn't recognize the people behind the counter anymore.
submitted by obeliskposture to stupidpol [link] [comments]
It's relevant to the sub insofar as it's about urban alienation and the working conditions at a small business run by IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE people. (I tried to pitch it as a story of the great resignation with a momentary flicker of cosmic horror.) It's based on a similar job I took on after getting laid off during the lockdown, and the circumstances of the main character's breakup are faintly similar to one I went through several years back (her job sucked the life out of her).
Without further ado:
* * *
It was getting close to midnight, and the temperature outside was still above 80 degrees. We’d locked up the shop at 10:15 and walked over to Twenty, the dive bar on Poplar Street, where a single wall-mounted air conditioner and four wobbly ceiling fans weren’t putting up much resistance against the July heat baking the place from the outside and the dense mass of bodies giving it a stifling fever from within.
Just now I came close to saying it was a Wednesday night, because that was usually when the cyclists descended upon Avenue Brew, the gritty-but-bougie craft beer and sandwich shop I was working at back then. Every Wednesday between March and November, about fifteen to twenty-five Gen Xers dressed in skintight polyester, all packages and camel toes and fanny packs, locked up their thousand-dollar bikes on the sidewalk and lined up for IPAs and paninis. They reliably arrived around 8:00, an hour before we closed, making it impossible to get started on the closing checklist and leave on time at 10:00. The worst of them were demanding and rude, and even the best got raucous and stubborn after a couple drinks. There were nights when bringing in the sidewalk tables couldn’t be done without arguing with them. Most were sub-par tippers, to boot.
After Wednesday came and went that week without so much as a single 40-something in Ray Bans and padded shorts stopping in to double-fist two cans of Jai Alai, we dared to hope the cyclists had chosen another spot to be their finish line from there on out. But no—they’d only postponed their weekly ride, and swarmed us on Friday night instead.
I was the last person to find out; I was clocked in as purchaser that evening. The position was something like a promotion I'd received a year earlier: for twenty hours a week, I got to retreat from the public and sit in the back room with the store laptop, reviewing sales and inventory, answering emails from brewery reps, and ordering beer, beverages, and assorted paper goods. When I put in hours as purchaser, my wage went up from $11 to $15 an hour, but I was removed from the tip pool. On most days, tips amounted to an extra two or three dollars an hour, so I usually came out ahead.
This was back in 2021. I don't know what Avenue Brew pays these days.
Anyway, at about 8:15, I stepped out to say goodbye to everyone and found the shop in chaos. Friday nights were generally pretty active, the cyclists' arrival had turned the place into a mob scene. The line extended to the front door. The phone was ringing. The Grubhub tablet dinged like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Danny was on the sandwich line and on the verge of losing his temper. Oliver was working up a sweat running food, bussing tables, and replenishing ingredients from the walk-in. The unflappable Marina was on register, and even she seemed like she was about to snap at somebody.
What else could I do? I stayed until closing to answer the phone, process Grubhub orders, hop on and off the second register, and help Danny with sandwich prep. After the tills were counted out, I stayed another hour to take care of the dishes, since nobody had a chance to do a first load. Oliver was grateful, even though he grumbled about having to make some calls and rearrange Sunday's schedule so I could come in a couple hours late. Irene and Jeremy, Avenue Brew's owners, would kick his ass if he let me go into overtime.
Danny suggested that we deserved a few drinks ourselves after managing to get through the shift without killing anyone. Not even Marina could find a reason to disagree with him.
The neighborhood had undergone enough gentrification to support an upscale brunch spot, an ice cream parlor, a gourmet burger restaurant, a coffee and bahn mi shop, and Avenue Brew (to name a few examples), but not yet quite enough that the people who staffed them couldn’t afford to live within a ten-minute walk from the main avenue where all these hep eateries stood between 24-hour corner stores with slot machines in back, late-night Chinese and Mexico-Italian takeout joints with bulletproof glass at the counters, and long-shuttered delis and shoe stores. Twenty on Poplar was the watering hole set aside for people like us. It was dim, a bit dilapidated, and inexpensive, and usually avoided by denizens of the condos popping up on the vacant lots and replacing clusters of abandoned row houses.
When we arrived, Kyle waved us over. He didn’t work at Avenue Brew anymore, but still kept up with a few of us. He was at Twenty at least four nights out of the week.
So there we all were. I sat with a brooding stranger freestyling to himself in a low mumble on the stool to my left and Oliver on my right, who tapped at his phone and nursed a bottle of Twisted Tea. To Oliver’s right sat Marina, staring at nothing in particular and trying to ignore Danny, who stood behind her, closer than she would have liked, listening to Kyle explain the crucial differences between the Invincible comic book and the Invincible web series.
I recall being startled back to something like wakefulness when it seemed to me that the ceiling had sprouted a new fan. I blinked my eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore. It reminded me of an incident from when I was still living with my folks in South Jersey and still had a car, and was driving home from a friend’s house party up in Bergen County. It was 6:30 AM, I hadn’t slept all night, and needed to get home so I could get at least little shuteye before heading to Whole Foods for my 11:00 AM shift. I imagined I passed beneath the shadows of overpasses I knew weren’t there, and realized I was dreaming at the wheel.
I was pretty thoroughly zombified at that point. Heather and I had broken up for good the night before, and I hadn't gotten even a minute of sleep. Calling out at Avenue Brew was tough. Unless you found someone willing to cover your shift on like six hours' notice, you were liable to get a writeup, a demotion, or your hours cut if you couldn't produce a doctor's note. So I loaded up on caffeine pills and Five-Hour Energy bottles at the corner store, and powered through as best I could.
I finished the last thimbleful of Blue Moon in my glass. Oliver wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a napkin and covered his mouth to stifle a laugh at the KiwiFarms thread he was scrolling through. Pool balls clacked; somebody swore and somebody laughed. The TouchTunes box was playing Bob Dylan’s “Rain Day Woman #12 & 35,” and enough bleary 40-something men around the bar were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to make it impossible to determine which one of them paid two bucks to hear it. A guy by the cigarette machine who looked like a caricature of Art Carney in flannel and an old Pixies T-shirt was accosting a woman who must have been a toddler when he hit drinking age, and she momentarily made eye contact with me as she scanned the area for a way out. Danny was shouting over the bartender’s head, carrying on a conversation with the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, who was sitting on the horseshoe’s opposite arm.
I never got his name, but when Oliver first referred to him as the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, I knew exactly who he meant. Philly scene kid par excellence. Mid-20s, washed-out black denim, dyed black hair, thick bangs, and dark, gentle eyes. He was only truly alluring when he was on the job, because he seldom smiled then—and when he smiled, he broke the spell by exposing his teeth, stained a gnarly shade of mahogany from too much smoking and not enough brushing.
