You fall in love with somebody when you’re twenty-six, and you see them in all kinds of different lights and according to their potential, but after years and years of marriage and shared parenting and all the other shared decisions you have to make just to get through the days, you accumulate a lot of data about that person that after a while just seems… more or less accurate. If you continue to have illusions, that’s your fault. So if you stay married it’s because you’ve accepted that this is what they’re like, and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you. It’s like being a Knicks fan.
Swallow simple propaganda pills to assuage your inner worry warts and swagger the nation — bound and gagged.
I felt the blister in your bluster — a boil lanced and gushed.
I heard the snivel in your snideness — the timbre of malice in that tone.
I smelled the fear in your denouncements — pitiable gutter-mouthed guttersnipe in your dénouement rags.
A visual pestilence follows where you point your finger — a rasp and a gasp and the nation is ours — procedural domes fracked. Teapot petulance our nation’s saving grace.
You sextant to diminishing returns on a foundering dory — flummoxed by flounder thoughts on a mid-winter Friday.
Your fundamental decorum foundationally fucked where like-minded manhoods finger themselves rotten.
You slurp your kitten soup with femur spoons — you delegate ghoul, you!
Thanks for the carbuncle memories and sophist suppurations. W’shall never forget thee.
What I’m Reading:
The truth is a sphere. We never see it whole, in its entirety. It slips down our throats, through our thoughts . . . The truth is changeable, it contracts, implodes, it’s powerful like a bullet. And it can be lethal . . . The truth, a sphere that also contains within it a lie that spins at a different rhythm, like a cog that seems broken, unnecessary, but is vital to the mechanism’s functioning. The challenge is finding the lie within the sphere.
This is a life on this side of the globe — existence in a parallel hemisphere.
Here the auroras don’t shimmer so brightly — we don’t see them at all.
Here the men in long coats use truncheons and gas — cudgel as pacification.
Here our custom is the manifest destiny of consumption — we shit where we eat.
Here we’re mesmerized by bright shiny objects — we are eagles with bowerbird brains.
Here we were flawed from inception and bent to the will of capital — we repeat our behaviors and expect a different result. Insane in the membrane.
This is repetition compulsion American style — truer than the red, white and blue, ooo, ooo, ooo!
How goes it with you?
What I’m Reading:
It has often been said, in the twenty-first century and in earlier centuries, too, that Americans lack a shared past and that, built on a cracked foundation, the Republic is crumbling. Part of this argument has to do with ancestry: Americans are descended from conquerors and from the conquered, from people held as slaves and from the people who held them, from the Union and from the Confederacy, from Protestants and from Jews, from Muslims and from Catholics, and from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. Sometimes, in American history—in nearly all national histories—one person’s villain is another’s hero. But part of this argument has to do with ideology: the United States is founded on a set of ideas, but Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.
— Jill Lepore / These Truths: A History of the United States
wayward talk of chile and ecuador, the prime stops on the silk road, techniques of the boustrophedon, raging poppy fields + too much hash…
the one-upmanship: sharp…
how we’ve lived through seven of the top twelve historic snowstorms in boston over the last 22 years…
a peripatetic call and response about the tang + other merits of uzbeki beer + uruguayan women, the obscurity of radiohead + the future is m(h)aol + have u listened to attachment styles?…
the timbre maudlin, the umka a perfect puff…
declamations of wanderlust in the south, remaking the ruins of venezuela in the image of argentina, death by clear cutting rainforest, petrodollars are the ruination…
somehow the talk turns to czars…
the plov congeals in its oil…
meandering laments of the rarity of this ritual, forecasts + promises to do this more often, something in their voices belies that certainty…
the crash of a kazan clanging a death roll in the kitchen…
peregrinations of assiduous maths—parsing a $109 bill 3 ways to the tenth of a cent, then a drunken 3 card pile up on a plastic credit card rectangle…
yes, let’s, more often…
a terminal point chicken is beheaded in the alley…
image: the boston globe
What I’m Reading:
In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse.
Bikeless days are a bummer. They do happen. Rain drowns the city, or snow dumps down. You have appointments to keep, and you have to show up looking more presentable than you would after an eighty-block bike ride. Maybe your bicycle is in the shop. Maybe your bicycle has been stolen. When you’re used to traveling by bike, the condition of bikelessness is disorienting and debilitating.
— Jody Rosen / Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle
Everything is fine: a means to endure news cycles, historic cycles, menstrual
cycles. This is walking home after work, crawling into bed naked. Night, quiet with
snow. I am an empty bank account. I am a pylon glowing in the dark. I am a primal scream. I am not here.
— Amy M. Alvarez / “Burn Out”
The fossil fuel industry is essentially running the United States government from the inside. It’s a desperate industry. They know that clean renewable energy is cheaper. They know that they only compete by virtue of massive subsidies from being allowed to pollute for free, which nobody should be allowed to do. And they prop all of that up with enormous amounts of political corruption and leverage and a huge climate denial fraud campaign.
— Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, to Akshat Rathi, Oscar Boyd, and Jennifer A Dlouhy / “Sheldon Whitehouse on How to Confront ‘Fossil Fuel Monsters’ in the US” / Bloomberg News
She sings “America the Beautiful.” She sings: From sea to every goddamn American sea. I walk away but her song follows me, carried on by some aura I can’t outrun.
