Bruise your chest / Bruise your ears

Today: David Roth, an editor and co-owner at Defector; Trevor Alixopulos, comics artist and author of The Hot Breath of War; and Kim Kelly, author of FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor, and labor columnist at Vice and Teen Vogue.

Issue No. 3

Land of Enchantment
David Roth

What's in Your Super's Mystery Room?
Trevor Alixopulos

Kim Kelly's Riff Wrecks, Vol. 1
Kim Kelly

Land of Enchantment

by David Roth

If it was a selling point on the campus tour, which I guess it was, the fact that a person could go from my college campus to 1) the beach and 2) the mountains in the same day mostly registered to me as a factoid, or whatever unit of knowledge represents a lower denomination than that. It was something I would occasionally think to myself as a freshman while hitting the Dejected Charlie Brown Walk on a solo mission to go get some inexplicably cold donut holes at the Yum Yum Donuts on Arrow Highway. A person, who in this instance both has a car and is in a number of other crucial ways not me, could do both of the two big California things in one day. 

That would take some planning, of course. You would probably want to set an alarm and get up early. You would also have to want to go to either of those places, and I did not want to do any of those things, at that moment, starting with the alarm. I was from one moment to the next incapable of any of them, though it was the nature of my emerging suite of issues—this would later become, for want of a better term, my personality—that the lack of capacity or desire felt as objective and as absolute as my much more literal lack of car. I wanted agency, but I didn’t really know what that was yet; mostly it manifested as me listening to Dr. Octagon a lot, dour and sober in my dorm room. That was a thing I could do.