“How’s Best? Marcus still a joker?” Danny asked him.
“Yeah, you know Marcus. You know how he is.”
So the Hot Guy had been working at Best Burger (directly across the street from Avenue Brew) ever since Pizza Stan’s owners mismanaged the place unto insolvency. (Afterwards it was renovated and reopened as a vegan bakery—which incidentally closed down about a month ago.) Danny used to work at Best Burger, but that ended after he got into a shouting match with the owner. I happened to overhear it while I was dragging in the tables and collecting the chairs from the sidewalk the night it happened. It wasn’t any of my business, and I tried not to pay attention, but they were really tearing into each other. A month later, Oliver welcomed Danny aboard at Avenue Brew. I hadn’t known he’d been interviewed, and by then it was too late to mention the incident. But I’d have been a hypocrite to call it a red flag after the way I resigned from my position as Café Chakra's assistant manager two years earlier—not that we need to go dredging that up right now. Let's say there was some bad blood and leave it at that.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving in and buying a pack of cigarettes from the machine—and then remembered that Twenty didn’t have a cigarette machine. I looked again. The Art Carney-lookalike was still there, fingering his phone with a frown, but the girl was gone—and so was the cigarette machine.
I had only a moment to puzzle over this before Danny clapped me on the shoulder and thrust a shot glass in front of me.
“Starfish!” he said. (Danny called me Starfish. Everybody else called me Pat.) “You look like you need some juice.”
He distributed shots to everyone else. Marina declined hers, but changed her mind when Kyle offered to take it instead.
She and Kyle had stopped sleeping together after Kyle left Avenue Brew to work at the Victory taproom on the Parkway, but Marina was still concerned about his bad habits, which Danny delighted in encouraging.
We all leaned in to clink our glasses. Before I could find an appropriate moment to ask Marina if I could bum a cigarette, she got up to visit the bathroom. Danny took her seat and bowed his head for a conspiratorial word with Kyle.
I watched from the corner of my eye and tried to listen in. Like Marina, I was a little worried about Kyle. He got hired at Avenue Brew around the same time I did, just before the pandemic temporarily turned us into a takeout joint. He was a senior at Drexel then, an English major, and sometimes talked about wanting to either find work in publishing or carve out a career as a freelance writer after graduating. But first he intended to spend a year getting some life in before submitting himself to the forever grind.
He read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. He relished the gritty and sordid, and had already been good at sniffing it out around the neighborhood and in West Philly before Danny introduced him to cocaine, casinos, strip clubs, and a rogue’s gallery of shady but fascinating people. (None were really Danny’s friends; just fellow passengers who intersected with the part of his life where he sometimes went to Parx, sometimes came out ahead, sometimes spent his winnings on coke, and sometimes did bumps at titty bars.) Kyle recounted these adventures with a boyish enthusiasm for the naked reality of sleaze, like a middle schooler telling his locker room buddies about catching his older brother in flagrante and seeing so-and-so body parts doing such-and-such things.
Marina hated it. She never said as much to me, but she was afraid that the template Kyle set for his life during his “year off” was in danger of becoming locked in. The anniversary of his graduation had already passed, and now here he was trying to convince Danny to contribute a couple hundred dollars toward a sheet of acid his guy had for sale. He wasn't doing much writing lately.
I was the oldest employee at Avenue Brew (as I write this I’m 37, but fortunately I don’t look it), and when Kyle still worked with us I felt like it was my prerogative to give him some advice. The longer he waited to make inroads, I once told him, the more likely he’d be seen as damaged goods by the publishing world. He needed to jam his foot in the door while he was still young.
I could tell the conversation bored him, and didn’t bring up the subject again.
The bartender took my glass and curtly asked if I’d like another drink.
“No thanks, not yet,” I answered.
She slid me my bill.
I missed the old bartender, the one she’d replaced. I forget her name, but she was ingenuous and energetic and sweet. Pretty much everyone had some sort of crush on her. Sometimes she came into Avenue Brew for lunch, and tipped us as well as we tipped her. Maybe three months before that night—Danny witnessed it—she suddenly started crying and rushed out the door. Everyone at the bar mutely looked to each other for an explanation. (Fortunately for Twenty, the kitchen manager hadn’t left yet, and picked up the rest of her shift.)
She never came back. None of us had seen her since. But drafts still had to be poured and bottlecaps pulled off, and now here was another white woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black tank top, a pushup bra, and a scrunchie, same as before. Twenty’s regulars grew accustomed to not expecting to see the person she’d replaced, and life went on.
“How’re you doing?” I asked Oliver, just to say something to somebody, and to keep my thoughts from wandering back to Heather.
“Just kind of existing right now,” he answered. His phone lay face-up on the counter. He was swiping through Instagram, and I recognized the avatar of the user whose album he hate-browsed.
“And how’s Austin been?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not even three weeks after getting over the jetlag from his trip back from the Cascades, he’s off touring Ireland.” He shook his head. “Living his best life.”
He’d hired Austin on a part-time basis in September. We needed a new associate when Emma was promoted to replace a supervisor who'd quit without even giving his two weeks. There was a whole thing. I'm having a hard time recalling the guy's name, but I liked him well enough. He was a good worker and he seemed like a bright kid, but he was—well, he was young. Naïve. One day he found Jeremy sitting in the back room with his laptop, and took advantage of the open-door policy to ask why the store manager and supervisors didn’t get health benefits or paid time off. Jeremy told him it "was being worked on," and that he couldn’t discuss it any further at that time. I understand the kid got argumentative, though I never knew precisely what was said.
Irene started visiting the shop a lot more often after that, almost always arriving when the kid was working. No matter what he was doing, she’d find a reason to intervene, to micromanage and harangue him, and effectively make his job impossible. A coincidence, surely.
It’s something I still think about. By any metric, Jeremy and Irene have done very well for themselves. They’re both a little over 40 years old. I remember hearing they met at law school. In addition to Avenue Brew, they own a bistro in Francisville and an ice cream parlor in Point Breeze. They have a house on the Blue Line, send their son to a Montessori school, and pull up to their businesses in a white Volkswagen ID.4. But whenever the subject of benefits, wages, or even free shift meals came up, they pled poverty. It simply couldn’t be done. But they liked to remind us about all they did to make Avenue Brew a fun place to work, like let the staff pick the music and allow Oliver and me to conduct a beer tasting once a day. They stuck Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, and Progress flag decals on the front door and windows, and I remember Irene wearing a Black Trans Lives Matter shirt once or twice when covering a supervisor's shift. None of the college students or recent graduates who composed most of Avenue Brew's staff could say the bosses weren't on the right team. And yet...
