Welcome to Fingers, a newsletter by me, Dave Infante, about drinking culture, being online, and beyond. If you haven’t already, please sign up for future dispatches, OK?

Follow @dinfontay on Twitter & @its.fingers on Instagram. Send tips, praise, and pictures of barroom graffiti to [email protected], thank you very much.

Hello and welcome to Fingers, I’m your friendly editor/best friend Dave Infante. I didn’t feel like sending this out in an email because it’s basically just stream-of-thought despair flowing from my brain through Fingers’ fingers, so if you found this, thank you for being a superfan/absolute sicko, I guess.

Anyway, here are some things that make me want to drink heavily and with abandon right now:

1. People are all pissed off about that gender-reveal party that sparked one of the many devastating wildfires currently a-burnin’ in California, which fine me too, but also I find depressing we’re all dunking on the narcissistic ghouls who insisted on firing up a pyrotechnic device to reinforce toxic gender norms but have a whole lot less to say about narcissistic fossil-fuelghouls that have profiteered on our shared natural resources for the past century to the point where deadly wildfires are just an ordinary, expected occurrence. Like which is more symptomatic of bottomless irrecoverable sociopathy: a) filling an exploding box with blue- or pink-tinted cornstarch powder in the middle of a forest during a drought (or whatever *this* is, etc.) to celebrate a social construct about weiners and boobs? Or b) systematically destroying the earth and propping up monstrous regimes and hoarding absolutely obscene amounts of capital that you then use to build luxury bomb shelters to secure yourself from the fallout of your cartoonish carbonic greed? Hmm I simply can’t decide, moving on.

2. President Respect The Troops was out there calling dead soldiers little bitches for *checks notes* fighting fascists in the trenches of WWI Europe and further being rude to John McCain, who is also dead. This is both funny and sad and I don’t really have much more to say about it, but Judd Legum of Popular Information certainly did!

3. Paramilitary militias radicalized by right-wing YouTube videos are roving through American cities slaughtering citizens protesting the killing of citizens by paramilitary state agents that rove American cities, who themselves have been radicalized by a century of institutionalized racism as well as more recently the mainstream rise of “warm and fuzzy” American fascism and oh I dunno probably some of those very same YouTube videos, too.

4. Also Chadwick Boseman, of Black Panther fame, died of cancer at 43 a few weeks ago, which is very sad in an entirely different but no less real way than the fact that 180,000 people in this country have now died due to the coronavirus pandemic, which used to be global but is now a uniquely severe crisis in America thanks to the insatiable power hunger and incompetence and ethical bankruptcy of those lizard-brained sacs o’ flesh whose veiny hands clutch the levers of power in these United Failed States.

Those are just some of the recent headlines that I remember surfacing from the ether and making me feel bad in recent weeks. There were of course so many more but we simply haven’t the time.

Also I should note that just because things make me want to drink doesn’t mean I always do. Remember folks, alcohol in isolation is Not Good For You!

Our Man, The Cheese Mayor

Alright I have to include one more story that I can’t get enough of because it’s just absolutely incredible. This one from my local news market (coastal South Carolina.) There’s a part-time resident on a barrier island north of Charleston called Pawley’s Island who finagled his way into a mayorship and owns a pimento cheese brand that markets itself with the image of an old, now deceased Black woman on the label. This part-time resident, it may shock you to learn, is Not Black.

Seems like Our Man, The Cheese Mayor, may have improperly cut the woman’s family out of proceeds from the cheese sales, which would be very bad if it turns out to be true, even though he claims his wife, Sassy (that is her name, not a description of her demeanor) is the true originator of the recipe. If this is true, I hope the woman’s family gets what they’re due in the near future, but I haven’t investigated further because I try to limit my exposure to the Southeastern spreadable-snacks beat. (Please understand.)

Anyway, this all came to light only because Mayor Pimento recently Logged-On to call Black Lives Matter (and antifa, lol) a “terror organization,” then refused to resign, then tried to guilt people into not boycotting his cheese because… #jobs, I guess?

Normally I would try to end with some sort of witty zinger but I think the facts sort of speak for themselves here, and I wouldn’t want to… spread it on too thick ahaha I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.

From the archives

Here are some recent Fingers stories you might like to read:

• Arise, Surly workers

• Bud Light Seltzer’s no good, very bad job

• Who’s got the bar tab Venmo?

• Hire me, White Claw

• Gentrivitalization by brewery

If you have a friend you think would enjoy this piece, please forward it to them and encourage them to sign up for future editions:

Big thanks to Friend of Fingers, the very-talented Daniel Fishel, for this newsletter’s logo and banner art. Check out more of his work and commission him to draw things for you at o-fishel.com.