I was going to make a noose, but instead I made a basket.
The basket coils like a snake in wait, white string binding plain brown rope. It is small but taut. When I rest it on its side, it looks like an eye. I put it on my bedside so it can watch over me as I sleep.
The basket is too small to hold anything but my nightmares. But I know it’s working, because I used up all the rope for my noose.
* * *
I wanted to stab someone 8000 times. Instead, I cross-stitched an ancient design.
The design is a Mediterranean dream not my own. A four-square grid of dark blue and light blue: the cross, the star, the carnation, and the scroll, made of tiny x’s.
I like imagining that hundreds of years ago, a Byzantine craftsman stitched the same patterns as me. I do Palestinian embroidery, tatreez, for similar reasons. I want to learn from a past that persists to the present: a strike against genocidaires who insist that Palestinian culture never existed.
I also do tatreez because it’s attractive. Why is it so hard for some to see the beauty? Maybe this is not a question to ask of those who abide the mass murder of children. People who violate universal taboos are not going to understand art or life or love.
It takes me about a month to stab something 8000 times. To X out so much that my stabbing forms intricate shapes and the X’s blend into a restorative whole. From a distance, there is no X in the fabric at all.
I stabbed X so many times that a new and tranquil world took its place.
As I embroidered, Santorini — where I spent my honeymoon decades ago; Santorini, where the inspiration for this textile came — was evacuated due to earthquakes. I remembered riding a donkey by ancient ruins and eating octopus fresh from the sea, and my husband and I wondering when the Iraq War, then three months old, would end. By the time the war of lies was over, we were raising two children in a rotting husk of America, and Greece hated us with reason.
I dream of Mediterranean days. The soft blue thread makes me feel like I could still ride the waves, though I likely never will again.
I wove a cloth of rage, and when it was finished, I held a cloth of memory.
* * *
I wanted to beat someone to death, but instead I got a treadle loom. A loom is an ideal apparatus if you feel like murdering people but also making an appealing placemat.
The center part of a loom is called a beater. You slam it until you push the threads into submission. Before you beat the threads, you pull them through narrow metal slots, like prison bars for string, until they reach the other side. That thread is called “warp” because it takes a warped mind to create this contraption.
I am learning to weave from an 81-year-old woman who generously gave me her old loom and is teaching me how to use it. I asked her how to get the threads through the slots, and she informed me I would use a “slay hook.”
“Yes!” I said, wielding the s-shaped metal like a weapon until she gently told me it was spelled “sley hook”.
“I’m calling it a slay hook anyway,” I said. “Because I want to slay something.”
“Well, this part of the process is very boring,” she said, as I moved 120 strands of thread one by one, “so you might as well.”
I wondered what the spies using surveillance technology to track me thought of my new project. I hoped they were stuck watching my weaving lesson. I hope they groaned when they discovered that after pulling each thread through 120 tiny bars, I had to pull each thread through 120 tiny holes. I hope I bored them to death.
Excessive crafting is a standard Midwestern response to excessive stress. I would be a model Midwestern housewife if I didn’t despise these people with every fiber of my being, and some fibers beyond it.
There were coyote tracks at the Missouri mine. They weren’t supposed to be there. No one understood how such a distant predator got in or how to keep it out. But that’s true about a lot of places in America these days.
We were wandering the ruins of Federal Mill Number Three, the largest lead mine in the US until its closure in 1972. For centuries, most lead came from Missouri. Ammunition for every war, toxic paint for every child’s classroom, noxious petrol for every parent’s car.
Lead spread from the heartland, made in America, and when we were poisoned, we were poisoned together.
Lead exposure makes you violent. It possibly created generations of psychopaths. But folks didn’t know that when Federal Mill opened in 1906. They knew the ground sparkled when they walked. They thought the earth was meant to be stripped down and sold for parts, because its bounty was infinite, and the country was new.