I'm sorry—I was talking about Austin. He was maybe 30 and already had another job, a “real” job, some sort of remote gig lucrative enough for him to make rent on a studio in the picturesque Episcopal church down the street that had been converted into upscale apartments some years back. Austin wasn’t looking for extra cash. He wanted to socialize. To have something to do and people to talk to in the outside world. He wanted to make friends, and all of us could appreciate that—but it’s hard to be fond of a coworker who irredeemably sucks at his job. Austin never acted with any urgency, was inattentive to detail, and even after repeated interventions from Oliver and the supervisors, he continued to perform basic tasks in bafflingly inefficient ways. Having Austin on your shift meant carrying his slack, and everyone was fed up after a few months. Oliver sat him down, told him he was on thin ice, and gave him a list of the areas in which he needed to improve if he didn’t want to be let go.
When Austin gave Oliver the indignant “I don’t need this job” speech, it was different from those times Danny or I told a boss to go to hell and walked out. Austin truly didn’t need it. He basically said the job was beneath him, and so was Oliver.
It got deep under Oliver’s skin. He did need the job and had to take it seriously, even when it meant being the dipshit manager chewing out a man four or five years his senior. He earned $18 an hour (plus tips when he wasn’t doing admin work), had debts to pay off, and couldn't expect to get any help from his family.
The important thing, though, the part I distinctly remember, was that Oliver was looking at a video of a wading bird Austin had recorded. An egret, maybe. White feathers, long black legs, pointy black beak. Austin must have been standing on a ledge above a creek, because he had an overhead view of the bird as it stood in the water, slowly and deliberately stretching and retracting its neck, eyeing the wriggling little shadows below. As far as the fish could know, they were swimming around a pair of reeds growing out of the silt. The predator from which they extended was of a world beyond their understanding and out of their reach.
The video ended. Oliver moved on to the next item: a photograph of the bird from the same perspective, with a fish clamped in its beak. Water droplets flung from the victim's thrashing tail caught the sunlight. And I remember now, I clearly remember, the shapes of like twelve other fish stupidly milling about the bird's feet, unperturbed and unpanicked.
Danny peered at Oliver’s phone and observed a resemblance between the bird—its shape and bearing, and the composition of the photograph—and a POV porn video shot from behind and above, and he told us so. Elaborately. He made squawking noises.
“And mom says I’m a degenerate,” Oliver sighed. “Can you practice your interspecies pickup artist shit somewhere else?” Oliver flicked his wrist, shooing Danny off, and held his phone in front of his face to signal that he was done talking.
Danny sagged a little on his stool and turned away. I sometimes felt bad for him. For all his faults, he had the heart of a puppy dog. He really did think of us as his tribe. There was nobody else who’d only ever answer “yes” when you asked him to pick up a shift, and he did it completely out of loyalty.
He was turning 29 in a week. I wondered how many people would actually turn out to celebrate with him at the Black Taxi. Kyle probably would—but even he regarded Danny more as a source of vulgar entertainment than a friend.
Then it happened again. When I turned to speak to Oliver, there’d been a pair of pool cues leaning side-by-side against the wall a few stools down. Now they were gone.
This time it might have been my imagination. Somebody passing by could have casually snatched them up and kept walking.
But a moment later I seemed to notice a second TouchTunes box protruding from the wall directly behind me. I let it be.
Marina returned from the bathroom. Danny rose and offered her back her seat with an exaggerated bow. Before she got settled, I asked if she’d like to step outside with me. She withdrew her pack of Marlboro Menthols from her canvas bag, which she left sitting on the stool to deter Danny from sitting back down.
Marina never minded letting me bum cigarettes from time to time. I couldn’t buy them for myself anymore; it’s a habit I could never keep under control, and was only getting more expensive. Like everything else in the world. About once a month I reimbursed her by buying her a pack.
The air out on the sidewalk was as hot as the air inside Twenty, but easier to breathe. After lighting up, Marina leaned against the bricks and sighed.
“I wish Oliver would fire Danny already and get it over with.”
I nodded. Marina rarely talked about anything but work.
“He sneaks drinks and doesn't think anyone notices he's buzzed,” she went on. “He steals so much shit and isn’t even a little subtle about it. He’s going to get Oliver in trouble. And he’s a creep.”
“Yeah,” I said. These were her usual complaints about Danny, and they were all true. “At least he’s better than Austin.”
“That’s a low bar.”
Three dirt bikes and an ATV roared down the lonely street, charging through stop sign after stop sign, putting our talk on hold.
“Remind me. You’ve got one semester left, right?” I asked after the noise ebbed.
“Yep.”
Marina was a marketing major at Temple. She’d had an internship during the spring semester, and her boss told her to give her a call the very minute she graduated. Her parents in central Pennsylvania couldn’t pay her rent or tuition for her, so she was a full-time student and a full-time employee at Avenue Brew. Her emotional spectrum ranged from "tired" to "over it." She’d been waiting tables and working at coffee shops since she was seventeen, had no intention of continuing for even a day longer than she had to, and feared the escape hatch would slam shut if she dallied too long after prying it open.
She’d considered majoring in English, like Kyle. She went for marketing instead. I couldn’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been kind of off all day.”
“I’m terrible.”
“Why?”
I gave dodgy answers, but she asked precisely the right follow-up questions to get me going about what happened with Heather the night before.
It was the new job. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a server at a Center City bar and grill. (That's where I met her; we were coworkers for about a year, and then I left to work Café Chakra because it was quieter and closer to where I lived.) When the place closed its doors and laid everyone off during the lockdown, she got a stopgap job at the Acme on Passyunk, and hated it. Then in March, she found a bar-and-lounge gig in a ritzy hotel on Broad Street. Very corporate. Excellent pay, great benefits. Definitely a step up. But her new employers made Irene and Jeremy look like Bob and Linda Belcher by comparison. It was the kind of place where someone had recently gotten herself fired for leaving work to rush to the hospital after getting the news that her grandmother was about to be taken off life support, and not finding someone to come in and cover the last two hours of her shift.
Heather seldom worked fewer than fifty-five hours a week, and her schedule was even more erratic than mine. At least once a week she left the hotel at 1:00 or 2:00 AM and returned at 9:00 the next morning. Neither of us could remember the last time she’d had two consecutive days off, and it had been over a month since one of mine overlapped with one of hers. She’d spent it drinking alone at home. All she wanted was some privacy.
I’d biked to South Philly to meet her when she got home at 1:30. The argument that killed our relationship for good began around 2:30, when I complained that we never had sex anymore. Heather accused me of only caring about that, when she was so exhausted and stressed that her hair was falling out in the shower. Quit the job? She couldn’t quit. The money was too good. She had student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, and for the first time in her life she could imagine paying it all off before hitting menopause.
