Stories of Q
DAY 4 - CANDIDATE Q. The End of The Beginning...
Guys in the back of the J Series pick-up flipped Q. the bird, laughter and dust swirling as their truck sped off. Middle of nowhere, he laid his backpack down and watched two more RVs motor past. Like they didn’t have room to give a guy a lift. When the woman’s car crept up beside him he thought it was another wind-up. She pushed her purple shades up on top of her head and looking at Q. patted the passenger seat. Hour later they were hot fucking behind a Winston Lights billboard. And she took care of the check in some swanky uptown joint.
“You cannot allow any of your people to avoid brutal facts. If they start living in a dream world, it’s going to be bad. […] Find the enemy that wants to end this experiment in American democracy and kill every one of them until they’re so sick of the killing that they leave us and our freedoms intact.”
– General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis
DAY 3 - CANDIDATE Q. The End of The Beginning...
A bit late to the gate but turns out Q.’s flare for making pictures means he’s on his way to Cooper Union, or should’a been. Had this thing about wheat pasting characters who worked in the neighbourhood. Chef Louis from the diner, Diego who sold books on the sidewalk, mad Harley who wheeled four dogs about in her customised shopping cart… Everyone loved ‘em, the paste ups. Until someone didn’t. Pushed him down some basement stairs, broke his leg in three places. Missed the interview for college, of course. Didn’t try again.
“War in its essence is another form of capitalism. Wars make people rich – and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people’s lives away from them. So much of the war that is happening is the attempt by one group to snatch the resources of another group.”
– Bell Hooks
DAY 2 - CANDIDATE Q. The End of The Beginning...
Just him and ma these days sharing a room in Chicago. This is during Mayor Daley’s time. Place was pretty grim but the people, the street got together, they organised. Q’s ma is one of the women saying to district officials that their kids needed a playground. Mayor must’ve thought that dangerous ‘cos the next day they heard their street was gonna be tore down. Called it urban renewal.
“Less comic-book aberration, more an embodiment of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarisation that’s overtaken American politics, to growing populist contempt for expertise” – Michiko Kakutani
DAY 1 - CANDIDATE Q. The End of The Beginning...
Sitting on the stoop, sunlight dappling through the trees, warming his face, boy didn’t see it coming. Just felt the heft o’ that fat roll o’ comics Jed’d set alight to and hit him square in the face. Too shocked to make a noise, eyes burning, nose a bloody mess and tears, and the sticky remains of that fine pink bubble he’d just been quietly proud of. Ma and grandpa saw it all, couldn’t say nothing o’ course.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.” – Hannah Arendt
