Having a Heart for Those in Misery

What am I doing? Eating a waffle fry.

How does it taste? Not so good.

Howdy! I wrote the bones of this newsletter several weeks ago, but I didn’t like what I wrote or how it read, so I abandoned it and carried on with my life. But I wrote it, it’s all true, and I’m not sure that a newsletter is a good reason to worry about the quality of one’s writing, especially when one largely writes nothing at all.

Side note: Yesterday was my little brother Matthew’s birthday, as well as my dear friend Frank’s—so happy birthday to them!!

Story Time:

On September 3rd I went for a walk in the evening, a little later than usual, and I was a few minutes away from home when I heard gunshots just down the street. And a lot of them, like thirty rounds in less than 10 seconds. There was a pause, then more shots. 

I’ve lived in Kansas City for a half decade now, so I’m very familiar with this sound. In July, some friends and I stood about 10 feet away from a 16-something-year-old boy firing shots from a car while stopped at a red light—and I think this was the closest any of us had ever been to stray bullets.

When I lived in Westport, I woke up to the sound of gunshots quite regularly. On a side note, I woke up frequently from other noises as well—upstairs neighbors in high heels returning home shit-faced, arsonists getting crazy, car alarms blaring in our parking lot as they were hot-wired one by one, and Lost Souls yelling aloud their drug-induced mantras for the night. But the gunshots I heard while on my walk were especially loud, resounding like an uninterrupted expulsion of bullets, and were, from what I could tell, ricocheting off of metal. They were the sounds of a semi-automatic weapon.

So I hid behind a tree until the noise stopped. When the ringing in my ears started to dissipate, I stood up, but I only made it a few steps toward home before a truck came screeching around the corner, headed in my direction. The backfiring engine made it sound like the vehicle might explode at any moment. When I realized the truck’s headlights were casting a blue-tinted spotlight on my body, I laid down on the sidewalk and held my breath. The truck’s driver was clearly removing himself from a situation with great haste. The vibe was very bad.

The truck passed me, I walked home quickly, and then they started arriving from all directions: the ambulances, firetrucks, police cars, then a helicopter. I said to myself, as I do every time my innocent Chevy Spark strikes yet another rogue pothole so hard that I’m sure a tire will instantly eject from its axle, every time city officials decide to remove benches and covers from bus stops presumably to make the poor and miserable even more poor and miserable, and most especially, every time I hear gunshots within a too-close-for-comfort radius: that I fucking hate this city. And this time I couldn’t help but think of all of the gun-loving folk in rural areas and suburbs who vote against stricter gun laws in the same breath that they demonize “inner-city crime.” They will always vote for easily-accessible weapons when it isn’t their neighbors’ or child’s blood staining street corners and elementary school desks.

But I digress.

~*~*~

The night of this particular shooting I changed up my walking route. More specifically, I walked to the end of my driveway and did something for the first time since moving to my new place—I paused. I looked left toward my usual route dotted with beautiful homes, cottage core yards designed to impress (and they do, I love them), and streets lined with the kinds of trees that definitely have secrets. Then I looked to my right, toward the direction I didn’t want to walk in, and back again toward the neighborhood of victorian exteriors carpeted in invasive Ivy, Weeping Willows, and walkways lined with Darby roses. But because the sun had just set and tree-canopied Hyde Park is sparse in streetlights, I decided, with an air of disappointment, to walk what I deem the Ugly Way.

On the ugly route, I happened upon a surprisingly large mushroom that had emerged from a little plot of grass imprisoned between the sidewalk and a tall cinderblock wall. Just a few days prior to this, I’d watched a movie called Misericordia and glimpsed in this story of unrequited love, how fungi and death are inextricably intertwined. On all of my walks in this city where I live, I’d never seen a mushroom like this one. This, I thought, is the kind of mushroom you find somewhere in the woods, not confined by concrete. I of course thought immediately of death.