But lead was finite, like freedom. The mine closed after the minerals were extracted and the ground was useless and torn. A chart from the last day of operation stands in front of rusted towers, workers’ names frozen in the hour their world ended.
Missouri did what it always does in the face of self-made disaster: it turned the mine into a park. Federal Mill became the Missouri Mines State Historic Site. It has two museums and an ORV track nearby, where the ground is too toxic for straight hiking but still ripe for fun.
I’ve had a lot of good times in abandoned Missouri mines. I kayaked through one using a Hefty bag as a sea blanket and took a pontoon ride past a scuba diving pit in another. Missouri excels at turning wreckage into recreation. Our state has been living in the aftermath of the American Dream for a long, long time.
I woke up to a note I had no memory of writing. I scrawled it in the dead of night, a time I used to dread but now embrace, because the nightmare-makers sleep then too.
It is January 2025. The future has caught up with my prognostications and I’ve started rationing reality: as Shirley Jackson noted, too much of it makes you insane. But I’ve written the story of American autocracy so manydamn times that I can’t watch it play out at the speed of life. My mind works like a rigged redactor, drawing black lines over the sins of day.
Later my conscience gets the better of me and I remember what I long to forget. I write it down because those redacted lines stretch like a highway to the past. The past is precious: that’s why oligarchs want to erase it. The past is a gift, but living in it was a curse. I walked that highway like a time-traveling hitchhiker, thumb forever down.
Folks like to say that no one believed my warnings. I wish that were the case. The hard truth is officials believed them and let the worst happen anyway.
The first article calling me Cassandra came out in 2016. “A Cassandra of Trumpland”, it proclaimed, due to my observation that Americans were a betrayed people and my prediction that Trump would win and rule like a kleptocrat. In 2019, I got upgraded to “The Prophet of Flyover Country” for claiming US institutions were too corrupt to combat autocracy and the Mueller probe would do nothing to stop Trump’s takeover.
My predictions were obvious, the monikers ridiculous. I accept only one nickname: Cosa Nostradamus, because all I see coming is transnational organized crime.
Track the profit, not the prophet. America’s fortune’s been told and it’s sitting in offshore accounts.
* * *
I open the note to see what I wrote to myself.
“I Been Right So Long, I Been Done Wrong,” it said at the top. Underneath, I wrote: “(Kendzior Blues)” followed by paragraphs of lyrics.
I started laughing. Who was directing my subconscious? Lightnin’ Hopkins? Tony Joe White? I could hear the melody as I read: I woke with a song in my head that I hadn’t known I composed. I hoped I hadn’t sung it while sleeping, for the sake of my household. But I decided it was okay if I had.
David Lynch had died the week before. I was mourning him along with everything else American. Twin Peaks is my comfort show. Its world reflects our Epstein reality — with the exception of its competent, imaginative FBI agent. I rewatch Twin Peaks because in the pilot, everyone is crying — the way you should cry when someone dies. Lynch’s work is surreal but never fake, in contrast to AI and its heartless facsimiles.
In 1992, Lynch was panned for telling the truth too early with the Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk with Me, and its raw exploration of female pain and exploitation. His film came out three months before Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope and was also punished for telling the truth too early — again, about power and sexual abuse. I watched their vindications over the decades, artistic and factual. I know they both would have traded vindication for justice, and that’s why I loved them.
Now they’re both dead, and the industries that never understood them are dying, and Americans are being sold scraped bits of plagiarized humanity in their place. AI will never tell the truth too early: that’s why authoritarians crave it. AI knocks out the inherently human power of subconscious pattern recognition. AI will never challenge authority. AI will never dream.
If you learn anything from David Lynch, it’s that dreams matter. Even if they’re wild. Even if they leave notes in the night that go a lil’ summin’ like this:
I been right so long, I been done wrong Lost the fight and all I got left is this song Singing a chorus but no one here to sing along A solo to a choir of liars in the midday sun Ten years of warning, in the end — it’s ten years gone.
