An irritating squirrel says To an umbrella made of stone:
You are a conflation of an Absurdist dialectic. You are an impossible form.
The umbrella sprouts a stratocumulus cloud on its ferrule and floats away.
The squirrel, inspired, writes a sonnet, follows that with an ode, then a sestina.
What I’m Reading:
The farther she moves away from the door, the harder it is to breathe. She feels like she’s swallowing buckets of water every time she inhales, but she’s lived enough years with the taste of salt on her skin to not panic at this impromptu encounter between air, sky, and ocean.
Backup codes let me access my account if my phone is lost, stolen, or if I run it through the washing machine and the bag of rice trick doesn’t work.
I make friends and influence people.
I spend more time with my wife and cat.
I have curated opinions.
I am a proud ghost.
I’m just reaching out to confirm that we’re all set for next week’s appointment.
I have printed or saved hate speech.
I am kind.
I am a child of the universe. No less than the trees and the sky I have a right to be here.
I favor curiosity over certainty.
I favor curries over potages.
I will renew my passport at the first available moment.
I will flee this country at my convenience.
I won’t preach or convert.
Vote my way or hit the highway.
I am an autodidact that stresses dactyls.
I am an Anabaptist that stresses anapests.
I am a humanist.
I wear my britches up to my sternum.
I am too big for my bridges.
A quote by Bukowski is my favorite mantra.
I follow bouncy balls and shiny things.
I have to do stupid stuff.
In signing this, I acknowledge that, to the best of my knowledge, the information in this evaluation form is true and correct.
I acknowledge that If the office is closed, my vehicle will not be officially checked in until the next business day.
I look forward to seeing you; bye, bye now.
Um, in the meantime have a wonderful week.
Here is a demonstration of how easy it is to stop thinking . . .
What I’m Reading:
Reality is made of the conscious and the unconscious. Both, at the same time. The unknown is to be respected. You don’t have to fear it—you’re a part of it. Whether you want to be or not.
If there is anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon is that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself.
— Álvaro Enrigue / You Dreamed of Empires
I steal faces and keep them in the branches.
I assemble this body from walnuts that someone’s parents leave on the path.
— Luciana Jazmín Coronado / “Childhood”
Super-polluting plumes were also seen in the US, the largest detected in 2025 occurring in Texas and leaking 5.5 tonnes of methane per hour, equivalent to running about a million fuel-guzzling SUVs. Venezuela (five) and Iran (three) also had multiple mega-leaks from state-owned facilities.
— Damian Carrington / “Revealed: the world’s worst mega-leaks of methane driving global heating” / The Guardian
Fish speak fear in an emotional fever; they’d move to warmer water to have their temperature raised because they burn up in stress. Like me, they can suffer—
— Belle Ling / “Contemplating the Cod”
Young people are not driving. Gen Z is not driving. We should be building a city for the future not for the past.
— Sharon Durkan, Boston City Councilor / Boston City Council Meeting, March 18, 2026
Stewed meat. My mother’s prayers: “Oh, Crucified God!” Blood in the east, Napalm and bombs. Children massacred, parents massacred; blood oranges. The sky cold as a dead man’s chest.
— Marigloria Palma / “Daily Verses 1”
AI is basically sucking up all human knowledge and throwing it back at us, and charging a price.
— David Byrne / BBC interview
What I’m Listening To:
It has a crooked past, this crooked street. Where cars patrol this crooked beat Badges flash and sirens wail They’ll be taking one and all to jail
there’s much to consider in tin the thwarters the thwarting of certain species banana seats cause tolerance issues with crafts engineering and here I’m mean farts and crafts not “vehicle” crafts. Although witch crafts have a certain reliance and tendency to attract the individual’s tolerances on second hand — actually when thinking of the calving of the Thwaites glacier and how that will flood and fly … so, in summation, there is … there is … much to consider in tin
there’s much to consider in tissue thwarter
the speedball thwarting
banking secreto celebrity tools jade with the crazes of chimps in enterprise. I’m speculating on lunar fatuousnesses and the crazes that vent crazes. Although wonder crazes reveal a certain remembered-captain and his terms to attract cataracts and the cloak of infallibilities. Remember, captain, the sedative handkerchief when the thread of the craving snaps and the Thwaites glimpses fodder goodbyes so, in summation, there is … there is … much to consider in tissue
image: p. remer
What I’m Reading:
I didn’t want a map. I wanted a machete to clear a path in the jungle, to follow the unconscious.