The mushroom was like a bouncy, fleshy sponge, and I wondered what life-form had nourished this section of earth. A bird? A baby bunny? A squirrel? I wanted to pull the beautiful little beast from the ground and take it home with me, but I didn’t. Instead, I stared at it, poked it a few more times, recalled past memories of decay, and then took a photo to immortalize this strange and brilliant organism—member of a one-billion-year-old species and a kingdom more closely related to animal than plant. Not to mention, a trusted messenger for the trees.

I walked another few minutes, then the shots rang out.

I haven’t yet mentioned how grateful I was that I changed up my route that night, because instead of being on Armour & Harrison—the home stretch of my cottage core route—around 9 PM on September 3rd when the shooting occurred, I was exactly one block north and had just turned a corner.

~*~*~

I woke up at 3 AM that night, unable to sleep, and Googled “Kansas City shooting” to see if anyone had been injured. The first article listed was egregiously titled Kansas City police search for suspects after Hyde Park neighborhood mass shooting injures 5. One of the injured, I’d later learn, died in the hospital a week later. He was 23.

Why am I writing about this? At least two reasons:

• I want my friends to be safe. I want everyone to be able to walk down the street without having a bullet lodged in their kneecap or neck. I especially want people to know that they don’t look dumb for dropping to the ground when shots are fired. Preserving the fragile homeostasis of one’s ego really isn’t worth the risk of having hot copper and lead sever your carotid artery while on your evening stroll. Personally speaking, I know my ego has evolved over the years in at least one beneficial way, because it now shrinks, quite rapidly, when it hears gunshots—and I’m very grateful for this. Don’t be the person who stands immobile on the sidewalk and darts their eyes around in confusion when a hand that’s holding a gun is sticking out the window of a car that’s passing you by. I say this with love: there are way too many of y’all.

• I’m also writing about this because Kansas City’s crime statistics are not great, and by not great, I mean they’re really bad. I was made aware of this first on The Majority Report a couple of months ago, and later when I searched “Kansas City shooting” at 3 AM. The search results were bleak. Lots of homicides and shootings just in the previous week. A teen boy killed while walking at a South KC park, people shot in a parking lot near Power & Light, a pregnant woman shot while driving in her car (she was okay, but the unborn child died), people killed in a drive-by in Crossroads. The list goes on and on.

An article titled Homicides fall across U.S., but rise in KC states that homicides in Kansas City have risen by 12% since last year.

So we know things aren’t looking great when someone like me chooses to write about crime like a concerned suburban mom. This is where we are now. America is a hot gun being waved around like the crazy-eyed champion of a wedding bouquet toss. Instead of finishing my essay collection I’m writing a diary-style blog post about my city’s crime statistics. I suppose it could be worse. I could be heading a 1-hour press conference about a medication I can’t pronounce. Fox News could be my religion. I could look and talk and think like Stephen Miller. Horrifying. No thank you!

CONTENT TIME:

Movie: Misericordia | Below you will find an unstimulating Letterboxd review (No need to read it, hence it’s small) written by yours truly; however, it was written for Letterboxd, and therefore it isn’t actually a review but rather a long-winded way of saying I liked Misericordia, and “Misericordia” is a good word, and I think we all should have a heart for those in misery, today and always, and that mushrooms and absurdity and the existence of serene, rural French villages make life worth continuing—despite the despair of unrequited love and this corporeal plane’s surplus of tragedies and monotony... Despite it all.

Music: 

• Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands by Joan Baez. It’s quite long. It builds. Her voice is beautiful (and so is she).

• Something contemporary: System from Prewn’s new album.

• Also: But I Want More from Prewn’s 2023 EP that is quite good.

Videos: 

• This uplifting reel of Italy’s general strike organized by Italian dockworkers, or this longer video by The Guardian titled 'Our Genocide': How do Israelis feel about the war in Gaza? that’s pretty damning for Israeli society as a whole.

OR:

• This short reel about the catastrophic flooding in Western Alaska that there won’t be relief for. Thanks so much, Lee Zeldin, for being a despicable human being.

My psychic mother’s predictions: I’ve received no 2 AM texts from her since my last newsletter, so I have nothing to share here. Sorry.

Quote:

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”

― Albert Einstein

So what are we doing if we aren’t helping?

Taking care of ourselves and those around us I hope.

Sending love.

-HV