I did the only thing a Missourian can do when they start writing the blues in their sleep: I went to the river.
* * *
The Confluence is one of my favorite places to go in winter. This is the spot where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers meet. In warm weather, you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. But when the rivers freeze, the Mississippi thaws first, turning a shimmering blue, while the Missouri stays a dull translucent grey with shards of swift-moving ice.
This January saw the longest stretch of freezing weather in St. Louis in decades, contributing to the stir-crazy feeling that made me pen the nighttime autocracy blues, but promising adventure once the cold receded. It was frigid on the day I arrived, but earlier warmth had melted the snow, making the trail passable. The wind whipped my skin as I approached the water, but I was so glad to be outside that I didn’t care.
At the Confluence, fading signs remind you that you are at the nexus of history. This is where two major American rivers collide, where Lewis and Clark set out on their westward journey. They left behind the Mississippi, that mighty river of pain.
When Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America — a change I acknowledge as much as the so-called renaming of Twitter — my first thought was how many songs he would ruin. And that music would be the reason the name would never stick, because the real America — the one Trump keeps approximating but never lands — is the America of country and rock and blues, of Memphis and New Orleans, of a river of mud that empties into a swampland gulf.
Trump is good at reading America the way a vulture is good at detecting prey. But he can never feel soul, and soul is what the river has to offer. Soul is safe at the river, even when your own soul hurts like hell.
On the way to the Confluence, I checked my email. “Despair is not an option!” an email heading proclaimed, which I thought was rude — folks need to know they have options! The emailer’s recommended remedy was to send politicians money.
My parents saw Elvis Presley live in 1976, one year before he died, and somehow didn’t tell me until last week. They had near front-row seats and my mom could see Elvis up close, stuffed into a white suit, gasping his way through the hits. He was sick and sweaty and slurring, suffering on the stage.
It was clear he wasn’t well. But they never thought that in a year he’d be gone. He was Elvis and they were Boomers. Elvis had always been there, and it seemed he always would be, even as he deteriorated. Whether you loved him or loved to mock him, Elvis was the star around which American pop culture orbited.
You never thought he’d just die on the toilet.
This is what it feels like to watch America in 2024. A fading star, a bittersweet song, every day feeling like a farewell tour. You are the audience but you are also Elvis: tired of performing for the benefit of people who hurt you, trying to remind yourself that the music still matters. The government is Colonel Parker, Elvis’s vicious manager, exploiting every fear.
You are never safe in America, even when you’ve made it — even when you are an “it” upon whom things are made. That’s the worst part, Elvis knew: to become a brand and lose being a person.
In his day, that was the model for pop stars. In the digital era, it is the model for everyone.
I asked my mom about Elvis because I’ve watched Return of the King, the documentary about Elvis’s 1968 comeback concert, a dozen times since its November debut. This was accidental: I was so exhausted that I kept falling asleep, forcing a nightly replay. I’d drift off to Elvis’s gospel howl and awaken to musicians analyzing the industry predators who sought to steal his soul.
Money was only the quotient indicating the degree to which he’d be abandoned, one said —
— and I thought about the insurance CEO whose policies killed tens of thousands before a masked man shot him dead and the president who helped kill tens of thousands overseas and then pardoned his son who was made wealthy through ill-gotten gains and how we were supposed to excuse their behavior because the incoming president is evenworse, a rerun kleptocrat whose own pardons are a rogue’s gallery of the worst Americans, some of whom he seeks to grant federal power along with the crypto sons of apartheid —
And then Return of the King would return to my screen, because this madness has a temporary cure. If you want to drown out the nightmare, you can — because there is still American music, the most reliable outlet for American pain. The well so deep it restores even the dead light in an icon’s eyes.
I don’t want my country to collapse. I want it to be redeemed, like Elvis in his 1968 comeback special. When he was truly himself, in all his contradictory appeal, the best and truest Elvis he could be.
