S.O.S.

This morning, I finished getting the warehouse set up, and yanked all the inventory from the physical store that will make the transition to the online store. Then, with time to spare before open, I walked down to my favorite coffee place, and noticed that the line for the food bank was the longest I’ve ever seen it. Over the two years our store has been here, I’ve made that trek every morning, so I recognize many of the faces in line — the usual customers, so to speak. But the last several weeks, I’ve been seeing a lot of newbies.

2024 was a profitable and successful year for Vortex, and for our neighboring businesses. 2025 has been an utter shitshow. The fault is squarely on the current administration’s economy. This isn’t something they “inherited”. This is all objectively due to economic policies they have put in place over the last ten and a half months.

I am neither a Republican or a Democrat, and this is something that leaves my friends in both of those clubs confused. But that confusion must pale in comparison to the confusion that my friends on the Right are experiencing this morning.

Because it turns out that the party who — for most of my adult life — has full-throatedly professed to be against big government, federal overreach, a police state, a surveillance state, foreign intervention, taxation without representation, lax sentencing for crimes, activist judges, and a host of other things … were actually FOR all of those things the moment Jeffery Epstein’s best buddy was sworn in for a second term back in January. The party who claimed to be against the New World Order turned out to actually be okay with it, long as it was their side enacting it.

That’s what you voted for.

And yesterday, a majority of Americans voted against those things.

Only problem with that is that it doesn’t fucking matter. The opposing party has, thus far, been like a crossing guard on quaaludes, either afraid to stand up and mount an actual political resistance movement when there was still time, or — like my homeboy John Fetterman — playing footsie with the other side in a ill-fated attempt at self preservation. (Seriously. I’ve never seen anyone blow through so much good will in such short a time. How does that lobbyist teat taste, John?) Maybe the opposing party got some juice from yesterday’s election results. Maybe they’ll find their balls again. But I suspect it’s too little, too late. The current administration will continue looting the national coffers, ignoring the rule of law, expanding the surveillance and police states, and wiping its ass with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, because they have been getting away with it for a year now, all while the economy continues its grim slide downward.

Or, who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the economic policies of Jeffery Epstein’s best buddy will suddenly start working in their 12th month. Or maybe the opposition will actually grow a fucking pair, instead of their performative yammering on social media and the morning news talk show churn.

But I don’t think they will.

Fifty-eight years on this planet has been enough to teach me that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Time, as Alan Moore and Thomas Ligotti both wrote, is a flat circle, and ka, as Steve King wrote, is a wheel upon which no one can stand for long — a wheel that, in the end, always comes round to the same place again.

Or, in the words of Motley Crue, it’s the same old situation. The rich will get richer. The poor will get poorer.

But at least I will have time to write again, soon. As I packed up Jesus and Dave’s ashes this morning, I said “Well boys. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. But we damn sure tried, didn’t we? I wonder what will happen next…?”

Their answer, sent across the aether, indicates that either our sense of humor still exists in whatever place our consciousness goes to after this… or things are going to get much worse.

Either way, once the physical store closes, I suppose I’ll have more time to write about all that, as it happens.

~

My dear friend Laurel Hightower has a new book out. It kicks all sorts of ass. You can get it here in paperback and for Kindle.