Because I didn’t want to go, I made my partner cry. I feel poorly today, both physically and now because I made him cry.
I have a predisposition for alienation — and a tendency to make more of sirens than I should. I never just picture a heart attack, car accident victim, or appendicitis; no, I picture terrorist bombings, the start of uncontrolled pandemics, anthrax poisonings, the first wave of nuclear fallout victims, and such.
And such is the way of my addled mind. I am a sick woman. I don’t think anyone would disagree — except the Sacrafect of Mantia who believes that sunfish can tell time better than clocks.
The Sacrafect has been trying to inject bioluminescence into sunfish so he’d be able to tell time at night.
He’s failed miserably.
image: propublica
What I’m Reading:
At its core, end times fascism is a crisis of rampant impunity born of concentrated power and wealth. Far too much money, information technology, and weaponry have been allowed to concentrate into the hands of the few, and that unchecked power has deranged our elites, goading them to take risks that put our societies and countless species in existential peril.
— Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor / End Times Fascism: And The Fight For The Living World
the deus ex machina falls through the trapdoor into the charnel house
the deus dramatic effect lost and centrifugal with a caravaggio thud
see deus roll among the sweet vinegar panhandlers
watch deus finish the hand cream to douse the smell of blood
deus in a goddard film works the chiaoscuro / a tenebrism / petrichor
deus in bombogenesis full of piss and vinegar spews
deus scumbles the rain-doused pines works the blur
deus in a peppery flourish works against the wet season cold
deus caught in the armature of the machina / ex-officio works union scale
deus doused in dim-light garlic butter reduction topped with sea salt
deus! dreary dubious dulcet dungeonal!
deus escaped mental patient waxing ontological on black stone paths
deus relents / off stage / orders the curtain fall
deus in the jug and the red of the grapes
ii. deus ex machina pt. 2
deus in the wings, taking hits off the fog machine, directs with shakespearean aplomb
deus as the hole in the sole of your quotidian shoes in the gutter beat
deus as the syncopation of your soul in 5/4 time—a blue beat among blue notes
deus as the sun ra arkestra in hyperdrive singing “nuclear war,” it’s a motherfucker, don’t you know
deus as the writing blister on your finger— the sweetest pain you know
deus as stan brakhage bubblegum—you chew chew chew ‘til your teeth go numb
deus as the usher who stepped away from lincoln’s box at ford’s theater
deus as the antediluvian methane seeping out of thawing permafrost
deus as another opportunity missed—exchanging sharp words with the stage manager
deus as your ill-lighted and out of focus photograph
deus snickering at his blackout jape—power cable in hand next to the light board
deus closing up shop and hanging his sign—away on holiday
What I’m Reading:
Geologists say that in ten years, Florida’s coastlines will be underwater. Oceanfront properties will drown in the wake of global warming, and still, mansions sprout up, fungus clustered on the dunes.
She opened the pigpens— A physics of badlands Resembled the scrubby hills Of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. A parliament of swine chuff— Popped and faded paroxysms, sonnets of oilfield imbalances, Oilskin flints, & parley figs. She sang to the pigs: An imperfect parricide breeds This parody of oligarchy. Swim, pigs, swim!
What I’m Reading:
It might seem weird, but I always feel most comfortable spending the night in abandoned buildings. Be it a cold high-rise in Prypyat or an apartment without furniture in Chornobyl-2. I always feel calm in buildings where the roofing tar is covered with moss; where a ferocious May shower turns the roof into a swamp teeming with mosquitoes and tadpoles; where trees grow.
— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadentband the Depraved of Chernobyl
Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift!
— Robin Wall Kimmerer / Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
I don’t know where they come from. I can summon them (sometimes I can) into my mind, into my fingers, I don’t know why. Or I’ll suddenly hear them walking, sometimes waking— they don’t often come when I need them. When I need them most terribly, never.
— Franz Wright / “Words”
You donate money to charity, and they spend it all trying to get you to donate more.
— David Sedaris / The Land and Its People: Essays
The rage that shatters the soul into bodies, the body, into dissimilar organs, and the organ into eight-note thoughts the rage of the poor carries a core fire against two craters.
— César Vallejo / “[The rage that shatters a man into children,]”
Al adept at exploiting not just financial, legal, or communications systems but also human psychology, our weaknesses and biases, is on the way. Researchers at Meta created a program called CICERO. It became an expert at playing the complex board game Diplomacy, a game in which planning long, complex strategies built around deception and backstabbing is integral. It shows how Als could help us plan and collaborate, but also hints at how they could develop psychological tricks to gain trust and influence, reading and manipulating our emotions and behaviors with a frightening level of depth, a skill useful in, say, winning at Diplomacy or electioneering and building a political movement.
The space for possible attacks against key state functions grows even as the same premise that makes AI so powerful and exciting-its ability to learn and adapt-empowers bad actors.
— Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskan / The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future
Write a 12-line rhythmically charged poem in which you slant rhyme (at least twice) the name of the last official indicted from the Tr*mp administration. Reference the most recent climate change related disaster. Address by first name one of the 27 migrants who have died in ICE custody since the beginning of 2026. End with the instructions given to you by a parent or guardian on what you should do when waking from a nightmare.
— Susan Briante / “Further Exercises”
Never has humanity possessed so much wealth, knowledge and technological capability. Yet for billions of human beings, progress remains out of reach. They see prosperity around them, but not for themselves in their own lives. They are told that globalization expands horizons, but they only experience exclusion. They are promised that technology will unlock new possibilities, yet many fear it will take away their livelihoods. Meanwhile, billions of people still live today without the essentials embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals that should be guaranteed for everyone: food, clean water, education, decent work, health care, dignity.
— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations / “Final Address to the United Nations, September 22, 2026”
What I’m Listening To:
The city at night, the rebel sound You’re a bullshit farmer on fertile ground Growing bad crop on a field of sorrow If the opposite was cool, you’d be different tomorrow
This is the body of the entry: This is the complication. This is the climax. This is the gist of what I wish to convey. This is the denouement. This is what you get.
What I’m Reading:
What slips from me is what slips from me. Slippage is the hinge on which my life
This is a digitized morning page. This is a digitized mourning phase. This is digitized mental squall. This is digitized coming to terms. This is digitized hullabaloo. This is digitized push and pull through the eye of a needle in haystack out on the fringes of the wasteland. This is digitized someone else’s neuroses filtered through semi-quavered skronk tectonics. This is digitized skronk tectonics, this. This is digitized digital manipulations via pistoning thumbs—tap tap tap tap poo. Ok, this is digitized poo. Ok, this is the pops. This is digitized digital masturbatory aleatory foo. This is digitized living in the still relatively new-new century. This is digitized raw manifold with a peculiar filter applied. This is digitized. This is Friday. This Friday. This.
What I’m Reading:
I am looking, it seems, for aesthetic correspondences to a sense of both desolation and supplication, though it is not clear to whom my entreaties are directed or even what they are. Deliver me from anything and everything, I will take whatever you can give: a request that leaves me as powerless as I feel.
A vibrant tuning fork in hand— This is normally a prime time for burrowing a hole in your heart.
You tell me to videograph your heartache. You claim that this crowded urban area saps your optimism and your love for your fellow human. Someone’s banging on the door, yelling: get out, get out. You will slowly reopen your heart and repair the gaps, and hope for the best. It’s still not easy to be asymptomatic. Over the next couple of weeks before October love forlorn, love clinically enervated, will disappear permanently.
Fuel for the broken heart. Food for stormy weather.
What I’m Reading:
First, we could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed. This would obviously be terrible … In the other direction, these systems could concentrate too much power in too few hands. No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else. A company or country that believes only it can be trusted with this technology can use that belief to justify almost anything else. We have to reject that logic, even when it’s convenient for any one actor.
— Sam Altman / “Sam Altman’s remarks at the United Nations Security Council” / openai.com
there’s a desolation and a strange hope, all at once, in the vast spaces of the west…
there’s something to be said of empty spaces…
day after day…
you fill in the story…
What I’m Listening To:
I am nowhere tonight On the interstate west Where the sodium lights Meet the vanishing stars A whole country out there Branded with signs Cut through with roads And some of them are mine
— The Wingdale Community Singers / “I’m In The Mood (To Drive)”
She found herself on the other side of the country — drove in a fugue as far west as she could until she hit the ocean.
As she drove away from the eastern ocean on the other extreme of the country — away from her husband, a husband who never was but insisted on the name and the discipline he forced; away from the son she never really wanted but the “husband-man” insisted on — she felt no bindings stretching taut, no heaviness.
No fear.
She had her passport, soon she’d have to choose: north to a clean well lighted place or south to the land of her ancestors — anywhere but this moribund, splintering, ghost ship crawling with mites and weighted down by a gargantuan millstone.
Staring at the sea, she spoke this into her phone:
I long to shape a moon from bone.
I heard that before, somewhere— it resonated. A chord struck—atonal & dissonant.
A wound—a pickaxe stymie, a hurricane hole in homogeneity. Monosyllabic—
trickle & tone.
“Where you going—where you been?”
I’ll find a planetarium to bathe in—
nothing more to say.
She threw the phone into the Pacific, walked back to car, and drove…
What I’m Reading:
Sometimes she imagines it will happen this way / that it has happened already, and she stands remembering / that it is happening now, in the dawn of her imagining—her body a wisp of air in a drafty corridor, stirred in the wake of her passing.
— Jennifer Maier / “The Occupant Revisits the Rooms of Her Life and Arrives at a Late Understanding”