So, yeah, I was cranky about our sex life being dead in the water. Say whatever you like. But at that point, what were we to each other? We did nothing together anymore but complain about work before one or both of us fell asleep. That isn’t a relationship.
She said my hair always smelled like sandwiches, even after bathing, and she was done pretending it didn’t turn her off. I told her she was one to talk—she always reeked of liquor. As things escalated, we stopped caring if her roommates heard us. “You want to be a father?” she shouted around 4:00 AM. “Making what you make? That poor fucking kid.”
We fought until sunrise, and I left her apartment with the understanding that I wouldn’t be coming back, wouldn’t be calling her ever again. I biked home and sat on the steps facing the cement panel that was my house’s backyard. After my phone died and I couldn’t anaesthetize myself with dumb YouTube videos or make myself feel crazy staring at the download button for the Tinder app, I watched the sparrows hopping on and off the utility lines for a while.
At 11:40 I went inside. One of my roommates was already in the shower, so the best I could do was put on a clean Avenue Brew T-shirt before walking to the shop and clocking in at noon to help deal with the lunch rush.
“That’s a lot,” Marina finally said. “Sorry.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. She was sixteen years my junior, after all, and just a coworker. She didn’t need to hear any of this, and I definitely didn't need to be telling her. But who else was there to tell?
She’d already finished her cigarette. I still had a few puffs left. She went inside.
I decided to call it a night.
The second TouchTunes box was gone—naturally. Danny had taken my stool, and regarded my approach with a puckish you snooze you lose grin. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just pay my bill, give everyone a nod goodnight, and walk the five blocks back home.
And then Danny disappeared.
One second, he was there. The next—gone.
Danny didn’t just instantaneously vanish. Even when something happens in the blink of an eye, you can still put together something of a sequence. I saw him—I seemed to see him—falling into himself, collapsing to a point, and then to nothing.
You know how sometimes a sound is altogether inaudible unless you’re looking at the source—like when you don’t realize somebody’s whispering at you, and can then hear and understand them after they get your attention? I think that was the case here. I wouldn't have known to listen if I hadn't seen it happen. What I heard lingered for two, maybe three seconds, and wasn't any louder than a fly buzzing inside a lampshade. A tiny and impossibly distant scream, pitchshifted like a receding ambulance siren into a basso drone...
I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain I remember a flash of red, and I have the idea of Danny’s trunk expanding, opening up as it imploded. A crimson flower, flecked white, with spooling pink stalks—and Danny’s wide-eyed face above it, drawn twisting and shrinking into its petals.
For an instant, Twenty’s interior shimmered. Not shimmered, exactly—glitched would be a better word. If you’re old enough to remember the fragmented graphics that sometimes flashed onscreen when you turned on the Nintendo without blowing on the cartridge, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It happened much too fast, and there was too much of it to absorb. The one clear impression I could parse was the mirage of a cash register flickering upside-down above the pool table.
Not a cash register. The shape was familiar, but the texture was wrong. I think it was ribbed, sort of like a maggot. I think it glistened. Like—camo doesn’t work anymore when the wearer stops crouching behind a bush and breaks into a run. Do you get what I’m saying?
Nobody else seemed to notice. The pool balls clacked. A New Order track was playing on the TouchTunes box. A nearby argument about about Nick Sirianni continued unabated.
Finally, there was a downward rush of air—and this at least elicited a reaction from the bartender, who slapped my bill to keep it from sailing off the counter.
“Danny,” I said.
“Danny?” Kyle asked me quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Danny?” Oliver repeated in a faraway voice.
After a pause, Kyle blinked a few times. “You heard from him?”
“God forbid,” said Marina. “When he quit I was like, great, I can keep working here after all.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Kyle. Did I ever show you those texts he sent me once at three in the morning?” The color had returned to Oliver’s face.
“No, what did he say?”
Oliver tapped at his phone and turned the screen toward Kyle.
“Oh. Oh, jeez.”
“Right? Like—if you want to ask me something, ask me. You know? Don’t be weirdly accusatory about it…”
I pulled a wad of fives and ones from my pocket, threw it all onto the counter, and beelined for the exit without consideration for the people I squeezed through and shoved past on the way.
I heard Marina saying “let him go.”
I went a second consecutive night without sleep. Fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to come in the next day.
The schedule. It’s funny. Oliver was generally great at his job, and even when he wasn’t, I cut him a lot of slack because I knew Irene and Jeremy never gave him a moment’s peace. But I could never forgive him those times he waited until the weekend to make up and distribute the schedule. This was one of those weeks he didn’t get around to it until Saturday afternoon. When I found it in my inbox, Danny’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
As far as I know, nobody who hadn’t been at Twenty that night asked what happened to him. We were a bit overstaffed as it was, and everyone probably assumed Danny was slated for the chopping block. The part-timers were, for the most part, happy to get a few additional hours.
Oliver abruptly quit around Labor Day after a final acrimonious clash with the owners. I never found out the details, and I never saw him again. Jeremy and Irene took turns minding the store while a replacement manager was sought. None of the supervisors would be pressured into taking the job; they knew from Oliver what they could expect.
About three weeks after Oliver left, I came in for my purchasing shift and found Jeremy waiting for me in the back room. I knew it was serious when he didn’t greet me with the awkward fist-bump he ordinarily required of his male employees.
“You’ve seen the numbers,” he said. Business for the summer had fallen short of expectations, it was true, and he and Irene had decided to rein in payroll expenses. My purchaser position was being eliminated. Its responsibilities would be redistributed among the supervisors and the new manager, when one was found. In the meantime, I'd be going back to the regular $11 an hour (plus tips of course) associate position full-time.
Jeremy assured me I'd be first in the running for supervisor the next time there was an opening.
I told him it was fine, I was done, and if he’d expected the courtesy of two weeks’ notice, he shouldn’t have blindsided me like that.
“Well, that’s your choice,” he answered, trying not to look pleased. His payroll problem was solving itself.
I racked up credit card debt for a few months. Applied for entry-level museum jobs that might appreciate my art history degree. Aimed for some purchasing and administrative assistant gigs, and just for the hell of it, turned in a resume for a facilitator position at an after-school art program. Got a few interviews. All of them eventually told me they’d decided to go in a different direction. I finally got hired to bartend at Hops from Underground, a microbrewery on Fairmount.
I’m still there. The money’s okay, but it fluctuates. Hours are reasonable. I’m on their high-deductible health plan. There’s a coworker I’ve been dating. Sort of dating. You know how it goes. In this line of work you get so used to people coming and going that you learn not to get too attached. I walk past Avenue Brew a few times a week, but stopped peering in through the window when I didn't recognize the people behind the counter anymore.