When he didn’t know how little time was left and could find redemption outside of applause.
* * *
In 2017, my sister and I took our children to Graceland. Four kids under ten years old, mystified by the shrine to a pompadoured rando with shag carpeting.
“What’s ‘TCB’?” my nephew asked as we passed Elvis’s private jet.
“Taking Care of Business!” I exclaimed, not sure how to impart the irony of Elvis’s inability to do so. “The lightning bolt means he’s Taking Care of Business in a Flash.” My nephew side-eyed me, thinking this could not be real. That is a standard reaction to Graceland.
Inside we passed women weeping near stained-glass peacock doors and portraits of Elvis cased in gold. I’ve been to Graceland three times, and it’s always packed with crying pilgrims.
But Graceland is no weirder than anything else in Memphis: the hamburger joint that has been recycling the same grease for a century and had it transported in an armored vehicle when it switched locations; the Bass Pro Shop shaped like a giant silver pyramid with a live alligator pit inside; the ducks in the Peabody Hotel who perform a daily red carpet parade led by a formally dressed “duck master” before returning to their Royal Duck Palace on the roof; the vendors outside the Lorraine Hotel who, in an act of atrocious tastelessness, sold Martin Luther King shot glasses.
Memphis — so wounded, so wonderful, so wrong and so right, like its most famous resident.
The kids asked whether Elvis was popular when we were little. Yes, we told them, in the 1990s, Elvis was everywhere. Elvis had died before we were born — but had he, really? Or was he in hiding, spotted across the nation like Bigfoot? The rumor was an admission that Elvis had too much America inside him and had to quit before it poisoned him with the downers and PBB&Bs. (The third B stands for Bacon.)
You couldn’t go to the supermarket without a checkout tabloid proclaiming ELVIS LIVES. You didn’t kill him, they assured us, he’s safe, a safe honeychild of America, thankyouverymuch. The Elvis memorabilia industry exploded. The generation that loved him most had disposable income and they stayed loyal to their King.
Younger generations were more skeptical. In 1989, Public Enemy declared, “Elvis was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me,” condemning the racist industry that elevated Elvis while leaving the Black musicians who inspired him behind. Gen X learned American history from that song but forgot it decades later — or maybe they didn’t want to fight the power in the first place.
But we all rode the wave of inanity. The first person I voted for in a national election was Elvis. In 1992, the United States held a referendum: which Elvis should be on a stamp, Fat Elvis or Skinny Elvis? Ballots were available at your local post office or People magazine. Bill Clinton made an endorsement. Skinny Elvis swept the polls, garnering nearly a million votes, and became the most popular stamp of all time. I voted for Fat Elvis because he seemed lonesome, and I knew Elvis did not like being lonesome tonight.
When I told this tale to my children, I had to fact check it because it seems surreal: the casual comradery, the functional postal service, the existential crises lurking like cicadas underground.
I wish my children could have voted in the Elvis Election, to see what it’s like to cast a ballot without fearing a coup.
At Graceland, I bought a “TCB” Christmas tree topper. It is decorated with a lightning bolt, back when that emblem didn’t instantly evoke Nazi stormtroopers. Back when the return of fascism was a shock instead of an American expectation.
* * *
I have a playlist I listen to when I’m thinking about the government. It has only one song.
The song has different titles — Bobbie Gentry called it “Sermon,” Johnny Cash called it “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” Bill Lanford called it “Run On for a Long Time,” and Elvis called it “Run On” — because it belongs to none of them and to all of us. This song is American gospel: a threat and a promise, with each variation tallying different sins.
The song’s characters include the long-time liar, the midnight rider, the gambler, the rambler, and the backbiter. It’s like a session of Congress, only with a promise that in the end people get what they deserve.
