{
  "title": "Outa Touch",
  "author": "Julio Dominguez",
  "genre": "testimonial",
  "series": "Trash Vibes",
  "issue": 5,
  "featured_essay": "An (Urban) Camping Story",
  "featured_essay_author": "Van Fox",
  "art_by": "Goldie Moretti",
  "publication_date": "July 2023",
  "publication_location": "Tallahassee, FL",
  "sections": [
    {
      "title": "Moscas volantes",
      "summary": "A brief surreal meditation on disconnection, suspended consciousness, and the instability of what people take to be solid reality. The narrator says the ground is not really the ground, but a symbolic shell over the Earth, and asks readers what they believe."
    },
    {
      "title": "An (Urban) Camping Story",
      "author": "Van Fox",
      "summary": "A first-person account of homelessness and survival in downtown Los Angeles. The narrator contrasts recreational camping with involuntary homelessness, then describes trying to enter the Weingart Center's detox and treatment system while living outdoors and remaining sober. Nights are spent around Pico and Sixth, in MacArthur Park, and eventually on the rooftop of the Hastings Hotel, an improvised but tightly governed camp populated largely by runaway teenagers. The essay details the roof's security rules, mutual protection, food insecurity, the Hippie Kitchen's no-questions-asked meals, and dumpster foraging. Its dark humor and blunt language emphasize the gap between official services and the practical networks that keep unhoused people alive.",
      "settings": [
        "Weingart Center, Los Angeles",
        "Pico and Sixth",
        "MacArthur Park",
        "Hastings Hotel rooftop",
        "Hippie Kitchen"
      ]
    },
    {
      "title": "Absent Creator",
      "summary": "A short philosophical coda asks whether God matters, distinguishing an immaterial deity from the potentially liberating idea of universal interconnectedness. It ends by suggesting that treating one another better could create heaven on Earth."
    }
  ],
  "themes": [
    "homelessness and survival",
    "urban camping",
    "mutual aid and informal community rules",
    "institutional help versus autonomy",
    "food insecurity and dumpster foraging",
    "religion, interconnectedness, and secular ethics",
    "alienation and unstable reality"
  ],
  "style": "The zine combines fragmentary surreal prose, autobiographical oral storytelling, caustic humor, profanity, social critique, and a brief spiritual-philosophical conclusion.",
  "source_url": "https://www.cushbomb.com/ZINES/TV5_DL.pdf"
}