2023.06.03 15:38 MichiganMan48166 Have been digging thru the gazillions of pics on my old laptop & found two to share here.
 | My first attempt at hybridizing was with two Hibiscus moscheutos ~ a huge, pure red and significantly smaller dark pink. This one result was the only one worth the time & trouble and not long after blooming caught some Round-Up overspray and that was that. 😢The irises came with the farm and even tho not much to look at have a very prominent grape smell to them. submitted by MichiganMan48166 to flowers [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:37 PotableRecreat Building a house at East Legon will be difficult for any Ghanaian actor- Ekow Smith Asante » GhBase•com™-Everything & News Now
| | submitted by PotableRecreat to Happenever [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:37 Seglegs The dirtbag case for Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor? (Crank, Gamer, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance)
There are only a few posts in this sub about Neveldine-Taylor so it's time to rekindle the flame of these dirtbags.
I've only seen Gamer and some of Crank, but Gamer impressed me so much I'm at least going to try Crank 2 and Ghost Rider 2. Gamer has a great aesthetic that successfully encapsulates the 2009 era in which it was made.
https://letterboxd.com/floorit/film/game
Without doing research, it appears these two either got small-budget blank checks, or turned down more expensive work before getting Gamer, a fairly expensive ($80M today) blank check, and Ghost Rider 2 ($80-$100M today). Then they part ways and make their own stuff. Their only critical success is when one of them abandons the reality show quick-cut wild aesthetic.
https://www.reddit.com/blankies/comments/axuum5/the_case_for_including_neveldine_and_taylor_in/
submitted by Seglegs to blankies [link] [comments]
I've only seen Gamer and some of Crank, but Gamer impressed me so much I'm at least going to try Crank 2 and Ghost Rider 2. Gamer has a great aesthetic that successfully encapsulates the 2009 era in which it was made.
https://letterboxd.com/floorit/film/game
It's absurd to me that this aesthetic was likely planned before Speed Racer (2008) came out. This was the zeitgeist. If anything, it doesn't go far enough. ... The frantic cuts and zooms you see even in dialog scenes (the TV interview) are less common towards the end. What's there is awesome and unhinged.A mini on these two would be 7ish episodes if you follow both short solo careers. There's a new Hellboy that Taylor just finished shooting so you could coincide a series with that. It's just 4 movies in the Neveldine-Taylor canon.
Without doing research, it appears these two either got small-budget blank checks, or turned down more expensive work before getting Gamer, a fairly expensive ($80M today) blank check, and Ghost Rider 2 ($80-$100M today). Then they part ways and make their own stuff. Their only critical success is when one of them abandons the reality show quick-cut wild aesthetic.
https://www.reddit.com/blankies/comments/axuum5/the_case_for_including_neveldine_and_taylor_in/
Okay, okay, hear me out: Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have one of the most interesting runs as Blank Check directors in modern action history after the Wachowskis and maybe Nolan, and it's only four movies long. A duo that immediately made a name for themselves with a tight-budget action thriller that was a moderate success and made a decent amount back gets a short string of blank checks to do absolutely whatever they wanted (which, of course, meant making two of the most unnecessarily intense, terrible-in-a-sort-of-glorious-way action movies of the past several decades) before landing a high profile job on Ghost Rider 2, a movie which did fine and immediately ended their combined career for some reason. Neveldine directed the Vatican Tapes, a movie that managed to flop on a 13 million dollar budget, and Taylor directed Mom and Dad (the only film with any hint of the Neveldine/Taylor structure to be critically well-received and an excellent bonus episode), but they haven't worked together since Ghost Rider 2. Everything else about the two is also sort of incredible - they invented the Roller Dolly because they knew they'd need a rig that allowed them to shoot while roller-blading(!?), Taylor is still technically tapped to direct a feature adaptation of the video game Twisted Metal, and Neveldine lives on a farm and spent two years smartphone-free so he could focus on hunting and farming "somewhere in New York." Overall, these specific two friends seem like the absolute definitive vulgar auteurs, and even when their movies aren't very interesting, the directors themselves seem to have enough going on to fill a single, month-long miniseries with truly compelling episodes.
2023.06.03 15:36 SourceOfTheSpring Crave Café Now Open at 1200 East-West Highway
| | submitted by SourceOfTheSpring to SilverSpring [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:34 DONT_READ_THIS_OKAY UKRAINE: WHEN THE ONLY FACTORIES PRODUCING ANYTHING CREATE LIES
 | submitted by DONT_READ_THIS_OKAY to u/DONT_READ_THIS_OKAY [link] [comments] https://preview.redd.it/umhgxfnq2t3b1.png?width=878&format=png&auto=webp&s=99501307f15c787439f689be3993206461614c1c One lie after another is being manufactured by Ukraine currently which is then faithfully transmitted to western populations by a mainstream media industry exhibiting fervent jingoism rather than its previous endeavour, journalism. This is getting so blatant as to be highly embarrassing to western officials. This is the lamentable state of affairs in the western world today, one which it has gotten itself into several times previously in this century, notably immediately after 9/11 and then again on several occasions as regime change wars of choice were pursued. Like being only partially pregnant only having partial integrity is a rather dubious state of affairs. The decline to no integrity at all in an ‘All’s Fair in Love and War’ scenario is quite precipitous and that is where we find ourselves now. Russiagate was part of this too of course, the bending of facts to fit the news required due to the justification that an electoral accident brought a profoundly uncouth ogre to power was deemed justification enough. But how to recover from such presstitution? Having reached the absolute bottom of the barrel in a post-fact society do you then simply begin to swim in the dregs you find there? I get the distinct impression that is more or less exactly what is happening. The 24-hour news cycle demands ever more of the same and exaggeration and pushing accusations and viewpoints, opinion, speculation and allegation add much grist to the mill. It just takes discovering who or what is the target of the day and really, that gets pretty easy after a while. Then the feeding frenzy on that target’s bones begins and continues while the ratings rise. The big targets become very easy to discern when the big political beasts throw you some meat. Putin stepped on a minefield in 2007 when he blithely said Russia was not on the bus headed for a unipolar world run solely by the USA and its cronies. The signal very definitely went out at that point. Gone were the cordial invitations to gaze into presidential eyes at the White House, the audience with the Queen of England… all that kind of stuff that took place from 2000 to 2007 when he spoke to plainly were never to be repeated. The word went out. The president of Russia became a marked man. The articles, the innuendos, the negativity, every possible piece of venom was saved up especially for him. Then, the world went out that though he was a the target of choice the whole barrage was to be widened to include the entire Russian government. And so it has remained to this day. And now with knobs on. So, when Kiev, assisted via Langley either on the spot of by secure telegraphic means, generates some product from one of its lie factories the full potential for speculation, accusation, opinion, inference, narratives and talking points is realised. The 24-hour news day is filled for a while. Then another juicy bit of fevered imagination and CIA gloss emerges and away we go again. Putin and Russia are fair game with no consequences to be feared in being just as slanderous as you like. No qualifiers such as ‘alleged’ need be bothered with. Russia did this, that or the next thing, Putin planned this, did that and is responsible for whatever the news machine will lap up. War mode forgives a multitude of sins as was seen when all those who got Iraq or Russiagate wrong went directly upstairs to better offices, perks, pay and status. It’s what used to be the world in reverse. believe it or not there was once integrity. Now there is quite plainly none. Anything goes as long as it sells. And right now Ukraine sells. So the demand for its fabrications is high. UKRAINE: WHEN THE ONLY FACTORIES PRODUCING ANYTHING CREATE LIES https://preview.redd.it/x5ub1uus2t3b1.png?width=878&format=png&auto=webp&s=01f005ace7bb2e3f014af3a5b4818cc1b90cff72 |
2023.06.03 15:34 blaringbrunch4331 Building a house at East Legon will be difficult for any Ghanaian actor- Ekow Smith Asante » GhBase•com™-Everything & News Now
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2023.06.03 15:34 Affectionate_Air414 Unveiling Rational Insights Quran: Word of God or word of Man and convenient revelation.