— Natalie Scenters-Zapico / “Aura”
Last year has been confirmed as the third-warmest year on record by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and US research organization Berkeley Earth — despite the return of cooling La Niña weather phenomenon. “The warming spike observed from 2023-2025 has been extreme, and suggests an acceleration in the rate of the Earth’s warming,” said Berkeley Earth in its report. Burning fossil fuels remains the main cause, but the situation is probably being made worse by hot seas and changes in cloud patterns caused by warming, and (ironically) the cleaning up of sun-shading air pollution.
— Jacob Smith / “ 2025 shows Earth is getting hotter, faster” / Nature Briefing
On the road home the tide is rising.
Riding the road-tide is dangerous
but it’s not safe to stand still.
Hang on the verge & you drown.
— Marie Ponsot / “ Rain All Night, Paris”
But research increasingly suggests that reading may be more powerful than we realize. In fact, doing so regularly has been linked to lower stress, stronger memory, protection against cognitive decline and dementia, and even a longer life.
— Daryl Austin / “Reading books can help you live longer—here’s how” / National Geographic
A California of snow and the surprise Of illness. I throned myself in the white Noise of its silence and watched as the world Fell away. All the silver flickerings of possibility Going out like the sound of horse hooves Clicking into the distance. It is almost the end Of the world.
— Cynthia Cruz / “January”
What I’m Listening To:
Hate speech Climate change They/them Tile drainage Trauma Privilege Uterus
• mulberry stained mouth • truncheons and cigars to fear • orgasms on hate • his revulsion unfiltered • napalm nosegays in the morn’
What I’m Reading:
If you ever want to feel your place in the scales of the universe, go into a Walmart Supercenter. It’s a universe that offers a lot of almost identical and not very attractive choices.
It’s been six days since I fell through the crack. I’m spiraling down depression way again. The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something to sort it out— San Andreas fault be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure!I’m out. This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced out and lost.
Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next? Which way do I move? What direction? How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again. Is it fair enough to start like this again? The only option really. How did I get here again? How do I avoid ending up here again? I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation. And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required. The only other option isn’t really an option. Is it? No.
So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again. This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward. It had to begin somewhere. Why not right here?
******
The next day, the 20th, she wrote:
I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse. I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to. I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view. I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself. This signifies nothing within nothing.
Didn’t Thoreau say, Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping. To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body sitting on a cold toilet. And so I start anew.
What I’m Reading:
The primary duty is not to live but to write. I write because I’m unhappy. I write because it is a way of fighting unhappiness. If I didn’t write, I would blow my brains out, without a shadow of a doubt.
— Mario Vargas Llosa / “The Art of Fiction No. 120” / The Paris Review
I often stare into the sun. It’s the only way I know to calm down. My father required it of me when I was a young boy—he broke me early and often. He was the superintendent of our crumbling building in Boca de Camarioca after the revolution. Our homely squalor had a taste and a color: bile-yellow.
When I was a pre-teen my mother also demanded that I stare for hours at the sun. One early morning she plunged all of my father’s screwdrivers—a dozen from his tool box—into his chest; and when I say early morning I mean when it was still dark out. The talon ends of three claw hammers were embedded into his head.
None of this was traumatizing at the time. But over the past few years I find myself living inside that visionary loop multiple times daily. And here, when I say daily, I mean when it’s light out. In the dark I have other devices and literary tropes to rely on.
All these years later I live in exile, in Hialeah, and as you might imagine I am half-blind. I still look into the sun out of habit, but the sun at this hyper-capitalist meridian is out of tune—a legato A minor flat 6 chord that fills me with revulsion. I want to go back to my island where the sun is in the proper key.
But for now I wait in this dollar-rama thrift shop of a philosophically bankrupt and pestilent country. At least I still have my guaguancó and my son montuno. I carry those in my heart everywhere I go.
I do like the sound of the word kookaburra but I hate the fact that’s it’s a silly looking bird. It should be a sabre-toothed marsupial with a name like that. I hate it when life does that!
Life does that all the time.
And I hate inhabiting my skin. It gets to me, especially these days—it happens more and more that I find myself with some sharp implement in hand ideating about all sorts of bitter and painful ends for myself, but I can’t get anything to happen. My hands won’t conform to the images unspooling in the projection room in my head.
But, man, do I remember mother and those stare-downs with the sun. For the record, I never blinked first. I was always called away to do my chores.
Sometimes I envy how the Mongols had Caffa (I think they call it Feodosia now) and their trebuchet delights; how the Spaniards had their mastiffs for Taino ambush oneupmanship; and how deftly American colonials deployed their pox blankets.
Why can’t I get what I want?
Please, please, please let me get what I want… but I’m even off of that song, as the man who sang it is a white supremacist of some sort now.
The rails—bottom and top—don’t stay in place anymore… everything that rises must converge… or so mother told me. But I found, as all frauds are eventually found out—it was really something she gleaned from a Flannery O’Connor narrative… and then she said that Hemingway rewrote the last page of The Sun Also Rises 39 times.
Apocrypha?
Sometimes I feel like a detached bathysphere. All I have is this metaphoric gibbet and the wheel: I’m here alone. Pitched up here—30 feet in the air, spinning a half turn with every stiff breeze…
What I’m Reading:
She was courting her own disgust, these days. The way she’d picked at her knee scabs as a kid — knowing it would end in blood but doing it anyway. Revulsion was a stimulant.
thee istsfor manity reader 