December 8, 2020. I keep wanting to write 1980. JL's death was tragic, but perhaps no more so than that of anyone else who dies young for no good reason. We're losing upwards of two-thousand people a day, thanks largely to 45 and the trump death cult. Some members of which want a civil war, which they may or may not get. But who knows? Maybe some among them will summon the wit to think of COVID as a consolation prize. Or maybe they already have.

Mayans MC Season Two. I'm thinking its central motif, and its central truth, lie in its editing: it always cuts back and forth between the palatial estate of the Galindos, the beauty and calm of which blonde Emily G would like to see unsullied, and the violent, gritty lives and works of the bikers. The former could not exist without the latter, and the idea that they can be kept separate is unsustainable, as Emily, to her horror, is finding out. Case in point being the death of a young City Hall bureaucrat of her acquaintance resulting from her request to the biker Ezekiel, an old flame, to intercede with him. You think of that scene in GFII where Michael Corleone is so outraged about the attempt on him at his Nevada home, the place of his domesticity, that he shouts at Pentangeli about it. And the whole conundrum is embodied in Marcus Alvarez, the Mayans MC chieftain who has seemingly shed his biker garb for a suit and seems to live on the estate as factotum, or consigliere, to Jose Galindo.

"Behind every great fortune is a crime." So it seems. A crime, or many crimes.