postcard from PA
Dear Buttondown,
Thanks for your email pointing out I haven’t written anything in a while. To answer your question about whether I’m having technical issues: No. It’s not you, it’s me.
I’ve been spending the large majority of my time at the volunteer spot, working my ass off in a warehouse without air conditioning. It’s the best job I’ve ever had (more on that in a bit). But it’s physically and mentally exhausting, and when I get home at night I have nothing left to give.
And part of me thinks “who wants to hear my trivial stories when there’s a genocide happening in Gaza, people in this country are being kidnapped and disappeared by men in masks, and (enter latest awful news item here)?”
But since several people have emailed or texted me asking WTF is happening in DC right now, here goes: I do not know because I am not there. I am at my annual dogsitting gig in Pennsylvania. (Winston says hi. He is still a very good boy even though I’ve caught him lying on the bed. Twice.)
I do know that several things are true:
Violent crime in DC is the lowest it has been in 30 years, per the Justice Department.
But there is still a lot of gun violence in the poorest and Blackest parts of the city. For example: A stray bullet came through someone’s window last week, hit a water pipe, and flooded a home so badly that a woman and her two kids, ages 2 and 4, lost everything. They will get help from A Wider Circle, but we’re running low on warm weather clothes for little kids, so if you have any to donate, please do.)
The felon-in-chief is hoping the (brown and Black) locals will get angry and throw rocks, so he can justify using extreme force and blame the victims.
If you really want to know what’s going on in DC, or LA, or any other city where people are protesting, search TikTok for the phrase “music festival.” The social media platforms are suppressing videos documenting resistance, so, for now, people are using “music festival” instead.
Since we’ve gotten this far, I might as well include a couple fun stories from the last several months of volunteering:
Happy volunteer
I think I already wrote about an incredible trove of vintage clothing that came in to the warehouse. A wealthy woman had presumably died and her family donated her clothes: More than 100 pieces of 1980s/1990s designer winter clothes in immaculate condition. Mostly YSL with some Escada, Ungaro, Armani, even a Chanel skirt.
Because these were all winter clothes, and it was only April, all of this was supposed to go into “overflow.” (A truck comes twice a week to haul out maybe 1,000 pounds of overflow clothes, housewares, furniture, electronics, and other things that are either not in season or not good enough to give to clients.)
I could not bring myself to dump designer vintage clothes into overflow bags. So I got the OK to reach out to vintage dealers. Sara from Get Shredded Vintage (store site) drove down from Baltimore, took most of it off my hands, and left A Wider Circle a fat donation check.
A week later I drove up to a vintage expo in Baltimore, where Sara was debuting some of these items. She was slammed, but texted me later: “The cobalt YSL blazer went to a Johns Hopkins University pediatric lung specialist for lectures, and the leopard skirt/scarf combo to a fashion historian.”
Happy client
My job is to dig through the 500 pounds of clothing that comes in every single day, and send only the best stuff upstairs to the boutique. One day I was upstairs fetching more hangers when I saw a client come out of the dressing room. A petite woman, maybe my age, in a white pantsuit that fit her like it had been custom tailored. The contrast between her dark skin and the white fabric was so striking, she was GLOWING. All the volunteers stopped in their tracks to gawk at this supermodel, who was grinning and walking around the boutique making jokes like, “Can I see your boarding pass?” THIS is why I bust my ass downstairs.
Happy sorting
Downstairs on a busy Saturday. I am looking at a box that just got dumped on top of other donations. In my peripheral vision, someone is standing six feet away, outside the bathroom door. After a few seconds, he says to me, “Is anyone in the bathroom?”
I look up and, OK, I am not going to type his name here. If you know anything about DC punk/hardcore bands, DIY, straight-edge, etc., I’m talking about the person at the top of that pyramid. I guess he was dropping off donations and needed to pee. “You can knock on the door,” I tell him. Someone comes out, he goes in, and I turn my attention back to the box.
A minute later he is standing next to me. It is his box of donations. Everything is clean and folded neatly. I hold up a shirt, trying to make sense of the Italian text. He says he thinks it’s from an international film festival. Says someone sent it to him.
“People must send you a lot of stuff, huh?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “I get a lot of stuff.”
I thank him for his donations. He smiles, says “well, happy sorting,” and leaves.
DC is so small sometimes.
Links
In which Mike Masnick nails the archetypes of who goes MAGA. (Techdirt.)
Bobby leaving the tanning salon four blocks from my apartment. (TikTok)
Loved this essay about someone randomly paying off a school’s lunch debt. (HuffPost)
Heteropessimism is my new band name. (The Cut)
Why and how to leave Substack. (LeaveSubstack)
Paddie’s sister from another mister. I laughed so hard. (TikTok)
Yardman Ken FTW. (TikTok)