I am re-releasing the rare album "buy product" as a bandcamp exclusive. Adam WarRock is featured on the track "Fuck Nostalgia." It also features some new bonus tracks that I added today even if you have grabbed it in the past. On a less-fun note, I am currently dealing with a shutdown at my dayjob, two weeks with no pay. This sucks about as much as you might expect it would. Despite that, I am re-releasing this album as pay-what-you-want just like all of my music currently is on bandcamp. If you are feeling generous, though, it'll be appreciated and either way i hope you enjoy the music and it finds a cozy spot on your home media server.
mikalkhill.bandcamp.com/album/buy-product
Alternately feel free to subcribe to the patreon www.patreon.com/mikalkhill or hit linktr.ee/howcouldyou to see a list of things you can support/listen to/use to send me money.
Thank you and I hope you are having a lovely holiday season.
Rebuking President Trump’s decision to pardon Jan. 6 rioters, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) staunchly vowed this week to continue falling down stairs in the face of an apparent fascist takeover. “I can no longer physically stand upright for a party that excuses a violent insurrection that targeted our Capitol,” the 82-year-old lawmaker said as he slid down a row of steps outside the Senate chamber.
It's been four years since I spoke to my now ex-wife.
I came home from work Sunday night. We'd been fighting, basically separated for about two weeks, though we had discussed trying to patch things up. What I had been doing was quietly going to the room I'd been sleeping in or sitting in the yard by the firepit with Tiberius. But this night, I walked in the door and she was sitting on the floor crying.
I should have kept walking. Should have walked up the stairs, closed myself in a room and put on Star Trek DVDs or read comics or whatever the hell I was planning to do at the end of my work week.
But I still loved her. So I put my bag down on the couch and sat on the floor in front of her. Asked what was wrong. She didn't make much sense and I figured out after that she was drunk and full of cocaine. She was crying and I tried to be comforting and I don't know how, but it became an arguement. I was ready to walk away and she looked up at me and said "I want you to know, I'll remember this: I hate you."
And then she punched me in the throat, jaw and eye.
I immediately walked away, locked the door and reported it. I was just trying to firm up my divorce case, I told the operator who took my call. (I had an appointment with a lawyer a couple days after.)
The cops showed up, arrested her and talked to me, took pictures.
I didn't sleep that night. The adrenaline crash after the cops left wrecked me and I still couldn't close my eyes. My voice was rough and raspy from the throat punch. Her parents drove three hours and change to bail her out.
I talked to a DV advocate assigned by the city. They kept me out of the courtroom during her trial. (They put me in the room they usually keep abused kids in, so I spent an hour or two sitting in a beanbag chair reading the comics I brought until they told me she plead guilty and I didn't have to testify.)
(Another aside-- I was told that despite her confession the night she was arrested, my report to the police; if I hadn't been willing to testify, she'd have walked.)
My ex wouldn't leave the house, our house, despite the police telling her to stay away from me. I ended up scrambling to find a place to live.
Shortly after the divorce was finalized, I spent a week in the hospital. I'd fought so hard to keep everything together until I couldn't maintain it. I was diagnosed with PTSD. Realized that it wasn't the fact that I was getting older or whatever and that wasn't why my memory was getting worse. Why I was forgetting periods of time.
I have the video of her getting arrested. I didn't trust her or the cops to somehow wiggle out of the charges, so I saved the doorbell camera footage. They pop up in my photo memories every year around this time.
I've never watched them.
The past week, I've been having bad flashbacks. Blacking out. Crying in my sleep. Woke up the other day with dried tears on my face.
I'm really not sure if watching the videos will help or hurt.
I realized that I haven't updated this page in, what, almost ten years? I guess I can give a quick rundown of my life since then.
Okay, so, I moved from cooking professionally to FOH. I started bartending and I'm really fucking good at it, if I may say so myself. Bounced around a few places, managed a couple of spots. Like I said, I'm good at my job. Got interviewed by a few local publications, even did the weirdest interview I could possibly imagine with a men's magazine.
Anyway.
I started dating a woman and it started really great. We clicked and got along insanely well and we ended up getting married. It was weird and fun and we adopted a dog, Tiberius, and we had a pretty healthy relationship until her substance abuse problems came back after COVID. It ended after I came home from work one night, found her crying on the living room floor. I tried to comfort, find out what was wrong and, I'll be honest, the events caused me to block a lot of the night from my memory. I remember talking to her. Her crying. And nothing. Until she said "I want you to know, I'll remember this. I hate you." And punched me in the neck and face.
So, after filing paperwork for a restraining order and a DV trial and a divorce...
Pfft.
Okay. I thought I had more of this in me today and I was very wrong.
I know the what’s-going-on-in-rural-America line has lately been well traveled among journalists, among we who make up “the media” that millions of voters mistrust and perceive as out of touch and condescending. But my curiosity isn’t clinical. All year, opening Facebook and hearing from family, what I felt was real and growing alarm. I was baffled at how people I knew could push aside facts and evidence to buy into an infomercial selling a quick fix. The presidential election seems to have turned the Show-Me State in which I was raised into the Show-You State, raising two big middle fingers to crybaby protesters and self-interested liberals and entitlement abusers, even as the disability and farm-subsidy checks keep going out (and getting cashed).
I grew up in Mexico, Missouri, but the election makes me wonder if I ever really knew it
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