I've tried to think of any logical argument in favor of islam concerning this verse but couldn't think of it once you examine the entire chapter it almost sounds like the product of a human author and its hard to dispute otherwise.
"O you who believe! Enter not the Prophet's houses, unless permission is given to you for a meal, (and then) not (so early as) to wait for its preparation. But when you are invited, enter, and when you have taken your meal, disperse without sitting for a talk. Verily, such (behaviour) annoys the Prophet, and he is shy of (asking) you (to go); but Allâh is not shy of (telling you) the truth. And when you ask (his wives) for anything your want, ask them from behind a screen: that is purer for your hearts and for their hearts. And it is not (right) for you that you should annoy Allâh's Messenger, nor that you should ever marry his wives after him (his death). Verily, with Allâh that shall be an enormity."
In the world there are many things going on like world hunger, genciode, slavery and back in the 7th century there was worse things going on in the globe for example in the americas during this time there 100 percent be human sacrifice going on which has been going on for Thousands of years and ended in the 1520s by Europeans, Allah didn't do anything to stop it, despite him being a universal God.
If you are telling me God almighty cares more that Muhammad doesn't like guests and is insecure of people talking to his wives if not behind a screen, sits back during other issues it just sounds ridiculous to be Revelation of God and you would agree with me if let's say hypothetically this wasn't in the Quran at all but was written in some other scripture like as if it was Revelation from joesph Smith you would indeed see how strange it is from that point of view.
if you use logical thought it just seems very strange and i can't think of any other argument against that point and it's not even just a few verses it's most of this chapter that makes it sound man-made, in order to fufil and justify the author's desire like in verse 33:37 I find it very strange that God, creator of the universe has commanded Muhammad to marry his adopted son's wife not for the typical reason it's critized but because it seems werid how God has more concern for Muhammad following his desire of lust rather than interfering with aztec sacrifice for example and many other things and instead of telling them its evil and immoral, what matter do you think is more important
he'd basically rather tell Muhammad Go marry your Adopted son's ex wife, that you desire so much i command you which seems like a human wrote it as a excuse and verse 33:38 "There is no blame on the Prophet for doing what Allah has ordained for him. That has been the way of Allah with those ˹prophets˺ who had gone before. And Allah’s command has been firmly decreed." From a logical point of view its extremely bizzare, this chapter stands out like a sore thumb.
submitted by Affectionate_Air414 to DebateReligion [link] [comments]
"O you who believe! Enter not the Prophet's houses, unless permission is given to you for a meal, (and then) not (so early as) to wait for its preparation. But when you are invited, enter, and when you have taken your meal, disperse without sitting for a talk. Verily, such (behaviour) annoys the Prophet, and he is shy of (asking) you (to go); but Allâh is not shy of (telling you) the truth. And when you ask (his wives) for anything your want, ask them from behind a screen: that is purer for your hearts and for their hearts. And it is not (right) for you that you should annoy Allâh's Messenger, nor that you should ever marry his wives after him (his death). Verily, with Allâh that shall be an enormity."
In the world there are many things going on like world hunger, genciode, slavery and back in the 7th century there was worse things going on in the globe for example in the americas during this time there 100 percent be human sacrifice going on which has been going on for Thousands of years and ended in the 1520s by Europeans, Allah didn't do anything to stop it, despite him being a universal God.
If you are telling me God almighty cares more that Muhammad doesn't like guests and is insecure of people talking to his wives if not behind a screen, sits back during other issues it just sounds ridiculous to be Revelation of God and you would agree with me if let's say hypothetically this wasn't in the Quran at all but was written in some other scripture like as if it was Revelation from joesph Smith you would indeed see how strange it is from that point of view.
if you use logical thought it just seems very strange and i can't think of any other argument against that point and it's not even just a few verses it's most of this chapter that makes it sound man-made, in order to fufil and justify the author's desire like in verse 33:37 I find it very strange that God, creator of the universe has commanded Muhammad to marry his adopted son's wife not for the typical reason it's critized but because it seems werid how God has more concern for Muhammad following his desire of lust rather than interfering with aztec sacrifice for example and many other things and instead of telling them its evil and immoral, what matter do you think is more important
he'd basically rather tell Muhammad Go marry your Adopted son's ex wife, that you desire so much i command you which seems like a human wrote it as a excuse and verse 33:38 "There is no blame on the Prophet for doing what Allah has ordained for him. That has been the way of Allah with those ˹prophets˺ who had gone before. And Allah’s command has been firmly decreed." From a logical point of view its extremely bizzare, this chapter stands out like a sore thumb.
