Ranney Campbell

California Dreaming

Mathew asked about you and I told him: hating Fauci; anti-vax; raw milk; your rightwingnut ex and her likely incel manosphere offspring feeding you dross in your isolation post-retirement while living off you and complaining about H-1B Visas (as if that’s what’s keeping them from getting jobs) and how even with this offal overflow you still didn’t know those DOGE boys lacking fully formed frontal lobes stole all of our data from the Social Security Administration. Matthew shook his head, saddened, then we took turns telling stories of our losses to opposing intransigent dogmas: a friend who moved to Portland, Oregon and then blocked him for attempting intelligent nonconfrontational conversation about cultural appropriation; my brother and fluoride; his brother who went Christian Nationalist, but quotes only the Old Testament; my friend the physicist, quite sane in the 90s, who might quietly support the repeal of the 19th and wants to move to Montana and that the last text he sent was that he hated everything there is about California when I told him it is the only place I want to live, though he has never been there. (I replied: he probably just would miss the single-use plastic bags hanging in trees and blowing the streets, but he hasn’t answered me since, even when I sent him a cartoon, skinny, sunglassed, funky-dancing Santa, “Merry Christmas,” GIF.) We hung our heads in the acquiescence we have developed. I quietly added, it’s been ten years since I lost my daughter to the South City SJWs, I never met, who taught her the word, “enmeshed,” and the action, “no contact,” and that I just want to go to where all the scientists driven out of the CDC, by experts the new administration found in the comments sections of YouTube videos, now are working.

 

Ranney Campbell is a former journalist and artist and author of the poetry chapbooks, Pimp, and Charcoal and Ink, the desert so, and Caddish. Other of her work has published in Reed Magazine, Storm Cellar, and elsewhere. She currently is an adjunct writing professor.