Punish the villains. (Also, Swedish Death Cleaning 2026: items 10 - 11)

I went to bed last night as election returns were still coming in, and Alonso was happy.

I was happy, too, just knowing that right-wing people were unhappy, but I've been voting since my first opportunity in 1984 when I marked my ballot for Mondale against Reagan. I've spent the last 42 years watching the pendulum swing back and forth, with Republicans figuring out more and more evil ways to ruin people's lives, and Democrats becoming more and more ineffectual.

In my dreams, I'll wish for Deb Haaland, the first Native American to become the Governor of New Mexico, to succeed so wildly that she later becomes President. But for the moment I am cautiously pleased and, come January when they all take office, I'll be ready to let my Blue Wave electeds know that the only reason I voted for them is because I'm overflowing with rage and it seemed like the barest minimum use of my energy to do so. Now they need, in the words of a friend of mine, to "reach across the aisle to wring some necks."

I want very serious consequences doled out to the criminal, murderous people of this Presidential administration. Hakeem Jeffries said "The American people don't want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf." He has it half-right. We want the new wave of leaders to be aggressive, to establish practices and laws that help American citizens survive the current onslaught of corporate predators and substandard living conditions they created – and the Big Beautiful Bill that's saving its worst shit for 2027 – all of it enabled by weak-willed elected officials. My desire is for nothing as schoolyard as "getting even." I want the bad actors in government driven out and prosecuted for their crimes, punished, forbidden to return, and I want Democrats to get to work on that task. The short version: rain down hell on these Garbage Fucks.

In other news related to taking out trash:

If I weren't deranged, I'd have already discarded the cassette pictured above in the continuing practice of Swedish Death Cleaning (see here and here), but there is something wrong with me.

For my seventh birthday my grandfather gave me $5.00. In 1971 that was not an insignificant amount of money.

I had to spend it right away, obviously, so my mother took me to King's discount department store and I purchased Up to Date by The Partridge Family on 8-track tape. I had a small record player in the bedroom that I was quite territorial about, but I had convinced myself that 8-track was the way to go. There was an 8-track player in the car and in our living room, which meant that everyone could share in my pleasure, but no one else in my home shared my affection for that TV show and its fictional band, so this didn't work out as planned.

I spent the remaining money on the same record in the LP format. No one noticed that I had done this because no one was monitoring my limited financial activity, and even if they had, I'd have explained my need for copies across the range of formats and I would have done that repeatedly until I had worn down the opposition.

The LP had a book cover inside the sleeve. The albums by the Partridge Family always arrived with some sort of gimmicky item, a child-fascinating prize, the way cereal boxes used to contain little toys. An LP-sized publicity photo of the show's cast in the first one, a multi-colored, lightly psychedelic, plastic shopping bag in a later one, and a beautiful full-color book cover in Up to Date. You proved your loyalty to the Partridge Family – who were, to you, real musicians playing real music, in spite of unpartridgey names like Hal Blaine and Mike Melvoin plainly listed on the back of every record and that were cause for not much concern to you but that did push you to disassociate from inconvenient truths – by wrapping a school textbook with this cover. It was my math book and I felt very cool because I was.

How I got the cassette version you see above is outside of my memory. It certainly happened later in life. Probably a thrift store or garage sale, purchased as a reflex. The item itself is extremely vintage. Housed in a hard black plastic case. A fading paper label glued to the outside. AMPEX printed on the bottom. "Playable on stereo or monaural equipment." The cassette itself reads, "manufactured in Elk Grove Village, Illinois." It also refers to David Cassidy as "Dave," which is odd. These intangible qualities are why one holds onto something like this.

These details made me hang onto it for no logical reason. It's not like it functioned smoothly. Every tape player it met caused these impeccable songs recorded by The Wrecking Crew (see Blaine/Melvoin above) and Ron Hicklin Singers to sound like the entire enterprise's collective battery was winding down. It's not even the best Partridge Family album. That's Sound Magazine, and if you were a real one you'd know that already. Sorry to deliver the burn.

I started writing this part of the piece before the election and before what happened next, which was putting the cassette into a player and attempting to listen to it. Now it's destroyed. Mangled. The decision to part with it was made for me.

Determined to listen to something while I wrote, I put another vintage cassette into the player: The B-52s Wild Planet. It, too, gave up on life. I'd call it the player's fault but these tapes were really old, between 45 and 55 years. So...

The process of discarding can be easy, or it can make you feel weird about the passing of time. For me it's pretty easy. I don't hoard. I don't think my younger years were the best time of my life. I don't cling to objects. I do, however, cling to music I love, and I still have Up to Date on LP and CD because I'm not some psychopath who can just stop listening to 55-year-old bubblegum songs by a fake band. I deserve universal health care, the opportunity to witness Elon Musk and Donald Trump go to prison, and regular doses of sunshine pop until my own batteries wind down.