2023.06.03 15:33 PotableRecreat Building a house at East Legon will be difficult for any Ghanaian actor- Ekow Smith Asante » GhBase•com™-Everything & News Now
| | submitted by PotableRecreat to u/PotableRecreat [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:31 NearbyRepublics Building a house at East Legon will be difficult for any Ghanaian actor- Ekow Smith Asante » GhBase•com™-Everything & News Now
| | submitted by NearbyRepublics to FacePlan [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:31 Monsterbeats76 Who Killed Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls: Hip Hop Homicides Officially Solved by Ivan the Great"
Ivan Law’s review of Holly Hood Who Killed Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls: Hip Hop Homicides Officially Solved by Ivan the Great Goodreads
](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1679089469l/103757023.\_SX98\_.jpg](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1679089469l/103757023._SX98_.jpg)))
Holly](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/103757023-holly-hood-who-killed-tupac-shakur-and-biggie-smalls](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/103757023-holly-hood-who-killed-tupac-shakur-and-biggie-smalls)">Holly) Hood Who Killed Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls: Hip Hop Homicides Officially Solved by Ivan the Great by Mr](https://www.goodreads.com/authoshow/27244902.Mr\_Ivan\_Law\_Sr](https://www.goodreads.com/authoshow/27244902.Mr_Ivan_Law_Sr)">Mr) Ivan Law Sr
My rating: 5](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5592978039](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5592978039)">5) of 5 stars
Holly Hood Who Killed Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls: Hip Hop Homicides Officially Solved by Ivan the Great
)
Finally, after a quarter of a century, Ivan law ravels who killed Tupac and Biggie. This is an amazing story, well written. We Finally Know Dr Dre and Ice Cube are behind the murders. -{Ivan Law} has Released a New Blog {Robo Cop: The Demo That Drove Dr Dre to Murder at {January 22, 2014}
{Ivan Law}, announced {The Murders Of Pac And Biggie Have Been Solved}The release of His new Blog and Videos, {Robo Cop: The Demo That Drove Dr Dre To Murder}, which {The Blog was published online and has been read by over a million readers and has spawned numerous spin-offs Like Who Killed Eazy E and all of the Pac murder Doc filmed after January 22 2014.
The blog has generated an appetite for more info on Eazy E murder and the Pac and Biggie murder case. date January 22, 2014, revised in 2015 and 16 the videos were made after my investigation had been turned over to law enforcement and I was informed by detective Dupre That Dr Dre and Ice Cube were official suspects.
The Blog and video have a worldwide audience Blog can be found on Google blogger the videos and YouTube to a worldwide audience we also have placed on Facebook and various websites relating to the reward for the Pac and Biggie Murders. can be found on Facebook as well as YouTube. Distribution Via Monster Beats}.
This new Blog and Video is released by {Monster Beats} and distributed worldwide by {Monster Beats}.
{Robo Cop: The Demo That Drove Dr Dre to Murder} has {one Blog 3 updates from the murder investigation and 3 new videos’} new songs that were recorded between {Recording period} of {2014-15 Blog Videos 2021 at {Monster Beats}. These {5 new Blogs and Videos} new Blogs and Videos are where {The audience heard in 2014 the original Music Demo by Ivan Law as submitted to Macola Records in 1987. In 2015 the audience heard That Ivan Law walked out on a record deal for beat making. And in doing so he left His musical work on the table for all to use freely. A very unselfish act. Ivan Law showed his fans the violent nature of Dr Dre. Ivan’s Blog contains the video of Michelle declaring, That Dr Dre Shot at her.
They also heard that Eazy E was the first to be Murdered with an Aids Injection. The Blog contains the Video of Suge Confessing to killing Eazy E With Aids Infected blood on Jimmy Kimmel and that Pac and Biggie would be Dr Dre next victims of Contracted hits after the Murder of Eazy E. The Blog also points out the fact that without the ability to kill people Dr Dre would not be who he is today.
In 2021, the video was released letting the world know that Ivan Law's name had been added to the Biggie Homicide Case file. Ivan Law is Responsible for solving the Pac and Biggie case. Dr Dre and Ice Cube are responsible for the murders.
However, the killers remain at large with a bounty of $100,000.00 on their heads for arrest and conviction. They remain at large pending the finalization of the investigation. Ivan declares the fact that Eazy E was Dr Dre's first victim. Since Suge originally was his flunky before he became a Rap Mogul. The audience has heard that Dr Dre was fired from Death Row and six Months after being fired the Pac and Biggie Assassinations took place
Ice Cube was The Second person to reveal to law enforcement that Pac and Biggie were Assassinated. The Video contains a Clip of the Rapper Ice cube declaring That Pac and Biggie were assassinated and only the killer would know that}.
“{Ivan Law walked out on a record deal with Macola records. Ivan Law created the sound of Hip hop and left his demo in Dr Dre pocket.},” said {Ivan The Great}. He went on to say that “{Eazy and Ruthless Records were the original stewards of the sound of Hip Hop after the Murders of Eazy E. Dre became the unjust steward of the sound of hip hop. The sound was created by Ivan law. Dr Dre would lose control of the sound of hip Hop to Tupac and Biggie; they were far superior as artists. After The Murders of Pac and Biggie, no one would ever take the sound of Hip hop from Dr Dre until the true Creator of the sound showed up and put him and ice cube in jail for Murder and took his sound back.}.”
“{I am Adding your name Ivan Law to the Biggie Homicide file.},” said {Lieutenant Thompson) I have Dr Dre Address I'm going to interview him for the Murders of Biggie) Said Detective Dupree}, {lieutenant & Lead Detective Biggie Homicide Case} at {LAPD Robbery Homicide}. “{We are going to get Dr Dre and Ice Cube too for the murders of 2Pac Shakur and Biggie smalls}.” Said {Detective Dupree}
{RoBo Cop: Is Dr Dre the Luckiest Man Alive or A Killer?} Tracklist
{The Demo That Drove Dr Dre to Murder}
{The Music, The Timeline, The Motive, The Murders and The Rise to Unprecedented Fame}
{Is Dr Dre the Luckiest Man Alive, or a Killer?}
{HollyHood Who Killed Pac and Biggie The Cover up}
{Pac And Biggie Murders: Officially Solved, Is Dre & Cube Responsible for the Hits On 2Pac And Biggie}
{Who Killed Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls,}
Additional Information
{Who killed Pac and Biggie? Were they assassinated, if so, why? Who are the men who benefited from the assassination of Pac and Biggie? Why was Eazy E. murdered? Was Eazy E. Dr. Dre's first contract hit?
Did Dr. Dre and Ice Cube kill Pac and Biggie, so that Dr Dre could maintain control over the sound of hip hop? #2Pac #Biggie #unsolved #Tupac All of the swag comes from real hood cats. Straight outta Compton, is 1980s gang slang, everything is a product of Eazy E.
Did Dr. Dre contract the hits on Eazy? Did Dr. Dre and Ice Cube contract the hits on 2Pac and Biggie? Why have Dr. Dre and Ice cube not been investigated? Is Dr. Dre an active serial killer? Did Dr. Dre plagiarize his music career?}.