My heart is with Bobbie Gentry’s acoustic demo — there’s just something about female writers slighted for being ahead of their time — but I love the Elvis version. He’s but a pious messenger, the song insists, yet his warning makes you move like a fire lit under your feet. In Return of the King, friends note how gospel saved Elvis’ career and life, allowing him to shed his plastic 1960s skin and bear his soul.
The vast quantity of low-grade Elvis is part of the Elvis charm. But it’s the sincerity that makes you stay. Elvis had heart. It’s what people struggle to find behind AI and algorithms. It’s what’s missing from the sold-out souls of Americans turned into digital brands. Americans used to consume celebrities, now we consume each other.
My favorite Elvis song is “Edge of Reality.” It was released in 1968, a year when mainstream singers were making extremely strange shit on the velvet mornings when they were straight. Elvis croons of madness:
Oh, I can hear strange voices echo Laughing with mockery The borderline of doom I’m facing The edge of reality!
Elvis lives — in 2024 America, in the here and now, where the edge is the center, and the center does not hold.
I’ve heard that the tech overlords want to turn Elvis into an eternally touring hologram. When it happens, then I’ll know Elvis is really dead.
And who killed him.
* * *
In December 2023, I drove the Natchez Trace Parkway up Mississippi to Tupelo and ate something called a “Belvis Burger” at a restaurant called The Neon Pig.
Tupelo is one of those small cities with an economy based on a hometown hero long gone. I’m familiar with the type: Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain, is another.
We stayed in a chain hotel decorated with Elvis everything. Outside was a sideways billboard stand looming like a crucifix near the highway. I named it “The Black Cross of Tupelo” and pretended it was a local landmark. The power lines surrounding it reminded me of the lightning bolt from “Taking Care of Business in a Flash.”
Here is where Elvis derived his powers, I thought. Electric American Jesus!
2023 had been a long, hard year, and I wasn’t sleeping much then either.
We went to Elvis’s childhood home, a shotgun shack with a church nearby. A memorial plaque for Elvis’s stillborn twin, Jessie, is there. He died a half hour before Elvis entered the world.
There is an unnerving starkness to the Tupelo home and especially to that sad twist of fate. This was the place of poverty Elvis was terrified of revisiting. This was the edge of reality, and he did not want to cross it, and you couldn’t blame him.
Return of the King is the story of how scared Elvis was. Scared he would let down his fans, let down the country, let down himself. Scared he would pull himself down into depths of no return, which he did, in the end.
But for one glorious night, he destroyed everyone’s expectations, including his own.
I am haunted by the documentary’s look at money and abandonment. How money is not only a means of survival, but a token mistaken for love. How the digital era encourages people to quantify every like and follow and let data subsume the soul.
How an unexpected large bill is a real expression of hate: the swift plunge into deprivation, the cold slap of corporate cruelty. There is no reason necessities like healthcare should bankrupt anyone: it is sadism posing as bureaucracy. This is why Americans do not mourn a slain insurance CEO but instead mourn the families his company robbed of life and dignity.
Americans live in fear: even the ones at the top, even Elvis. At the heart of the fear is the threat of humiliation, which can be converted into rage — sometimes destructive, sometimes righteous. American music was invented by the downtrodden: people battered but not beaten down enough to forgive the parties responsible for their plight. They documented it in song instead. Gospel, bluegrass, country, blues, rap: all American genres reckon with redemption and revenge.
American music came from folks wondering why all this heartache landed on them in the first place. Why a country you love acts like it hates you — and these days, what worse entity may replace it if implodes.
For now, the mess is still recognizably ours. Not yet overrun by artificial intelligence, not yet fiefdoms partitioned and sold for parts, but a particularly American kind of damage and delusion. The kind that gazes at you with youthful doe eyes from a stamp, because America likes to pretend that is what it still looks like, instead of a bloated addict dying on the toilet.
“If you’re looking for trouble, then look right in my face,” Elvis sang in his comeback special, eyes gleaming. “Because I’m evil: my middle name is Misery.”
And then he wailed for redemption, like an American.
* * *
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