I’m feeling strangely attracted to the can of vicious motor oil in the corner. I could have said “viscous” but I’ve just come from the cornershop thrumming in a pink and light blue aura of sexiness, one that is ineffable in these turbulent times. Anarchic times for desolate people—times for rows and perturbations. Give me some kind of sign. It doesn’t have to be a walking on the waiter kinda’ sign or a multiplication of leaves and frog’s legs sign, but let it have that old-timey censer mysteriousness about it. It’s driving me crazy all the swinging censers that way, and what is that censorious smell? Is it frankincense? Why so critical? Why so blue? Gas prices gotcha’ down?
What I’m Reading:
You don’t tear the ocean like fabric or leave an imprint as you would in sand or snow. Plunging in, you condemn yourself to invisibility.
a monk’s murk roils on tuesday thursday within the hairshirt of sadness and fury
the exophony of another tongue begs: please move on with this glossolalia jacket
a derecho blows feckless anagrams, altostratus, and tornado doppelgänger swing the heartache (beyond set)
beyond recognition Ñackets, Ñackets! bullyboy cries, this is the movement of fear so watch your peripheries
do the bullyboy creep and squall it’s my birthday, too, yeah! another year in the life of the fugu-flaker
we’ve hit the coda — poison, lenticular, monocular, oulipian (in spirit) and bipedal . . . an ouroboros unclenched from its tail
parapraxis say what? another mono-tonal slip — we’re plucking the scabs
this is a minatory moment this is a crisis of faith ephemera finds a home
What I’m Reading:
As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.
— Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor / “The rise of end times fascism” / The Guardian
i lived on dandelions when oxygen would not suffice
the soul craves . . . the soul sinks from its own weight
sound and suffering what do you see when you see death from above
there is no discernible end to our inhumanity
there is only occlusion, delusion, fritillaries hanging,
and the deal struck with the devil
What I’m Reading:
We might think Amazon was about making books available to us that we couldn’t find locally—and it was, and what a brilliant idea—but maybe it was also just as much about eliminating human contact.
her delicate blue-veined wrongdoings her slender handfuls of bone shards her clubhouse lay crushed and pathetic her lathe upon her black veil her fragile fraction of cologne and ammonia her frangible fiction coiffed in toxins her old frayed cataract her daughter’s prickled shank armhole her boilers her cowards her tomes un-dusted her snow-white petulance her pickled discontinuities
she freed of meaning
What I’m Reading:
People who use large language models are picking up writing patterns, reasoning methods and even opinions from the chatbots, some research suggests. This pattern threatens to homogenize human writing and discourse, argue some computer scientists, and could even influence text written by people that aren’t first-hand AI users. But not all researchers in the field agree. In one study, a team of scientists found that certain groups of writers held on to their personal writing style after using AI, and some even developed one that was more markedly distinct from that of the LLM.
— Jacob Smith / “AI use could ‘same-ify’ human expression” / Nature Briefing
The uterine is blasphemous! His desultory words matched his affect —
Didn’t you have a mother? Don’t you have a significant other?
Have you been to the Levant? Do your needles pass an elephant?
You must know of what I speak — Riblets, man! Riblets!
The tzela. The tzela, man! His spittle spray profuse.
He had my father’s eyes — That madness innate.
Semiotic spew — Signs arranging and rearranging In obscure topographies. He wrote his own hagiography. A drug-addled Rasputin shooting Lasers from his third eye. Healing hands like cudgels Ready to inflict . . . What?
Confusion, delusion, repulsion, Disrepute.
Go now, you unmoored ghost. Back into the recesses of a lunar mind. Back into forgotten memory . . .
until the next visitation.
What I’m Reading:
I don’t want to have to go to work for someone else. I don’t want to have to participate in an economic system that leads to, you know, bombing a school of kids on the other side of the planet.
— Bike Farmer / “What Am I Even Doing Here, Instead of Working?” / Instead of Working
thee istsfor manity reader 