View](https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166378048-ivan-law](https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166378048-ivan-law)">View) all my reviews
submitted by Monsterbeats76 to monsterbeatspress [link] [comments]
Holly](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/103757023-holly-hood-who-killed-tupac-shakur-and-biggie-smalls](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/103757023-holly-hood-who-killed-tupac-shakur-and-biggie-smalls)">Holly) Hood Who Killed Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls: Hip Hop Homicides Officially Solved by Ivan the Great by Mr](https://www.goodreads.com/authoshow/27244902.Mr\_Ivan\_Law\_Sr](https://www.goodreads.com/authoshow/27244902.Mr_Ivan_Law_Sr)">Mr) Ivan Law SrMy rating: 5](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5592978039](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5592978039)">5) of 5 stars
Holly Hood Who Killed Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls: Hip Hop Homicides Officially Solved by Ivan the Great
Finally, after a quarter of a century, Ivan law ravels who killed Tupac and Biggie. This is an amazing story, well written. We Finally Know Dr Dre and Ice Cube are behind the murders. -{Ivan Law} has Released a New Blog {Robo Cop: The Demo That Drove Dr Dre to Murder at {January 22, 2014}
{Ivan Law}, announced {The Murders Of Pac And Biggie Have Been Solved}The release of His new Blog and Videos, {Robo Cop: The Demo That Drove Dr Dre To Murder}, which {The Blog was published online and has been read by over a million readers and has spawned numerous spin-offs Like Who Killed Eazy E and all of the Pac murder Doc filmed after January 22 2014.
The blog has generated an appetite for more info on Eazy E murder and the Pac and Biggie murder case. date January 22, 2014, revised in 2015 and 16 the videos were made after my investigation had been turned over to law enforcement and I was informed by detective Dupre That Dr Dre and Ice Cube were official suspects.
The Blog and video have a worldwide audience Blog can be found on Google blogger the videos and YouTube to a worldwide audience we also have placed on Facebook and various websites relating to the reward for the Pac and Biggie Murders. can be found on Facebook as well as YouTube. Distribution Via Monster Beats}.
This new Blog and Video is released by {Monster Beats} and distributed worldwide by {Monster Beats}.
{Robo Cop: The Demo That Drove Dr Dre to Murder} has {one Blog 3 updates from the murder investigation and 3 new videos’} new songs that were recorded between {Recording period} of {2014-15 Blog Videos 2021 at {Monster Beats}. These {5 new Blogs and Videos} new Blogs and Videos are where {The audience heard in 2014 the original Music Demo by Ivan Law as submitted to Macola Records in 1987. In 2015 the audience heard That Ivan Law walked out on a record deal for beat making. And in doing so he left His musical work on the table for all to use freely. A very unselfish act. Ivan Law showed his fans the violent nature of Dr Dre. Ivan’s Blog contains the video of Michelle declaring, That Dr Dre Shot at her.
They also heard that Eazy E was the first to be Murdered with an Aids Injection. The Blog contains the Video of Suge Confessing to killing Eazy E With Aids Infected blood on Jimmy Kimmel and that Pac and Biggie would be Dr Dre next victims of Contracted hits after the Murder of Eazy E. The Blog also points out the fact that without the ability to kill people Dr Dre would not be who he is today.
In 2021, the video was released letting the world know that Ivan Law's name had been added to the Biggie Homicide Case file. Ivan Law is Responsible for solving the Pac and Biggie case. Dr Dre and Ice Cube are responsible for the murders.
However, the killers remain at large with a bounty of $100,000.00 on their heads for arrest and conviction. They remain at large pending the finalization of the investigation. Ivan declares the fact that Eazy E was Dr Dre's first victim. Since Suge originally was his flunky before he became a Rap Mogul. The audience has heard that Dr Dre was fired from Death Row and six Months after being fired the Pac and Biggie Assassinations took place
Ice Cube was The Second person to reveal to law enforcement that Pac and Biggie were Assassinated. The Video contains a Clip of the Rapper Ice cube declaring That Pac and Biggie were assassinated and only the killer would know that}.
“{Ivan Law walked out on a record deal with Macola records. Ivan Law created the sound of Hip hop and left his demo in Dr Dre pocket.},” said {Ivan The Great}. He went on to say that “{Eazy and Ruthless Records were the original stewards of the sound of Hip Hop after the Murders of Eazy E. Dre became the unjust steward of the sound of hip hop. The sound was created by Ivan law. Dr Dre would lose control of the sound of hip Hop to Tupac and Biggie; they were far superior as artists. After The Murders of Pac and Biggie, no one would ever take the sound of Hip hop from Dr Dre until the true Creator of the sound showed up and put him and ice cube in jail for Murder and took his sound back.}.”
“{I am Adding your name Ivan Law to the Biggie Homicide file.},” said {Lieutenant Thompson) I have Dr Dre Address I'm going to interview him for the Murders of Biggie) Said Detective Dupree}, {lieutenant & Lead Detective Biggie Homicide Case} at {LAPD Robbery Homicide}. “{We are going to get Dr Dre and Ice Cube too for the murders of 2Pac Shakur and Biggie smalls}.” Said {Detective Dupree}
{RoBo Cop: Is Dr Dre the Luckiest Man Alive or A Killer?} Tracklist
{The Demo That Drove Dr Dre to Murder}
{The Music, The Timeline, The Motive, The Murders and The Rise to Unprecedented Fame}
{Is Dr Dre the Luckiest Man Alive, or a Killer?}
{HollyHood Who Killed Pac and Biggie The Cover up}
{Pac And Biggie Murders: Officially Solved, Is Dre & Cube Responsible for the Hits On 2Pac And Biggie}
{Who Killed Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls,}
Additional Information
{Who killed Pac and Biggie? Were they assassinated, if so, why? Who are the men who benefited from the assassination of Pac and Biggie? Why was Eazy E. murdered? Was Eazy E. Dr. Dre's first contract hit?
Did Dr. Dre and Ice Cube kill Pac and Biggie, so that Dr Dre could maintain control over the sound of hip hop? #2Pac #Biggie #unsolved #Tupac All of the swag comes from real hood cats. Straight outta Compton, is 1980s gang slang, everything is a product of Eazy E.
Did Dr. Dre contract the hits on Eazy? Did Dr. Dre and Ice Cube contract the hits on 2Pac and Biggie? Why have Dr. Dre and Ice cube not been investigated? Is Dr. Dre an active serial killer? Did Dr. Dre plagiarize his music career?}.
View](https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166378048-ivan-law](https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166378048-ivan-law)">View) all my reviews
2023.06.03 15:30 blaringbrunch4331 Building a house at East Legon will be difficult for any Ghanaian actor- Ekow Smith Asante » GhBase•com™-Everything & News Now
| | submitted by blaringbrunch4331 to u/blaringbrunch4331 [link] [comments] |